Blurring Boundaries Bookelt Final

8/8/2019 Blurring Boundaries Bookelt Final

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AnnualPostgraduateResearchConference2009

SchoolofEnglish,UniversityofKentThursday21stMay

BLURRING

BOUNDARIES


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Blurring Boundaries

Annual Postgraduate Research Conference 2009

School of English, University of Kent

9.15 a.m. Arrival, registration, tea and coffeeWelcome by Prof. Bernhard Klein

Session One Chair: Clive Johnson

10.00 - 10.30 a.m. Kate Limond

The Persistent shape-shifting life of things: subject-objectrelations manifest. A.S. Byatts Possession: A Romance

10.30 - 11.00 a.m. Jon Cranfield

Football, Text, Ideology

11.00 - 11.30 a.m. Irene Musumeci

Orientalism and the post-9/11 Film

11.30 - 11.45 a.m. Tea and Coffee

Session Two Chair: Tara Puri

11.45 - 12.15 p.m. Judy Dermott

Weather Causes Mass Breakouts of Community Spirit

12.15 - 12.45 p.m. Tinashe Mushakavanhue

A Post-colonial child and the ambiguity of identity: PersonalReflections

12.45 - 1.15 p.m. Sarah Horgan

Anglo-Irish Gothic: Protestantism, Paranoia and Passing inUncle Silas


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1.15 - 2.00 p.m. Lunch

Session Three Chair: Sarah Horgan

2.00 - 2.30 p.m. Tara Puri

Austerity as Display

2.30 - 3.00 p.m. Clive Johnson

Mrs Crummles was the original Blood Drinker: Dickens andthe Blurred Boundaries of the Comic World

3.00 - 3.30 p.m. Monica Mattfeld

Show Me Your Horse, and I Will Tell You Who You Are:Henry William Bunbury and Late Eighteenth-Century Visual

Satires of the Human-Animal Centaur

3.30 Closing address by Professor Donna Landry


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The persistent shape-shifting life of things: subject-object relations manifest. A.S. Byatts Possession: A Ro-mance

Materiality in Possession functions with no fixed identity, oftenshifting between states of being. There is a fundamental dichotomybetween objects as possessions (both possessed and possessing) andtheir existence despite, and outside, of the subject-object relationsprojected onto them.

The accessory in Possession is an exemplary object for under-standing the novel on its own terms; it is a locus where the various

meanings of possession meet. Accessories within the novel are figuredas possessions, as the excursion to the jet shop in Whitby or Ashsgift of the woven May crown to his daughter reveals. Accessoriesare also possessed of meaning, representing manifest subject-objectrelations. They symbolise relationships between people, as well asfunctioning as memento mori, heirlooms, commodities and scientificdiscoveries, embodying this sense of the transmutable nature of mat-ter informing the transmutable identity of objects.

Subject, object and body question each other as solid concepts.

The status of subject and object are ambivalent, as demonstrated bythe manifest spirits that are the objects of the seance-goers. The airyforms that the spirits take questions the nature of the body, actingas liminal between corporeality and an airy immateriality. The novelchallenges the assumed relationship between subject, object and thebody through materiality and furthermore the materiality itself isnot static, rather it is transmutable both in its matter and identity.

Kate Limond


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Football, Text, Ideology

This paper addresses the role of football within culture and ex-amines how it functions as a medium of knowledge-production andconsumption. Theories of culture and aesthetics have traditionallytaken a very hard line with sport in general and I argue that the workof Umberto Eco and Theodor Adorno can throw some light on whythis is so. The football stadium needs no subtle theoretical rhetoricto make it count as culture. It is a medium overflowing with nar-ratives which are created and consumed in relatively sophisticatedways. The sports media struggles to impose as many potential nar-

ratives on any particular game, all of which are alive in one way oranother when the ball is in play. Both Eco and Adorno describe thestrange, alienating sense of watching the senseless movements downthere on the pitch. Football is reduced, in this formulation to aseries of stark athletic exertions. For Adorno, these exertions are apotent metaphor for the poverty of mass culture; art becomes, likesport, a meagre triumph against ridiculously limited, self-imposedand self-legitimising conditions. The football crowd greet the free-kick goal like an aesthetic event but surely, Adorno says, there can

be no surprise, no transcendent response when the millionaire whospends his entire life training to score goals, manages (against noodds at all) to score a goal. I argue, however, that narrative makesfootball beautiful and that the undulating tensions that flow aroundthe senseless movements derive from an ability to decode thesedensely packed narrative strands. This phenomenon can be easily il-lustrated with reference to historical examples where football createda space for cultural and ideological contests.

