DEATH BY WATER: FLOODS AND HURRICANES IN THE AMERICAN IMAGINATION

Panel Chairs:

Mª Esther Álvarez López (Universidad de Oviedo)
eal@uniovi.es

Manuel Broncano (Universidad de León)
manuel.broncano@unileon.es

The apocalyptic scenery of post-hurricane Katrina showed to the US and to the world at large the frailty of a civilization whose technological development and economic power proved utterly unable to prevent a disaster of such biblical magnitude, or even to mitigate its destructive effects. Since its very beginnings, the American experience has been determined by the hostility of an environment whose climate and soil required a radical process of adaptation. Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca probably was the first European to record in writing the experience of surviving the deadly power of hurricanes in the American coastal southwest. These cyclones have become a recurrent motif in literature, from the 17 th -century hurricane that probably inspired Shakespeare's The Tempest , to the one that devastates the Floridian everglades in Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God . Floods and blizzards are likewise found recurrently in American literature, from the snowstorms that plague Mary Rowlandson's captivity in Colonial New England, to the deluge of "Upon the Sweeping Flood," the poem in which Taylor imagines the bowels of heaven overflowing as a result of a purgative administered by humans, later the inspiration of a short story by Joyce Carol Oates. The protagonist of the "Old Man" section of Faulkner's The Wild Palms battles the great Mississippi river flood of 1927 to save a pregnant woman from the raging waters. In Huckleberry Finn , the same river washes away human and physical debris, including Huck's father.

            Our panel takes its title from T. S. Eliot's "Death by Water," the shortest section of The Waste Land , in which Eliot rebuts the ideas of renewal and regeneration traditionally associated with water. Thus, we seek papers that explore the role that water plays in American literature and/or cinema, not as a source of life but as a force of death and destruction. We are interested in the Noah-like fight for survival against the aquatic overflows of nature as recorded in fiction, from the founding era to post-Katrina America. We will consider any proposal that deals with hurricanes, floods, blizzards, storms and their literary representations in the US and the Caribbean. Proposals dealing with Katrina and its aftermath are especially welcomed.

Suggested topics:

- Representations of hurricanes in literature and related arts, from the colonial era to the present.

- Surviving the Great Flood: American heroes against the raging waters.

- Death by water: drowning as a literary motif.

- Snow and ice: exploring and surviving the frozen wilderness.

- Katrina and its aftermath.