Cross-Cultural Encounters 1865-1933

The University of Salzburg

December 6-7, 2012
Salzburg, Austria

The University of Salzburg’s American Studies Department invites scholars from the disciplines of literature, cultural studies, transatlantic studies, theater studies, musicology and art history to a 2-day conference to reflect on America’s relationship with Austria around the turn of the last century (ca. from the end of the American Civil War to the end of the First Austrian Republic).

If, as Ralph Waldo Emerson suggested, Americans go to Europe to be Americanized, this is perhaps because, as Cushing Stout upheld a century later, Europe, in the American imagination, has been projected as a nexus of ideas, values and institutions directly contrasting that of their own New World. Certainly fictional characters from inter-war works of figures including Djuna Barnes and Kay Boyle exemplify these maxims. Yet images of Austria, created or dismantled by such authors, had already been evoked in American fiction, nonfiction, personal writing and poetry by earlier writers including William Cullen Bryant, Mark Twain, Henry Adams and Edith Wharton. Meanwhile, Austria has long stood just far enough off the beaten tourist track to remain adaptable to a wide range of American stereotyping.

Invited panels, papers and presentations might treat the following themes:

• Ties between literary and political transatlantic relations involving the United States and Austria
• Issues of immigration and emigration
• Images of America in Austrian literature and arts from around the turn of the century
• Literary presentations of Austrian culture, politics, literature or psychoanalysis in the U.S.
• Late 19th and early 20th century English-language translations of Austrian literature
• Austrian authors on the American stage
• Influences of American Romanticism on Austrian Modernism

Proposals in English or German are welcome and should include a title, an abstract (500 words maximum) and a brief personal biography of no more than 150 words. Please submit your proposal no later than March 31, 2012 to the conference organizers joshua.parker@sbg.ac.at or ralph.poole@sbg.ac.at