Esharp Issue 28 Estrangement & Reconciliation
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Nadia Lucchesi ---Artist’s Statement--- Nadia Lucchesi is a Glasgow-based artist who works across various disciplines, including digital art and printmaking. With an enduring interest in illustrating the written word, she has for some years been chief illustrator for Scottish Left Review Press, and her relief printing, most recently showcased in a Featured Artist exhibition at Glasgow Print Studio (2019), has a strong figurative style with a narrative approach. In her response to the prompts ‘Estrangement’ and ‘Reconciliation’ Nadia wanted to convey estrangement as not simply the absence of someone, but as an experience of distance and isolation. The image of the sea came to her immediately. The use of jigsaw pieces for ‘Reconciliation’ describes a resolution, a completion of something that was not quite whole. The timeless symbolism of two hands, and its suggestion of touch, felt especially profound to her in the current context of social distancing. Issue 28 Summer 2020 Estrangement and Reconciliation General Editor: Maria Ioana Marchidanu Editorial Board: Molly Gilmour, Mariana Rios Maldonado, Carolyn J McNamara, Nat Paterson, Jessica Reid, John Taylor Media Representative: Carolyn J McNamara Published August 2020 ISSN 1742-4542 http://www.gla.ac.uk/research/az/esharp/issues Cover artwork by Nadia Lucchesi The views expressed in the articles belong to their authors alone. They do not reflect the position of eSharp, the editors, the University of Glasgow, or its College of Arts. Copyright © in all contributions resides with the contributors. Contents Contributors…………………………………………………………………………………..1 Editors’ Introduction………………………………………………………………………... 2 Estrangement and reconciliation in the culture clashes of science fiction: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed……………………………..4 Claire Y. Z. Tan Yearning to Belong: Willa Muir’s Struggle with the Motherland………………………..19 Emily Pickard The Self-Analyst and the Doctor: Montaigne and Browne in Dialogue…………………..35 Andrea Di Carlo The Great War and the Western Front: Lieux de Mémoire as Symbols for Reconciliation………………………………………………………………………………..46 Sarah Fissmer Gender, Race, and Participatory Neomedievalism in Dungeons & Dragons…………….68 Lars Johnson The Male Gaze, Gender Dynamics and Narrative Control in Muriel Spark’s Reality and Dreams……………………………………………………………………………………….80 Steven Harvie Masters and Sons: Reconciling the Family in There Will Be Blood, The Master and Phantom Thread…………………………………………………………………..………...96 Theo Fenerty The (E)strange Case of Han Kang’s Vegetarian and Her Discontents…………………..111 Sonakshi Srivastava eSharp Issue 28 Estrangement and Reconciliation Contributors Andrea Di Carlo is a third-year PhD student in Philosophy at University College Cork. Her main research interests include early-modern political philosophy (Machiavelli), early-modern English and French literature (Montaigne, Bacon, Browne, and Milton), and issues of crisis and suspicion. Theo Fenerty graduated with a degree in English Literature and Film Studies in 2019 from Manchester Metropolitan University. He started an MA in Film, Photography and Media at the University of Leeds in September 2020. His research interests are contemporary cinema, with a particular focus on gender, race, adoption and critical theory. Sarah Fissmer is a third year PhD candidate at the University of Bonn, Germany, and a doctoral research associate at the University’s Institute for English, American and Celtic Studies. She teaches BA and MA students in the fields of English Literary and Cultural Studies, mainly focusing on the First World War and its commemoration as well as on Shakespearean theatre. Her doctoral thesis addresses the role reconciliation plays in today’s British Great War remembrance. Steven Harvie (University of Glasgow) is a PhD student researching the work, the writing practices and the critical recaption of Muriel Spark. The nature of his research is collaborative, relying and heavily based on the extensive Spark archive collections held at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh. With access to this resource Steven uses manuscripts, typescripts, correspondence and other supra-textual materials to investigate the development of Spark’s novel writing from conception to completion; reevaluate the critical primacy of Spark’s novels over her poetry; and finally, explore her rarely straightforward relationship with the publishing industry. Lars Johnson is a current MLitt student at the University of Glasgow studying English fantasy literature. His research interests include gender and sexuality studies, neomedievalism, eco- criticism, and epic fantasy. Emily L. Pickard is a thesis pending PhD researcher