Friday 22 March
Panel 1 – Writing Life Reflectively (10.50 – 12.20)
Chair: Elsa Fiott
1. Daria Gosek, Jagiellonian University, Poland
Paper: Writing the Life. H.-F. Amiel and his Journal Intime
―As a matter of fact there exists only one subject of study: the forms and the changes of the mind‖ once wrote Amiel.
Born in 1821 in Geneva, Swiss philosopher, poet and critic left behind almost twenty thousands of pages – ―Journal
Intime‖, several critics and poetry. But only the ―Journal Intime‖ proved to be an European revelation.
Two words can describe Amiel‘s work: ―introspection‖ and ―self-exploration‖. The Swiss diarist treats himself as an
example - he concentrates on himself and studies himself just as a philosopher studies existence. But not only Amiel
treated himself as a case. Jean Vuilleumier introduced the name ―Amiel's complex‖, which was a specific feature of the
more recent Swiss literary works: atrophy of power and predilection to self-analysis. Critics (George S. Rousseau and
Caroline Warman in their article ―Writing as Pathology, Poison, or Cure: Henri-Frederic Amiel‘s journal intime‖) placed
Amiel in the context of romantic melancholy.
Henry – Frederick Amiel‘s life was mediated by writing, and the journal is the record both of Amiel's resignation from
taking action and of directing his attention to himself, the inner part of himself. Amiel‘s life is not (re)lived in his diary –
he is experiencing everything through his diary.
2. Xymena Synak-Pskit, University of Gdansk, Poland
Paper: Masochism: Melancholia at-a-Loss, Life-at-a-Loss
All the set forms, having exhausted their content in endless metamorphoses, hung loosely upon things, half-wilted, ready to flake off.
(Schulz, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass)
Formally speaking, masochism is a state of waiting; the masochist experiences waiting in its pure form. Pure waiting divides naturally
into two simultaneous currents, the first representing what is awaited, something essentially tardy, always late and always postponed,
the second representing something that is expected and on which depends the speeding up of the awaited object. It is inevitable that
such a form, such a rhythmic division of time into two streams, should be “filled” by the particular combination of pleasure and pain.
(Deleuze, Coldness and Cruelty)
There is no sexual relation (Lacan)
In Freud‘s ―Mourning and Melancholia‖ the ego‘s loss is constitutive in its constitution-in-a-lack. If there can be no ego
without melancholia - as Freud‘s essay makes it clear – the constitution of the ego in the process of self-expulsion or selfloss and the instance of ―an object-loss withdrawn from consciousness‖ make the melancholic substitution a space of
resistance against interiorization of the other. If mourning is the ―affirmative incorporation of the Other‖ (Derrida in
Butler 1997: 195) and melancholia is the resistance against such an incorporation, a dis-location of a loss itself spaces out
there, in the form of a the difference between Freudian death instincts – which is co-present with life forces - and the
Death instinct as the absolute negation; in the form of melancholic desire where the lost-object of desire means the object
as loss itself, never to be regained or, which is the same, always being re-gained.
‖Desire and its object are one and the same thing‖, say Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus (2009: 26), which brings us
back to the object of Freudian melancholia, withdrawn from consciousness. ―The ―thing-representation‘ – Butler
comments upon Freudian object-loss in melancholia – of the object is not the object itself, but a cathetic trace, one that is,
in relation to the object, already substitutive and derivative. In mourning, the traces of the object, its innumerable ―links,‖
are overcome piecemeal over time. In melancholia, the presence of ambivalence in relation to the object makes any such
progressive de-linking of libidinal attachment impossible. Rather, ―countless separate struggles are carried on over the
object, in which love and hate contend with each other; the one seeks to detach libido from the object, the other to
maintain this position of the libido against assault.‖ This strange battlement is to be found, Freud maintains, in ―the region
of the memory-traces of things.‖‖ (Butler 1997: 173)
Desire misses its object, thus appearing in its disappearance as ―the objective being of desire‖ (Deleuze and Guattari 2009:
26) and relating to its object as an instantiation of a drive, detour, a path to death. Here Freud‘s disavowal of loss –
internalization as non-abolishing of the loss – comes to its limit, melancholia having been incorporated into the object of
desire, or desire itself. Withdrawn from consciousness, melancholic irretrievable loss de/constitutes the ego itself, or the
self of the ego. Melancholia – a constant disruption of continuity – is a becoming-space of the loss, which means that the
loss can only be realized in its being carried outside itself, in its exteriority as its internal limit. The loss is possible via the
traces left in the subject – even if it is the subject that is at-a-loss - before there is any masochistic delay, or any life,
possible.
Butler, J. (1997) The Psychic Life of Power. Theories in Subjection, Stanford: Stanford UP.
Deleuze, G., F. Guattari (2009) Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. R. Hurley et al., New York: Penguin Books.
