XXXV Aedean Conference (Universidad Autónoma Barcelona 2011)
PANEL MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE (Coordinator: Juan Carlos Hidalgo)
SESSION 1
‘An Odd Road’ towards Virginia Woolf’s Lighthouse
Tomás Monterrey Rodríguez (University of La Laguna)
Email:
La estética de la fragmentación y el collage en My Life de Lyn Hejinian
Luisa Mª González Rodríguez (University of Salamanca)
Email:
Recovery of the Past in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Telling
Katarzyna Baran (University Rovira i Virgili)
Email:
SESSION 2 (ROUND TABLE)
El trauma como nuevo paradigma cultural y modo narrativo
Marita Nadal Blasco (University of Zaragoza)
Email:
Participants: Marita Nadal Blasco (Chair), Constanza del Río, Jessica Aliaga and Silvia Pellicer (University of Zaragoza)
SESSION 3
An Interpretation of Masculinity in Manhattan: Reading Raewyn Connell’s concept of “Hegemonic Masculinity” in Jed Rubenfeld’s The Interpretation of Murder
Peter Ferry (Queen's University, Belfast)
Email:
Gendered Spaces and Theatricality in Peter Ackroyd's Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem.
Lin Elinor Pettersson (University of Malaga)
Email:
To Commit a Desecration: The Ambiguous Nature of Unconscious Landscape in Theodore Roethke's "Greenhouse" Poems
Borja Aguilé Obrador (University of Salamanca)
Email:
SESSION 4 (ROUND TABLE)
The Politics of Re-reading/rewriting in Contemporary British Theatre
Hildegard Klein Hagen (Univesity of Málaga)
Email:
Participants: Hildegard Klein (University of Málaga) (Chair), Clara Escoda, Mª Isabel Seguro (University of Barcelona) and Verónica Rodríguez (University of Murcia)
SESSION 5
Unhomely Home. Britain and Surrealism
Yiyi López Gándara (University of Sevilla)
Email:
The Fountain-Head of World’s Drama: The French Play and The Advent of an English National Theatre
Ignacio Ramos Gay (University of Valencia)
Email:
Exorcising Traumatic Aporia: Recovered Memories and the Trauma that Never Was in Nicci French’s The Memory Game
María Jesús Martínez Alfaro (University of Zaragoza)
Email:
SESSION 6 (ROUND TABLE)
A. S. Byatt and the Polemics of Art
Celia M. Wallhead (University of Granada)
Email:
Participants: Celia M. Wallhead (University of Granada), Chair, Alexa Alfer (University of Westminster) and Carmen Lara Rallo (University of Malaga)
ABSTRACTS
‘An Odd Road’ towards Virginia Woolf’s Lighthouse
Tomás Monterrey Rodríguez (University of La Laguna)
This paper focuses on the image of the lighthouse in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. It is read as an art (pictorial) object placed in the ordinary reality of the characters. Therefore, it is no longer a representation within a frame (a window, for instance), but its very iconic nature is projected upon the characters. The lighthouse becomes a dynamic symbol whose signification is enriched at every occurrence throughout the text. Usually associated with Mrs Ramsay, it turns out to function as the unifying axis of the novel. The opposition presence/absence mutually established by Mrs Ramsay and the lighthouse in the first and the third parts will be considered, as well as Lily Briscoe’s determination to put into practice her own methods of creativity and gaining wisdom, which are those of Mrs Woolf herself.
Keywords: ekphrasis, unframed images, To the Lighthouse, Woolf, Lacan
La estética de la fragmentación y el collage en My Life de Lyn Hejinian
Luisa Mª González Rodríguez (University of Salamanca)
Este trabajo se centra sobre el uso que Hejinian hace de la fragmentación y el collage en My Life para desestabilizar las nociones de unidad y coherencia del sujeto poético y cuestionar la posibilidad de transmitir su experiencia mediante el lenguaje. El uso de la estética del collage en este poema autobiográfico subraya la contingencia tanto de los materiales utilizados como de la forma de ensamblarlos no sólo con la intención de plantear cuestiones como la autenticidad o posibilidad de representar la vida de la autora de forma mimética, sino más bien para revelar los códigos y estructuras que convencionalmente se han utilizado para representar la realidad. Además, se analizará la forma en que el collage aporta multidimensionalidad a su poesía al permitir a Hejinian romper las fronteras formales creando estructuras caleidoscópicas que desafían la mimesis que propugna el realismo tradicional y que centran la atención del lector sobre el proceso creativo.
