2024 Ex-position Talks 

Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures, National Taiwan University

Title: The Ambiguous Century: Passing, Cross-Dressing, and Transgressing in Nineteenth-Century American Literature

Speaker: Dr. Elena Furlanetto (Senior lecturer, University of Duisburg-Essen)

Time: 2–4 PM Friday, October 25, 2024
Venue: Online (registration link: forms.gle/GGzJMACaTGjfLvag7)

Hosted by Dr. Manuel Herrero-Puertas (National Taiwan University)

Born and raised in Italy, Elena Furlanetto earned her doctorate in Transnational/Transatlantic American Studies from the TU Dortmund in July 2015. She is the author of Towards Turkish American Literature: Narratives of Multiculturalism in Post-Imperial Turkey (Peter Lang AG, 2017). She is the coordinator of the DFG Research Network “Voices and Agencies: America and the Atlantic, 1600-1865” (with Ilka Brasch) and a PI within the DFG Research Unit FOR 2600 “Ambiguität und Unterscheidung: Historisch Kulturelle Dynamiken.” Elena Furlanetto’s habilitation “Ambiguity: Dis/Ambiguated Texts and Selves in North America, 1643-1883” won the 2023 Rob Kroes Publication Award by the European Association of American Studies.

This paper centers on three social and identity “movements” that radiate through literary texts and genres of 19th-century American literature: passing, cross-dressing, and transgressing, and suggests that the identity shifts and transfers activated by the three movements are fictionalized through an aesthetic of ambiguity. I understand 19th-century literary ambiguity as a mode of reflection on raced and gendered bodies, as well as an intersectional aesthetic, as it presses against 19th-century binarization policies designed to categorize and racialize, such as, among others, the Indian Removal Act, postbellum segregation, white supremacist pseudo-science, and the Cult of true Womanhood. The three movements appear, alone or in various combinations, across the 19th-century literary spectrum, but I will narrow down on works of fiction, both canonical and under-researched, where all three movements are present simultaneously and/or display significant interferences. My case studies will include William and Ellen Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860), William Still’s The Underground Railroad (1872), and Louisa May Alcott’s Eight Cousins (1875). This selection will allow me to reflect on how the three movements magnify, dilute, overpower or facilitate each other, and what kind of ambiguity phenomena accompany them.