Cristina Alsina Rísquez
Serra Hunter Fellow at the Universitat de Barcelona
Member of the Board of the journal "Lectora: Revista de Dones i Textualitat" http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/Lectora
Member of the Research Center in Theory, Gender and Sexuality - ADHUC at the Universitat de Barcelona
Co-IP of the Project, funded by the Spanish government, "(Un)Housing: Dwellings, Materiality, and the Self in American Literature".
Coordinator of the Master's Program "Construction and Representation of Cultural Identities" -CRIC
Member of the Board of the journal "Lectora: Revista de Dones i Textualitat" http://revistes.ub.edu/index.php/Lectora
Member of the Research Center in Theory, Gender and Sexuality - ADHUC at the Universitat de Barcelona
Co-IP of the Project, funded by the Spanish government, "(Un)Housing: Dwellings, Materiality, and the Self in American Literature".
Coordinator of the Master's Program "Construction and Representation of Cultural Identities" -CRIC
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Papers by Cristina Alsina Rísquez
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction: Innocence? Ethics, Cristina Alsina Rísquez & Cynthia Stretch xi
I. From Battle-Fields to Mounts of Stone: The Failed Promise of National Renewal in Herman Melville’s Battle-Pieces and Clarel, Laura López Peña 1
II. Ellen Glasgow's The Battle-Ground: The New Woman Emerges from the Ashes of the Civil War, Constante González Groba 27
III. Sutton Griggs's Imperium in Imperio and the Spanish-American War: The Battle for Black Constitutional Nationalism, Carme Manuel 49
IV. "Say of them, they are no longer young": The US Left and the Cultural Response to the Spanish Civil War, Víctor Junco 77
V. Enunciations of a War Machine: Crossing The Thin Red Line, Michael Podolny 103
VI. Innocence and Insanity: The Golden Day Episode of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Jochem Riesthuis 121
VII. "The Most Dangerous Enemy of Truth and Freedom": Fahrenheit 451 and the Enforcement of Innocence in Early Cold War America, Mercè Cuenca 135
VIII. Innocents Abroad? Generation Kill in the Three-Block War, Lena-Simone Günther 153
IX. Mourn the Dead. Heal the Wounded. End the War: Women's Contributions to Protest Culture During the Iraq War, Elisabeth Boulot 169
X. "Where have all the soldiers gone?" Ideological Identification and Ethical Responsibility in Contemporary Images of American Postmodern Wars, Cristina Gómez Fernández 193
XI. "Huge protests continue, protests without alone and against alone": Situating Juliana Spahr's Antiwar Poem this connection of everyone with lungs, Nerys Williams 217
XII. Amnesia and the Geographies of Innocence and War, Stipe Grgas 233
Coda: What's at Stake? 247
Youth and War, William V. Spanos 249
The Myth of Innocence in Two Seminal Films About the Vietnam War, David Zeiger 255
The Treasonous Space of Terror, Cary Nelson 259
Loss of Innocence, Cindy Sheehan 267
– un texto en homenaje a H. D. Thoreau, a cargo de Eulalia Piñero Gil (Universidad Autónoma de Madrid);
– un texto en homenaje a Derek Walcott, a cargo de Jesús Varela-Zapata (Universidad de Santiago de Compostela);
– un texto en homenaje a Jonathan Swift, a cargo de José Francisco Fernández (Universidad de Almería);
– un texto en homenaje a René Dirven, a cargo de Francisco José Ruiz de Mendoza Ibáñez (Universidad de la Rioja);
– un texto en homenaje a William Labov, a cargo de Melissa G. Moyer (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona);
– un texto a cargo de Ignacio M. Palacios Martínez (Universidad de Santiago de Compostela). Este último texto inaugura una sección en nuestra publicación con la que queremos promover la difusión del excelente trabajo que se realiza en los grupos de investigación en los que participan los miembros de la asociación. En esta ocasión, el texto se encargó a Ignacio M. Palacios Martínez en calidad de investigador principal del proyecto “La conversación en inglés contemporáneo: Innovación, creatividad y negociación comunicativa en contextos nativos y no nativos” y del grupo de investigación SPERTUS (Spoken English Research Team at the University of Santiago de Compostela).
