See, Hear, Experience
From Images to Text and Back: Photography in the Works of the First Woman Novelist of Mali
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Cheryl Toman
In 1993, Aicha Fofana became Mali's first woman novelist with the publication of Mariage, on copie. This novel has a highly original take in that its protagonists are four women attending the same wedding who take a similar journey of personal reflection. The wedding video and shots produced by the Studio Photo Diakité provoke streams of consciousness and flashbacks that make these women question memory, reality and truth. The reference to photography here is no coincidence; Mali is home to legendary photographers known the world over such as Malick Sidibe and Seydou Keita who literally changed the way the world viewed Mali, having previously been seen only through the gaze of French colonizers whose images perpetuated stereotypes of "primitive" lifestyles. Photos are thought to be proof of some kind of reality only to realize that photos, too, like literary writings written in French need to be decolonized. This paper examines how photography in the novel is an extra "lens" used by the author to interpret women's lives while at the same time, the novel is a tribute to some of the greatest photographers ever known. Sidibe's and Keita's photos date from the 60s and capture the period just after Mal's independence from France, Fofana's book was written in the 1990s. This study relies heavily on the theories put forth by Alison Moore in her book, Embodying Relation Art Photography in Mali, theories which are extremely useful and eye-opening when analyzing Fofana's text.
Listening to the Laureates: A Commentary on New Directions in Literary Criticism and Theory 2010 - Present
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Nishevita Jayendran
What is the discourse of literary criticism and theory in the 21st century? In this paper, I de/construct the trend through the Nobel lectures on Literature from 2010-present. Sir Alfred Bernhard Nobel’s will formulates statutes guiding the award of the Literature prize to individuals with “the most outstanding work in an ideal direction” created for the “greatest benefit to humankind” (27 November 1895). The Nobel speeches offer one indicator of this perceived ideal - a normative frame in themes, reading and writing that also characterise the scope of literary criticism and theory. A survey of the Literature laureates indicates a conscious shift towards cosmopolitanism and multidisciplinarity through diversity in nationalities, professions, cultures, genres, and (gendered and ethnic) identities from which “ideal” writing is signposted as emerging. Recurring thematic concerns of these laureates include social justice, the centering of the ordinary, the commonplace and the individual, universal humanism, and empathy for everyday experiences manifest in identity, race, gender, war, politics, history, culture, diasporic and ethnic conflict. These reflect existing shifts in literary discourse that incorporate critical and cultural theory, affect, ecocriticism, globalisation, “crisis critique” and DEI into its disciplinary concerns (Barry, 2009; di Leo, 2023). Adopting a deconstructionist approach, and through a thematic, (critical) discourse analysis of the laureates’ public speeches of acceptance of the prize, the essay constructs a reflective commentary on literary theory and criticism, its (multi)disciplinarity and its (implications for the) expanded vision of the reading, writing/doing and normative role of literature in the 21st century.
On the Trail of Victorian Writers in Video Games
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Paolo D'Indinosante
Two-way transmedia transfers regularly take place between literary texts and video games. If, on the one hand, some contemporary novels enrich and complicate the plot of pre-existing video games, on the other hand, some video games appropriate textual and paratextual elements of specific literary works of the past, such as events, characters and authorial figures. My paper discusses a series of examples falling into this second typology, as it will investigate the presence/absence of a group of diverse Victorian authors such as Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling within video games which variously adapt and appropriate some of their masterpieces. In particular, I will focus on the different ways in which the names, words and bodies of these canonical authors of English-language literary works appear or disappear in the various video games which I intend to examine and on the functions performed by the remediation or by the removal of these authorial figures as a result of a process of intersemiotic translation. In so doing, my analysis of the rewriting of the figures of some literary authors of the past in the videogame medium offers a potentially useful contribution to the study of the contemporary multimedia reception of some specific Victorian writers, as well as of some of their best-known literary works.