Jon Cranfield


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Orientalism and the post-9/11 Film

Shot in 2005, Paul Greengrass film United 93 is only one textamongst many responses in popular culture both visual and literaryto the events of 11 September 2001. Aiming to realistically depictthe hijacking and crash of flight United 93 by utilising a third-personreal-time narrative framing and documentary visual style, this textplaces itself in the tradition of historical fiction, as well as disastermovie/literature genres.

However, the films ostensible realism hides a profoundly racedand gendered treatment of the dynamics of exchange between the

generic categories of heroes and villains, translated into the con-frontation of American passengers and Islamic terrorists as ideo-logical opposites - a paradigm of much post-9/11 rhetoric.

This interdisciplinary paper aims to uncover what has been calledan orientalist fear and its implications on the construction of Amer-ican national identity and mythology through fiction - whether inliterature or in film - by applying Edward Saids theory of orien-talism to the films representation of Islamic terrorists. Crossingthe boundaries between cultural/literary studies and film studies I

will examine how Saids notion of the East-West, us-them bina-ries typical of orientalism, manifests itself in the visual and topicalrepresentation of the terrorist.

Thus I hope to demonstrate the persisting strength of Saidsscholarship, and to pursue his desire for intellectuals to stand againstall-pervasive ideologies such as the clash of civilisations, which arefully involved in the cultural discourse proposed by United 93, in aneffort to better understand the conditions of the post-9/11 world.

Irene Musumeci


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Weather Causes Mass Breakouts of Community Spirit

This paper will examine the use of technical and conceptual op-positions found in the work of James Joyce. My aim in presenting itis to examine and illustrate the two very different modes of discoursethat give rise to these oppositions and to demonstrate how they areclearly discernible from his very earliest texts. My contention isthat although they present so very early in the writers work, theyremained throughout, and although changing and metamorphosing,led ultimately to his increasing experimentalism and sense of uni-versalism. My thesis rests on the theory that these very distinct

approaches have their roots in an alternate loss and strengthening ofselfhood on behalf of either narrator or protagonist and that theirincreasingly rapid juxtapositions gave rise to much of his innovatorywork and the illumination of the ordinary. I also hope to demon-strate how the oscillation between the two modes gives strength andrealism to their separate dualities.

I shall examine how the loss of selfis based on a process of whatI call Dissolution - the dissolving of self and consciousness and alsoon the use of Romantic Irony which mythologises the self and the en-

vironment. This expansion of consciousness I see as being instigatedby very precise phenomena: weather, light, sexual attraction andmusic. The experience is invariably joyous but also binding, involv-ing as it does whole communities and fellow citizens.? By contrastthe strengthening of selfhood, a process I describe as Alienationcontracts the consciousness re-inforcing the hardening of egoand itsisolation. This interpretation of Joyces work is linked to his interestin Eastern religions, in Blake and the influence of Theosophy in hisearly youth, with the subsequent emphasis on aspects of the Eternal

throughout his work.

Judy Dermott


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A Post-Colonial Child and the Ambiguities of Identity:Personal Reflections

The intention of the paper is to use my personal narrative to de-fine the post-colonial child in Zimbabwe. Since I was born in 1983 afew years after Zimbabwes independence in 1980, it officially makesme, in the most literal sense, a post-colonial offspring. But what doespost-colonial mean? Is post-colonial an abstract condition? Whatare the contradictory implications of being post-colonial? What hu-man creatures have been created as a result of post-colonialism? Asmuch as I will engage with post-colonial theorists in this paper, my

life experience of being born and raised in post-colonial Zimbabwe isthe primary basis of my argument. In other words, the manifesto ofthis paper is simply: Who Am I?

Tinashe Mushakavanhu


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Anglo-Irish Gothic: Protestantism, Paranoia and Pass-ing in Uncle Silas

The Protestant Ascendancy class in Victorian Ireland were plaguedby thoughts of their own negation. The traditional insecurities thathad been so embedded in the Anglo-Irish psyche in the seventeenthand eighteenth centuries acquired a greater sense of urgency as theyears moved towards 1900. The Act of Union, the dissolution ofGrattans parliament in Dublin and growing agitation for CatholicEmancipation and land reform combined to make Ireland in the Vic-torian era a more inhospitable terrain for the besieged settler class

than it had ever been before. In literature, a constant search for atangible and solid sense of identity, made much more urgent by thechanging social and cultural conditions of the day, typified the writ-ings produced by these Irish Anglican elite in the nineteenth century,writings that were often expressed in the Gothic form.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu was one such writer and his Gothicnovel Uncle Silas is in many ways a meditation on the uncertaintyand insecurity that haunted the Anglo-Irish condition in the period.It is a text fundamentally about identity and the insecurity, paranoia

and the general uneasiness felt by the Protestant elite in VictorianIreland in relation to this issue. Just as the Anglo-Irish activelysought a new identity to inhabit in the nineteenth century, UncleSilas is a novel about the difficulties of maintaining a fixed sense ofself in a world where nothing is what it seems, where nothing staysthe same, and where boundaries are constantly blurred.

