The Waste Land’s 100th Anniversary

The Waste Land’s 100th Anniversary Celebration, Madrid, April 6-8, 2022

The European Association for American Studies is proud to present poet Giannina Braschi and scholars David E. Chinitz, Ramón del Castillo, and Eulalia Piñero Gil as the plenary speakers of The Waste Land’s 100th Anniversary Celebration in Madrid this April. The title of 2022 EAAS Wastelands conference alludes to T.S. Eliot’s masterpiece and the main themes in it, expanding the idea of wastelands to the study of the United States. The conference is open to all kinds of reflections around the concept of wastelands and waste in U.S. culture, history, and politics.

Wastelands 2022: European Association for American Studies Conference

“April is the cruelest month, breeding
lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain.”

T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland, 1922

WASTELANDS IN THE ANTHROPOCENE

• Environmental waste (water, land, e-waste, etc.).
• Anti-Waste: degrowth philosophy.
• “Zero waste” movement and consumerism.
• Food waste.
• Wastelands as devastation of spaces.
• Waste of resources (human, natural, economic, etc.).

THE ETHICS OF WASTE

• Moral waste: deterioration of democracies and other values. Empty discourses (political, cultural, etc.).
• Wasted opportunities (land of opportunities, American dream).
• Waste as a “negative store”, as opposed to the archive; forgetting, destruction, and latent cultural memory.
• Waste of information: useless and redundant data, technology, media, etc.

CORPOREAL WASTE

• Illnesses and pathologies.
• Age: The Growing Land.
• Emotional wastelands: real or metaphorical
• Pandemics and other physical threats.

LITERARY AND CULTURAL REPRESENTATIONS OF WASTELANDS

• “Wasteland” as an image of decadence, crisis, and postwar.
• Barrenness vs. fertility, hopelessness vs. regeneration.
• S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and its literary / cultural influence.
• Literary representations of wastelands.
• (Audio)visual representations of wastelands.
• Ruins, trash, in painting, music, film, and other artistic representations.

EAAS PLENARY SPEAKERS: The Waste Land’s 100th Anniversary Celebration

GIANNINA BRASCHI

Puerto Rican author and poet Giannina Braschi is the author of Empire of Dreams, Yo-Yo Boing! and United States of Banana. PEN called Braschi “one of the most revolutionary voices” in Latin American Literature today. Her work is a postmodern hybrid of poetry, fiction, theater, and political philosophy. The Latinx philosopher writes in Spanish, Spanglish, and English on far-ranging subjects—from immigration, economy, and colonialism—to love, liberty, and creativity. Born in San Juan, Braschi was a fashion model, singer, and tennis champion in her teen years. She was mentored, during her studies at la Universidad Complutense de Madrid, by distinguished Spanish poets Carlos Bousoño, Claudio Rodriguez, and Blas de Otero who encouraged her to pursue poetry. With a Ph.D. in Hispanic Literatures from State University of New York, Stony Brook, she taught at Rutgers University, City University of New York, and Colgate University. She has published essays on Cervantes, Garcilaso, Machado, and Lorca, as well as a book on Bécquer entitled Si/pero no: La poesía de Bécquer (Costa Amic, 2022). She won el Premio Cambiemos in 2021 for her lifetime achievements in literature. She has also won awards/grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, Ford Foundation, Danforth Scholarship, New York Foundation for the Arts, Reed Foundation, InterAmericas, Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, Rutgers University, Cambio16, and PEN America. Artists have adapted her texts into experimental theater, art films, music, photography, painting, sculpture, and graphic novel.

DAVID E. CHINITZ

David E. Chinitz is the author of T.S. Eliot and the Cultural Divide and Which Sin To Bear? Authenticity and Compromise in Langston Hughes as well as co-editor of The Complete Prose of T. S. Eliot, vol. 6: The War Years, 1940-1946 (winner of the 2019 MLA Prize for a Scholarly Edition). He also edited the Blackwell Companion to T. S. Eliot and co-edited the Companion to Modernist Poetry. He co-directs Modernist Networks (modnets.org), which provides peer review and aggregation for digital projects in modernism. He served as president of the International T. S. Eliot Society from 2010 to 2012 and as president of the Modernist Studies Association in 2014. A professor at Loyola University Chicago, he currently chairs its English Department.