in the Scottish Literature Department. She studies motherhood in Willa Muir's life and writings, specifically through a feminist and socialist framework. Sonakshi Srivastava is a final year postgraduate student of English Literature at the University of Delhi, India. She has published two academic articles and has presented papers at the National Congress of Social Sciences, the International Renaissance Conference held at Jadavpur University, Kolkata, and the international conference “Language and Violence in the Anthropocene” in Vigo, Spain. Her areas of interest include postcolonial literatures, anthropocene literatures, memory and trauma studies, and Indian writing in English. Claire Yi Zhi Tan is an MA English Literature student at Anglia Ruskin University. She did her BA in Education with English at the University of Cambridge and subsequently taught literature in a Malaysian school, where she became interested in the intersection between English literature and the lived realities of postcolonial contexts. Her research interests are in contemporary and postcolonial literatures, with a particular focus on Malaysian literature in English. 1 eSharp Issue 28 Estrangement and Reconciliation Editors’ Introduction The theme for the 28th issue of eSharp was chosen in late 2019, against the backdrop of a fresh general election in the United Kingdom and the looming spectre of Brexit. The editorial board was also aware of the continuing issues of immigration around the world, especially the needs and experiences of refugees and asylum seekers. In this context, we reached out for the ideas of 'Estrangement and Reconciliation' as a means of recognising the former as it was brought into sharp focus in the world around us, and perhaps hope that the latter could be achieved not only in our own small realities, but perhaps also in the world at large. Little did we know how much more appropriate this theme would become, with the arrival of COVID-19 on the world stage in early 2020. As cities around the world shut down in an attempt to protect their citizens from what continues to prove a dangerous and often lethal virus, our sense of estrangement from our own realities and loved ones has become heightened, and our yearning for the reconciliation that we are yet to experience seems only to grow. In addition to affecting our personal lives, COVID-19 has further affected the ability of the editorial board to hold necessary meetings, as well as contributors’ access to research premises and vital sources housed in libraries and archives. This completed issue is a testament to our contributors’ dedication. This theme was further selected for its ability to encourage work from a wide field of disciplinary backgrounds and subject interests, which allows for many types of estrangement and reconciliation to be considered by the works included. We see this breadth of interpretation made manifest through explorations of international relations, minorities in society, the relationship between society and the environment, gender, and more. In her article, ‘Estrangement and Reconciliation in the Culture Clashes of Science Fiction: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed’, Claire Y. Z. Tan contrasts the aforementioned texts’ different engagement with the concept of ‘cognitive estrangement’. As strategic representations of cultural clash, Tan argues that both novels demonstrate the importance of change and uncertainty in any process of reconciliation. Emily L. Pickard, author of ‘Yearning to Belong: Willa Muir’s Struggle with the Motherland’, explores the contrast between estrangement and reconciliation in the autobiographical and literary works of Willa Muir. Pickard focuses on Muir’s relationship with Scotland from a gender, cultural, and linguistic perspective, while also illustrating the role played by family, feminism, nationality, and the fluidity of home in contouring both the author’s place in Scottish Literature and in the wider European landscape of women’s writing. Andrea Di Carlo’s article, ‘The Self-Analyst and the Doctor: Montaigne and Browne in Dialogue’, explores how the early modern writers Michel de Montaigne and Thomas Browne reconciled their beliefs and themselves with a world fraught with socio- political upheaval. In doing so, Carlo compares the two authors to Paul Ricœur’s ‘Masters of Suspicion’ and concludes that both Montaigne and Browne were able to reach reconciliation with their society through self-analysis and doubt. In ‘The Great War and the Western Front: Lieux de Mémoire as Symbols for Reconciliation’, Sarah Fissmer analyses three sites in Northern France dedicated to the memory of the Great War. Fissmer concludes that the three chosen ‘lieux de mémoire’ show that national perspectives on the First World War do not necessarily