Panel chair:
Aitor Ibarrola-Armendariz ( Universidad de Deusto)
ibarrola@fil.deusto.es
While describing America' s natural landscapes, Peirce Lewis has remarked that "any nation would have been lucky to have either of those two magnificent waterway systems--the Great Lakes or the Mississippi River system. But America had both, and as it turned out, they were easily connected by canals following the course of abandoned glacial drainage channels--which were in turn reinforced by railroads and highways built along the old canals." No geographer or historian would question today the key role played by these waterway systems in the South-Western expansion of the nation during the 19 th century and in its expeditious economic development thereafter. The Central Lowland and the Mississippi Valley have become the American heartland in several ways. There is its astonishing fertility which turned it into the nation's granary. Moreover, it was far enough from the Eastern Coastal Plain not to be so immediately influenced by European cultures and to develop a character of its own. Last but not least, for a long time it stood as a lively threshold/frontera beyond which, as Huck Finn put it, civilization could not exist in the same terms. Although not everything said about the region is so favourable (visitors may find its landscapes boring and sociologists its politics too conservative), there is little doubt of its immense impact on the American literary imagination. The list of authors deeply-rooted in this region would be too long to include it here, but just to mention a few: Jane Smiley, Theodore Dreiser, Jonathan Franzen, E. Hemingway, Charles Johnson, Bobbie A. Mason and, of course, Mark Twain.
Suggested topics:
- The presence and significance of rivers and any other waterways
- their relation with questions of mobility and fluidity (both literal and psychological)
- their transformative power on landscapes and personality
- their role as life-generators and death-inflictors
- their male and/or female character traits, etc.
- How humans have interacted with the environment in this particular region.