Illuminating Literature: Stories of Our Lives
(Asynchronous Session - Online)
Does Australian Fictional Literature Ring with the Sound of Birdsong? View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sonia Tidemann
Australians, particularly those outside urban areas are awakened, pre-dawn, by carolling birds, but is this reflected in fiction by the country’s writers? About one fifth of stories have auditory references such as bells, clamorous trumpeting, squawking, screeching, hot pealing and "boobook nights, mopoking winter nights," as well as the powerful sounds of myriads of beating wings. But birds also appear in a number of other ways: as generators of empathy, and environmental and geographic connectors, creating intellectual images and philosophical links. Aboriginal writers wove subtle references to Aboriginal culture and lore into their stories that extended into the astronomic realm, as well as imaginary travel, while other Australian writers made use of idiomatic turns of phrase, such as "Stone the crows," and created memorable characterisations. Almost one hundred bird species were identifiable. Amongst them were the stately Black Swan, dancing Brolga, characterful Sulphur-crested Cockatoo, carolling Australian Magpie, and always ravenous Silver Gull, to the humble chicken. So while Australian literature does ring with birdsong, folk, Aboriginal and other Australian writers make birds do much more, creating a richly colourful and intricately feathered collage.
Building a Community in a Civil War Novel, Two College Friends View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Setsuko Ohno
Frederic Loring’s novel, Two College Friends (1871), tells a story of Ned, a Harvard student who fights on the side of the Union in the Civil War. Taken prisoner by the Confederate army, Ned realizes that his college friend, Tom, has a high fever. Ned, therefore, asks a Confederate general, Stonewall Jackson, for mercy. The general agrees not to take him to the prison camp and to stay where they are under the condition not to escape. Ned breaks his promise, returning to the Union camp to leave Tom. Ned goes back to the Confederate side in order to be punished by death. The work has been considered as the first “gay novel” in the U.S. My focus, however, is on the historical background of Harvard students’ enlistment in the Union army. A historian Kanisorn Wongsrichanalai (2016) indicates that New England college students, who fought for the Union, were instilled with the idea that “rigid discipline and obedience to order” would lead to “honorable conduct.” Although Ned is one of the best examples in that he displays obedience to the Union, he also applies the same principle of conduct to his enemies. It is beyond comprehension that he is so obedient to the rules of the South that he is willing to sacrifice his own life. I interpret his loyalty and sacrifice to the Confederacy as an act of building a new community, bringing together two halves of a republic.
Nawal El Saadawi’s The Fall of the Imam: Writing Dissidence View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Hala Ghoneim
Although Nawal El Sadawi has frequently articulated the themes of her novel The Fall of the Imam both in her fictional and non-fictional works, she describes a difficult struggle with language while writing this particular novel. This paper examines El Saadawi’s discussion of language’s role as a tool for the oppression of women and a potential tool for their liberation. El Saadawi lays out the disturbing correspondence between linguistic and social apparatuses of exclusion, marginalization, and discrimination; the ramifications of exercising a monopoly on naming and labeling; and the liberating potential of reinventing systems of signification and narration strategies. Hélène Cixous’s “insurgent writing” and Julia Kristiva’s “semiotic” are concepts the paper will rely on in analyzing The Fall of the Imam as a rare example of what French feminists term “feminist writing” and a crafty utilization of postmodernist narration techniques to promote a rigorous feminist agenda. El Saadawi targets the reductionist in the postcolonial by exposing the (neo)patriarchal structures that plague the post-independence nationalist discourse in Egypt, as it questions religious, political, and social institution and Western supremacy.
The History of the Hungarian Novel: Examination of 100 Novels from 1832 to 2005 View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Botond Szemes
In my study, I undertake a significant data-based analysis of the history of the Hungarian literature. The corpus contains one hundred Hungarian novels from 1832 to 2005 in which I mostly examine the average sentence length of each texts. Visualizing the results along the years of their publication, clear tendencies emerge, which could open new perspectives on the history of the Hungarian novel. My paper describes the process of the composition of the corpus, the codes which produced the graphs in the R Studio programming language environment, as well as the interpretation of the graphs. What could lie be behind the declining trends of the 19th century (what is the connection between the history of the education, the history of the press and the length of the sentences), how much this can be seen as a national specificity, and how can we describe the “long-sentence poetics” of the late 20. century (eg. Péter Esterházy, Péter Nádas, Imre Kertész)? These main questions are explored in this macroanalysis.
Stuart Moulthrop’s Electronic Literature: Give Me a Maze and I Shall Immortalize Borges View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ana Abril Hernández
The notions about labyrinths and the incipient orientating of the rhizome put forth by Jorge Luis Borges earned him a reputation as a forerunner of the World Wide Web. His metaphysics of the multiverse is clearly akin to later developments of this notion in literature. One of these literary manifestations of the rhizome as a modern maze draws on the myth of the Cretan labyrinth and on the short story “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941) as literary sources. This is the case of the electronic novel “Victory Garden” designed by Stuart Moulthrop and released by Eastgate Systems in 1991. In this electronic piece of hyperfiction the traditional role of the reader transforms into a more engaging ‘prosumer.’ This hypertext makes use of the digital medium to portray a version of another version of the Classical myth, on a sort of second-scale literary revision of a classic. This fact, far from detaching the original connotations and characteristics of the ancient myth, feeds on it and on Borges’s own revision to present the rhizome along whose branches readers will find events, experiences and feelings about the first Gulf War of the years 1990-1991. The present study relies on the classical myth of the labyrinth and on Borges’s story to deepen into Moulthrop’s modern understanding of the world in his piece of e-literature: “Victory Garden” from an intermedial and literary lens.