Keywords: collage, escritura experimental, sujeto lírico, Hejinian, My Life
Recovery of the Past in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Telling
Katarzyna Baran (University Rovira i Virgili)
In the last decades of the twentieth century there has been an important change in dystopian and utopian writing with a shift from the classical to the critical dystopia. This paper aims to analyse Ursula K. Le Guin’s latest novel The Telling and highlight certain characteristics that make it a perfect example of a critical dystopia. Moreover, it deals with the question of modification and erasure of both memory and the past as a means of control in repressive societies. Furthermore, it takes a closer look at the possibilities of challenging the centre of power by a retrieval of the forbidden past, its language, texts and bodily practices. It also emphasises the importance of dialogue and a collective struggle employed in this process, rather than an individual venture.
Keywords: critical dystopia, “resistance” memory, “past” dialogue
El trauma como nuevo paradigma cultural y modo narrativo
Marita Nadal Blasco (University of Zaragoza)
Participants: Marita Nadal Blasco (Chair), Constanza del Río, Jessica Aliaga and Silvia Pellicer (University of Zaragoza)
Se trata de debatir a través de fragmentos y ejemplos literarios y fílmicos la pertinencia de la noción de trauma como nuevo paradigma cultural y modo narrativo capaz de influir diferentes géneros y manifestaciones culturales
Palabras clave: trauma, holocausto, narrativa post-apocalíptica, neogótico, autobiograficción
An Interpretation of Masculinity in Manhattan: Reading Raewyn Connell’s concept of “Hegemonic Masculinity” in Jed Rubenfeld’s The Interpretation of Murder
Peter Ferry (Queen's University, Belfast)
The field of Masculinity Studies has enjoyed steady progress for the last three decades within the disciplines of sociology, psychology and cultural studies. Yet it is only in the last ten years that the field has begun to recognise the wider cultural and social value of literary representations of men and masculinities (Lea and Schoene 2002: ‘Introduction to the Special Section on Literary Masculinities’). This paper will present the sociological value of the American novel in the study of the social construction of masculinity with Jed Rubenfeld’s The Interpretation of Murder (2006).
A work of historical (detective) fiction, the setting of Rubenfeld’s tale at the time of Freud’s one and only visit to the United States, or to be more precise, Manhattan, is extremely significant in terms of two separate but interrelated issues. First, 1909 was a key moment in the development of New York City as the city of modernity. Rubenfeld, interpreting the masculine discourses that characterised Manhattan during this period through the protagonist of the novel, the urban flâneur Dr. Stratham Younger, confirms this urban arena as the ideal location for the study of the social discourses that shaped American masculinity. Second, 1909 saw the arrival of psychoanalysis in America. The turn of the twentieth century was a historical era of great intellectual development in which a European philosophy - psychoanalysis - would be transposed onto an American consciousness. Through the cast of male figures, the novel illustrates how a new generation of American men would define and be defined by these new theories of masculinity.
To fully illustrate the dynamics of the social construction of masculinity in The Interpretation of Murder, this paper engages in a reading of the novel with what has been called “the most influential theory in the field of men and masculinities”: Raewyn Connell’s concept of “hegemonic masculinity.” Connell’s theory, recognising the existence of a plurality of diverse masculine groups competing within a hierarchical social framework, illuminates the power discourses at play in Rubenfeld’s Manhattan. Explicating the performances of ‘internal hegemony’ (the domination of the hegemonic group over other masculinities), and ‘external hegemony’ (the domination of the hegemonic group over women), this paper will underline the dual didactic role of The Interpretation of Murder - as a text which rigorously examines the historical moment of the birth of the modern American male while simultaneously affirming the power of the novel to evaluate the discourses that shape American masculinity.
Keywords: Masculinity Studies, hegemonic masculinity, Raewyn Connell, New York Fiction, Jed Rubenfeld.
Gendered Spaces and Theatricality in Peter Ackroyd's Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem.
Lin Elinor Pettersson (University of Malaga)
This paper examines theatrical acts of performance in Peter Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994) and looks into how the author engages the Victorian world of music hall with the Ripper murders. I will focus on how the protagonist Elizabeth Cree uses her performatory skills to commit murders in terms of theatricality by turning the city of London into her stage. By stepping into the footlights and later transfer the spectacle off stage, Elizabeth Cree destabilizes gender and space as fixed categories by bending limits and crossing boundaries. In doing so she depends on the performatory condition of the city. In my study the protagonist’s interaction with the city I will examine how she approaches it first as a flaneur, an urban stroller and observer, and then, look into how she steps in from the margins to enact murder on the centre-stage of London.
