“A South Texas Port in Tejano and Anglo-Texan History and Lore: Intersecting and Competing Regional Narratives of Corpus Christi, Texas”

May 31, 2016; 4 pm (16 Uhr c.t.)
Philosophicum, Fakultätssaal
Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz

The lecture examines Corpus Christi, Texas – a port, industrial, and tourist city of around 400,000 along the South Texas coast – in order to illustrate the myriad ways that competing, but also intersecting Mexican American and Anglo American understandings of regional history and identity show up in historical accounts of the city and shape the city’s appearance, art and architecture, and cultural politics. Despite its Spanish name, the city was founded in the 1830s by Anglo promoters and developed over the nineteenth century as a launching point of Anglo American commercial expansion into and colonization of the Mexican-U.S. borderlands. That dramatic, often violent experience remains at the heart of local historical discussion and debate, which even after a century of urbanization continues to take the form of competing frontier epics: a south-to-north Hispanic story of gradual colonization overwhelmed by a headlong east-to-west Anglo American invasion.

Download the poster here.

“Vignettes: Micro-Fictions in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers”

February 2, 2016; 6 pm (18 Uhr c.t.)
Philosophicum P12
Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz

Drawing from the findings of the Viral Text Project at Northeastern University (http://viraltexts.org/), this talk describes and theorizes a prototypical but largely unstudied newspaper genre, the vignette. These are very short prose pieces, typically a few paragraphs, that mark themselves simultaneously as fact and fiction and embody a complicated negotiation between objective truth and subjective fiction that underlay much of the period’s literature.

This talk situates the vignette as an essential genre in antebellum American letters, both influential in the development of sentimental fiction and a precursor to the prose writing later styled „literary journalism.“ The vignette in many ways encapsulates the medium of the nineteenth-century newspaper: it is both fact and fiction, operating in the gray space produced by a medium through which news, poetry, fiction, and countless other genres jostled for readers’ attention on the same pages. Through its form and situation, vignettes demonstrate similarly deep entanglements between the newspaper’s informational mode and the emotional mode of contemporaneous fiction.

Download the poster here.

“Shades of Blackness in the Autobiography of Malcolm X”

This lecture is part of the seminar “Introduction to Autobiography/Life Writing”.

January 29, 2016; 10am – 12 noon (c.t.)
SBII 02-432
Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz

Download the poster here.