Words & Music, 2010 |
Thursday, November 18
9:30 a. m. — Muriel's Restaurant at Jackson Square
LOVE & WAR
in Paul LeBlanc de Villeneufve's The Heroism of Poucha-Houmma or Festival of the Young Corn
By Nancy Dixon, Ph.D
Lelanc’s play, The Heroism of Poucha-Houmma or Festival of the Young Corn, is the oldest extant script that exists in New Orleans, which in itself makes it a valuable work. Moreover, LeBlanc lived and worked with the Choctaw Indians for seven years, and was told the account of Poucha-Houmma’s heroics from his son, the chief of the Houmma Indians, Cala-be, the rash young man depicted in the play. LeBlanc’s play was first performed at Téâtre de la Rue Saint Pierre (Now Le Petit) in 1809. Since play reviews did not appear in the newspapers of the time, we know little about the play’s reception. However, we do know that Governor Claiborne sent a copy of the play to Thomas Jefferson, and that copy can still be found in the Jefferson papers today. At the age of thirteen, LeBlanc found himself penniless when his father died. There were few choices for men of his class other than to join the military, which he did, and at sixteen, he was sent to Louisiana to work with the Native Americans of this state. Those seven years with the Choctaw Indians inspired The Heroism of Poucha-Houmma, a play about the rash young son of the chief of the Houma Indians who gets drunk and murders the young son of the neighboring “Tchacta” tribe. Custom dictated that his life must be sacrificed for the life the young man he murdered. However, his father, Chief Poucha-Houmma cannot bear to see his young son die, so he makes the ultimate sacrifice and offers his own life. Writing in the French neo-classical style of the time, LeBlanc adheres closely to the Aristotelian unities, emphasizing reason above passion.
Dr. Dixon is a longtime scholar of Louisiana Literature. Her book, Fortune and Misery, Sallie Rhett Roman of New Orleans, won the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities (LEH) Book Award in 2000, and since then she has published articles on Louisiana writers in Louisiana Literature and the anthology Songs of the Reconstructing South. She has an upcoming article, Armand Lanusse, Les Cenelles, and the Censorship Laws of 1830 in the anthology, Turning Points and Transformations: Essays on Language, Literature and Culture to be published next year by Cambridge Scholars Press. Nancy received a Publication Initiatives grant from LEH for her current project, NO Lit: An Anthology of New Orleans Literature from 1803 to Post-Katrina. She teaches English at the University of New Orleans.
4:00 p. m. — The Cabildo at Jackson Square
HERE TO WATCH
Voyeurism, Journalism, and War in Michael Herr’s Dispatches
Presented By John David Hoseman, Graduate Student in Literature
"Here to Watch" to watch is a phrase from Michael Herr’s Dispatches that connotes a certain conscious voyeurism present throughout the text. The current study investigates this voyeurism on several levels, illuminating issues such as the allure of war and catharsis as a theme in war literature. During an era when visual media began to transform the societal consciousness of a generation, the war in Vietnam became America’s first shot of relatively live-action war images that would capture the attention of a nation and turn its citizens into voyeurs. In an essay on the Vietnam war and postmodern literature, Lucas Carpenter notes that “because the Vietnam War was the first war to be reported via television and where the media were given extensive and uncensored access to the combat, conflicting discourses claiming the ‘truth’ soon developed to explain the images flowing every evening into American living rooms” (34). It comes as no surprise, then, that Michael Herr’s Dispatches, a book placed near the top of the Vietnam narrative hierarchy, is a text that acknowledges the evolving forms of media that affected not only his audience but also his subject, the war itself. Put simply, Herr’s goal in writing this text was to arrive at a sufficiently described war that traditional journalists failed to illustrate for the American public. However, a more complex reading reveals Herr’s awareness of the power of observation and the meaning of looking as that which allows this book to become a complex arrangement of fragmented bits of memory and images, performing the war rather than describing it. Embedded throughout Dispatches are reminders of Herr’s role as a correspondent and what it means to be a voyeur of war. Frequently, Herr’s descriptions of death and fear teeter on a visceral and sometimes sexual allure of war, establishing himself as a conscious voyeur in the conventional sense of the term. While Herr’s war-as-sex analogies are telling of his obsession with the allure of war, there are several layers of meaning in regards to voyeurism in the text. Beyond the aforementioned war gawking, Herr finds himself negotiating an ambiguous role of mediator between the subject of the gaze (war) and the voyeur (media consumers). By investigating voyeurism as a