3. Marko Stamenkovic, University of Ghent, Belgium
Paper: Writing (One‟s Own) Death
The paper centers on practices of writing-oneself through images of self-denial, mediated by cultures of display focused
on self-destructive phenomena. If digital technologies have greatly enhanced the ability of social communication on a
large scale, including new opportunities for self-presentation and self-expression (Ferranto 2010), my aim here is to
explore the possibilities of writing through the contemporary notion of the ‗self‘ while highlighting a case study closely
linked to what Derrida had named ‗autothanatography.‘ In order to understand the structural and functional properties of
writing-oneself as seeing-oneself in the mirror of the text, I would like to evoke an exemplary and infamous case that took
place in Vienna in 1908. It triggers my attention not for being yet another self-destructive ritual, happening in the general
cultural and psychological climate colored by deep, even spiritual introspection in the fin-de-siècle Austro-Hungarian
Empire, but precisely due to the logic upon which that ritual relied on available optical tools. The facts that the victim was
one of the most promising young painters in early twentieth-century Vienna, that he never exhibited in his lifetime, and
was barely known, all make little importance for this paper. In his own way of using images (and particularly in terms of
inscribing himself into the history of image-making), Richard Gerstl left a statement about his time and place inseparable
from a concrete historical situation of the early twentieth century – but also from our own. Precisely thanks to his
sensitivity toward the laws of vision and the power of looking he understood the dark side of the logic of the human gaze:
this is what makes his case unique yet complementary to cyber-suicide practices in our own digital era. Were Gerstl the
man of today, how would he have written his own death before voluntarily abandoning this world and why does it still
matter to us?
Panel 2 – Writing Life for/through the Screen (10.50 – 12.20)
Chair: Anna Camilleri
1. Annie Nissen, Lancaster University, UK
Paper: Julie‟s Recipe for Writing Life in Julie & Julia (2009)
Nora Ephron‘s 2009 binary-biographical film, Julie & Julia, portrays the intertwining lives of Julia Child, who wrote a
French cook book in the 1950s, and Julie Powell, who in 2002 decided to cook her way through the 524 recipes of Child‘s
book in 365 days. In a blog, entitled ‗The Julie/Julia Project‘, she writes about her cooking experiences and includes
aspects of her private life. The film viewer witnesses Julia Child devising and writing her recipe book and Julie
simultaneously cooking the recipes, writing her blog and attempting to make sense of her life by structuring it after Julia
Child‘s recipes.
Essentially Julie attempts to organise her life by following someone else‘s recipe book, using that to write her own life.
What started out as a mere cooking blog turns into writing of a more personal nature. Gradually, her desire to
communicate the project to her unknown readership, as well as to follow in Julia‘s footsteps, become more important than
her actual life away from the kitchen.
My paper analyses the identificatory processes in which Julie not only copies Julia‘s cooking, but also uses fragments of
Julia‘s life as a template for her own, clutching at any similarities between her life and Julia‘s, a parallelism that the film
adapts visually.
The paper also examines the unplanned dynamics of following someone else‘s written instructions in writing about one‘s
‗self‘. Not only can such writing take over living; it can also produce an underlying identity struggle, where the
boundaries between the emulated other and self become blurred. Were this not the case, the cookery book might be
interpreted as an allegory for a recipe-led life, where abiding by the right ingredients and instructions guarantees a perfect
result.
2. Mirjana Batinić, University of Primorska, Slovenia
Paper: Life in the Other Place
This paper is devoted to the theme of place and placelessness as a frequent position of contemporary artists. It
corresponds to the theme of Life in-between the virtual and the real, but moreover it is about Life in the Other Place.
What is ―the other place‖? Who are ―the others‖? There are political, social, economic and technological aspects to deal
with.
Attention will be devoted to the related issues, such as place and placelessness; artists in exile; identity; transnationalism;
transculture; globalization; logocentric minds and nonconceptual visuality, contemporary art, video art and its narcissism,
etc.
Also, what are the grounds and consequences of being displaced as an artist? Is art necessarily getting new function with
this position and its product structure and what does society gets from these models of communication? What are its
structural possibilities?
I will focus on displaced contemporary video artists, trying to answer if displacement is a privilege and what does it mean
exactly. Also, there will be some notes about video art and its aesthetics of narcissism, as well as other components that
are related to the theme. I am interested to talk about artists to whom displacement comes as a second nature.
