Panels and Abstracts BACLS-WHN Loughborough 2018 Table of Contents Bodily Affects .................................................................................................................................................................. 2 Contemporary Canonicity (or, what not to read): Workshop ................................................................................. 4 Contemporary Life Writing and its Gender Dynamics ............................................................................................ 4 Ecology and Writing Beyond Human ......................................................................................................................... 6 Experimental Writing ..................................................................................................................................................... 7 Feminist Documents ...................................................................................................................................................... 9 Formations of the Human ........................................................................................................................................... 11 Haunting as Resistance in Contemporary Writing .................................................................................................. 13 Human and Nonhuman Nature ................................................................................................................................. 14 Intersectional Ethics ..................................................................................................................................................... 16 Marxist Literary Criticism in the Contemporary ...................................................................................................... 17 Media Infrastructure and Literary Aesthetics ........................................................................................................... 19 National Encounters .................................................................................................................................................... 21 Negative Mobilities, or Precarity and Unprecarity .................................................................................................. 23 Neoliberal Subjects ....................................................................................................................................................... 24 Poetry as Resistant Form ............................................................................................................................................. 26 Political Efficacy and the Novel ................................................................................................................................. 27 Post-Secular Writing ..................................................................................................................................................... 29 Queer Being ................................................................................................................................................................... 31 Reading Affect ............................................................................................................................................................... 32 Reading Matters ............................................................................................................................................................ 34 Realisms .......................................................................................................................................................................... 36 Retelling and Rewriting ................................................................................................................................................ 37 Shareveillance ................................................................................................................................................................ 39 Teaching Contemporary Literature Beyond the Book ........................................................................................... 40 The Problem with ‘Now’ ............................................................................................................................................. 42 Theorising the Novel Now ......................................................................................................................................... 43 New Media Literary Studies ........................................................................................................................................ 45 Utopian Readings .......................................................................................................................................................... 47 Videogames as (Comparatively) Contemporary Literature: Parallels, Precedents and Paradigm Shifts ......... 49 Working with Authors, Archives and Questions of Authority ............................................................................. 50 Writing Brexit ................................................................................................................................................................ 51 Writing Women: Subjectivity and Selfhood in Contemporary American Fiction .............................................. 53 Zadie Smith, The Panel ................................................................................................................................................ 54 Bodily Affects To Hold His Body: Liminality and Mourning in Lincoln in the Bardo Emily Direen (University of Melbourne) Propelled by recent critical claims that childhood is a major theme in contemporary fiction (Eaglestone, Dodou, Schneider), this paper seeks to investigate what Richard Kuhn has called “the enigma posed by the fictitious child … and the topography of the universe in which he moves” (6) by offering a critical analysis of George Saunders’ novel Lincoln in the Bardo (2017). In Saunders’ Man Booker winning novel President Lincoln’s beloved eleven-year-old son is laid to rest in Georgetown cemetery, only to ‘rise again’ in “the bardo” – a liminal realm, between Earth and ‘the next place’, which is filled with ghosts. Using Nancy Armstrong’s assertion that twenty-first century fiction is experiencing “a disconcerting sea change in the traditional subject of fiction” and has turned toward the “extremophile subject”, alongside Elspeth Probyn’s argument that “Writing is interested [and] is deeply embedded in contexts, politics, and bodies” (89) this paper aims to interrogate what is at stake in this evocative depiction of a child in spatial, emotional and existential limbo. I will examine the representation of the affective dynamics of the father- son relationship, and consider how the familial bond fantastically jumps the gap between life and death, whilst drawing attention to the way that the text simultaneously raises questions about non-filial responsibilities towards children. I synthesise this study with the ongoing literary discourse generated by critics such as Ellen Pifer, James Kincaid and Lee Edelman concerning the role the figurative child—as a potent symbolic figure of the future—plays in social discourse. Emily Direen is a PhD Candidate at the University of Melbourne. Her research interests include contemporary literature, adaptation studies, neo-Victorianism, and representations of childhood and adolescence. She is currently working on a dissertation provisionally titled: “Agentic Children: Affective Events and Childhood Upheaval in Contemporary Anglo-American Fiction.” Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life: Vulnerability and Resilience Beatriz Domínguez-García (U of Huelva) In Life After Life (2013), British writer Kate Atkinson returns to the rewriting of History. Ursula Todd’s lifespan overlaps with the major historical events of the twentieth century. Most of all, Life After Life highlights the deep vulnerability of women to systemic gender violence, but it seems to emphasise women’s resilience, which can be defined as “a form of suppleness and elasticity that enables adaptation to and recovery from shocks, surprises, and even slowly evolving changes and afflictions” (Hirsch 2014: 338). Thus, in the novel Ursula is the victim of repeated acts of gender violence, yet her extraordinary capacity for rebirth allows her to start anew, and eventually to escape the specific aggressions of each previous life in the next. The purpose of this paper is to examine Atkinson’s peculiar rendering of resilience, which interestingly she locates in the body, rather than in the mind (the more traditional adscription). I contend that in Life After Life resilience results from the combination of embodied memory and emotional forgetting. Since rebirth is a creative licence and patently impossible in real-life terms, Atkinson seems to establish the impossibility of victims to put an end to their own victimization and, likewise, the ability to “recover” from that bodily violence. In this respect, one may wonder if Atkinson is just questioning the ability of female victims to be resilient, whether resilience can be a viable discourse for recovering from gender violence and, finally, whether cultural texts can successfully present female resilience at all. Dr. B. Domínguez García works as a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Huelva, where she is currently teaching women’s writing and critical theory.