psychoanalytic concern, Dispatches becomes mimetic of a psychoanalytic theorist’s interest in subconscious motivations of the subject in that Herr is concerned not with the superficial war, but with the war’s substratum. This substratum, or subconscious motives, lie within the stories told by the grunts; stories that were frequently discarded by other, more conventional, journalists. In this endeavor, Herr gives American citizens a reality with more depth than was portrayed by the surface level stories concerned with statistics and strategies that left the media consumers feeling as if “the suffering was somehow unimpressive” (Herr, 201). By focusing on voyeurism and its place in this work of creative non-fiction, multiple layers of meaning become apparent that speak to the psychology of war. First, Herr’s fascination with the seduction of war and the images that come with it confronts the issue of our own attraction to war. However, Herr’s awareness of his own conscious voyeurism (not to mention the fact that Dispatches was written in book form after several years of editing and psychological therapy) allows for a more complete Vietnam narrative, functioning as a cathartic rendering of images that have often proved problematic for those who have viewed them. Works Cited: Carpenter, Lucas. “‘It Don’t Mean Nothin’”: Vietnam War Fiction and Postmodernism, .Herr, Michael. Dispatches. New York: Everyman’s Library. (2009),
John David Hosemann is a graduate student of literature at the University of Southern Mississippi. Having attained a bachelor’s degree in psychology while also studying literature, Hosemann’s approach to his work, whether science or humanities, has always been interdisciplinary in nature. Currently, his research interests include but are not limited to visual culture and literature, focusing specifically on the technology of looking (i.e. photography, cinema, television, and the internet) and how artists have come to represent such mass voyeurism. When he isn’t teaching composition or writing paper proposals, Hosemann can be found in his own home practicing the same voyeuristic tendencies he studies via Facebook. He even fan
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cies himself a “weekend photographer.”
TELL IT ONE MORE TIME
Repetition as “truth” in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried
By Brian Schneider,
One of the lasting tenets from Tim O’Brien’s book The Things They Carried is the author’s repeated separation of “story-truth” from “happening-truth.” O’Brien continually invokes repetition, in many forms, in his never-ending quest to find the “story-truth” in his experiences of the Vietnam war. And scholars continually try to separate truth from fiction in his work. My paper does not question the validity of the “truth” of O’Brien’s stories, but how he creates – and why. Using the work of noted war trauma psychologist Dr. Jonathan Shay as a starting point, Schneider delves into O’Brien’s use of repetition is a method of some form of recovery from the traumatic events of war. However, the word “trauma” is not used once in the text of The Things They Carried. What may be more important, and something Schneider points out, is how the repetition of similar events transcend not only the individual chapters of The Things They Carried, but resonate throughout O’Brien books such as his memoir If I Die in a Combat Zone and his novel Going After Cacciato. While referencing several of O’Brien’s other works, Schneider's paper focuses on how the refined use of repetition is clarified within The Things They Carried. Using examples such as the character Kiowa’s death in a field filled with excremen and something as simple as a one line reference to a character named Stink Harris, I show how the use of repetition creates multiple avenues for the reader to understand the realities of war and close combat. How to make combat understandable to someone who has never experienced it? Tell it again, only this time from a different angle. Even within all of O’Brien’s Vietnam-related writing, The Things They Carried is the pinnacle of his repetition technique.
Brian Schneider is a former U.S. Air Force Sergeant, former military contractor, and veteran of the American war in Afghanistan. He grew up in the small town of St. Helen in northern Michigan and has also lived in Italy and Canada. He holds a Bachelor of Arts Degree in English from the University of Maryland and a Master of Arts Degree in English from the University of British Columbia. He currently is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of British and American Studies at the University of Constance in Germany where he focuses on contemporary American war writing. In addition, he also teaches English courses at U.S. military installations in Europe for the University of Maryland University College. His fiction has appeared in several magazines and he is currently working to publish his first novel, This is Squalorville, based on his experiences with the war in Afghanistan and Post-traumatic Stress Disorder.