3. Monika Maslowska, University of Malta, Malta
Paper: Writing for the Screen: Learning How to Portray the Lives of Others by Living Deeply and
Observing Closely from the Shadows of a Screenplay
The Postmodern thought assumes that there is no single world with a knowable structure by suggesting that there are as
many worlds as human beings can discover (Jennings). The aim of this paper is to claim that the screenwriter makes the
best of this thought by granting himself the freedom to create fictional worlds and lives. Worlds that familiar but
unknown, lives that are same but different - retaining their palimpsestic nature and visualizing the ghostly presence of the
screenwriter and the desire to go beyond, beneath and behind the metaphors in search of aesthetic expressions. This paper
explores further the screenwriter‘s modes of engagement with the postmodernist‘s view of the multiple worlds by
transposing and molding them into one coherent aesthetic impression of life. The screenwriter explores thus what is
connected and how it is connected by pushing the horizon of storytelling and image-making beyond ‗the knowable
structure‘ to construct the complex patterns of human emotion, desire and thought. But who is the screenwriter? What is
his/her message in the screenplay? Is there a message in the screenplay? Furthermore, what is the screenplay? This paper
will suggest answers by claiming that the screenwriter, just like any artist, relies on living deeply and observing closely in
order to create believable characters designed around the screenwriter‘s perception of what‘s worth living for and what‘s
worth dying for. Screenplay is therefore, an emotional world constructed by living the lives of others based on the
screenplay‘s distinct literary devices and conventions. The screenwriter assumes nothing. S/he tells the story as it is by a
subtle manipulation of image, word, and the aural sending the reader on an emotional, spiritual and intellectual journey.
Panel 3 – Writing Other Life (13.30 – 15.00)
Chair: Stefanie Cilia
1. Claudia Cremonesi, Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy
Paper: Writing about Dogs, Why Not? Flush, the Biography of Elizabeth Barrett‟s Cocker Spaniel
The aim of this essay is to investigate the writing of animal life, through the analysis of Virginia Woolf‘s work Flush: A
Biography (1933). In July 1931, Woolf began to write Flush: A Biography, while she was completing the first draft of The
Waves: ―I was so tired after the Waves, that I lay in the garden and read the Browning love letters, and the figure of their
dog made me so laugh so I couldn‘t resist making him a Life.‖1
Animals were a constant presence in Woolf‘s life, the Stephen family always had at least one dog in their household, and,
while Virginia was writing Flush, a cocker spaniel, Pinker, was sharing her and her husband‘s household at Monks House.
Despite her love for dogs, Woolf considered her work Flush just a joke. Actually, Flush is a significant biographicofictional enterprise. First, it is a creative experiment in which fiction and biography mingle together; second, it serves as a
criticism concerning the way of living the city; third, by highlighting Flush‘s perceptions, the work allows Woolf to have
access to Elizabeth Barrett‘s inner feelings, and to relate some episodes of the Brownings‘s life. Lastly, Flush offers to
Woolf‘s the possibility to explore her personal emotions: by comparing Elizabeth Barrett and her father‘s difficult
relationship with her controversial relationship with Leslie Stephen, Woolf manages to recall her past and control her
ghosts.
Thus Flush becomes a life in the life: through the biography of a dog, the life of his owner is perceived, and, to some
extent, also Woolf‘s life may be detected.
1
Nicolson, Nigel, Trautmann, Joanne, eds., The Letters of Virginia Woolf, cit., vol. V, 1979, pp. 161-162. To Lady Ottoline Morrell,
Feb. 23rd 1933.
2. Melvin Chen, Cardiff University, UK
Paper: An Axe for the Frozen Sea: Estrin's Magic Agential Realism, Insect Thigmotaxis, and the
Problem with Kafka
My proposed paper seeks to examine the life of an ungeziefer, as explored in Kafka's The Metamorphosis and in Estrin's
sequel, Insect Dreams: The Half Life of Gregor Samsa, and its relation to the proposed aim of Wittgenstein's antiphilosophy: showing the fly the way out of the fly-bottle. I will argue that the use of the fictional operator allows literature
to - as philosophy cannot - place us in the attitude of disbelieving acceptance, the paradigm attitude of fictionalism, in
which animal life may be written as much as it may be imagined. My paper discusses how, in order for non-human life
(animal or cyborgian) to be written, diffraction (as I understand the term from its appearance in the work of Haraway and
Barad) rather than reflection is what is required for us to escape the representationalist trap that binds philosophy (and
even its most deviant and promising variant: anti-theory) to speciesism. Such diffraction, central to the agential realism of
Barad and to the enterprise of writing animal life, is, I will argue, essential to any attempt to foreground a non-human
ethics that does not reduce to the benign trusteeship model of contractualism and anti-theory. The paper proceeds to
demonstrate how - in the meeting between Wittgenstein and the ungeziefer in Estrin's novel - it should be to literary ethics
rather than to philosophy that we should look toward in our search for authentic writings about animal life.
3. Charmaine Tanti, University of Malta, Malta
Paper: Everything We Are: Reading the Human through the Vampire
According to Gordon & Hollinger, 'one of the functions of our monsters [is] to help us construct our own humanity, to
provide guidelines against which we can define ourselves.'
