Auður “the Deepminded” Ketilsdóttir and Guðríður “the Far Traveller” Þorbjarnardóttir were two remarkable and widely travelled medieval women whose stories are related in the Icelandic Sagas. Auður grew up in the Scottish Hebrides, married into Ireland, settled again in the north of Scotland and finally travelled with her retinue across the ocean to Iceland to make her home there. Guðríður was born in Iceland, travelled to Greenland and lived there for some years before going to Vinland (Newfoundland), where she gave birth to the first European reported to be born in North America. She returned to Greenland and then settled in northern Iceland, later going on a pilgrimage to Rome.

This paper focuses on how these two Saga women are depicted in historical novels by two women writers, the Icelandic author Vilborg Davíðsdóttir and the Scottish author Margaret Elphinstone. Davíðsdóttir’s Auður trilogy (Auður (2009), Vígroði [Crimson Skies] (2012), and Blóðug jörð [Ocean Road] (2017)) and Elphinstone’s novel The Sea Road (2000) both present women who went against tradition and made their mark on history. While these portrayals clearly reflect the fact that many women in the Icelandic Sagas – including both Auður and Guðríður – are shown to be energetic, independent and strong-willed, the focus however shifts from the generally male-centred Saga world (of conquests, battles and land-winnings) to a domestic and personal perspective, that of the women themselves, focalising their own experience and outlook. Overall, the representation of Auður and Guðríður reflects both authors’ interest in women’s position in the past as well as their concerns with how female experiences and perspectives have been side-lined in historical accounts.

This presentation grapples with the legacy of 9/11 in American life and literature, particularly novels that are not about 9/11, per se, but that illuminate what it means to live in the aftermath of the attacks. Ours is (still) a post-9/11 world, and credible lines can be drawn between the events of 9/11, responses to those events, and ripple effects of those responses. One way to trace such ripple effects is to analyze literature after 9/11 using what I call a slant approach, uncovering the subtle, almost imperceptible ways in which 9/11 has seeped into both fiction and culture. 

Existing scholarship on post-9/11 literature tends to focus exclusively on novels that deal directly and explicitly with the attacks and their aftermath. I lay out a different strategy for conceptualizing and analyzing post-9/11 literature—a strategy that considers not only works that bear an obvious relation to 9/11, but also, and perhaps more importantly, works whose engagement with 9/11 is indirect and/or oblique. Drawing on trauma theory and memory studies, this presentation uses case study analyses of three 21st century novels to broaden the understanding of how 9/11 shows up—often undercover, often hidden in nooks and crannies—in contemporary literature, and also contemporary life. 

Known as the poet of democracy, the singer of America – all its people and places – Walt Whitman nevertheless had a darker, possibly lesser-known side to himself, which was more visible in his prose works rather than in his poetry. Not long ago, Whitman’s problematic comments on the topic of race returned to the forefront of public and academic debate, in the context of the recent cancel culture phenomenon, prompting different responses aimed at questioning the validity of Whitman as a representative of American values. One of the highlights of the cancel culture focus on Whitman was the online petition for the removal of his statue from a preeminent place on the Rutgers-Camden campus, in New Jersey. This presentation will offer an overview of Whitman’s racist stances, as well as of the events at Rutgers. It is, moreover, part of my research toward my doctoral dissertation Walt Whitman Reconsidered: Democracy, Race, Cancel Culture and “America’s Poet.”

Representing the peak of mainstream American rap of 2011, the Hype Williams directed video for contentious rapper Kanye West’s “All of the Lights” features a hyper-stylized and explosive series of animated typography, creating a compelling balance of aesthetics and excess. However, “All of the Lights” was essentially a mainstream scale stint of plagiarism of the opening credit sequence of extreme cinema director Gaspar Noé and his psychedelic cinematic feat, Enter the Void (2009). Surprisingly, despite Noé’s notoriety of Franco-centric, challenging art house films, the references to him within the American rap mainstream do not end here. 

This paper sets out to explore the connections between music video aesthetics adapted into the mainstream and their ultimate subversive roots, repositioned for a wider audience. This will bring into discussion the distinctions of reference, appropriation and plagiarism in the moving image and explore how West, A$AP Rocky, Rihanna and The Carters connect to skim the surface of a controversial cinematic corpus where associations to Noé have their own surprising implications. Finally, this paper will acknowledge current controversies surrounding West’s racist commentary that continue to add relevance to the discussion of ethical artistic practices and associations.

Derived from the foundational work of my ongoing doctoral research, this project establishes the extreme in video games as an original term/concept, referred to here as the “ergodic extreme” or simply “extreme gaming.” Rather than an artistic advancement or the peak of the medium, the extreme in video games has been used as a marketing ploy or for esports branding—think “Xtreme.” Yet, extremity, as its own genre, has been academically and artistically observed in literature and cinema. This project extends that courtesy to video games, especially since the usual standards of aesthetics and narrative do not entirely apply, mainly due to the inclusion of gameplay. The extreme in video games will be defined by considering the crucial role of gameplay—for instance, in horror, Soulslike titles, virtual reality, and procedurally generated games—and by exploring its hyperintensive interactive immersion of or relationship with an engager’s self and avatar in a game-world through reception theory, affect theory, and game theory. Broadly, this project ponders the following two questions: to what extent and in what manner does gameplay/interactivity influence artistic extremes, and how do these extremes benefit the understanding of video games as a medium and as art?