Learning from Landscapes
“In the Empty Air Between Us”: Ideology and Entropy in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session John Corrigan
This paper makes the case that Absalom, Absalom! (1936) presents William Faulkner’s first significant artistic challenge to the ideologically saturated plantation regimes of the American South. The novel both identifies the flows of information, resources, and capital that sustained the slave system of the antebellum South and meditates on the entropy produced when such an institution fails on a large scale and, with it, the systems of representation that uphold it. I begin by analyzing the planter patriarch Thomas Sutpen, not as a man, but as a coercive ideology replicating itself through an epistemology of textual space. As forceful as this plantation ideology initially appears, Faulkner also identifies the internal contradictions that erode its power and hold over those who engender it. Though he situates the weakening of this ideological paradigm during the Civil War, he also indicates that it is not war alone that is responsible. Rather, we see how regimes of power fail from within – with a network of individuals increasingly unable to relate to each other, so mediated are they by the ideological and racial abstractions of the plantation system. Importantly, Faulkner imagines the ensuing entropy in terms of an express disenchantment with textual signification. It is not simply existential angst that the characters articulate, but a disillusionment with the textual epistemology of the plantation system as it enters into a period of chaos and reformation.
Estrangement and Precarity: The Living Death of Srilankan Tamil Dalits View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Alamelu Geetha Krishnamurthy
This study examines the caste ideologies embedded in the Srilankan Tamil Society. While the ethic conflict between the Sinhalese and Tamils have received considerable attention, there is very less focus on the caste ideologies prevalent among the Srilankan Tamil Dalits. Drawing on Achille Mbembe's concept of Necropolitics, this study engages in a critical reading of Srilankan Tamil Literatures to explore the precarious and estranged experiences of Srilankan Tamil Dalits.
Medieval Literary Journeys Through European and Middle Eastern Landscapes
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Cristian Bratu
In the first part of this paper, I discuss the emergence of travel narratives in French and Spanish medieval literatures, whereas in the second part, I discuss the authorial self-depictions of the individuals who penned these first travel narratives. French travel narratives emerged during the crusades, in the early 13th century, and within crusader history-writing (Robert de Clari, Geoffroy de Villehardouin, and Jean de Joinville). Later, other travelers to the East, such as Ogier d'Anglure, Nompar de Caumont and Bertrandon de la Brocquière will further develop the genre. In Spain, travel narratives emerge earlier than in France and have a considerably more complex history. In the 12th century, there are several travel narratives in Arabic, Hebrew and Latin. But the first actual travel narratives in Spanish appear in the 15th century, in the works of Ruy González de Clavijo, Gutierre Díez de Games, and Pero Tafur. I contend that in both French and Spanish literatures, travels were a major impetus for the medieval writers' self-assertiveness. Travels provided writers a certain amount of narrative freedom which inspired them to stop narrating exclusively someone else’s (hi)story and shift the focus—no matter how briefly—to the I of the traveler.