The literary vampire is one of the monsters that, throughout its bicentennial existence, has changed with us, mutating to
reflect our changing times and values. Since its origins in the nineteenth century, the vampire has incarnated our deepest
fears and desires, seducing and fascinating us with his powerful and transgressive Otherness. Writers have invested their
vampires with our social and cultural preoccupations and anxieties, transforming them into potent multi-layered
metaphors.
The vampire's oxymoronic essence is mirrored in the contraries it embodies: terror and allure, strength and weakness,
dominant patriarch and marginalized Other and rebel. Its protean qualities have enabled it to cross genre boundaries
effortlessly, to mutate according to our needs, to hybridize itself with other monsters.
This paper proposes to trace the evolution of the literary vampire from nineteenth century supernatural predator to the
present-day heroic antagonist, discussing the way it has engaged in human life and in social, moral and political
discourses. It will show that, as Nina Auerbach says, every generation has indeed created and embraced its vampires,
often using their monstrosity to give voice to the controversial and the unspoken.
Panel 4 – Written Life Remediated (13.30 – 15.00)
Chair: Giuliana Barbaro-Sant
1. Catherine Han, Cardiff University, UK
Paper: How to Be a (Victorian) Domestic Goddess: Charlotte Brontë‟s Entangled Life and Art in
Contemporary Jane Eyre Screen Adaptations
In 1851, William Makepeace Thackeray mortified the author of a titillating new novel when he publicly introduced her as
her heroine, Jane Eyre. The confusion intensified as Charlotte Brontë‘s fame grew. Defending her literary and social
respectability, the writer struggled to distinguish herself from her protagonist, who defied and acquiesced to Victorian
gender constructions.
To salvage the author‘s posthumous reputation, Elizabeth Gaskell wrote The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857) to disavow
key connections between Brontë‘s life and art. In this classic of life writing, Gaskell asserted that her subject‘s existence
was divided into two parallel currents her life as Currer Bell, the author; her life as Charlotte Brontë the woman. Drawing
attention to the latter‘s domestic dutifulness, the first-hand account lessened the taint of unfeminine literary ambition to
transform Brontë into a secular saint; wholly unlike the seditious Jane (Miller, 2002). Nevertheless, Gaskell‘s biography
contains myriad slippages, which include revealing the similarities between Brontë and Jane‘s identities and aspirations as
practicing visual artists.
In this paper, I aim to delineate how contemporary cinematic and televisual versions of Jane Eyre continue a tradition of
equating Brontë with her literary character. With particular reference to the 2006 BBC miniseries, I seek to demonstrate
that recent screen versions promulgate the close association between creator and creation. In addition to considering the
effects of costume, setting and period, I pinpoint the significance conferred upon the heroine‘s status as an amateur artist.
Successive film and television makers recognise Jane‘s artistry, whilst obscuring her conflicted attitudes towards
Victorian gender roles. In the process, I argue that the adaptations collectively construe the heroine as an icon of
domesticity and reflect the continuing influence of Gaskell‘s biography. Furthermore, I wish to suggest further
implications due to the conflation between Brontë‘s life and text.
2. Claire Ellul, University of Malta, Malta
Paper: Remediating Life: The Many Faces of Sherlock Holmes
In the editorial notes of the 2012 Summer issue for ‗The Sherlock Holmes Journal‘, one of the first statements outlines
that ‗The Guinness Book of World Records confirmed that Sherlock Holmes is the most depicted literary human character
on film and television – though his total of 254 portrayals has almost certainly risen since the announcement was made in
May [2012]‘1. This implies that since Sir Arthur Conan Doyle published his last short story in 1927, the demand for the
character of Sherlock Holmes has not decreased, and as an answer to this he has been readapted proliferously.
Although Sherlock Holmes, both as a character and as a brand, has been adapted to several media, including theatre, film,
television and video games2, he found his true home in the visual media of film and television series as this record
demonstrates. The visual adaptations created around the men of Baker Street thus allow theories of adaptation such as
Linda Hutcheon‘s, Robert Stam‘s and Dudley Andrew‘s to be applied to the existing and prolific repertoire of Holmes in
the visual medium, but also to be applied to more contained selection in the form of case studies, which will be the case in
this paper. This also indirectly throws a lens on the creators of the adaptations, and their adaptive choices.
1
Roger Johnson, Heather Owen, ‗Editorial Notes‘ The Sherlock Holmes Journal, 119 (2012), p. 135-136.
An example of each is: Theatre: ‗The Secret of Sherlock Holmes‘, written by Jeremy Paul, 1988, casting Jeremy Brett and Edward
Hardwicke; Film: A Game of Shadows, dir. by Guy Ritchie (Warner Bros., 2011); Video Games: Sherlock Holmes vs Jack the Ripper,
dev. Frogwares, published by Focus Home Interactive (2009).
2
3. Sara Eriksson, University of Stockholm, Sweden
Paper: The Addressee of the Diary: The Impact of Publicity upon Representations of the Self
The Internet has changed the conditions governing whose life writing reaches the public sphere. Since the mid-1990s, a
growing amount of individuals have been publishing their diaries on the Internet, some of them read by a handful at the
most, some of them with millions of readers.
