OFFICIAL PROGRAM: 2014 SNS Conference---Land and The Novel, April 4-6, University of Utah
Friday, April 4 10 am-‐12 noon
1. Working the Land (Alpine) Chair: Ellen Rooney (Brown University) Panelists: Mark Browning (Johnson County Community College), “‘How
You Gonna Keep Em Down on the Farm’: Rural Life as Eden
in American Fiction” Elizabeth Duquette (Gettysburg College), “Building on the Land
in The Rise of Silas Lapham” Nick Young (St. John’s University) “‘Acting American’: American
as a Lived Ontology”
2. Transnational Novels (City Creek) Chair: Kathryn Stockton (University of Utah) Panelists: Robert Colson (Brigham Young University), “David Mitchell’s
Cloud Atlas, Metalepsis, and the Collapse of the Global” Yogita Goyal (University of California, Los Angeles), “What Was
Postcolonial Literature? Race, Diaspora, and the
Afropolitan in Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah” Nirmala Iswari (University of Massachusetts, Amherst),
“Countering the Motions of Globalization: Repose as
Resistance in The Pick-‐Up?” Neelofer Qadir (University of Massachusetts), “Unpacking the
‘jadoo of the colonies’: Dispossession in Sea of Poppies”
3. Geology, Geological Time, and the Novel (Bonneville) Chair: Jeffrey McCarthy (Westminster College) Panelists: Ted Howell (Temple University), “The Earth Beating Time:
Howards End in the Anthropocene” Mario Ortiz-‐Robles (University of Wisconsin, Madison),
“Hardy’s Wessex and the Natural History of Form” Beth Wightman (California State University, Northridge),
“Virginia Woolf, Halford Mackinder, and the Island
Vernacular” Abigail Droge (Stanford University), “A Panorama of Passions:
Land in Balzac’s Comédie Humaine”
Friday, April 4 12:15-‐2:14, Luncheon/Lecture Plenary Speaker: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (University of California, Irvine) (Douglas Ballroom)
Friday, April 4 2:30-‐4:30 pm
4. Land, Law, and Property (Alpine) Chair: Matthew Titolo (West Virginia University) Panelists: Dana Lloyd (Syracuse University): “Indians Make the Best
Cowboys” Leila Mansouri (University of California, Berkeley): “Properties
of the Novel in America: Locke, Land, and Labor in
Sheppard Lee” Marc Roark (Savannah Law School): “Robert Penn Warren’s
Southern Exceptionalism in Space and Place” Tania de Miguel Magro (West Virginia University): “The Spatial
Politics of El Buscón”
5. Homelands Real and Imaginary (Bonneville) Chair: Jeremy Rosen (University of Utah) Panelists: Robert Caserio (Pennsylvania State University): “Lawrence,
Sons and Lovers, and Italian Land” Lauren Shohet (Villanova University): “Cavalier Clay: Thinking
Native Soilin Chabon’s Amazing Adventures” Ryan Siemers (University of Utah): “Magical Land in Graham
Swift’s Waterland” Jeffrey McCarthy (Westminster College): “Modernism’s
Country: the New Materialism and the Limits of Englishness in 1928”
6. The Novel Beyond the Nation (City Creek) Chair: Robert Colson (Brigham Young University) Panelists: Ellen Rosenman (University of Kentucky): “Sons of the Soil:
Victorian Penny Fiction and National Belonging” Andrea Haslanger (Tufts University): “Cosmopolitanism Within
and Beyond the State: The Case of Humphry Clinker” Nasser Mufti (University of Illinois, Chicago): “Un-‐Imagining
Community in Bleak House” R. John Williams (Yale University): “Futures Beyond the Nation
in Philip K. Dick”
7. FantasyLand, Virtuality, and Speculative Geography (Officers’ Club, East) Chair: Scott Black (University of Utah) Panelists: Alf Seegert (University of Utah): “Desert of the Real, Oasis of
the Virtual: Technostalgic Pastoral in À Rebours and Ready
Player One” Julie Fiorelli (University of Illinois, Chicago): “The Land Re-‐
worked: Race in Utopian and Dystopian Responses to
Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward” Katherine C. Henderson (Washington University): “Urban
Fantasies of Pastoral Sprawl in China Miéville’s Perdido” Rebekah Baglini (University of Chicago) and Jonathan
Schroeder (University of Chicago): “Nostalgia, the Novel, and Database Epistemology”
Friday, April 4 5-‐7 pm, Reception (Officers’ Club, South) Open bar and hors d’oeuvres
Saturday, April 5 10 am-‐12 noon
8. Land, Territory, Nation, Empire (City Creek) Chair: Robert Caserio (Pennsylvania State University) Panelists: Anne Jamison (University of Utah): “Land Surveyor?”
