Evolving Knowledge
Form, Formlessness, and the Unravelling of the Novel: A Postmodern Feminist Examination from Woolf to Evaristo View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nycole Prowse
This paper traces the unravelling of the novel over the past century marking the agentic slipperiness and potentiality of the shifts in both the literary form and the formlessness of digitalisation. A comparative textual analysis of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves and Bernadine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other bookend a postmodern feminist exploration of the ontological shifts and implications of the destabilisation of the novel form. Textual analysis is situated alongside an epistemological examination of the physicality and access of the text. The shift from print medium (that proffered the initial rise of the novel form) to a digitalised medium can be seen to ameliorate Woolf’s concerns of the patriarchal discursive control that beleaguered female access to texts and authorship. Reengaging in Hélène Cixous’ hopes for l’écriture feminine and a postmodern feminist reading of the heteroglossia of Woolf’s psychical narratorial deconstruction and Evaristo’s narratorial diaspora exemplifies the potentiality of multiplicity that contests rigid phallocentric notions of subjectivity. The digitalised formlessness of the text evokes the slipperiness of the postmodern unbinding of form that has the potential to free the subject of phallogocentricism.
Featured Living in the Interstices as a Muslim Woman: The Convergence of Muslimness and Queerness in Tanaïs’s Bright Lines (2015) View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Neriman Kuyucu
This paper responds to the lack of emphasis on how Islam operates as the subtext (and the context) in contemporary literature. It will discuss the literary and sociopolitical implications of making meaning of a Muslim self in the diaspora through an analysis of Tanaïs’s (they) novel, 'Bright Lines' (2015) which breaks new ground by placing queerness at the heart of Muslim diasporic experience. By using Brah's 'diaspora space' theory and Shahab Ahmed's theorization of Islam, this paper offers a study of the difficulty of reconfiguring the queer Muslim diasporic self in fictional works, with a focus on how Tanaïs challenge the dominant narratives about diasporic queer Muslim subjectivity in the novel. The novel, the paper will demonstrate, unsettles the tendencies to portray Islam and queer identity as a monolithic whole. Through a close-reading a few passages, the study focuses on how Tanaïs reclaim queer Muslimness by disentangling the restrictive Islamic prescriptions from Muslimness. The formation/representation of a diasporic Muslim subjectivity in the novel, I further argue, intersects with and pushes in elements of Islamic thought and feminist-queer thought in new directions within a transnational context. There emerges then a literary representation of diasporic Muslim subjectivity that resists the restrictive heteronormative, homophobic, and discriminatory impulses of both conservative Islam and secular liberalism.
When Whites Write Black: Aesthetic Values in Literary Texts View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Brenda Flanagan
Images matter, and when they are reinforced in literary texts, they help to shape identity, some true, some false. What can we learn about the aesthetics of writers who have created texts with characters defined by a skin color different from their own? Does the period in which the texts are set and published make a difference in how we should apprehend them? These questions are not new. Scholars such as Richard Jackson, in his The Black Image in Latin American Literature (1976), David Dabydeen, editor of The Black Presence in English Literature (1970), Wilfred Cartey's important comparative exploration of Caribbean poetry in Black Images (1970), and Lemuel Johnson's The Devil, the Gargoyle and the Buffoon: the Negro as Metaphor in Western Literature (1969) have long interrogated these issues. More recently, claims about appropriation and psychological misinterpretation have inspired writers such as Toni Morrison to revisit these question in relation to texts by Americans. Because the study of literature is central in academic curricula, these questions remain relevant to our understanding of literature's place in the shaping or reinforcement of perceptions. This paper engages in explorations of how a play by William Shakespeare and a novel by Jean Rhy shape, complicate, and reinforce images of what Lemuel Johnson called "Blackness in human form."
Temporal Indifference and the Bisexual Imaginary: Crossings between Kristeva and Woolf View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Maria Margaroni
If, as modern physics argues, time is a distinctly human fiction, one that helps us conceptualize and organize our lives as “human”, then what might be the consequences of bracketing this fiction from our lives, activating a kind of temporal indifference, thus opening ourselves to the unchanging and entangled reality of a Now that does not flow or pass? Both Virginia Woolf in Orlando and Julia Kristeva in The Enchanted Clock take the challenge to explore this question, each at the turn of a new century. As I shall demonstrate, the two writers use the device of time-travelling in an attempt to enable their eccentric protagonists to push beyond the borders of the categories (man, woman; reason, instinct; life, language; reality, imagination) that have framed the human, exploding it ecstatically to its infinity-point, a Now that enfolds a multiverse of possibilities.