In the light of this development, I am interested in two questions: How does publicity change the ways in which people
write about themselves and their lives, and is it productive to make a distinction between public and private life writing?
It can on the one hand be argued that language is always dialogical and thus directed towards a reader. On a different level
however, the knowledge that your diary can be read by thousands of others will inevitably create a different kind of
addressing than in a diary written in a notebook with padlock.
In order to approach these questions, I am examining the ways in which an audience is, explicitly and implicitly,
addressed in both traditional, private diaries and in diaries on the Internet. Through concrete examples of ways of
addressing I will analyze the impact of publicity upon the diary texts and the self images produced in them. I will compare
the ways in which diarists online and offline address their texts in order to evaluate the difference between the two forms
of diary writing.
Panel 5 – Writing Life Bodily (16.30 – 18.00)
Chair: James Farrugia
1. Aaron Aquilina, University of Malta, Malta
Paper: Writing Afterlife: The Exhibitionism of the Dead
This paper aims to evidence the corpo(-)reality of King Hamlet in William Shakespeare‘s Hamlet. Problems immediately
make themselves manifest: how can a textual body evidence anything material? How can a ghost, the negation of such
materiality, be in possession of a body? Thirdly, even if the ghost has matter, why should the physical body matter at all?
To the exclusion of subsequent filmic and staged adaptations of Hamlet, where the ghost cannot be anything but a body
disguised as a no-body, this paper focuses on three main areas. The first shall be the popular sources for Shakespearean
tragedy, as well as Hamlet being itself used as a source. References to Aristotle, Seneca and Stoppard‘s Rosencrantz And
Guildenstern Are Dead shall keep the body centre-stage, metonymically focusing on blood and its flowing connotations.
The second section shall focus on the heart as the parent organ of blood. Here Jean-Luc Nancy‘s 2000 essay ‗The
Intruder‘ shall be brought in so as to further exhume bodily notions as elicited through Hamlet itself. Throughout this
section, it shall be argued that King Hamlet‘s textual body has skin, emotions (which Nancy reconfigures as e-motions),
and an intrusive, physical, inside-out soul/body.
The third section shall explore Hamlet‘s dead and their wish for exhibitionism.1 Nancy‘s Corpus, along with two other
essays, shall highlight the consequences of such a reading, through which King Hamlet is exposed as having an in-finite
body at the limits, precisely exhibiting it as the being-exposed of his being. There remains, of course, Nancy‘s question –
―How best to take death seriously?‖ – an answer to which shall be attempted in this paper‘s concluding movement, should
it be permitted its materialisation.
1
This third section is still tentative – I have still to work out whether there’ll be space for it.
2. Marija Grech, Cardiff University, UK
Paper: Reading and Writing the Book of Life: Charles Darwin and the Human Genome Project
Over the past few decades the rhetoric surrounding genetics and the Human Genome Project has been dominated by the
use of one specific metaphor—that of the Book of Life. Scientists have ―decoded‖ DNA, ―drafted‖ and ―annotated‖ the
human genome and, more recently, begun to develop methods of bio-printing in which cellular tissue is literally printed
out using modified printers. The pervasiveness of this metaphor in contemporary genetics and genomics is such that the
―Book of Life‖ trope has ceased to function as a mere rhetorical device and has instead become a conceptual framework
for these scientific discourses.
One can trace the pervasiveness of this trope in modern science to the metaphor of the Book of Nature used by
philosophers, theologians and scientists throughout the ages. This paper will examine how this metaphor is adopted by
Charles Darwin in his theory of natural selection. I will argue that within Darwin‘s writings, the book of nature is read as
a biblical Book of Life that tells us the story of the survival of the fittest and raises questions related to authorship and
authority. These questions become increasingly significant in contemporary discussions about genetic engineering as
scientists acquire the power to not only read and interpret this metaphorical book, but to also edit and rewrite it.
3. Katrin Dautel, University of Malta, Malta
Paper: Playground of Gender: Cross-Dressing and Self-Mutilation as Negation of Gender Identities in Tanja
Dückers‟s Novel Spielzone
Although it is an outstanding example of writing life as negotiation of gender roles as well as exploration of the body as
site of identity constructs, Tanja Dückers‘s novel Spielzone, published in 1999, has not yet received the critical attention it
deserves. The novel was criticised as a mere collection of material, but displays an interesting aesthetic technique of
representing the milieu of two Berlin districts and their inhabitants, whose identity conflicts can be shown to reflect the
state of construction of the urban space before its homogenization through gentrification. Especially with regard to gender
identities, Dückers portrays the search for a different lifestyle, which is expressed through a striking focus on aesthetic
differentiation (Schlette 1999) and cross-dressing. The protagonists stage masculinity and femininity through a theatrical
masquerade, which reveals the construct of gender identities (Garber 1991) and advocates a postmodern transgender
existence. The negotiation of a new identity without binary gender attributions ranges from the negation of traditional role
assignments to self-mutilation. Therefore, in the proposed paper, Dückers‘s text will be analysed as uncanny playground
of gender between masquerade and brutal gender embodiment, which nevertheless, with all its negations of conventional
values, eventually moves near to a return to traditional patterns.