RAMÓN DEL CASTILLO

Ramón del Castillo is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Anthropology at the UNED and Vice-Dean of Graduate Studies and Research at the Faculty of Philosophy. He teaches courses in contemporary philosophy in the B. A. of English Studies, Anthropology and Art History, and Cultural Studies in the Master’s Degree of Philosophy. He has been the coordinator of several research teams exploring the crisis in the public sphere. His area of research is Anglo-American culture and philosophy, from the end of the 19th century to the present, especially pragmatist social philosophy, cultural materialism and Marxist theory. He has translated the works of Terry Eagleton and Fredric Jameson into Spanish. His last two books are El jardín de los delirios. Las ilusiones del naturalismo (Turner 2019) and Filósofos de paseo (Turner 2020). Some of his most recent essays are “Thinking without Banisters”, “The Comic Mind of William James,” “Gags and Games: Wittgenstein and his Relation to Jokes”, “El jardín en llamas: a vueltas con Fahrenheit 451”, “Del espacio exterior al espacio interior. Raymond Williams y la Ciencia-Ficción.” Currently, he is a member of a research team on artistic designs and architectures in the Anthropocene. Among his forthcoming publications (Autumn 2021) are a book about Antonio Gramsci’s ideas on detective novels (Conan Doyle and Chesterton) and a sequel of his book on naturalist ideologies focused on recent discussions on the environmental crisis. Also, from the 1990s, he has collaborated as a critic, commentator, and instructor in the musical and audiovisual world (Classical Radio, Barenboim-Said Foundation, National Orchestra, Young National Orchestra, Teatro Real) as well as in several music festivals and music schools.

EULALIA PIÑERO GIL

Eulalia Piñero Gil teaches American Literature and Gender Studies at the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid. Currently, she is president of the Spanish Association for American Studies (SAAS) and director of the Madrid Master’s Degree in English Studies of the UAM. She has also served as member of EAAS board and the Spanish Association for AngloAmerican Studies (AEDEAN) board. She is delighted to partake in The Waste Land’s 100th anniversary celebration as part of the EAAS Wastelands Conference. She has taught at Purdue University, Saint Louis University, UNED, University Complutense and University of Castilla-La Mancha. She was awarded a scholarship to study Comparative and American Literature at Purdue University in Indiana where she graduated with a Master’s degree. Likewise, she was awarded a doctoral grant to research the archive of the American modernist poet Marianne Moore at the “Rosenbach Library and Foundation” in Philadelphia and two postgraduate scholarships by the Canadian Government to research Canadian and American women’s poetry at Toronto University. She has published on American Renaissance, modernism, women’s literature and comparative literature. Notably, she has co-edited several works including Visions of Canada Approaching the Millennium (1999), Voices and Images of Women in 20th Century Theatre. Anglo-American Women Playwrights (2002), Women and Art: Visions of Change and Social Development (2010,) Breaking a Sea of Silence: Interdisciplinary Reflections on Gender Violence (2013), and Live Deep and Suck all the Marrow of Life. H. D. Thoreau’s Literary Legacy (2020). She is also the author of the critical edition of Extraordinary Narrations by E. A. Poe (Octaedro,1999), and the translation and critical edition of Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener (Espasa Calpe, 2006). In 2012, she translated and edited Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (Cátedra), and in 2020 Kate Chopin’s Complete Short Stories (Páginas de Espuma). She has been appointed a member of the Kate Chopin International Society Advisory Committee for her contribution to this American writer. In 2018 she translated and edited for the first time in Spanish John Dos Passos’s A Pushcart at the Curb, Invierno en Castilla (Renacimiento).

Presenting organizations of The Waste Land’s 100th Anniversary Celebration in Madrid:

Special thanks to the EAAS and its partners Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia and Universidad Complutense de Madrid. Cristina Garrigós, Antonio Ballesteros, María García Lorenzo, Dídac Llorens, Luz Arroyo Vázquez, Isabel Castelao Gómez, Marta Cerezo Moreno, Raymond Echitchi, Isabel Guerrero Llorente, Adriana Kiczkowski, Mariángel Soláns García, Ana Zamorano Rueda, Inés Ordiz Alonso-Collada, Esther Díaz Morillo, Noelia Gregoria, Natalia Martínez, Isabel Durán, Carmen Méndez, Laura de la Parra, Rebeca Gualberto Valverde, Francisco José Cortés Viec. Gracias for producing the Wastelands Conference in honor of The Waste Land’s 100th anniversary celebration in 2022.