WE ARE ALL VICTIMS
The Devastating Effects of the New Warfare on the Physical and Psychological Health of Our Soldiers, Their Families, and Those Who Care for Them
By Gregory Anderson, MD
Dr. Anderson's paper will explore the psychological impact of the dreadful wars in the Middle East which are characterized by
the dramatically increased role of improvised explosive devices (IED's) which cause tremendous physical damage to the human body and cause concussive injuries and traumatic brain injuries.There are instantly fatal injuries from IED s at the time of the explosion, mutilating injuries to soldiers with shrapnel wounds, hearing loss, loss of vision, and parts of bodies blown away. Some of these individuals survive, with significant lifelong disabilities.The level of surgical skill is so high now that many soldiers who would have died from their injuries in the past are now be saved. The most difficult aspect of these injuries is that traumatic brain injuries are not always obvious and can be quite subjective.They are frequently difficult to diagnose, may require observation of behavioral changes with re-evaluation over time. Sometimes there may be little treatment. Many of these injuries will take a year or two to figure out the scope of the injuries. Unfortunately, most will never recover sufficiently to lead normal lives. These are tragic and difficult cases, changing for ever the lives of the families involved and those who care for them. In addition to the injuries inflicted upon our young men and women in the military, both combatants and caregivers, is the damage to their psyches caused by being in countries where essentially they are not wanted, where they are, in fact, despised as unbelievers. Female physicians in the combat zones attempting to give care to injured muslim enemies as well as American military personnel have no credibilituy, may not touch or uncover maile prisoners, are often spat and urinated upon. "As a family physician I become part of my practice," explains Dr. Anderson." What affects my patients and their lives at some point begins to affect me. I have known some of my colleagues for seven years now. We know each other well and are a tightly knit group, recognized for the past several years as the best of Madigan Army Medical Center's Family Medicine Clinics for the quality of care we provide. It has became apparent over time that all of us are being adversely affected by events in the lives of our patients and their families. Some more than others, but nobody gets off free."
Gregory Anderson, MD, has for the last eight years worked for the U. S. Army in the Department of Family Medicine at Joint Base Fort Lewis-McCord, WA. His job has been to provide primary medical care for soldiers deploying to and returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as their families. Now in his 40th year of medical practice, Dr. Anderson grew up in the Mid-West in the 50s during the Korean conflict and was educated during the Vietnam conflict. He attended Yale University, graduating in 1967 with a BA in Asian History. He attended the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, graduating in 1971. He interned in Pediatrics at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. Then the Vietnam conflict caught up with him. He was drafted as a Navy doctor and spent two years on a submarine tender in San Diego, Portland and Bremerton. He has lived in the Northwest since 1975, spending 20 years in solo family practice before he began working for the Department of Defense. He is married. He and his wife Beth have six children, three boys and three girls. He will be presenting a paper on the care of military personnel returning from Middle East wars with post traumatic stress syndrome and severe disabilities incurred in battle and roadside bombings. His paper will address how in turn those who treat the devastating mental and physical injuries suffer post traumatic stress syndrome.
THE CHILDREN LEFT BEHIND
A Reflection on What Happens to a Child Abandoned by a Foreign Soldier
By Zachary J. George
In literature written about war there is an absence of reflection on what happens to a child abandoned by a foreign soldier. Using the research already compiled about the orphans abandoned in Vietnam as a starting point, George will explore the war and reveal the after effects through the voices of the children who had no choice.
Zachary
George is finishing his thesis in preparation to earn an MFA in fiction writing from the University of New Orleans. This project, a novel called Four Days to the Mile, follows the life of an Amerasian born in Vietnam in 1967 up through 2002. George has taught English in South Korea, Vietnam, and Prague. It was during his travels in 2002 that he first became interested in the Vietnamese people and the strength of their character. George worked on Voices Rising and Voices Rising II as assistant editor to Rebeca Antoine. He also gathered stories for the two books through interviews with victims of Hurricane Katrina. George’s short story What Cats Do is forthcoming in the fall issue of Inkwell Journal. He worked for Faiyo Magazine in Prague, writing a bi-weekly story for each issue and has just begun a gardening column for Nola Defender, a new online magazine focusing on New Orleans.
Friday, November 19
9 a. m. — The Hotel Monteleone, Queen Anne Ballroom
Saturday, November 20
9 a. m. — Hotel Monteleone, Orleans Room
ANGER
A personal account of the dilemma and physic trauma men in insurgent combat endure.
Presented by Franklin Cox, author of the new book Lullabies for Lieutenants, published in April.
Cox will read an excerpt, Anger, from his memoir, Lullabies for Lieutenants, which captures the chaotic nature of the U.S. Marine's life at war in Vietnam. The book recounts his experiences as a young officer in a series of unrelated short pieces which describes a specific events, stories of emotions, or remarkable people. Cox gives the reader a true sense of the pulse-pounding contact, surrealism, pathos, humor, and beauty that defined one of the low points of the American experience.