Panel 6 – Nineteenth-Century Ways of Writing Life (16.30 – 18.00)
Chair: Irene Scicluna
1. Argun Abrek Canbolat, Middle East Technical University, Turkey
Paper: Life-Affirming Writing in Nietzsche‟s Works
Nietzsche, in his works, seems to defend life-affirmation, rather than life-negation. For him, s/he who affirms life is
capable of creating beyond himself/herself. In this work, I will examine how Nietzsche puts forward life-affirmation in his
works, and try to examine whether we are capable of Nietzschean life-affirmation in today‘s world. I will argue that,
limited by the degenerating influences of modern life, we are no longer capable of affirming life as presented in the
writings of Nietzsche. But what can be ascertained when Nietzsche talks about life? To clarify this, first, I will examine
two different approaches to Nietzschean life-affirmation; (i) the affirmation of ―life as we understand life as it is,‖ (ii) the
affirmation of ―life as Eternal Recurrence.‖ I will state that the latter (ii) is the one we need to consider if we are to talk
about Nietzschean life-affirmation. Second, I will examine the various possibilities of reading Nietzsche‘s writings on
life-affirmation, such as the ―cosmological reading,‖ or reading them as constituting a ―maxim,‖ and state that although
some approaches can give way to the possibility of Nietzschean life-affirmation, what we need to do in order to affirm life
as Eternal Recurrence is to approach the doctrine as Nietzsche did. To do so, I will say that, following Klossowski, we
need to be in a certain mood which I believe we can never reach in today‘s modern life. Therefore, we are not capable of
affirming life as Eternal Recurrence.
2. Maura Dunst, Cardiff University, UK
Paper: „Because she could not tell the truth‟: Creative Control and Autobiographical Autonomy in New
Woman Fiction
When the Victorian New Woman author Sarah Grand (Frances Clarke McFall) was asked why she would not write
memoirs, her response was always that she could not tell the truth. Nevertheless, her life managed to find its way into her
fiction, weaving autobiographical elements into nearly all of her novels. Similarly, George Egerton (Mary Chavelita
Golding Bright) used her own life as material for her short stories, and even published her love letters as the novel Rosa
Amorosa. Both women were brilliant and talented, both were stifled and held back by a system which devalued them, and
both found a way of critiquing that system through their writing, thus opening up discussions of such taboo subjects as
domestic violence, the spread of syphilis, sexual fidelity, and rape. In a society which insisted that women‘s stories were
not of interest and women‘s creative capacities were limited to mere re-creations of men‘s superior works, Grand and
Egerton were not only putting forth their own creative autonomy and publishing new and innovative literature, but they
were making women and their experiences—sometimes autobiographical—the primary focus. These authors were
writing their lives, and the lives of other women like them, taking creative control of their literary output and insisting that
the stories of their lives—both good and bad—were worth telling. This paper is particularly relevant to Malta as Grand
herself stayed there in 1879 when she accompanied her husband, an army surgeon, to his station. Her novel The Heavenly
Twins is divided into books, one of which is called ―A Maltese Miscellany.‖ The description given of sailing into Malta‘s
Grand Harbour is a perfect example of how Grand‘s life informed her writing, and how her own experiences—which she
felt she could not tell—came to light in her fiction.
3. Rebecca Hutcheon, University of Bristol, UK
Paper: Mapping the City: the problems of mimesis in George Gissing's The Nether World
With particular focus on the novels of George Gissing, this paper will present the alternative methods of writing life at the
fin de siècle, a period which incorporates the heights of materialist realism found in Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells, the
death of high-Victorian realism, and the advent of symbolism.
In the 1880s and 90s, there was a poised interchange between urban fiction and social science, with fiction able to, in the
words of Charles Booth, social historian, ‗disentangle the confused issues, reconcile the apparent contradictions in aim,
melt and commingle the influences for good into one divine uniformity of effort, and make these dry bones [of his
research] live‘, and the science offering a method of observation and form of discourse within which newly apparent
problems could be addressed1. To Booth, fiction can provide a channel, heavily involved in the ideal, through which the
facts of science can be given cohesive meaning.
Thus, in his early novels addressing the locations of lower-class London, George Gissing is contributing to a discourse
created in the contemporaneous reaction to newly recognised problems culminating in Charles Booth‘s extensive survey
of the 1890s, Life and Labour of the London Poor.