El número también incluye un total de cuatro reseñas y una entrevista a Pat Barker, a cargo de María Villar Lourido (Universidade da Coruña).
Traditionally, cultural and literary criticism of Vietnam War fiction has analyzed those feelings as symptoms of the returned soldiers’ Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and, thus, as symptoms of each individual soldier’s psychological and emotional wounds. However, I believe the feelings of homelessness and of being unhomed can also be read as a commentary on the strategies of inclusion and exclusion, which characterize the definition of the nation as home. The question implied seems to be that of deciding who can feel at home in the US. The denunciation underlying said question is that of the injustice in the exclusion of those who put their bodies on the line for the “home” that now excludes them.
One of the ways Vietnam War fiction has represented the issue of homelessness and estrangement from the homeland has been by resorting to one of the most pervasive metaphors in US literature: that of the imperfect, crumbling down, haunted house. The House of Usher, the House of the Seven Gables, The Professor’s House, Joanna Burden’s house and slave shack, 124 Bluestone Road, to name but a few, are examples of that metaphor. A great number of the houses featuring in Vietnam War literature are also imperfect and uncanny: the apartment oppressively filled with plants in Wright’s Meditations in Green; the homicidal home in Rabe’s Sticks and Bones; the haunted apartment in Paco’s Story; O’Brien’s cabin in In the Lake of the Woods; all of them follow in that tradition and are a commentary on issues of belonging and exclusion.
In this presentation I am to analyze some of those “queer houses” by using the growing bibliography on homes in fiction (see selected references below) and the concept of the unhomed as defined by Homi Bhabha.
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References (maximum 150 words) (Chicago style)
BENJAMIN, David N., David Stea, and David Saile, eds. The Home: Words, Interpretations, Meanings and Environments. Aldershot: Avebury, 1995
BHABHA, Homi K. The Locations of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.
BLUNT and Robyn Dowling. Home. London: Routledge, 2006
BUSCH, Akiko. Geography of Home: Writings on Where We Live. Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press, 2003
CIERAAD, Irene. At Home: An Anthropology of Domestic Space. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2006.
COOPER, Clare. House as a Mirror of Self: Exploring the Deeper Meaning of Home. New York: Nicolas-Hays, Inc, 2006
DOUGLAS, Mary. “The Idea of a Home.” Social Research 58, no. 1 (Spring 1991).
MACK, Ariel, ed. Home: A Place in the World, Social Research 58, no. 1 (Spring 1991).
MILLER, Daniel, ed. Home Possessions: Material Culture Behind Closed Doors. Oxford: Berg, 2001.
American war literature, though, suggests a complicated relationship between the reveries of national innocence and the trials of history. The artistic renderings of the war in Vietnam apply pressure to the trope of American innocence by intersecting questions of experience, responsibility, and guilt in an otherwise monolithically idealist official discourse. In other words, and to follow Spanos’s argument in American Exceptionalism and the Age of Globalization, such counter-hegemonic cultural manifestations inscribe the Vietnam War through its representations in Benjamin’s category of catastrophic history, which disrupts the promissory dialectical history of progress. In 1992, Francis Fukuyama had conceptualized the end of history as the glorious emergence “not so much [of] liberal practice, as [of] the liberal idea” (45), naturalizing the violence that could ensue from liberal democracies as the unwanted but necessary historical responsibility to “defend” itself from evil aggressors. As Derrida critically points out, in Fukuyama’s argumentation “all these cataclysms (terror, oppression, repression, extermination, genocide, and so on), these ‘events’ or these ‘facts’ would belong to empiricity…their accumulation would in no way refute the ideal orientation of the greater part of humanity toward liberal democracy” (56-57). The world of the arts, as Spanos suggests, struggled to sustain the apparition of representations which place Vietnam in the genealogy of catastrophic —or as Derrida calls it, cataclysmic— history, reminding us that the war in Vietnam evidenced a crisis of hegemony, which made visible “the polyvalent global imperial will to power”, a will which, “under normal conditions, strategically remains invisible in the (onto)logic of the ‘free world’” (Spanos, 14).
My aim is to analyze the trope of the home and of the fragmented body in the G.I. underground press and in the anthology of poetry Winning Hearts and Minds to show how those texts problematized the re-establishment of the pre-war order since they destabilized the cohesive sense of identity defended by the American institutions.