Franklin Cox was raised in Atlanta, GA and received his undergraduate degree in English Literature from Saint Bernard College in 1963. He was awarded commission in the United States Marine Corps and served as a Forward Observer in Vietnam. His dramatic experiences with his fellow Marines in combat led him to recently write Lullabies for Lieutenants: Memoir of a Marine Forward Observer in Vietnam, 1965-1966, his first book (McFarland and Co.). After his service in the Marine Corps, Cox went to work on Wall Street and was a top-producing stockbroker for more than 25 years with Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns. A few years ago he left the securities industry to devote his full time to writing. He is currently working on two other books. One is his memoir, Trust Me! How Stockbrokers Tried to Steal Everything You Had. The other is a book about what it takes to build a perennial championship high-school football program, The Long Blue Line: the Ghosts of Marist Football.9
9:30 a. m. — Hotel Monteleone, Orleans Room
SEARCHING FOR MERCY STREET
Tim O’Brien’s Norman Bowker and the Literature of PTSD
By Kristin Kelly, Ph.D.
At the heart of Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried lies a section entitled Speaking of Courage, the story of Norman Bowker, member of Alpha Company and a great friend of Kiowa, a fellow soldier who perishes one dark night, bubbles where his head should have been, in a sodden field of human waste. Kiowa was folded in with the waste, and Norman Bowker was sucked down as well—even though he returns for several years to his small, clean, anonymous hometown in Iowa before hanging himself at the local YMCAO’Brien’s most empathetic portrait of Norman Bowker—rootless, bewildered, forever driving in circles on a long, hot July Fourth afternoon—focuses on the extreme isolation of the war veteran. Bowker’s only company for the day is the disembodied voice on the other end of the speaker at the local A&W drive-in. For Bowker, home is purgatory, with a certain heaven or hell preferable.
Kristin Kelly is an English professor at Gainesville State College in Gainesville, GA. She holds a B.A. and M.A. in English from the University of Georgia and a Ph.D. in English from Georgia State University. Her primary research interest is the literature of the Vietnam War and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She currently is offering a new composition class entitled The Combat Experience in American Literature. In late 2009, Kristin received a grant to begin work on an interview collection entitled Listen: Combat Veterans Speak. This project collects interviews from combat veterans of the current wars to be published in both print and electronic form. She has published in The South Atlantic Review and Green Leaves: The Journal of the Barbara Pym Society. She lives in Gainesville with her husband and two children.
3:30 p. m. — The Hotel Monteleone, The Royal Rooms (Ground Floor, adjacent to Carousel Bar)
LORD BYRON, BRIAN TURNER AND ISLAMIC AND CHRISTIAN STATES AT WAR
Poetry of War Then and Now
Presented by Kathryn Pratt Russell, Ph.D.
While Byron’s swashbuckling reputation currently owes more to his feats of sexual prowess than to his pugilistic or martial endeavors, the poet was famous in his day as a manly poet and personality. His ability to write scenes of battle and to evoke patriotic sentiment was widely admired. Written in 1822, Cantos Seven to Nine (the “War Cantos”) of his epic poem Don Juan represent on a grand scale the Siege of Ismail in 1790, a crucial battle of the Russo-Turkish war of 1787 to 1792 (the wars lasted for hundreds of years, flaring up regularly between 1568 and 1918). While Byron uses one heroic protagonist, Juan, to give emotional impact to the scenes of battle, his narrator ranges over the whole battle, including scenes from Russian General Suvorov’s training of his men to clashes between battalions. Byron’s depiction of war might seem irrelevant to Americans today, were it not for our involvement in two wars in which, since the World Trade Center attacks of 2001, the stereotyping of warring Christian and Muslim states has emerged with a vengeance from its short historical slumber. Brian Turner, a poet and soldier who served in Iraq, has produced two volumes of poetry that re-imagine war not as the performance of a heroic masquerade, but as lived experience at its most intimate and individual. While Turner, like all contemporary American poets, is indebted to Byron and the other Romantics for his lyric consciousness, Turner’s perspective is not satirical like that of Don Juan’s narrator, but dramatic and confessional. Even when Turner does depict Islamic forces against a historical background, he avoids the grand archetypal and idealizing portrayal of Christian-Muslim strife, instead showing individuals entrapped in a lived experience of history which belongs neither to one side nor the other.
Sunday, November 21
9 a. m. — The Hotel Monteleone, Queen Anne Ballroom
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