However, whilst drawing on journalistic methods of description which also find affiliation with the Naturalism of Zola,
among others, Gissing‘s portrayal of Clerkenwell moves beyond the bounds of mimesis. In Gissing‘s novels, the
antiquarian fascination with layers of history, the creation of personal and nostalgic geographies, and the overriding sense
of figurative space existing below the mapped surface, create a tension which recurrently deems mimetic London a
surrogate London.
1
Charles Booth, Life and Labour of the London Poor, volume 1 (1889), p. 157.
Saturday 23 March
Panel 7 – Writing Life After Life (11.30 – 13.00)
Chair: Katryna Storace
1. Daniela Brockdorff, University of Malta, Malta
Paper: Writing Death: Jim Crace‟s Being Dead
‗Thrasymachus: Tell me, briefly, what I shall be after death
Philathetes: All and nothing‘
Arthur Schopenhauer, A Dialogue on Immortality1
‗A death prompts the narration of a life. The particularities of that life become crucial in the
face of the anonymity of death‘
David Kennedy, Elegy2
Being Dead (1999), by Jim Crace, opens with an arresting tableau: Joseph and Celice, doctors of zoology, ‗the oddest
pair, these dead, spread-eagled lovers on the coast [...] without their underclothes, their heads caved in, unlikely victims of
unlikely passions‘ (Being Dead, 1). What can follow after the ending that is death? With an author who is a professed
atheist, an ensuing spiritual narrative — in all its diverse forms — is highly unlikely. Nonetheless, a narrative does follow.
What physically stops with death seems not to stop in narrative as life is made to be reconstructed. A question is thus
asked: how do writers write death? Or rather, when authors profess to writing life, are they really and truly writing death?
By exploring the engulfing depths of Crace‘s novel, this work will attempt to address literature‘s relentless attempt to
narrativise the interval between the instance of death and the laying to rest of the dead. The question as to whether Crace‘s
novel — and others of its kind — are in some way a contemporary take on the traditional form of the elegy will also be
explored. And ultimately, will this exploration of liminal space lead us to conclude that literature offers a resting place for
the dead or will it further reinforce a restless liminality that pervades in all of literature?
1
Arthur Schopenhauer, ‗A Dialogue on Immortality‘, The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, I (1867), 61-2 (p. 61).
David Kennedy, Elegy, The New Critical Idiom (Oxon: Routledge, 2007), p. 20.
2
2. Andrew Engwall, University of Malta, Malta
Paper: Melville‟s Elegy „Shiloh‟: Writing the Divided Life
This paper will engage in a sustained analysis of Herman Melville‘s elegy to the American Civil War battle Shiloh. The
intent is to posit Melville‘s elegiac response (and its nominal effects) as an aesthetically and politically subversive
response to the elegiac genre‘s own propensity to render nationally witnessed trauma and loss as something morally and
philosophically transcendent. Melville‘s elegy points toward a new and more productive intention to live differently
outside of traditional religious and American transcendental guises, and perhaps to a new desire to live in accordance with
a more democratically inclined will. This chapter will focus on how Herman Melville‘s elegy shapes the ethical and
aesthetic trajectory of American mourning and its response to national and collectively experienced loss. The elegy
―Shiloh‖ is uncanny, yet through its very uncanniness it functions like a more authentic elegy because it bears witness to
the now familiar and staggering effects associated with America‘s first traumatic national crisis: The American Civil War.
Additionally, Melville, rather than giving in to the American culture‘s desire to memorialize their dead in heroic,
religious, and nationalistic manners (through war elegies), first subtly then overtly, deflates the all too recurrent and easy
form of grieving which results in religious catharsis; conversely, Melville seems to have a radically different desire which
is to resist catharsis, and instead to bear witness to a new American, an American that Melville requires to mourn through
the conscious awareness of the horrific consequences of its own unbridled military and political forces.
3. Stefanie Cilia, University of Malta, Malta
Paper: Writing Archaeology, Writing Life: Seamus Heaney‟s „Bog‟ Poems
„Perhaps the most surprising response to the “bog body” phenomenon in modern
times has been literary.‟
Rick Turner1
‗Writing life‘ – this phrase lends itself to the concept that for a person to leave a record of his/her life, then it must be done
in writing. After all, how can one express their life before leaving this world if it were not in writing? It is in this sense
that the work of the archeologist finds subsistence. Archaeologists seek to write the lives of past communities who did not
possess knowledge of writing and consequently did not leave behind written evidence. Thus, it is in the hands of the
archaeologist to unearth artifacts long buried in the soil, and subsequently interpret the ways in which past communities
lived and how they met their death. It is believed that archaeologists and poets are both transformers with the skills of
seers to project into places or sites and retrieve things to illuminate a general past. 2 The Northern Irish poet Seamus
Heaney attempts to do just this – he looks upon the archaeological corpses of the ‗bog bodies‘ and uses them as allegories
to write about his own life in Ulster. During the Ulster Troubles which commenced in the late 1960s, explanatory contexts
were urgently required by the literary world to make sense of the severe political situation underway. This urgency put
Heaney at the centre of the stage. As a spokesperson for his people, he was required to put into writing and make sense of
the atrocities in his homeland. My research examines Seamus Heaney‘s response to these expectations. By exploring the
so called ‗bog poems‘ of Heaney‘s fourth collection, North (1975), I will be discussing the method acquired by the poet in
order to write about his own life and that of his people.