Sean Ward (Duke University): “Territory, Language, Thought: George Lamming’s Objects”
Mishuana Goeman (University of California, Los Angeles): “On-‐going Storms and Struggles: Trauma and Resource Exploitation in Solar Storms”
Rijuta Mehta (Brown University): “Reading Anticoloniality in The Sign of the Four”
9. Genres of Land: Saga, Pastoral, Georgic and the Novel (Alpine) Chair: Lauren Shohet (Villanova University) Panelists: Scott Black (University of Utah): “Adventure, Land, and the
Limits of Possession in The Journey to the West” English Brooks (Snow College): “‘After We Ate the Dogs:’
Cabeza de Vaca’s Relación and the New World
Picaresque” Robert Chibka (Boston College): “‘And Italy’: A Pentimental
Journey, or, Off the Map with Imlac and Yorick”
10. Blood and Soil/Race and Land/Autochthony and Strangers (Bonneville) Chair: Vincent Lloyd (Syracuse University) Panelists: Jared Hickman (The Johns Hopkins University): “‘Just a Dogged
Little Outpost in the Sand Hills, Within Striking Distance of
Kansas’: Place and Race in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead” Benjamin Balthaser (Indiana University, South Bend): “The
Mountains of the Surrounded: National Belonging and Anti-‐Colonial Resistance in the Novels of D'Arcy McNickle and Richard Wright”
11. Ecological Disaster and Post-‐Apocalyptic Territory (Officers’ Club, East) Chair: Andrew Hoberek (University of Missouri) Panelists: Robert Kennedy (University of Utah): “Where Man Himself is a
Visitor” Emily Steinlight (University of Pennsylvania): “The Geopolitics
and Biopolitics of Boundlessness” Theodore Martin (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee):
“Survival Skills” Mathias Nilges (St. Francis Xavier University): “Nostalgia for
Immediacy—The Contemporary Zeitroman and the Time of the Post-‐Apocalypse”
Saturday, April 5 12:15-‐2:15 Luncheon/Lecture Plenary Speaker: Ursula Heise (University of California, Los Angeles) (Douglas Ballroom)
Saturday, April 5 2:30-‐4:30 pm
12. Country and City, Redux (City Creek) Chair: Kate Flint (University of Southern California) Panelists: Hannah Walser (Stanford University): “Cognitive
Demographies: Community Size and Psychic Opacity in
Early American Literature” Ben Parker (Columbia University): “The Displacement of Affect
in Finance Capital: From Trollope’s London to Barsetshire” Matthew Price (Pennsylvania State University): “Hardy Country
and the City: Towards a Critical Literary Geography of
‘Wessex’” Neal Carroll (University of Utah): “‘Uncouth Objects,’
‘Barbarous Satisfactions’: Landscape and Thomas Hardy’s Narrative Method”
13. Territory and the Extra-‐territorial (Officers’ Club, East) Chair: David Glimp (University of Colorado) Panelists: Karen Jacobs (University of Colorado): “Virtual Nature, Virtual
Commons: Kathryn Davis’s Post-‐Propertied Apocalypse” Jeremy Rosen (University of Utah): “Escaping David Mitchell’s Dejima: Generic and Narrative Confinement on an Extra-‐
Territorial Island” Philip Joseph (University of Colorado, Denver): “The Child
Soldier and the Building of Vernacular Languages” Adele Bealer (University of Utah): “On the Border of the
Ecological Body: Material Memoir in Paul Chadwick’s Concrete”
14. Marco? Polo! Travel, Wandering, Peripeteia and the Novel (Alpine) Chair: Matt Wickman (Brigham Young University) Panelists: Rachael Dewitt (University of Utah), “Contemplative and
Material Oscillations: Arranging the Mind and Body in
Moby-‐Dick” Jennifer MacGregor (University of California, Los Angeles):
“Necessary Hybridity: The Narrative Construction of
History in Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines” Ji Eun Lee (University of California, Los Angeles): “Jamaican
Land, the Great House, and the ‘Ruination’ of Englishness in Michelle Cliff’s Abeng”
15. The New Indigeneity in the Americas (Bonneville) Chair: Lourdes Alberto (University of Utah) Panelists: Christine Diane Allen (University of Utah): “A Native America
Worth Living In” Elise Boxer (University of Utah): “‘Playing Indian’: Music,
Scripture and the Making of a ‘Lamanite’ identity” Gloria Chacon (University of California, San Diego): “Indigenous
Writers and the Novel in Mexico”
Sunday, April 6 10 am-‐12 noon
16. Manifest Destinies (City Creek) Chair: Jonathan Arac (University of Pittsburgh) Panelists: Dale Enggass (University of Utah): “Unoccupied Territories:
Empty Spaces and Absent Faces in Moby-‐Dick” Jessica Hurley (University of Pennsylvania): “Ground Zero at
the City on a Hill: James Baldwin on the American
Promised Land” Wlad Godzich (University of California, Irvine): “When is Here:
Andrzej Stasiuk’s Topopoetics” Elizabeth Oliphant (University of Pittsburgh): “A ‘desert
country, where it is hard for men to live’: Manifest Destinies and Indigeneity in Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop”
17. Land versus Place (Bonneville) Chair: Nancy Armstrong (Duke University) Panelists: Stuart Burrows (Brown University): “In Another’s Place:
Regionalism’s Imagined Communities” Brian Shetler (Drew University): “The Places Within: Analyzing
Space in E. M. Forster's Maurice” Antoine Traisnel (Cornell University): “The Rule of Capture: The
Purchase of America in James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales”