Hermes Summer School 2012: Literature and Intervention

THE HERMES CONSORTIUM FOR LITERARY AND CULTURAL STUDIES

The Relevance of Literature in a Changing World

Amsterdam, June 10-14

Welcome to Amsterdam

This year is Amsterdam the host of the HERMES seminar. We would like to welcome you and wish you a very inspiring seminar and pleasant stay. This map will help you find your way around Amsterdam. Amsterdam is a beautiful, historic and very compact city, making it easy to get around on foot or by bike. The excellent public transport infrastructure also makes it possible to move around the city quickly and easily.

Hotel Internet We have made reservations at the Easyjet hotel, van Public transport www.gvb.nl Ostadestraat 97 Amsterdam, for you. Unfortunately Tourist information www.iamsterdam.com the hotel does not serve breakfast. However, near the hotel are several places where they do serve Amsterdam Tourism & Convention Board breakfast (at you own expenses, with discount for Visitors to Amsterdam can contact one of the full- hotel guests). The staff at the hotel can inform you service VVV (tourist office) branches for the following about that. Or grab a croissant and orange juice at a services: supermarket or bakery on the way to university. • I amsterdam Card Public Transport: • excursions and admission tickets Hotel • souvenirs You can take tram 16 or 24 from Central Station to • public transport passes and information tram stop Albert Cuypmarkt. Walk 350 meters • tourist information southbound on the Ferdinand Bolstraat (towards the • souvenirs RAI) and you will find the hotel on the corner of the • cycling and walking routes Ferdinand Bolstraat and the van Ostadestraat. • maps, books and guides

Adresses: The VVV branches can be found at the following • Easyjet hotel – van Ostadestraat97 (A) locations: • Oudemanhuispoort - Oudemanhuispoort 4-6 (B) Central Station, Platform 2b • Bushuis - Kloveniersburgwal 48 (C) Leidseplein 26, terrace side / AUB ticket shop • Café de Jaren - Nieuwe Doelenstraat 20 (D) Noord-Zuid Hollandsch Koffiehuis (historic grand café), • Kapitein Zeppos - Gebed Zonder End 5 (E) Stationsplein 10 (Central Station) • De Brakke Grond - Nes 43 (F) Schiphol Airport, Holland Tourist Information, arrivals • Tram stop Spui (G) hall 2 • Rederij Kooij - Jetty for canal tour – opposite Spuistraat 44, specialising in gay tourist information Rokin 125 (I) Stadhouderskade 550, opposite no 78

Take tram 16 or 24 to Central Station, stop at Spui, all For updated information and for making reservations addresses are within walking distance. for accommodation and excursions, please call 020 - 201 8800 or visit www.iamsterdam.com. GVB day-ticket for public transport If you wish to explore Amsterdam using public Restaurants transport, then the GVB (municipal transport You will find as many different restaurants as there authority) day-ticket is a great option. After you check are nationalities in Amsterdam. The best thing to do is in for the first time, you can take as many rides as you go and see for yourself but to give you some tips… wish on any of the GVB trams, buses and metro trains Near the hotel as well as the night buses without worrying about Go to Albert Cuypstraat and around, for instance transfer times. The tickets are available for 1, 2, 3 or 4 Burgermeester, Albert Cuypstraat 48, for the best days (valid for 24 to 96 hours). The staff at GVB gourmet burgers (also veggie!) Tickets & Info would be glad to give you more info Bazar, Albert Cuypstraat 182, for Middle Eastern about day-ticket options and other public transport delicacies options in Amsterdam. Ask them for the free “Public Near the university and other venues Transport Tourist Guide”, with everything you need to Go to the Zeedijk (street behind Nieuw Markt), for all know about public transport facilities in Amsterdam in sorts of oriental restaurant. six different languages as well as attractive discounts Jordaan for various Amsterdam highlights. The GVB Tickets & There are a lot of good restaurants in this picturesque Info desks are located at the following public part of Amsterdam, especially around transport stations: Egelantiersgracht and Westerstraat. • Central Station (railway station) And last but not least, try to avoid the tourist traps • Central Station metro station around de Dam (Dam square) For more information, go to www.gvb.nl.

F C E B

A 1 Tram line with stop

Boat tour

Canal Bus

Canal Bike

Museum boat, operated by Rederij Lovers

P Parking location

Parking location 1 Tram line with stop Museum Boat tour Theatre Canal Bus & Concert hall

Canal Bike Police station

Museum boat, operated Post o ce by Rederij Lovers Tourist Information O ce P Parking location Legenda Tourist Information O ce Parking location Limited tourist information A - Eaysejet Hotel ± 300m 1 Tram line with stop Museum Market Boat tour Theatre Diamond B - Oudemanhuispoort & Concert hall polishing centre Canal Bus C - Bushuis/Oost-Indischhuis Police station Place of interest Canal Bike D - Café de Jaren Post o ce Hospital Museum boat, operated E - Kapitein Zeppos by Rederij Lovers Tourist Information O ce Metro station P Parking location Tourist Information O ce F - De Brakke Grond Limited tourist information Parking location Market Museum Diamond

Literature and Intervention

Schedule

Sunday, 10 June

all day Arrival guests 17.00-19.00 Drinks at Café De Jaren

Monday, 11 June Oudemanhuispoort room A0.09

9.00 Registration 9.15 Welcome 9.30 Keynote Sudeep Dasgupta Dissensual Configurations: The Politics of Literarity in a Cross-Medial Landscape 10.30 Coffee break 11.00 Session 1: The Politics and Aesthetics of Literary Intervention 12.30 Lunch Atrium 14.00 Session 2: Literary Intervention: Forms and Genres 16.00 Coffee break 16.30 Session 3: Literary Intervention: Authors and Intellectuals 18.00 End of sessions 19.00 Dinner

Tuesday, 12 June Oudemanhuispoort room A0.09

9.30 Keynote Andrew Gibson: Contemporary Misanthropy and/as Ethics: The Provocation of Michel Houellebecq 10.30 Coffee break 11.00 Session 4: Transcultural Literature and Intervention 12.30 Lunch Atrium 16.00–18.00 Excursion

Wednesday, 13 June Oudemanhuisp0ort room A0.09

9.30 Keynote Anneleen Masschelein The ”Residual Oeuvre” in the Humanities: Side-Track or Creative Necessity? 10.30 Coffee break 11.00 Session 5: Memories I 12.30 Lunch Atrium 14.00 Session 6: Futures 16.00 Coffee break 16.30 Session 7: Memories II 18.00 Drinks at Kapitein Zeppos

Thursday, 14 June Bushuis room F 0.22

9.30 Session 8: Media of Intervention 10.30 Coffee break 11.00 Final Meeting 12.30 Lunch Atrium 14.00 Hermes Business Meeting

Programme for the panel sessions:

Monday 11 June: The Politics and Aesthetics of Literary Intervention

11.00-12:30 Session 1: The Politics and Aesthetics of Literary Intervention Chair: Karen-Margrethe Simonsen

• Elisa Ruiz Velasco Garcia, Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Writer, Activist, Prophet? • Tytti Rantanen, Between poetics and politics: Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères and Le Corps Lesbien • Tereza Stejskalová, Agamben's Literary Paradigm

14:00-16:00 Session 2: Literary Intervention: Forms and Genres Chair: Beatrice Michaelis

• Jennifer Ch. Müller, On the Interdependene of Literature and Society - Social Inequalities in Naturalist Drama • Salla Shhadeh, Literature and Truth: The Relevance of Analysing Plato • Matthias Somers, Rhetoric’s Relevance: The Modernists’ Ambivalent Relation to Rhetorical Expression

16:30-18:00 Session 3: Literary Intervention: Authors and Intellectuals Chair: t.b.a.

• Isabel Dominguez, Presentativity against Individual Responsibility: The “Yugoslavian” Writer during the Balkan War • Vicente Lopez, The Response-ability of Intellectuals in the 21st Century • Carmen Van den Bergh, Italian young writers during the 1930s, between realism and experiment

Tuesday 12 June: Transcultural Literature and Intervention

11:00-12:30 Session 4: Transcultural Literature and Intervention Chair: Susana Araujo

• Agnes Broome, Can translated literature be made to succeed on the British market? • Alexander Matschi, The Persistent Relevance of Contemporary British Asian Fiction for the Renegotiation of Postcolonial Spatiality in Transcultural Contexts • Sara Vaghefian, Creativity and the Collapse of Opposition: Reading Arabic and French Texts

Wednesday 13 June: Memories and Futures in Literary Intervention

11:00-12:30 Session 5: Memories I Chair: t.b.a.

• Flávia Domingas Mendes Ba, The swords of the Carthaginians’ wives • Mathelinda Nabugodi, From Anarchy to Apathy: Political Satire in 1819, in 1948 and in 2011. • Daniela Silén , The Viking that shaped a nation: When poetry goes political

14:00-16:00 Session 6: Futures Chair: Pirjo Lyytikäinen

• Gregers Andersen, Imaginaries about the Future: Global Warming in Literary Fiction • Ruud van den Beuken, Performing the Past, Staging the Future: Memory, Modernity, and (Inter)nationalist Identities at the Dublin Gate Theatre, 1928-1957 • Mikkel Birk Jespersen, Machiavelli’s utopian potentials With John Milton as an example

16:30-18:00 Session 7: Memories II Chair: t.b.a.

• Sara Polak, Fictional Portrayals of Franklin D. Roosevelt as Public History – A Case Study • Radvan Markus, Connecting the Past and the Present: Literary Reflections of the 1798 Irish Rebellion and the Conflict in Northern Ireland • Tom Vandevelde, Listening Through Literature. Recapturing the Soundscapes of the Past.

Thursday: Media of Intervention

11:00-12:30 Session 8: Media of Intervention Chair: Ellen Sapega

• Judith Hofmann, How to Read an Animated Film –Animated Films as a Challenge in Literary Studies and Teaching • Ariadne Nunes, Between Past and Present. Examining the impact of a medieval text • Claudia Weber, Literary Experience as Media Experience: On the Role of Literature in Contemporary Media Society

Keynote abstracts and biographical notes

Sudeep Dasgupta Dissensual Configurations: The Politics of Literarity in a Cross-Medial Landscape

Historical transformations in the function of language were one way in which the problem of artistic specificity and categorizations like genre was broached. Transformations in categories like literature also bore a relation to social transformations. Adorno, for example, argued that the increasing compartmentalization of social life, and the politics of artistic differentiation were symptomized in transformations in language. By first exploring his negative dialectical argument around aesthetic and social transformation, the paper explores how the politics-aesthetics relationship may be thought in the context of contemporary genre-dissolution and intermediality in culture generally. In particular, I will think through Jacques Rancière’s understanding of “literarity” and the political consequences of the errancy of words, and their changing relation to bodies and images. The paper will relate Adorno’s understanding of linguistic transformation and Rancière’s understanding of “literarity” and “mute speech” developed around literature and historiography. Contemporary aesthetic transformations extend the politics of literarity across artforms like literature, cinema, television and photography while also questioning distinctions such as fact and fiction, word and image, form and matter. This aesthetics-politics relation requires rethinking both the specificity of contemporary artforms and the disciplinary protocols through which one approaches them. I will close by briefly suggesting examples of dissensual configurations in contemporary culture. Dissensual configurations bring together the undisciplined trajectories and errant combinations of words, images, sounds and bodies. They provide the occasion for recognizing the political potential of aesthetic heteronomy in contemporary forms of media culture and questioning the implied stability of both social order and disciplinary borders.

Sudeep Dasgupta is Associate Professor in the Department of Media and Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He has published on critical theory, aesthetics and politics, visual culture and political philosophy. He is the editor of Constellations of the Transnational: Modernity, Culture, Critique (2007), and published essays on migratory aesthetics, postcolonial visual culture, political philosophy (Derrida and Rancière) and feminist and queer theory. He wrote the critical Introduction (2009) to the joint Dutch translation of Jacques Rancière's Partage du sensible and L'inconscient esthétique. http://home.medewerker.uva.nl/s.m.dasgupta/

Andrew Gibson Contemporary Misanthropy and/as Ethics: The Provocation of Michel Houellebecq

Misanthropy is not a theme of much significance in most contemporary ethical discourses. This is not surprising. Misanthropies tended to appear and thrive in markedly hierarchical, undemocratic societies in which a founding, radical injustice ― most obviously, the disempowerment or impoverishment of a majority ― made it all the easier to abominate humanity as a whole. Alternatively, they emerged in more or less explicitly puritan cultures in which hating humankind was inseparable from a wholesale contempt for organic, fleshly being. But ours is a world committed, if fitfully and uncertainly, to the ever-advancing global spread of democratic freedoms and the development of new, international forms of justice and equity. It is also, or so the argument might go, a world that (with unfortunate exceptions, conspicuously Islam) is progressively arriving at a sane and enlightened philosophy of the pleasure principle. In such a world, misanthropy must appear as an antiquated irrationality, a historical curiosity at best. Alas, this seems not to have occurred to a number of distinguished contemporary writers. Bret Easton Ellis, J.G. Ballard, W.G. Sebald and Martin Amis, for example, cannot simply be labelled misanthropists. But their work nonetheless sustains and develops a set of present-day misanthropic discourses which call into question a large range of assumptions by now almost unquestioned within postmodern, social-democratic, liberal culture. This paper will take the misanthropic strains in the work of Michel Houellebecq as its particular theme. I shall ask how far Houellebecq might be paradigmatic of a contemporary writing obstinately if misanthropically pursuing one of the most serious ethical tasks of major literature, undeception, in the teeth of the so-called `death of critique’. Indeed, here the ungainsayable, specific importance of literature asserts itself all over again. If this is true of Houellebecq and other contemporary novelists, however, is it equally true of ethical discourses in recent literary and cultural theory and criticism? This lecture will argue that, at the very least, such theory and criticism might turn to the contemporary misanthropies for inoculation against the prophets of `the good society’. 9

Andrew Gibson is Research Professor of Modern Literature and Theory at Royal Holloway, University of London, and a former Carole and Gordon Segal Professor of Irish Literature at Northwestern University, USA. His books since 2000 include Joyce’s Revenge: History, Politics and Aesthetics in `Ulysses’ (Oxford University Press, 2002, Paperback 2005); Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency (Oxford, 2006) and Intermittency: The Concept of Historical Reason in Contemporary French Philosophy (Edinburgh, 2012). His The Strong Spirit: History, Politics and Aesthetics in the Writing of James Joyce 1898-1915 will be published by Oxford in 2013. Reaktion Books have just published a second, revised edition of London from Punk to Blair, which Andrew Gibson co-edited with architectural historian Joe Kerr.

Anneleen Masschelein The "Residual Oeuvre" in the Humanities: Side-Track or Creative Necessity?

In my paper I will address the "residual" production by theoretical authors in the last decades of the 20th century and the 21st century. I coined this term to indicate a variety of "new" text types, ranging from experimental fictions, creative nonfiction, autofiction, plays, poetry, interviews and course texts, by authors that are primarily known for their theoretical work in the humanities. The residual oeuvre is intimately linked to the theoretical work, in that it is remains in some way linked to the theoretical work and does not gain a really independent status, unlike the case of authors who are well-known both as theoreticians and as literary authors (the main example here is Umberto Eco). In a certain sense, the residue oeuvre seems subordinate to, or add least an oddity within the theoretical work of the author. In that sense, it can also be regarded as a by-product or sidetrack that is allowed in the margin. What light do they throw on the theoretical oeuvre and author? What is the context in which they appear and how are they critically received? After an outline and a provisional typology of the phenomenon in several disciplines (among others, literary theory, ethnology and philosophy), I take as my main lead Roland Barthes's Journal de Deuil (Gallimard: 2009. Translated as Mourning Diary, Hill and Wang: 2012). After outlining the controversy surrounding the publication of this book, I will examine the interrelation with other works by Barthes, most notably La Chambre claire (Camera Lucida) and his course on Le Neutre and the appeal of the book for readers. In my discussion I will focus on the author-position (posture) between creative writer, scholar and public intellectual and on the consequences of this type of work for the notion of oeuvre. Secondly, I want to question whether the phenomenon of the residual oeuvre should be regarded in the light of changes in the literary field or whether it continues a longstanding tradition of humanities scholars writing biographies or novels. Anneleen Masschelein is a Professor in literary theory and cultural studies at the University of Leuven, Belgium. She teaches literary theory, semiotics, introduction to cultural studies and literature and psychoanalysis. Her recent book, The Unconcept. The Conceptualization of the Uncanny appeared in 2011 with SUNY Press. She has published on the uncanny, cultural studies, literary theory, psychoanalysis and residual oeuvres. Her current research interests are residual oeuvres and creative nonfiction, the literary interview and DVD-series.

Participants abstracts and biographical notes

Gregers Andersen Institut for Kunst- og Kulturvidenskab,Humaniora, Københavns Universitet Imaginaries about the Future: Global Warming in Literary Fiction

In the last two decades anthropogenic climate change has presented itself as the most serious challenge to human existence and the biodiversity of the planet. However, the sciences about the human - the humanities – have been fairly slow to react to this challenge. This is clearly a problem, since “climate change has become an idea that now travels well beyond its origin in the natural sciences”1. To verify this, one can just look to literary fiction. In the last decade an increasing number of novels have depicted and imagined a future with (often extreme) global warming. But what can literary fiction really tell us about the major crisis that anthropogenic climate change marks for humanity and the planet’s biodiversity? In my paper I will deal with this question by exploring the relation between literary fiction and the imaginary in an attempt to move beyond the typical normative approach suggested by ecocriticism. Thus, I will argue that the imaginaries about the future that the fictional representations of global warming reveals are an important source of information, since anthropogenic climate change can be regarded as what the French sociologist Bruno Latour has called a quasi-object. That is, an object that is not only real, but also ties communities together by the way that it is narrated.

I am writing a PhD thesis with the working title: Imaginaries about the Future: Global Warming in Literary Fiction. I am especially interested in the imaginaries about the future that can be found in the literary fiction that depicts global warming. I am using cultural theory and philosophy along with cultural history to analyze these imaginaries, including thinkers of the environment and the climate such as Martin Heidegger, Peter Sloterdijk, Timothy Morton, Ursula K. Heise and Michel Serres. [email protected]

Ruud van den Beuken Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen Performing the Past, Staging the Future: Memory, Modernity, and (Inter)nationalist Identities at the Dublin Gate Theatre, 1928-1957

In October 1928, Hilton Edwards (1903-1982) and Micheál MacLiammóir (1899-1978) founded the Dublin Gate Theatre, which mostly produced Continental modernist plays in a uniquely avant-garde setting. Although perceived mainly as a “director’s theatre” with an imported repertoire, the Gate not only remedied the nationalist insularity of the early twentieth-century Irish stage, which was dominated by the politically sponsored Abbey Theatre, but also produced the works of several new Irish playwrights. Despite having grown up in the wake of the Celtic Twilight – the self- contained revival of a mythologised and unified past constructed around traditions and folk tales from the Gaelic west counties – these young Gate playwrights aligned themselves with an avant-garde theatre that explicitly sought to establish Dublin as a modern European capital. Engaging with Ireland’s conflicted history, memory, and identity, they sought to break the strictures of conservative drama and explore alternatives to the sociocultural conservatism of their Celtic Revivalist predecessors as well as the Abbey Theatre’s – and the censorious government’s – equally contestable notions of Irishness. Drawing on recent developments in postcolonial memory theory, my paper explores how this revolutionary theatre endeavoured to perform the newly independent country’s troubled cultural memory onstage, acknowledging the tension between modernist poetics and traditionalist politics that mostly fostered repression of the nation’s past and anxiety about its future. To illustrate such teleological interventions, I will discuss Mary Manning’s tragicomedy Youth’s the Season–? (1931), which depicts the disaffected antics resulting from a repressed bourgeois anxiety that, in fact, stems from the break with history that the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921) and the Irish Civil War (1922- 1923) brought to the Protestant Ascendancy. By implicitly drawing on Irish history to articulate a dramatic sociocultural message, Manning’s play exploits her audience’s collective past to reconfigure the nation’s possible future.

1 Hulme, Mike: Why We Disagree About Climate Change, Cambridge University Press, 2009, p. xxv-xxvi 11

Ruud van den Beuken has studied at Radboud University Nijmegen (BA in English Language & Culture [2009], Research MA in Literature & Literary Theory [2011]) and the University of York (visiting student in the MA programme in Modern & Contemporary Literature & Culture [2010-2011]). He is currently writing a thesis on the Dublin Gate Theatre as a PhD candidate in the Department of English at Radboud University. [email protected]

Agnes Broome University College London Can translated literature be made to succeed on the British market?

At a time when globalisation is making the world smaller, ever more links between people, nations and cultures are developing. This trend is reflected on the book markets of the world; online booksellers, e-books and print on demand technology have made it possible to find and access foreign fiction with unprecedented ease. Despite this, however, the impact of foreign fiction can be severely curtailed by a dearth of translations, making foreign titles practically inaccessible to the public. Nowhere is this truer than in the UK where only 3% of new fiction titles are translated from another language. What are the reasons for this disparity? Could the limited access to foreign literature have adverse consequences for British readers and society? And is it possible to remedy this situation through intervention? In this paper, I will outline how my research seeks to explain the present condition of translated fiction in the UK, with specific reference to Swedish texts in English translation, by demonstrating how complex social, cultural and institutional interactions systematically impact on its symbolic and commercial success. I will do this both by introducing a general model, which draws on, and integrates, theories from cultural sociology, book history, social theory and translation theory, and by showing the way in which this model may be applied to empirical investigations. Particularly, I will consider an in depth case study from my thesis, John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Låt den rätte komma in/Let the Right One In, in which the application of my model reveals the systemic pressures that act upon a Swedish text seeking entry into the British market but in which it is also possible to discern a number of strategies that can help a translated work of fiction achieve notable success in the UK.

I am a second year PhD student based in UCL’s Department of Scandinavian Studies where I use my background in linguistics and comparative literature to conduct research on Swedish literature in translation on the British book market. I also work as a translator and have recently started a skills development programme for early career Swedish-English literary translators. [email protected]

Isabel Dominguez University of Santiago de Compostela Presentativity against Individual Responsibility: The “Yugoslavian” Writer during the Balkan War

Dionýz Ďurišin theorized the concept of presentativity through which the author defined the role that it is attributed to writers and intellectuals in small nations, namely, subordinate their artistic creation to the interests of a new nation, as it is the case of the countries that emerged from the former Yugoslavia. This is the choice for writers who want to build a functional and politically committed literature. In contrast to the critical concept of presentativity, "individual responsibility" (in Hannah Arendt's sense) should lead the writer to issue an alarm signal in situations where the community seems to function as the gears of a big machine. This led some of the writers of the Balkans to denounce the aggressions that the armies of their own countries were perpetrating against soldiers and civilians of their “enemies.” The purpose of this paper is to highlight the relevant role played by the intellectuals of the Balkan countries during the war through, mainly, two polarized figures such as Dubravka Ugrešić and Miroslav Toholj.

Isabel Domínguez Seoane (BA in French Studies, University of Santiago de Compostela) is a MA student in literary theory and comparative literature at the University of Santiago de Compostela. Her research fields are comparative literature, literary systems, borderlands, and exile. The topic of her dissertation is "Border and Exile in Literary Systems: The Case of 'Yugoslav' Literature." [email protected] 12

Flávia Domingas Mendes Ba Centro de Estudos Comparatistas/Universidade de Lisboa The swords of the Carthaginians’ wives

Keywords: Portuguese Colonial War, fictions of memory, individual memory, society

The typical aphasia of Portuguese society over the colonial war in Lusophone Africa (1961-1974) is contradicted in the novel A Costa dos Murmúrios (1988) by the Portuguese writer Lídia Jorge (1946-). Conveying a sharpened female approach/point of view over a War made of «different» and individual wars, this novel points to the compulsory reflection about the historical meaning of the Colonial War. At the same time, as a metafiction of memory, A Costa dos Murmúrios offers a peculiar literary way of producing a past where memories and emotions become intertwined. This paper examines how the fragmented narration structure of A Costa dos Murmúrios allows a rethinking of the impact of war literature in the Portuguese public sphere. This analysis will be the leitmotiv for a reflection about the way literature problematizes cultural memory, introducing different ways of remembering as a counter-discourse of public memory. Lídia Jorge’s literary fiction impact on the aphasic tendency over colonial war became an example of intervention on the way the public sphere can intertwine both individual and collective memories. Fictions of memory can actually intervene in a changing world by changing the ways in which the past is remembered and by problematizing an univocal discourse about the past.

Flávia Ba is doctoral student at Centro de Estudos Comparatistas, Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa; She was director of the Portuguese Language Center and Lecturer of Portuguese Culture and Language in Cabo Verde (Santiago – Praia) – Instituto-Camões - Universidade de Cabo Verde (2007-2010); director of the Portuguese Language Center and Lecturer of Portuguese Culture and Language in East-Timor – Instituto-Camões - Universidade Nacional de Timor Leste (2004-2007); MA in Comparative Literature – Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa (2003); BA in Modern Languages and Literatures - Portuguese Studies – Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa (2000). [email protected]

Judith Hofmann Giessen Graduate School for the Humanities How to Read an Animated Film –Animated Films as a Challenge in Literary Studies and Teaching

Literary and cultural studies today consider films as texts, as cultural products carrying information about attitudes, behaviors and feelings, and engaging with social and cultural events and trends.2 Especially animated films possess great potential for storytelling.3 Not only do they reach a wide audience, they also depict and digest problems and developments in modern societies and can influence our ways of worldmaking.4 Being a medium which is per se non- mimetic and non-realistic, animated films are able to alienate what we regard as normal and can address cutting edge issues such as global warming (e.g. Ice Age) or the role of technological progress (e.g. WALL-E). Taking popular animated short- and feature films as examples, I will, primarily, elaborate on the role of animated films in literary studies: Why do the stories presented in animated films often seem to have a greater impact on us than many of those presented in books? Which narrative techniques do they use and which specific features do they have? And how can they react to cultural developments and, at the same time, question them? Furthermore, I will discuss how we can enable students to understand how animated films work, and thus, prevent an uncritical perception of them. Literature Ammann, Daniel (2000): “Zeichenhafte Wirklichkeiten.“ In: Ammann, Daniel & Katharina Ernst (Eds.). Film erleben. Kino und Video in der Schule. Zürich: Pestalozzianum. P. 10-18.

2 Cf. amongst others Henseler et al. 2011: 10 or Donnerstag 2000: 176. 3 Cf. Ward 2002: 132. 4 Cf. Ammann 2000: 10, who claims that we do not only gather information and knowledge about the looks of certain people from fictional films, but also about the ‘face of reality’ (‘Gesicht der Realität’), as he calls it. He states we know how e.g. doctors work or how life in the Middle Ages used to be first and foremost from the media. Also Ward (2002: 1) states that especially Disney “provides many of the first narratives children use to learn about the world”. 13

Donnerstag, Jürgen (2000): Zur Wirkung literarischer und medialer Erzählungen in sprachlichen und kulturellen Lernprozessen.“ In: Aguado, Karin & Adelheid Hu (Eds.). Mehrsprachigkeit und Mehrkulturalität. Berlin: PZV. P. 175- 184. Henseler, Dorothea, Stefan Möller & Carola Surkamp (2011): Filme in Englischunterricht. Seelze: Klett/Kallmeyer. Ward, Annalee R. (2002): Mouse Morality: The Rhetoric of Disney Animated Films. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Judith Hofmann is a doctoral researcher at Justus Liebig University Giessen. Her PhD thesis deals with the integration of animated films into English language teaching (ELT). Before having taken up her research at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) in October 2010, she studied English and German to become a teacher for German secondary schools. Judith Hofmann is also a member of the International PhD Programme Literary and Cultural Studies (IPP) and works as a research assistant at the GCSC. Her primary areas of interest are literary and media studies in ELT and intercultural learning. Institutional affiliation: Doctoral student at Justus Liebig University (JLU) Giessen/Germany and member of the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) and the International PhD Programme Literary and Cultural Studies (IPP) (all affiliated with JLU Giessen) [email protected]

Mikkel Birk Jespersen Comparative Literature and the Doctoral School in Arts and Aesthetics, Aarhus University Machiavelli’s utopian potentials With John Milton as an example

This paper will discuss the function of utopia as it intervenes in the context of revolutionary upheavals. Usually, utopias are thought to flourish in periods without open political conflicts. I will suggest, however, that the concept of utopia can also be used to analyse the ideological paradoxes and potentials of revolutionary periods. This requires a rethinking of utopia as a text. Here, Niccolò Machiavelli will probably seem like an unlikely resource in the theorization of utopia which usually takes its point of departure in his contemporary Thomas More. But Machiavelli’s textual praxis – in particular as it has been theorised by Louis Althusser – may nonetheless contain clues to some of the sources of the utopic. Crucially, Althusser’s reading of The Prince as a ‘revolutionary utopian manifesto’ notes the discrepancy between the position of the political subject and the position of Machiavelli’s textual discourse. The text’s point of view is “the People”, but the potential political subject is the non-existing “Prince”. It is this split between a fictitious political subject and a not-yet-realised political project which establishes the ‘alterity of utopia’, according to Althusser. Though it is defined as fictitious, utopia is hereby not limited to the realm of fiction, but can be analysed as a figure in a wide range of textual practices. As an example I will discuss John Milton’s The Readie and Easie Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth, written in 1660 on the eve of the Restoration as a final plea for a republican government. Though Milton shows little faith in the abilities of the English people to govern itself, his text contains a utopian potential which springs from its construction of a specific, future oriented point of view at a distance from the immediate political possibilities.

My PhD project is about literature and utopia in the English and American Revolutions. Inspired by the theorization of the utopian figure offered by, among others, Fredric Jameson and Louis Marin, I analyse the contradictions and potentials of the revolutionary ideologies in, e.g., texts by John Milton, Gerrard Winstanley, Tom Paine and Thomas Jefferson. [email protected]

Vicente Lopez University of Wisconsin-Madison The Response-ability of Intellectuals in the 21st Century

Over the last century, the different incarnations of the discussion on the figure of the intellectual, carried out by intellectuals themselves, like Julien Benda, José Ortega y Gasset, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, or Alain Badiou, has been framed for the most part by heated disputations over what precisely the responsibility of the intellectual was or should be. My contention is that our debate would greatly benefit if we were to move beyond ethical disquisitions by way of incorporating them to a more staid reflection on their response-ability,

i.e. the material possibilities of “response” or public intervention that, particularly literary intellectuals, have to their avail in the 21st century.

To this effect, I will interrogate the viability of historic modes of “response” of intellectuals (such as simplification, diversification, collaboration, artistic adaptation and exegesis) and explore novel, stimulating strategies that are being implemented all over the world and might eventually supersede them, which I have termed, respectively: tailoring, replication, aperture, perlocution and reflection; thus utilizing Searle and Austin’s speech act theory which distinguishes five levels in the course of an utterance. This shift in intellectuals’ modes of response will necessarily carry over to the status and function of intellectual activity in the 21st century and, to a certain extent, the survival of the Humanities (as the hub of the ongoing Enlightement project of human advancement by means of knowledge dissemination) will depend on intellectuals’ capacity to adapt to the constant challenges of interacting, communicating and influencing societies in a globalized world.

Born in Valencia in 1983, I’m a bilingual writer, Fulbright grantee and PhD student of Spanish literature at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with a minor in Creative Writing. I’m a graduate of the MSc in Comparative & General Literature at the University of Edinburgh and received an M.A. in Journalism from the Universidad Cardenal Herrera CEU. My research interests are comparative literature and contemporary Latin American literature, with a focus in Argentinean literature, theatre and the short-story form. My poetry has appeared in Turia, Magazine Siglo XXI, PEN International Magazine, Vulture Magazine, Mobius: Journal for Social Change and Movimiento Paroxista. [email protected]

Radvan Markus Centre for Irish Studies, Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures, Charles University, Prague Connecting the Past and the Present: Literary Reflections of the 1798 Irish Rebellion and the Conflict in Northern Ireland

It has been well established in contemporary theory that historical novels and plays are no mere poetic embellishments of the ‘hard facts‘ of history, provided by official historiography, but actively participate in the interpretation of the past, or, in the words of Hayden White, in the construction of “practical past,” a version of history defined by its direct connection to the issues of the present. The relevance of Ireland’s turbulent history for the recent conflict in the Northern part of the island can hardly be overstated as the attitudes of the opposing camps have deep historical roots, reaching often more than three hundred years into the past. The 1798 rebellion holds a key place in this past both as an inspiration and a warning: it was the first time in history when the various ethnic and religious groups inhabiting the island worked for a common goal, but, paradoxically, also a time when sectarian attitudes, persisting until this day, became bitterly exacerbated. This paper will focus on the ways how authors of 20th century historical novels and plays about 1798 dealt with this ambiguous legacy in connection to the Northern Irish conflict. The two-hundred-year-old rebellion served them both as a metaphoric screen, on which contemporaneous attitudes could be indirectly projected, as well as a ground where the causes of the conflict could be directly explored. After a brief overview of the field, the paper will analyse the novel The Year of the French by Thomas Flanagan (1979) and the play Northern Star by Stewart Parker (1984), arguably the most outstanding of the works in question. The underlying argument will highlight the importance of literature in creating a meaningful connection between the past and the present.

I have been enrolled in the PhD programme of my department since 2007, the topic of my research being reflections of the 1798 Irish rebellion in 20th century fiction and drama. My academic publications include articles in New Hibernia Review and Litteraria Pragensia and essays in the collections Politics of Irish Writing (2010) and Boundary Crossings: New Scholarship in Irish Studies (2012, forthcoming). Along with that, I have also co-edited these two volumes. I have participated in conferences and workshops in the Czech Republic, Poland, Ireland and Belgium. My other research interests include the relationship between history and fiction and modern prose in the Irish language. Apart from doing research, I also work as the Irish language instructor at Charles University, Prague and Palacký University, Olomouc. [email protected]

Alexander Matschi International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture in Giessen The Persistent Relevance of Contemporary British Asian Fiction for the Renegotiation of Postcolonial Spatiality in Transcultural Contexts In this paper, I analyse the role contemporary British Asian Fiction plays in the ongoing process of establishing alternative models of human spatiality which redescribe our contemporary world marked, above all, by tremendous shifts in geopolitical power constellations. These developments necessitate a renegotiation of traditional configurations of space in the light of the increasing interrelatedness of individuals’ lifeworlds in transcultural contexts (cf. Helff 2009: 81). Due to the pervasive impact of globalization and the simultaneous rise of emerging countries such as China, India and Brazil, the unipolar world order dominated by the USA as the only remaining superpower is crumbling. For various reasons, the global pecking order is currently going through a drastic shift of power asymmetries in favour of the two new superpowers, India and China. Both the rapid decline of Western hegemony in the last decade and the constant progress in communication technologies make the urgent necessity of rethinking human spatiality creatively on the global and the local scale ever more obvious. Based on these general reflections, I intend to argue that – despite the ever-increasing importance of the new media – literature, in particular transcultural genres such as British Asian Fiction, still plays a vital part in the process of creating, disseminating and perpetuating alternative conceptualizations of space in the 21st century, because it is capable of enacting intrinsically spatial power struggles characteristic of transcultural contexts. What is more, literature can likewise negotiate possible solutions to the conflicts arising from the hybridity and interconnectedness of incommensurable cultures in the fictional sphere. In the current age of transculturalism, these literary approaches to solving such difficulties can then serve as creative stimuli for the actual reshaping of cross-cultural relations via innovative configurations of human space, such as hybrid third spaces of transcultural coexistence (cf. Bhabha 1990/Soja 1996). Bibliography: Helff, Sissy (2009): “Shifting Perspectives – The Transcultural Novel.” Frank Schulze-Engler and Sissy Helff (eds.): Transcultural English Studies – Theories, Fictions, Realities. 1st ed. [2009]. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi. 75-89. Bhabha, Homi K. (1990): „The Third Space – Interview with Homi Bhabha.“ Jonathan Rutherford (ed.): Identity – Community, Culture, Difference. 1st ed. [1990]. London: Lawrence &Wishart. 207-221. Soja, Edward W. (1996): Thirdspace – Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Malden: Blackwell.

From 2003 to 2010, I studied English, French and Business Administration in the course Applied Modern Languages and Business at Justus Liebig University in Giessen and Sheffield Hallam University. In October 2011, I became a member of the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) and the International PhD Programme (IPP). Currently, I am in the initial phase of my doctoral dissertation entitled “Combining Space, Time and Agency: A Narratology of Motion for the Literary Enactment of Transculturality in Contemporary British Asian Fiction”. My further research interests include the Augustan Age, Postcolonial Literary Theory, Fictions of Empire, New Literatures in English and (British) Fictions of Migration in particular. [email protected]

Jennifer Ch. Müller International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC) Justus-Liebig-University Giessen On the Interdependene of Literature and Society - Social Inequalities in Naturalist Drama

In this paper, I will discuss interdependencies of literature and society in naturalist drama focussing on the question of how literature can transform society. The literature of naturalism broaches the issues of the capitalist production relations and inequalities in the form of class differences and the pauperization of large social groups. Thereby, the unadorned social reality first finds entrance into German literature in the 19th century. By means of a true-to-life depiction of reality, the reader’s gaze is directed towards the social problems of the underprivileged. This makes it essentially possible to take a sociological view on society by considering naturalist literature. In contrast to poetic realism (cf. e.g. Fontane 1892) naturalism breaks with the tradition of the aestheticisation of reality by the author. The rationality that complies with capitalist society is implemented in naturalist dramas by the use of such stylistic devices as the 'Sekundenstil' and the 'phonographic method' (Meyer, 2003; Möbius, 1982).

The analysis of the characters of “Die Familie Selicke” (Holz/Schlaf, 1890), “Papa Hamlet” (Holz/Schlaf, 1889) and “Die Ehre” (Sudermann, 1889) shows, however, that naturalist drama mainly causes compassion in the reader, while essential elements that are necessary for a politicisation are missing. Taking the examples of “Vor Sonnenaufgang” (Hauptmann, 1889) and “Die Weber” (Hauptmann, 1892), it can also be demonstrated that Hauptmann does not follow a political orientation and that an intended support of the development of a political consciousness cannot be ascribed to his dramas. Hence, all the authors mentioned write in an informing but not an operating manner. The explicit solidarisation with the characters is absent – and therefore the revolutionary, society changing potential remains unused. Literature Fähnders, Walter (2000): Naturalisten, Sozialisten, Anarchisten. Dispositionen der literarischer Intelligenz im ausgehenden 19. Jahrhundert. In: Ulrich von Aleman, Gertrude Cepl-Kaufmann, Hans Hecker, Bernd Witte (Hrsg.): Intellektuelle und Sozialdemokratie. Opladen: Leske + Budrich. S. 59-76. Fontane, Theodor (1950) [1892]: Frau Jenny Treibel. Roman. Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann. Hauptmann, Gerhart (2000) [1892]: Die Weber. Dichtung und Wirklichkeit. München: Ullstein. Hauptmann, Gerhart (2005) [1889]: Vor Sonnenaufgang. Soziales Drama. München: Ullstein. Holz, Arno/ Schlaf, Johannes (2010) [1890]: Die Familie Selicke. Drama in drei Aufzügen. Stuttgart: Reclam. Holz, Arno/ Schlaf Johannes (2007) [1889]: Papa Hamlet. Stuttgart: Reclam. Meyer, Theo [Hrsg.] (2003): Theorie des Naturalismus. Stuttgart: Reclam. Möbius, Hanno (1982): Der Naturalismus. Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer. Sudermann, Hermann (1997) [1889]: Die Ehre. Schauspiel in 4 Akten. Stuttgart: Reclam.

Jennifer Ch. Müller, born in 1983, is PhD Candidate at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC), Justus Liebig University Giessen. She writes her dissertation in Sociology on the Transformation of Education ('Bildung') in the Higher Education System. Her Research Interests are Sociology of Education, Higher Education Research, Theories of Socialization, Social Inequality, Critical Theory, Theories of Society and Qualitative Social Research. She completed a Diploma in Social Sciences, three First State Examinations in Teaching Post (Special School, Secondary School and Grammar School) and studied Sociology, Political Sciences, Educational Science, German Literature and German Linguistics at Justus Liebig University Giessen and Philipps University Marburg. Before her membership at the GCSC, she was a Teaching and Research Assistant at the Institute of Sociology, JLU Giessen and a Lecturer at the Technische Hochschule Mittelhessen. [email protected]

Mathelinda Nabugodi University College London From Anarchy to Apathy: Political Satire in 1819, in 1948 and in 2011.

One of the central elements of politically committed art is the relation between the artist and his audience. In this paper I will examine the changing status of the interventionist, lyrical poet by reading Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘The Mask of Anarchy’ (1819) alongside two rewritings of this poem: Bertolt Brecht’s ‘Der Anachronistische Zug oder Freiheit und Democracy’ (‘The Masque of Anachronism or Freedom and Democracy’; 1948) and Andy Bennett’s ‘The Masque of Apathy’ (2011). Dating back to Roman and medieval pageants, a masque is an allegorical procession, traditionally used to celebrate a military victory or the current ruler. In Shelley’s masque, however, the political leadership is portrayed as allegories of Murder, Fraud etc. While encouraging protest, the poet warns of the anarchy that will follow an armed rebellion and sets himself up as a prophet of non-violent resistance. Brecht’s satire of post-war Germany suggests that the new ‘democratic’ leaders are merely former Nazis in disguise, while use of English Democracy rather than German Demokratie derides the growing influence of American consumerism. Bennett’s poem unmasks the UK’s current government, but is even more poignantly a satire of postmodern consumerist and celebrity culture. The rise of consumerism is presented as making people complicit in their oppression, so that the major threat to liberation is no longer anarchy, but apathy. All three poems are interventionist literary acts, however they embody very different stances towards the people they seek to mobilize. This reflects the changing social standing of the lyrical poet and reveals a growing scepticism about poetry’s ability to achieve social transformation – yet this very cynicism is meant to provoke the readers into political action. Thus I will finish by exploring the routes open for politically committed poetry today.

I have an undergraduate degree in English Literature from the University of Edinburgh and a master’s degree in Translation Theory and Practice from University College London. At the moment I am pursuing doctoral research on Percy Bysshe Shelley and Walter Benjamin. Both writers have proven significant sources for 20th century theory (particularly Marxist theory and deconstruction as in the work of Theodor W. Adorno, Terry Eagleton, Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man). Shelley and Benjamin advocated a politically effective literary practice; primarily the politics of literature lie in stimulating critical thinking and counteracting the commodification of knowledge. My research looks back to these historical sources in order to answer the question of the purpose, value and literature in our own time. [email protected]

Ariadne Nunes CEC/University of Lisbon Between Past and Present. Examining the impact of a medieval text

Starting from the analysis of Livro da Vertuosa Benfeytoria, a Portuguese late medieval treatise, by Infante D. Pedro (1392-1449) and his confessor João Verba, the paper will discuss how to ascertain the impact this medieval text had in the public sphere of its time. The paper shall discuss, on the one hand, questions such as the genre of the text, its intended audience and the relevance of the language used, and, on the other hand, the idea, stressed by John Dagenais (1994), of medieval manuscripts as "fallen texts" and of incoherence as a powerful force in the medieval textual world. The paper aims at discussing how these issues are reflected in Livro da Vertuosa Benfeytoria and will conclude by analysing the participation of the scribes in the written process as one of the causes that conditions the impact and the intervention of the text in the public sphere. The medium by which present and past readers of the text have access to it reinforces the difference between its past and present understanding. As John Dagenais puts it, present readers usually have a sophisticated access to medieval texts through critical editions, which have recourse to clear, if technical, language, though with many unfamiliar referents, while the experience of the medieval reader was probably the opposite: their familiar everyday world and language were rendered strange or even unrecognizable by the incompleteness and incoherence of the manuscripts. The paper will examine the tension between present and past experience of reading, which conditions the impact of the text in terms of its reception. Works cited: Dagenais, John. 1994. The Ethics of Reading in Manuscript Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Ariadne Nunes is a PhD student at, and a member of, the Centre for Comparative Studies of the University of Lisbon. Her research mainly focuses on the idea of book and reading in a medieval Portuguese treatise of the late 15th century, on which she has published an article ("Ler o título. Sobre os capítulos IV e V do Livro de Virtuosa Benfeytoria". Românica. 2011). She co-edited the volume Memory and Wisdom (Húmus 2011) with Helena Buescu, José Pedro Serra and Rui Carlos Fonseca. She is involved in a project of a critical edition of one of the Chronicles of Fernão Lopes, a Portuguese chronicler of the 15th century, coordinated by Professor Teresa Amado (Centre for Comparative Studies, University of Lisbon). Impact and Intervention: The Relevance of Literature in a Changing World [email protected]

Sara Polak Netherlands Research School for Literary Studies, University of Leiden Fictional Portrayals of Franklin D. Roosevelt as Public History – A Case Study

While there is no doubt or ambiguity about the fact that novels like Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America (2004), or films such as Pearl Harbor (2001, dir. Michael Bay) are fictional, both depict their historical settings in ways that stem from collective memories of the events they engage with, and in turn presumably influence how these events are publicly remembered afterwards. The proposed presentation discusses how bestselling fictional accounts of historical events or issues (novels and films) contribute to the development of public images, using Franklin Roosevelt’s as a case study. My PhD project The First Modern Media President: Franklin D. Roosevelt in American Public History and Memory (NWO, 2010-2015) investigates how widely disseminated textual and visual portrayals of Franklin Roosevelt, regardless of 18

their historicity and (lack of) grounding in academic historiography, together form a contemporary (post-2000) image of Roosevelt. Rather than studying the level of ‘truth’ or historical ‘correctness’ of these representations, the project aims to show who and what are the key agents and culture products in narrating and mythologizing Franklin Roosevelt’s person and presidency for the general public. Consequently, all primary sources (concretely: films, novels, popular biographies, documentaries, monuments and museums) are seen as public history – narratives in the public domain that are at least to some extent renderings of history, intended to entertain and educate a large audience. The proposed presentation addresses the part of this investigation that relates to Roosevelt as represented in novels and films. With The Golden Age (2000) – written by historian Gore Vidal because he felt a novel would have more impact than a historical monograph – as its starting point, the presentation will treat Roosevelt representations in recent films and novels. To what extent do such portrayals contribute to Roosevelt’s image in public memory, and how they do so?

Sara Polak is PhD-candidate/lecturer at Leiden University since September 2010. She started working on her research project about a year earlier, in combination with a job as lecturer in American history at the University of Amsterdam. She also worked as writer of life narratives and co-authored various oral histories. Her publications include ‘Roosevelt in zijn eigen museum’, a chapter in Tweede levens, over personen en personages in de geschiedschrijving en de literatuur (Amsterdam: AUP, 2010) and Meerstemmig Verleden, persoonlijke verhalen over het Nederlandse slavernijverleden (Amsterdam: KIT Publishers, 2011). Sara teaches Twentieth-century American Literature and Contemporary Literatures in English (both 3rd-year BA modules) and is chairman of the PhD Council at the Leiden University Institute of Cultural Disciplines. [email protected]

Tytti Rantanen Comparative literature / University of Tampere Finnish Doctoral Programme for Literature Studies Between poetics and politics: Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères and Le Corps Lesbien

From gender studies to ecocriticism, the trend of ideological criticism in the last decades’ literature studies has proved its relevance by examining literature as the representation of various sociocultural problems. The value of literary criticism has been in its capacity to reflect on different aspects of the actual world around us. However, one cannot help wondering, if it is still allowed to study literature as literature. My paper “Between poetics and politics: Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères and Le Corps Lesbien” is defending the relevance of literature and literature studies as the manifestation (and studies) of aesthetics. I am not denying the connection between the literary corpus and the culture-historical or ideological circumstances it is reflecting on. My aim is not to treat literature as a documentary of some phenomenon, but rather as an art of it, I seek to examine the ways the political or ideologically committed content is expressed through the poetics of a certain work of art. The post-structuralist literary theory does not deserve its “relativist” reputation, but can be of great use in studying how radical ethos is expressed through the literary language. I am aware of Jacques Derrida’s warning about the impossibility to use deconstruction as a method. That does not prevent me from combining Derrida’s, Blanchot’s and Barthes’ views of language with reading of two radical writings by their contemporary Monique Wittig: Les Guérillères (1969) and Le Corps Lesbien (1973). Together with Wittig’s debut novel, L’Opoponax (1964), these writings are often treated in narrative studies as classical examples of “weird pronoun narration” (on, elles, j/e). But once this “weirdness” is stated, what else can be said about these manifestations? Contrary to L’Opoponax, these two writings are not listed as “novels” in Wittig’s bibliography. Can they still be read not merely as pamphlets, but as belles-lettres?

Tytti Rantanen (b. 1985) was graduated as Master of Arts from the University of Tampere in 2011. She is currently working on her PhD thesis “Poetic Interference in French Post-War Literature and Cinema” as a doctoral student in the Finnish Doctoral Programme for Literature Studies. In her Master’s Thesis, Rantanen studied Marguerite Duras’ Indian Cycle and the question of “negative poetics” combining post-classical narratology with French post- structuralist literary theory. In her PhD thesis Rantanen is not concentrating exclusively on Duras, but building a larger corpus with Claude Simon, Monique Wittig, Hélène Bessette and examples from the French cinema. The essential questions remain the same: how can the radicality of the form, the poetic interference, be treated not as an obstacle that has to be solved and tamed, but as a possibility that has aesthetic values in such – and how to encourage academic discussion about this possibility without mystifying it. [email protected]

Elisa Ruiz Velasco Garcia Department of Comparative Literature, faculty of Humanities at Aarhus University Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Writer, Activist, Prophet?

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was one of the most iconic writers of the Cold War. His work - in all its genres - was permeated with his vision of politics. For Solzhenitsyn, political activism was an essential part of being a writer. In this spirit, he published scathing criticism of communist prison camps, offered his own version of Détente, and his very personal interpretations of Russian history. Both in the Soviet Union and in exile in the United States he made every effort to communicate his message: through his novels, speeches, essays, and interviews. Not only was Solzhenitsyn’s work a form of political intervention, so was his canonization as both a writer and political figure. The Nobel Committee saw his political integrity as one of the reasons why he should be awarded their prestigious prize in 1970. He was also invited to speak to the US Congress about his views on US-Soviet relations. However, Solzhenitsyn’s political message was not always what his readers hoped for. His rejection of the core priorities of the student movements of the 1960s and 70s, such as female emancipation, civil rights, nuclear disarmament, and peace in Vietnam alienated millions of his supporters. What type of expectations did Solzhenitsyn fulfil and disappoint as a writer? How did critics with diverging political views deal with Solzhenitsyn’s literary works? In my paper I will explore the idea of the author as a political activist by analyzing Solzhenitsyn’s example. If Solzhenitsyn saw the purpose of his oeuvre as political, how was it assessed by literary critics? How did Solzhenitsyn’s vision of the purpose of literature clash with a changing world - a world with new priorities and evolving views on the role of literature, a world that was moving further away from the view of literature as a political compass?

Elisa Ruiz Velasco Garcia attained her Magister Artium degree at the Free University of Berlin. There, she majored in Cultural Studies and Sociology at the Eastern European Institute with minors in History and Semitic Philology. She worked at the German-Russian Museum in Berlin from 2007 until February 2010. In March 2010 she started her PhD at Aarhus University with a stipend from the Faculty of Humanities. She is part of the Department of Comparative Literature and specializes in Russian dissident literature and its reception abroad. The working title of her PhD- project is: “Cold War Icon or Literary Hero? A Study of the Western Reception of Alexander Solzhenitsyn”. She has presented papers at international conferences in the Denmark, the US, and Germany.

Salla Shhadeh Department of Comparative Literature, University of Turku. Finnish Doctoral Programme for Literature Studies Literature and Truth: The Relevance of Analysing Plato

The notion of truth may well be the most unfashionable concept in today’s literary studies. Yet one of the most simple and fundamental questions of literary studies, i.e. what kind of knowledge stories embody, implies the idea that knowledge is something held true. In my presentation, I would like to re-address the concept of truth in literature. I will approach this question from the historical perspective of literature, namely Plato’s work (427–347 BCE). Plato’s philosophy is rooted in the cultural-historical turning point where poetry started losing its authority over knowledge and truth to philosophy. The phenomenon coincided with the democratisation of Athens and aristocratic upbringing losing ground. The new political culture called for a new kind of education in which Sophists came in useful. Along with sophistry, literature in the form of stories started vanishing and came to be replaced mostly by (political) speeches, in which persuasion was the criterion of a good speech. Of course, this also meant the relativisation of the concept of truth. In poetry, on the contrary, the authority of knowledge and truth was of godly origin, since a poet was vested with the status of a mediator or prophet. In this socio-cultural situation Plato started writing his dialogues which in many ways reflect both poetry and sophistry. These reflections were used by Plato to articulate his own philosophy, mostly written in the form of dialogues where a platonic hero and the protagonist Socrates discourse with sophists among others. Many dialogues are presented as stories told about Socrates which link Platonic dialogues to such key issues of Greek poetry like being an eyewitness, the nature of fame or the development of myths. I postulate this was a conscious choice, a deliberate literary means that Plato used to thematise the questions of knowledge and truth in poetry. In my presentation, I try to explicate Plato’s position towards poetry. Plato writes stories told about Socrates. Are platonic dialogues mere repetitions or records of what was told in the form of stories about Socrates? What is the new, philosophical concept of truth that Plato applies in his stories on Socrates? 20

Salla Shhadeh studied Comparative Literature and Cultural History at the University of Turku, Finland. She graduated in 2007 and her MA dissertation was on the concept of knowledge in Plato’s dialogues. Currently, she is working on her PhD dissertation about “the Relationship between Poetry and Philosophy in Plato’s Dialogues”, at the department of Comparative Literature, University of Turku. [email protected]

Daniela Silén The Finnish Doctoral Programme for Literary Studies University of Helsinki The Viking that shaped a nation: When poetry goes political

The Gothicism (Swedish: göticismen), was a cultural movement in Sweden, glorifying the Swedish ancestors. The movement was founded as early as in the 17th century, but was revived in the early 19th century by the national romanticism, this time with Vikings as heroic figures. One of the movement’s most prominent figures was the Swedish author Erik Gustaf Geijer (1783-1847). Geijer was one of the founding members of the Geatish Society (Götiska förbundet), and it was in this society’s periodical Iduna, that Geijer’s famous poem ‘Vikingen’ (The Viking) was first published. ‘Vikingen’ portrays the Viking as the heroic Norseman that many of us imagine still today, and it became the starting-point of the rehabilitation of the Norse culture in Sweden. Around 1870 questions arose concerning the origin of some of the sources that constituted the Gothicism, and the movement lost much of its influence and power. Still, the movement was revived again in the 20th century, this time by the Swedish Nazis. Because of the connection to the Nazis, the question of the origin of the Swedes and the Gothicism as a movement, have become delicate subjects that aren’t widely discussed in present-day Scandinavia. What I am interested in looking into in this paper is how the political rhetorics of the Geatish Society take shape in the rhetoric of Geijer’s poem. Analyzing this one poem by Geijer will give us an idea of the rhetoric that played a part in shaping the Swedish national identity and that played a huge part in shaping our idea of Vikings. [email protected]

Matthias Somers FWO – KU Leuven – MDRN Rhetoric’s Relevance: The Modernists’ Ambivalent Relation to Rhetorical Expression

A thorough and coherent rhetorical education disappeared from the Anglo-American university in the course of the nineteenth century. When English departments were established for the professional study of the national literature, rhetorical composition was aligned with a form of belletristic criticism, and was divorced from oratory, the oral component of rhetoric. The systematic study of oral delivery was thus relegated to the outskirts of academia. In literary circles at the beginning of the twentieth century, a similar distrust of rhetoric can be witnessed. A number of now canonical—and then very polemical—‘high’ modernist authors such as Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot displayed a strong suspicion of traditional forms of codified collective speaking. However, at the same time, these authors entertained the deep belief that literature must have a public function, and stressed its transformative potential. The resulting dilemma—the creation of a discourse that was meant to have impact but was not rhetorical—accounts for their ambiguous poetics: although these modernist poets developed intricate formal devices to avoid a rhetorical discourse (e.g. the doctrine of ‘impersonality’), they were also deeply influenced by different ‘modernisms’ that re- created forms of codified expression (e.g. Yeats’s musical performances, Futurist declamation, etc.). Interestingly, the development of these modes of oral expression ran parallel with a revival of the old art of oratory in independent speech schools around the turn of the century. This paper will confront these different ‘movements’ of oral performance of literature with each other, and aims to show that the more rhetorical, expressive aspects of high modernism have been obscured by its institutional counterpart, New Criticism, which focused on a stark formalism at the expense of the social context the modernists wished to impact. Matthias Somers hold MAs in English literature and in Literary Studies from the University of Leuven (KU Leuven) in Belgium. He is currently working on a PhD project, under supervision of Sascha Bru, titled “Expiring Rhetoric: Expression Theory in the Anglo-American Academy and its Discursive Contexts, 1880s-1930s”, which deals with expression theory and oral culture during the modernist period, questioning the relationship between modernism

and rhetoric. This project is funded by the Fund for Scientific Research Flanders, and is carried out within the KU Leuven-based MDRN research group (www.mdrn.be). [email protected]

Tereza Stejskalová Charles University-Prague Agamben's Literary Paradigm

In the introduction of her essay “Agamben's Missing Subjects. Potentiality or Capacity?”, Nina Power has noticed that the discussion of social resistance in political theory has recently turned to solitary literary figures who are “reduced to their ability to merely resist or to refuse in the last resort”. Giorgio Agamben becomes the model thinker of this anti-heroic tendency. His politics, like the politics of other notables such as Toni Negri or Slavoj Žižek, is conceived as the practice of a philosophical principle while philosophy emerges as the completion of politics. Literary examples serve to bridge the two disciplines and introduce an unexpected and counter-intuitive political model based on a reinterpretation of ontological problems. My paper examines Agamben's use of literary examples to articulate the meaning of ethical and political life. Why and how does the Italian philosopher use literature as exemplary of authentic ethics and politics? What does literature and politics gain and lose by his philosophical treatment? To attempt at answering these questions, I will critically examine Agamben's paradigmatic method. Such strategy lies in isolating phenomena from their original context and employing them as lenses through which we perceive our situation in a way “that lights the spark in the present”.

Tereza Stejskalová is a Ph.D. Candidate at the Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. Her Ph.D. thesis supervised by Dr. Erik Roraback deals with the ways in which contemporary theory uses literature in order to exemplify political act proper. In particular, she focuses on the case of Melville's “Bartleby the Scrivener”. She works as a contributing editor of the A2 Cultural Journal (www.advojka.cz). [email protected]

Carmen Van den Bergh KU Leuven, MDRN Italian young writers during the 1930s, between realism and experiment

The paper I’d like to propose on the Hermes Seminar presents the results of a thorough analysis of a cluster of literary phenomena that emerged in Italy around the1930’s, characterized by a refusal of the dominant position of the aesthetically pleasing lyrical prose writing (known as prosa d’arte) and the plea for a heteronomous orientation of literature. These phenomena, known in literary historiography as the “(neo)realism of the thirties”, have frequently been too simplistically described as a rather marginal revolt of a new generation of writers, often wrongly circumscribed to a group of forerunners of following “neorealismo”. The purpose of this paper is to do justice to the complexity of the literary debate on realism and prosa d’arte and to highlight the numerous ways in which heteronomously and autonomously oriented poetics interact and at times‐ overlap. An interpretation of the textual and contextual dimensions of the tensions between autonomous conceptions of literature (literature for its own sake) and heteronomous alternatives (literature in the service of society, politics (see: fascism), religion), will be shown by proposing a few case studies out of our corpus of “realist” novels written between 1930 and 1940, ranging from young experimental writers who import non‐fiction and newspaper writing techniques to writers who combine apparently traditional narrative techniques with more experimental devices and/or with central preoccupations and stylistic features of modernism.

Carmen Van den Bergh is member of the Italian Department of the University of Leuven (Belgium) and is writing a PhD on 1930s realistic and documentary novel production, with a focus on issues such as the autonomous and heteronomous status of literature in fascist Italy. Her PhD is part of larger research project, called MDRN, that is specializing in concepts such as modernism, modernity and modern literature (see also www.mdrn.be). [email protected]

Tom Vandevelde KU Leuven, MDRN Listening Through Literature. Recapturing the Soundscapes of the Past.

In the ocularcentric society we live in, the ear has grown a distant second to the supremacy of the eye in the hierarchy of the senses. This well-established supposed evolution (Walter Ong, Marshall McLuhan) has recently been challenged (Hillel Schwartz, Leigh Schmidt) in attempts to put forward a more sophisticated image of our sensory history. The importance of the aural at the beginning of the twentieth century (which coincided with the emergence of influential aural media such as the phonograph, the gramophone, the telephone, and the radio) especially, cannot be underestimated. Nevertheless, it seems to have faded from our collective memory. In the growing field of sound studies, tracing sounds in literature has been one of the primary instruments used to efface the muteness of history (e.g. The World Soundscape Project) and rediscover the ‘soundscapes’ (Murray Schafer) of our past. This contribution argues that reaching out to the field of sound studies could enrich literary studies much in the same way as sound studies have benefited from their collaboration with literature. By drawing on the vast terminology of sound studies, I propose a theoretical framework for the study of narrative sound, enabling the reader to once again capture the rich sonority of fiction at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Tom Vandevelde (1987) completed an MA in Dutch and English Language and Literature at Ghent University before obtaining an MA in Literary Studies from KU Leuven, where he is currently preparing a Ph.D. on the representation and perception of sound in modernist narratives as a junior member of the MDRN group (www.mdrn.be). [email protected]

Sara Vaghefian French (UCL) Creativity and the Collapse of Opposition: Reading Arabic and French Texts

What value has been brought to literature through the collapse of binary opposition? For the Poststructuralists, a liberation from the compartmentalization and constraints of Structuralism; for the Surrealists, a liberation of the art form from theory; for the Arab Modernist poet, a liberation from a paradigmatic Classical tradition. This paper argues that the collapse of binary opposition is key to the assertion of individuality and is brought about through a constant process of creativity. This creative process plays with the interrelation of subject(ivity) and object(ivity), self and other, writer and reader, in order not to assimilate and systematise, but to individualise. I will conduct a cross-cultural analysis of texts by three writers, one from each of the above traditions: Barthes, Breton and Syrian-French poet and scholar, Adonis. Barthes, in his later writing, following The Death of the Author (1967), develops a concept of ‘neutral’ writing that he hopes will escape the political/ideological associations of language. Language itself becomes an experience involving reader as well as writer, and within which subject and object are blurred, even collapsed. Breton, despite being the founder of an essentially philosophical revolution, sought to highlight individuality of expression through an engagement with the unconscious in ‘automatic writing.’ Similarly, Adonis strove to escape both political and religious censorship of the Arab literary voice, creating a space in poetry for a new identity. Intellectually, artistically, politically, the call for this collapse of opposition is itself a form of opposition, a form of protest. Common to all of these writers is the desire to express the inexpressible, the result of which is a manipulation, a stuttering reinvention of the written word. What they find is that the very nature of language, the deferral it incarnates, its slippages and inadequacies necessitate an innovative engagement with imagination and creation. Through creativity, the writer moves beyond the familiar: he reaches within himself, reassessing and reinventing his own sense of being, or cultivating an individuality of his own. In the words of Adonis: ‘Through creating his work, the writer creates himself.’

Sara Vaghefian (Creativity and the Collapse of Opposition) is a 1st year PhD student in French, University College London (UCL) and a Teaching Fellow in Arabic, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), London. Her PhD thesis is based on a comparison of Arabic and French literature. I am comparing texts across different literary traditions and movements, focusing on the role of creativity and imagination in presenting the spiritual, the neutral and the metaphysical. [email protected]

Claudia Weber International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC), Justus Liebig University Giessen Literary Experience as Media Experience: On the Role of Literature in Contemporary Media Society

With the rise of ever new media technologies, writers and literary scholars have worried about literature being replaced and losing its function and significance. Today, it can be stated that literature has not forfeited its social and cultural role.5 Still, it is true that it competes with other media, e.g. television and the Internet. Pressing questions resulting from these circumstances are: In which way has literature found its place in the contemporary media landscape? Which specific functions is it (still) able to fulfill?6 Which experience can literature provide, and how does it depict and discuss other media experiences? In this paper I will elaborate on one specific role of literature in contemporary mediatized society, i.e. its exploration of and critical dealing with television. My focus will thus be on fiction and television, or rather television fiction. By analyzing 21st century novels and their examination of contemporary television genres I will argue that one crucial function literature fulfills today is the critical reflection of individual and collective media experiences. With reference to Hubert Zapf’s sophisticated triadic model of the cultural-ecological functions of literature,7 I will expatiate on the novels as both critical meta-discourse and imaginative counter-discourse. Bibliography: Gymnich, Marion, Ansgar Nünning. 2005. Funktionen von Literatur: Theoretische Grundlagen und Modellinterpretationen. Trier: WVT. Wolf, Werner. 2010. “Intermedialität und mediale Dominanz: Typologisch, funktionsgeschichtlich und akademisch- institutionell betrachtet.” In: Uta Degner, Norbert Christian Wolf. Der neue Wettstreit der Künste: Legitimation und Dominanz im Zeichen der Intermedialität. Bielefeld: Transcript. 241-259. Zapf, Hubert. 2005. “Das Funktionsmodell der Literatur als kultureller Ökologie: Imaginative Texte im Spannungsfeld von Dekonstruktion und Regeneration.“ In: Marion Gymnich, Ansgar Nünning. Funktionen von Literatur: Theoretische Grundlagen und Modellinterpretationen. Trier: WVT. 55-77. Institutional affiliation: Doctoral researcher at Justus Liebig University (JLU) Giessen/Germany and member of the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC), the International PhD Programme Literary and Cultural Studies (IPP) and the European PhD Network Literary and Cultural Studies (PhDnet) (all affiliated with JLU Giessen) As a member of the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC), the International PhD Programme Literary and Cultural Studies (IPP) and the European PhD Network Literary and Cultural Studies (PhDnet) Claudia Weber conducts her PhD both at Justus Liebig University Giessen and the University of Stockholm. Before having started her research she did her double honours at JLU Giessen. She has a master’s degree in sport sciences, sociology and psychology as well as a university degree (1. Staatsexamen) in teacher training (on high school level) with three subjects, i.e. English, Politics and Sports.

Claudia Weber’s dissertation project is called Fictions of Television: The Televisionization of and Television Critique in Contemporary Fiction and deals with novels critically exploring the contemporary television landscape. She works as a research assistant at the GCSC. [email protected]

5 Cf. Werner Wolf who claims that the rise of new media does not cause the disappearance of old media but, rather, results in a reconfiguration of the media landscape characterized by new power relations. (Wolf in Degner 2010: 254) 6 Clearly, the question on the functions of literature comes under scrutiny time and again, as every epoch provides different answers, depending on the specific historical context. Cf. also Gymnich and Nünning who argue that dealing with the functions of literature is not a new phenomenon but can be traced back to antiquity, which proves that this question is inevitably connected with a critical examination of literature as such (cf. Gymnich/Nünning 2005: 5). 7 Cf. Zapf in Gymnich/Nünning 2005. 24