This paper will seek to explore the ways in which Uncle Silas maybe said to truly be a text characterised by the three key facets of theAnglo-Irish identity question in the Victorian period; Protestantism,

paranoia and passing.

Sarah Horgan


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Austerity as Display

The body was a highly visible, and more significantly, a readablecultural symbol in the Victorian period and its signifying ability wasvitally linked to the clothes that covered it. The awareness of clothingas something that has potential for both restriction of identity as wellas expression of it permeates much of Victorian literature. It is quitecurious then that a large number of Victorian heroines choose, moreoften than not as an overt and considered measure, to dress in a stylethat can only be described as austere, at a time when propriety ofdress meant an appropriate display of familial status.

In a paradoxical inversion, austerity itself becomes a kind of dis-play, as well as the appropriate setting for a certain type of moraland intellectual integrity. In the process of self-construction, theseemingly apparent binary between display and restraint becomesincreasingly blurred, and the latter itself becomes more visible be-cause of its very marginality.

However, clothing is a complex means by which an individualnegotiates with the world, and this display of austerity has a pro-fuse range of often contradictory meanings circulating around it. In

this paper I attempt to examine the power and signification that isinfused into this unfashionable sartorial decision by the heroines ofBrontes Jane Eyre and Villette. Though these women dont observethe rules of fashion, they dont exactly flout those of decorum either- instead, they carve out a space within existing fashion norms, ex-tending the area between the acceptable and the unacceptable, andcreating personal spaces within a very public mode of articulation.It is this third space that will be the focus of my paper.

Tara Puri


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Mrs Crummles was the original Blood Drinker: Dick-ens and the Blurred Boundaries of the Comic World

Comedy is a literary mode which deals in the subversion of or-der. It breaks and blurs boundaries of forms, bodies, definitions andidentities. It is also the mode which itself defies definition, orderand identity. This paper will seek to outline the nature of the comicworlds that Dickens creates, focusing on his early fiction.

The theatrical world of Mr Crummless company in NicholasNickleby, is a world of blurred boundaries: shifting identities, trans-formations and ambiguities. Actors become their characters, they

use theatrical modes of behaviour when off stage, children becomeadults, adults become children, animals become actors, and wordsbegin to lose their capacity to define meaning. The physical worldof the theatre is comically deceptive. Costumes, lighting, faces andbodies are manipulated and transformed. The world of The Pick-wick Papers, is equally ambiguous and deceptive. In the theatre ofthe trial of Bardell against Pickwick, the lawyers create an almostsurreal alternative to reality, in which benevolent, innocent Pickwickis a monster, and in which a warming pan is a dark reference to

hidden passion.Dickens plays with the fluidity and polymorphous qualities of

the comic world. This paper will show how his distinctive approachto comedy, while one of his defining characteristics as a writer, isrooted in the comic traditions of the novels of his childhood, and thetraditions of thought on comedy that can be traced to Aristotle.

Clive Johnson


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Show Me Your Horse, and I Will Tell You Who YouAre: Henry William Bunbury and Late Eighteenth-Century

Visual Satires of the Human-Animal Centaur

Termed the Second Hogarth and the Raphael of Caricaturists,Henry William Bunbury (1750-1811) was one of the most famousvisual and textual satirists of his day. Bunbury, who was from thelanded aristocracy; frequent exhibitor at the Royal Academy; friendswith notables like Sir Joshua Reynolds, Horace Walpole, and SamuelJohnson; Equerry to the Duke of York and Lieutenant Colonel ofthe West Sussex Militia, would appear to be an interesting and in-

fluential subject of scholarly investigation; however, only a handfulof scholars have examined his work, and when they have done so,they have focused on his biography and his non-equestrian imagesin place of his most famous and socially influential satires, whichwere satires of horsemen. When Bunburys equestrian images havebeen discussed they are approached from a perspective far removedfrom horsemanship tradition and its engagement with human/animalclassifications, boundaries and interactions.

With this context in mind, in this paper I will analyse various

horsemanship satires by Bunbury, and will argue that the definitionsand boundaries of human and animal were not so much undergoingsolidification, the usual scholarly argument, as redefinition at the endof the century. The horse-man illustrated subject was one capableof varied and complex symbolism, nuanced meaning and great socio-political influence; however, this diversity, I argue, is undecipherablewithout approaching the equestrian subject of illustration and carica-ture - the visual and embodied centaur - as one intimately bound upwith equestrian theory and practice. Bunburys equestrian images,

satirized and ideal, must be considered through contemporaneoushorsemanship discourses, with special attention given to horsemenspractice of physiognomy and pathognomy.

