Literary Interpretations
From the Peaks to the Streets: Mental and Literary Landscapes in 19th Century France
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kathryn Mills
At the beginning of the 19th century, Romantics were wandering around trying to find their existential purpose, and usually finding it, finally, in God and in nature. By the middle of the century, with Baudelaire, individuals were wandering through city streets half lost, not sure if they were seeing trees or lampposts, with no cathartic epiphany in sight. Art, as in Baudelaire’s prose poem “Perte d’Auréole,” fell from the heights of nature into the streets. In doing so, art changed forms, entering the common usage of poems in prose, the medium of newspapers, and the genre of crime fiction. Art also became ambiguous regarding the meaning of existence, and even regarding the very existence of the street scenes it was surveying. Recognizing the changes brought about by socio-historical conditions, Baudelaire put words to them in 1863. Le Peintre de la vie moderne revolutionized literary traditions by declaring that art should represent low life as well as high life, the everyday as well as the eternal. Further, Baudelaire established that art does not have to be museum-worthy in order to be worthwhile; in fact, lesser forms can better capture the “saveur amère ou capiteuse” of contemporary life. Jules Laforgue and Sainte-Beuve brought these changes on to the end of the 19th century, and T.S. Eliot carried them into the 20th, and to other continents. This paper will draw on close readings of poems, socio-history, and Baudelaire’s manifesto for modern art to explore this far-reaching transformation of modernity’s mental and literary landscapes.
Virginia Woolf's Voyage Out: A Literary Soundscape of Feminist Discourse View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Linda Nicole Blair
The topic of the 2023 conference has inspired me to analyze Virginia Woolf’s The Voyage Out, a novel which creates a soundscape of feminist discourse I have described as FemPoetiks, a rhetorical discourse created by women as they speak/write their truths into the world. My primary objective is to re-interpret this novel as a way of understanding Woolf’s early 20th century innovations regarding the fictional representation of a woman’s experience. Her novels have become increasingly relevant and socially significant in the face of a growing number of personal and political barriers faced by women around the world. My work with this text includes a combination of three frameworks: literary, linguistic, and sociopolitical. The methods I use to collate source material include a literature review of current Woolf criticism, a textual analysis of select passages from The Voyage Out using FemPoetiks, and a critical reappraisal of Woolf’s influence today. In a combination of close reading and critical analysis, I will argue that in her first novel, Woolf began re-inventing the way in which women are represented in fiction, thus re-shaping the genre. The main results of my work are that FemPoetiks can lead to a re-imagining of the ways in which Woolf’s oeuvre has been crucial to the development of a rigorous feminist discourse within fiction. One conclusive outcome may be that we gain insights into how women’s truths are voiced in 21st century fiction, and what can be achieved in the future.
Between the Surreal and Existential: David Hare and Jean Paul Sartre Examine the Weight of Chimerical Objects View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Barbara Lekatsas
David Hare (1917-1992) came to prominence as an artist during the 1940s, when André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, André Masson, Max Ernst, Kurt Seligmann, Salvador Dali, Victor Brauner, and other artists fleeing Nazi-occupied France arrived in New York. Hare, only twenty-four, became the managing editor of Breton’s journal, VVV (1942-1944). The historical record confirms Hare’s importance in shaping Surrealism in America and making it a source for the birth of Abstract Expressionism. Between 1948 and 1953, Hare lived in Paris, where he became the American editor for Sartre and De Beauvoir’s journal, Les Temps modernes. As early as 1946, in an issue dedicated to America and American writers, Hare contributed an essay entitled ‘Comics’, which explored the surrealists’ fascination with this new genre. Sartre, despite his attacks on the surrealists for their failure to stay and fight in the Resistance, developed a relationship with Hare and admired his work, writing of his sculpture, “Each figure is hidden in its own shell…graceful and comical, mobile and congealed, realist and magical, indivisible and contradictory, showing simultaneously the mind which has become an object and the perpetual bypassing of the object by the mind” (N-Dimensional Sculpture, 1947). In this paper, I examine the visual art and writing of Hare and Sartre, in terms of their movement philosophy, as each grapple with “the perpetual bypassing of the object by the mind,” in contrast to the materialist hope shared with André Breton in Nadja that “all of the beyond is here in this life.”
