10th SAAS CONFERENCE

“The Backyard of the U.S. Mansion: Critical readings of poverty and wealth in the United States”

Alcalá de Henares (Madrid).  April 14-16, 2011

 

2) ‘Heading for a Change’: Deconstructing the Upward-Mobility Ethos in American Literature and Culture

Panel Chair: Mercè Cuenca
Institution: Universitat de Barcelona
E-mail: mcuenca@ub.edu; marta_bosch@ub.edu

From Anzia Yezierska’s “How I Found America” (1920), to Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (1949), from Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955), to Showtime’s TV series Weeds (2005-2009), American culture and literature problematize the upward-mobility ethos which has shaped US identity from the inception of the nation.
In this panel, we welcome contributions which explore this issue. We are particularly concerned with how American literary and cultural texts have sought to challenge and/or subvert the equation between the American Dream and economic progress. This progress is usually represented in the body politic as a visible success story best summarized as “from rags to riches”. However, American arts and letters are ripe with discourses which contradict the construction of the American Dream as unequivocally materialistic and propose that it can be defined otherwise: as a learning process, a yearning for equality, etc. Furthermore, characters who suffer physical or psychological harm due to their belief in upward-mobility as an exclusively money-oriented system serve the purpose of highlighting how disruptive this cultural given actually is.
We invite proposals which examine how the capitalist American Dream and its consequences are problematized through such deconstructions of the success story and/or through characters whose damaging commodification at the hands of the capitalist system personify the evils of ruthless materialism.

Suggested Topics:

- In what way/s have American writers and artists at large negotiated the paradox between the yearning for equality, which is at the core of the nation’s definition of “Democracy”, and the “rags to riches” ethos?

- In what way/s have American writers and artists at large sought to re-define the American Dream from a non-Capitalist perspective? Have the strategies that question exclusively materialistic values varied historically?

- To what extent do race, gender and/or sexuality impinge upon the (re)construction and representation of the American Dream in the nation’s arts and letters?

- To what extent can the portrayal of characters who suffer physical or psychological harm at the hands of their belief in upward-mobility undermine the mainstream construction of the “American Dream”? Is this an effective strategy?

- Do the cultural and literary deconstructions of the success story serve the purpose of questioning the upward-mobility ethos or, conversely, do they reinforce the distinction made in the American social imaginary between “winners” and “losers”?

 

10th INTERNATIONAL SAAS CONFERENCE
Alcalá de Henares, Madrid, 14-16 April 2011

THE BACKYARD OF THE U.S.A. MANSION: Critical Readings of Poverty and Wealth in the United States

Name:

Academic Affiliation:

E-mail:

Title of Proposal:

Panel:

Special requirements, if any:

Abstract (400-600 words):

Please, complete this form and send it, in electronic format (via e-mail), to the Chair of your selected panel. Deadline for sending proposals is October 29, 2010.