Monica Mattfeld


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Closing address

The Blurring Boundaries conference could well have been namedChanging Tracks. The exciting work presented foregrounded reflec-tions on theory and method as much thematic content. There wasa general interest in porous borders, whether between cultures orbetween genres, an interest in bringing things together that havebeen formerly kept apart. This phenomenon resonates with BrunoLatours questioning of the project of modernity and its heavy invest-ments in purification, separation or suspicion of hybrids, and main-tenance of strict boundaries. Approaches varied from thing theory

to ideology critique, from the Saidian critique of Orientalism to ques-tions of the visionary and the mystical. Relations between subjectsand objects were boldly featured in various ways, ranging from thenew animal studies to the functioning of exotic textiles and fashionwithin fiction. Both Donna Haraways term naturecultures and KatieKings term pastpresents capture something of the dynamism andcomplex imbrication of the subject/object, East/West, human/non-human, colonised/de-colonised, proper/improper distinctions beingexplored. Aesthetics featured not so much alongside as with, and

within, politics: the aesthetic effect might be a free kick in football,counter-ideological audience compulsion in cinema, or the matter ofbeauty as constituting meaning. We heard a great deal about thelanguage of capitalism and the marketplace, and about the limits ofconsumerism as a vocabulary of aspiration. Failures to de-coloniselead to distrust, and a re-wiring of affect into self-doubt and thesearch for alternatives. We heard much about self-doubt: on the partof the West, on the part of intellectuals, on the part of the Anglo-Irish Protestant Ascendancy. Attention to otherness and passing

remains a preoccupation, for which Lauren Berlants work on theprosthetic body remains relevant. The new body of work on affectby such scholars as Sarah Ahmed, Jonathan Flatley, and the late EveKosofsky Sedgwick that contributes to a new history of the emotionsappears as germane to our concerns as does a reinvestigation of com-edy and comic theory in Dickens, the figure of the vampire as an


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Anglo-Irish fetish, or the kinaesthetic symbiosis of horse and rideras a key to character: Show me your horse, and I will tell you who

you are. Show me your boundary, your border, and we might learntogether how to trespass it to good effect.

Donna Landry, FRASProfessor and Director of Research


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Biographies:

Kate Limond is a a second year MA by research student, work-ing on materiality in A.S. Byatts fiction. The title of her thesis isSubjects and objects in the fiction of A.S. Byatt. ([email protected])

Jonathan Cranfield is a doctoral student in the School of Englishin the University of Kent. His research interests include the workof Arthur Conan Doyle, The Strand Magazine, Late - Victorian andEdwardian Literature and, more generally, ideology and culture in

the 21st Century. He is a member of the British Association of Vic-torian studies, enjoys teaching Romantic poetry to undergraduatesand hopes one day to get a proper job. ([email protected])

Irene Musumeci is a second year PhD (Film) student at the Uni-versity of Essex and a sessional teacher in the School of English(Kent). Her thesis deals with responses to 9/11 in American cinema2001-08. ([email protected])

Judy Dermott is in her second year of PhD (part time), and isresearching the concept of Joyce as a visionary artist, looking at hislinks with Blake, Swedenborg, and Theosophy. ([email protected])

Tinashe Mushakavanhu is from Zimbabwe and a research stu-dentin the School of English. His research is a comparative study ofthe philosophical anarchism of the Romantic poet, Percy B. Shelleyand the late Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera.

([email protected])

Sarah Horgan is a first year PhD student who has come to Kentfrom University College Cork, Ireland. Her research is focused onvampirism in nineteenth-century literature and its relationship withconcepts of nationality. ([email protected])


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Tara Puri is a third-year PhD student, researching a thesis entitledFabricating the Self: Womens Body and Identity in Victorian Lit-

erature. She is also a sessional teacher for the School of English andis interested in the Sensation Novel, Victorian domestic narratives,and 19th century fashion studies. ([email protected])

Clive Johnson is a first-year PhD student researching the comicwriting of Charles Dickens. He was previously a secondary schoolEnglish teacher. ([email protected])

Monica Mattfeld is a first year PhD student, and her thesis title

(preliminary) is: Spectacular Masculinities: Visible Centaurs andVirtuous Horsemanship in the British Long Eighteenth Century.([email protected])


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Acknowledgements

The organisers(Sarah Horgan,Clive Johnsonand Tara Puri)would like to thankChristine Hooper,Alison Priest

and Helena Torres,for their help and guidance in planning this event.

Thanks are also due toProfessor Bernhard Kleinand Professor Donna Landryfor their support and encouragement throughout.

And, of course, to all those who attended and contributed on the

day itself; without such enthusiastic participation the conferencewould not have been the success it was.


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Alice,fromherheight,apprehendsthemirrorasapuresurface,acontinuity

oftheoutsideandtheinside,ofabove

andbelow,ofreverseandrightsides.

(GillesDeleuze,LogicofSense)

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Blurring Boundaries Bookelt Final