UNM English at the Southwest Texas Popular Culture and American Culture Conference

English Department faculty and graduate students were well represented at the Southwest Texas Popular Culture and American Culture Associations 33rd Annual Conference, February 8 – 11, 2012 at the Hyatt Regency Hotel & Conference Center in Albuquerque, NM.

Megan Abrahamson, “‘Sir Marty-Stu’: Lancelot and Le Morte D’Arthur as Self-Insert Fan-Fiction”

Vincent Basso, “Life in the World that Does Not Exist: Uses of the Surreal in Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz”

Paul Formisano, “Green Lagoons and Delta Blues: Transnational Considerations of the Colorado River Delta”

Genevieve Garcia de Mueller, “Gladys and Gorgias: Race, Neosophism, and Tragicomic Hope in the Monologues of John Leguizamo”

Scarlett Higgins, “Making Music Different: Nathaniel Mackey's Blutopic Lyric”

Matthew Hofer, session chair for “Poetry and Poetics (Critical) 1: Sounds and Silences in Twentieth-Century American Poetry” and presenter “‘I Want the Poem to Fail’: John Taggart's New Kind of Silence”

Natalie Kubasek, “Teatro de las Chicanas: The Emergence of an Aesthetic Chicana Feminist Space within the Movement”

Julia Remsik Larsen, “Dying for Change: Mortality and Immortality in Peter S. Beagle’s The Last Unicorn and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings”

Brian Slaughter, “Author as Authority and the Right to Write: Voice, Agency, and Representation in Chimamanda Ngozi Achidie’s Half of a Yellow Sun”

Diane Thiel, session chair for “Creative Writing 4: Mixed Genres” and presenter “Poetry and Translations”

Jill Walker Gonzalez, “From Captive to Captor and Captive Again: The Abduction Myth and Captivity Narrative in the Female American”

Julie Williams, “Depictions of Destruction: How Nuclear Literature Represents Imagined and Real Nuclear Devastation” and “Female Embodiment and the Western Landscape in The Story of Mary MacLane”