To Commit a Desecration: The Ambiguous Nature of Unconscious Landscape in Theodore Roethke's "Greenhouse" Poems
Borja Aguilé Obrador (University of Salamanca)
Grown out of the tradition that begins in William Wordsworth and follows in Samuel Coleridge and R.W. Emerson, Theodore Roethke's "Greenhouse Poems" present a particular perception of reality that transcends solipsistic modes of representation in an attempt to break the different levels of discourse that compose it. However, this moment of collapse and interchange within the poetic self is not accomplished by means of a pleasant transition but by an anxious realization of the dangers that this process may involve. The "Greenhouse Poems" perform a regressive movement into the past and constitute a poetic plunge into the unconscious that seems to threaten the unstable psyche of the lyrical persona. The purpose of this paper is show how these fears at dissolution permeate and shape Roethke\'s poems in order to produce and ambiguous and hybrid language that resolves what the actual experience cannot. For this reason, I will analyze several poems from Roethke's second book, The Lost Son and Other Poems (1948).
Keywords: Roethke, unconscious psyche, Jung, Growth
The Politics of Re-reading/rewriting in Contemporary British Theatre
Hildegard Klein Hagen (Univesity of Málaga)
Participants: Hildegard Klein (University of Málaga) (Chair), Clara Escoda, Mª Isabel Seguro (University of Barcelona) and Verónica Rodríguez (University of Murcia)
In Dionysus Since 1969: Greek Tragedy at the Dawn of the Third Millennium, Edith Hall claims that “more Greek tragedy has been performed in the last thirty years than at any point in history since Greco-Roman antiquity”, and that it has become “an important cultural and aesthetic prism through which the [globalized], dysfunctional, conflicted world of the late twentieth- and early twenty-first centuries has refracted its own image” (2004: 2). Contemporary British theatre, a field the four panelists have been working on intensively for a number of years, has particularly been engaged in rewriting the classics. From Edward Bond’s Lear (1971), a rewriting of Shakespeare’s King Lear (c. 1606), to Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Dianeira (1999), Martin Crimp’s rewritings of Sophocles’s The Trachinae (c. 430BC) in Cruel and Tender (2004), or of Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull (1899) in his 2006 adaptation, and Moira Buffini’s recent feminist rewriting of Sophocles’s Antigone (c. 442BC) in Welcome to Thebes (2010), British dramatists are increasingly turning to the activity of rewriting Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, or even fairy tales, to “pose questions to contemporary society and to push back the boundaries of theatre” (Hall 2004: 2).
The panelists of this round table seek to explore and analyze the extent to which the classics, which dramatize essential drives of human nature, may offer contemporary playwrights archetypal images, or parables, through which they are then able to engage in an ethical and political reflection on contemporary violence and inequality, and the latent dangers of globalization. As Hall explains, coinciding with the Vietnam War (1955-1975) and the Cold War, the year 1968, quite simply, brought an end to the “early post-war period” (2004: 7). The failed revolution of 1968 was symptomatic of the slow replacement which was taking place in Western countries of the Keynesian type of capitalism practiced since the end of World War II, with laissez-faire, corporate-led policies, as capitalism became more flexible and de-localized. This process of postmodernity and globalized capitalism would culminate with the Fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, which, according to Aleks Sierz’s ironical remark “kicked the globalized world into being� and �freed whole populations to become consumers” (2007:1).
This process has led to a markedly unequal, polarized world order, an “Age of Extremes”, that has produced “a tendential division of the globalized world into life-zones and death-zones” (Cheng 2004: 1; emphases original). In this context, and as Etienne Balibar reminds us, “there is a systematic use of various forms of extreme violence and mass insecurity to prevent collective movements of emancipation that aim at transforming the structure of domination” (2001: 16). Such unequal access to the means of existence has given rise to the phenomenon of international terrorism, which has, in its turn, subsequently led many British playwrights to engage in an exploration of violence, of the limits of retribution, or the tension between self and society. In their attempt to engage in a reflection on violence and inequality in the contemporary context, present-day playwrights have turned to the classics and found archetypal images of violence and resistance.
Martin Crimp, for instance, one of the most controversial and political playwrights of the moment, turns Sophocles’s play The Trachiniae into a post-consumerist tragedy in his own play Cruel and Tender, written after the invasion of Afghanistan and the War on Terror. The main protagonist and the Dianeira figure in The Trachiniae, Amelia, carries out an act of violence which aims to denounce the deep gender and world inequalities or asymmetries created by the current world order. Crimp depicts the transformation of the main protagonist, Amelia, a General’s wife and thus an apparent beneficiary of globalization and of the West’s “regulatory” wars, into a “terrorist” who rebels against the war her duplicitous husband is waging in Africa, by sending him a highly destructive chemical. Once she learns about the destructive effects the chemical has had on her husband�s body, Amelia kills herself, but first she passes on the testimony of what she has experienced to be the violence, both symbolic and literal, of the contemporary world order, thus interpellating spectators as witnesses of its �barbaric� underside.