Real and Imagined
Asynchronous Session
Distress and Desire: Confessionalism in Conchitina Cruz's Elsewhere Held and Lingered
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Janielle Villamera
One of the modern confessional poetry’s characteristics in New Criticism allows for the poet to speak through a persona. Besides uncovering their fictive nature, this study explores the archetypes of Confessionalism exhibited in Conchitina Cruz’s Elsewhere Held and Lingered. Using Margaret Atwood’s theory of “doubleness,” this study asserts that any persona can perform various voices. Describing it as a “bifurcated voice,” Cruz’s persona shows their duality through shifting sentiments on distress and desire. Bronwyn Davies further detailed that a confessional voice nonetheless reveals to be “fragmented, contradictory, always unfolding, embodied knowing.” As they often declare themselves behind the seemingly egoistic first-person pronoun “I,” Jonathan Culler’s concept of “performative temporality” proclaimed how they exist and act according to their remembered past, complex present, and imagined future. Given the study’s clear opposition against the poet-as-the-persona, it likewise aims to further discuss the research gaps on textual identity and the persona’s way of being in their created reality. The question dwells on the aspects as to how Cruz’s persona reveals their double or the alter ego that is considered to be evasive and slippery.
Artificial Literature: Notes on the Future of Literary Creation
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Alejandro Rossi
This paper explores the relationship between literary creation and the emerging generative AI technologies by analyzing works of fiction produced through these types of technologies over the last five years. This reveals how AI is increasingly influencing fiction writing, making it necessary to review our traditional ideas on originality, authorship, and intellectual property. The implications of the study are twofold: first, it highlights the beginning of a new paradigm in our global culture as AI becomes more intertwined with creative processes. Second, it raises ethical and philosophical questions regarding the collaboration between humans and intelligent machines in the creation of the arts. This allows us to establish that we can currently use the term "artificial literature" to describe this type of literary creation, which has the potential to create a common ground between researchers in both the Humanities and the Sciences.
“Morbid Melancholy, and Hereditary Ill-Health”: Gothic Europe in Edgar Allan Poe's Short Stories
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kirsten Møllegaard
More than any other geographical imaginary, gothic Europe looms large in American writer Edgar Allan Poe's short fiction. Although Poe (1809-1849) never set foot in continental Europe, several of his most prominent stories take place in European cities and landscapes. While clearly linked in theme and motifs to the works of Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, and Matthew Lewis, Poe's imaginary Europe is steeped in centuries-long traditions of dark exoticism and sophisticated grotesqueries ranging from murderous family feuds ("Metzengerstein"), aristocratic decadence ("Ligeia"), torture and oppression ("The Pit and the Pendulum"), plagues and carnivals ("The Mask of the Red Death" and "The Cask of Amontillado") to the labyrinthine cityscapes of the Dupin murder mysteries set in Paris. As a counter-image to antebellum USA and the pronounced anti-European strain in American letters of that time, Poe's gothic Europe harbors combustible energies rooted in deep histories. Where other American writers celebrated the newness and democratic foundation of their nation, Poe explored imaginary, multilingual Europe as a place where esoteric knowledge and aristocratic power produce madness, “morbid melancholy, and hereditary ill-health” (Poe "Metzengerstein" 87). This paper focuses on the way Poe positions continental Europe epistemologically on a history-saturated knowledge/power continuum that challenges the anti-historical nature-veneration of American romanticism.
The Economics of the Artificial and the Creative
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Michael M. Meany
In 1969 Herbert A. Simon wrote ‘The Sciences of the Artificial’ . This work became the ontological and epistemological corner stone of research works across a wide range of disciplines that examine the development of artificial, cultural products. A systematic literature review was used to compare disciplines including design, information technology, information science, communication, creativity and games. The literature review discovered a significant overlap in the works cited across these disciplines. The Sciences of the Artificial has been used to support epistemological arguments. Less frequently, it has been employed to support anti-fundamental, anti-positivist ontological positions. As ontological positions cannot be successfully argued, pre se, the paper was used to support a range of methodological approaches that came from these anti-positivist roots. The 1969 original edition, and subsequent editions, successfully argued against the use of positivist methodologies being employed to examine artificial, cultural products. Simon’s arguments were epistemological in nature. Having successfully removed these positivist epistemological foundations from the research, What replaced them? The short answer is economics. Across this range of disciplines the measure of success and failure has been calculated in terms of income, or return on investment. Not only does this affect the individual disciplines it also provides a rationale for the continued use of the neo-Marxist perspective, employing a base/superstructure model of our culture. This paper argues in support of Simon’s original thesis, however, it also argues he did not go far enough.
