Literature in Focus
Representation and Projection : A Cartography of Emotions in “Painful Case”
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ana Clara Birrento
Time and Space are essential referents offered by the poetic construction. Without them there seems to be an experience of helpless circulation, involved by the mystery of details, like an incomplete memory and an eventual suspicion that the narrative has been constructed with a disruptive intention or, maybe, a mere provocation of the author. Despite the awareness of Space, in its dynamic interactions with the subject, a greater emphasis has been placed on Time. Only in 1980 did Space start to have a central significance, as a transdisciplinary phenomenon in the humanities. Lefevbre, Deleuze, Guattari and Foucault are cornerstones of this approach. From a theory of thought that claims the omnipresence of Space and a requited interest between Literature and Geography, new methods of analysis were born whose object of study is Space. The field of Literary Cartographies follows the experience of Space, using psychological and emotional elements, pre-existing or resulting from the progress of the characters. Following various coordinates – self-referential, social, and spatial, of mobility or absence of mobility, of the meeting or of the escape with the Other, we draw a map of emotions applied to “Painful Case” from Dubliners by Joyce. Focusing on the main characters, Mr. Duffy and Mrs. Sinoco, the paper aims to clarify the implications of Space in the representation of identity, observing maps of meaning of the relationships. This allows us to map a cartography of emotions where a ‘materializing memory’ subsists within the affection bonds or in their absence.
The Last Acmeist - Mikhail Zenkevich: A Literary Biography
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Svetlana V. Cheloukhina
This paper presents my completed research on Mikhail Zenkevich (1886-1973), a Russian poet, translator, critic, and the longest surviving member of the Acmeist circle, a twentieth-century modernist literary movement. My book, Mikhail Zenkevich: A Literary Biography, the first book-length study, is forthcoming in Academic Studies Press. Based on extensive research and a large volume of archival documents, recently acquired in the U.S., Russian, Belgian, German, and Ukrainian archives, this book establishes a new approach to the study of this important but lesser-known poet. The book contains a description and analysis of Zenkevich’s oeuvre, presented in chronological order, a literary-critical overview of his major work (poems, prose, translations, and critical writings) and of the events of his life positioned against the historical and socio-political background. The study comes complete with selections from Zenkevich’s correspondence with his relatives and contemporaries – literati, cultural activists, and prominent figures, among them Valery Briusov, Gorge Fedotov, Vasilii Gippius, Nikolai Punin, Ada Onoshkovich-Iatsyna, and others, as well as his other documents also published for the first time. His editorial work is discussed, which accounts for several books, including translations by Anna Akhmatova and the first posthumous collection of poems by Vladimir Narbut. As a result, a new appreciation of Zenkevich as poet and cultural activist will emerge. In his many creative occupations Zenkevich was an outstanding Acmeist poet, an innovator, and, as will become apparent, one of the important figures of the Russian Silver Age and of twentieth-century Russian literature.
“Set Out on the Road”: The Alchemical Quest in the Journeys of André Breton and Ithell Colquhoun
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Barbara Lekatsas
On this 100th year of Surrealism, launched simultaneously in Paris with André Breton’s Manifesto of Surrealism and the journal he directed, The Surrealist Revolution in the final month of 1924, it is worth revisiting a preceding dictum he made in his adieu to Dada, in the periodical, Littérature in 1922, to “Leave everything…Leave the substance for the shadow” and “set out on the road.” The quest, an established genre in literature that is often linked to a journey both physical and spiritual or metaphysical, is given an array of new destinations and metaphoric means of travel in Surrealism, which increases the exchange between contrary realities and relies on alchemy to provide the keys to unlocking what Breton termed, “the gold of time,” his epitaph, inscribed on his tombstone and taken from his essay, “Discourse on The Paucity of Reality (1924). In this paper, I focus on journeys, framed as hermetic quests in the work of André Breton and the English painter and writer, Ithell Colquhoun, highlighting the paradox between Surrealism’s adherence to materialism, on the one hand, and its attack on realism, on the other. How do they expand or revitalize the established genre of the quest and establish a new understanding of the physical world, severed from what one commonly accepts as reality? Works to be explored are Breton’s Nadja, Martinique, Charmer of Snakes, and Arcane 17; and Ithell Colquhoun’s The Crying of the Wind, The Living Stones, as well as her paintings.