1
Rick Turner, ‗The Lindow Man Phenomenon: Ancient and Modern‘, Bog Bodies, ed. by Turner and Scaife , p.32, quoted in Christine
Finn, Past Poetic: Archaeology in the Poetry of W.B Yeats and Seamus Heaney, (London: Gerald Duckworth and Co. Ltd., 2004, p.
99.
2
Christine Finn, p. 82.
Panel 8 – Writing Life Transgressively (11.30 – 13.00)
Chair: Elsa Fiott
1. Jeffrey Micallef, University of Malta, Malta
Paper: Condemned Life in Dostoevsky‟s The House of the Dead
In ‘Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics’ (1929), Bakhtin contrasts the polyphonic nature of Dostoevsky’s works with
Tolstoy’s, whose characters seem to be the mouthpiece of the author’s. This paper shows the dialogic nature of the
fabula (story) as seen through the characters that populate ‘The House of the Dead’. The irony throughout the
novel is that the prison walls afford the convicts a better chance of/for life than freedom can ever promise:
Goryanchikov dies a (solitary) death just some time after he terminates his prison sentence and is released;
Kulikov and A.’s attempted escape to quench their “thirst for life” fails after just one week.
The incidents described come down to the narrator as an incomplete manuscript which he has to bribe to get after
Goryanchikov - its author - died. The life of freedom which the convicts constantly dream of is to be found outside
the prison walls – and outside the story. The paper proposes that the plot (sjuzet) limits the extent of the novel’s
polyphony; taking into consideration the arbitrariness of the incidents the manuscript’s author narrates and the
narrator’s editorial arrangements, being indistinguishable from Goryanchikov’s.
2. Viktoria Grivina, Karazin Kharkov National University, Ukraine
Paper: A Single Injection of Radioactive Past Times: Cut-up Theory of William S. Burroughs
When asked whether death is a bigger mystery than life, William Burroughs once made a remark, "Well how do
you know you're not dead already?" In fact, burroughsian writing could be well described by the mention in his
texts of the phenomenon of fugue state - temporary amnesia (a mind glitch that occurs to some individuals in
travels to unknown places, when the person develops a new, often arbitrary identity, only to forget it on return).
By the disruption of linear time, everyday routines and narratives, the artist acquires an opportunity to become a
stranger, Other, if only for a time being. In cooperation with his close personal friend Brion Gysin, Burroughs
discovered and later revolutionized a method of disruptive narrative - cut-ups. Cut-up, a collage technique of a sort,
enabled writers to fight the word-virus: the ever unstoppable stream of consciousness, sub-vocalization. One of the
exercises Burroughs suggested to his students in Naropa University was to compose several pages of text made
solely with borrowed words - what you could hear on the streets or radio, see on TV, in papers or fiction. Cut and
rearranged, borrowed words (" and indeed all the words are borrowed") invent new unexpected meanings, which
depending on personality of an arranger would create a loophole in the stream of sub-vocalization, a paradox. As
said, the major distinction between genius and consumer lies in the notion that genius recognizes new information
as being new, susceptible to constant flow, edits and makes trite facts mutate in compilation with the new ones; at
the same time, the consumer rigidly protects the habitual, always treating new as invader, Other. In my report I
will attempt to give an analysis of transgressive writing techniques employed by William Burroughs in his
experimental text "Naked Lunch" and understand whether these techniques are applicable to modern
counterculture fiction.
3. Maria Theuma, University of Malta, Malta
Paper: „I got 99 problems but a b**** ain‟t one‟: Confession, Reality and Story in Rap Music
Rap tells stories. It speaks of the truths of life and simultaneously re-imagines them as alternate realities. Its
narrative forms are often brilliantly crafted and its rapidly articulated phrases portray a vast expanse of human
experience. The essential and vital nature of the ancient oral tradition is extended and re-worked by rappers, who
resort to rhyme and dramatic voice in order to present to audiences the rawest of emotions. Whether the rapping
voice belonged to the Notorious B.I.G who dominated the 1990s or to Jay-Z, phrasing his ambiguous narratives
over a decade later, it always spoke, and still speaks, of life as a sort of fantastic story. The paper proposes to view
rap, and, more broadly, hip hop, as a genre of storytelling that contains endless possibilities of voice and poetic
narrative. The multiple voices employed by rappers will be explored as having an almost Eliotesque quality,
articulated by dramatic characters, creating imaginary personas and situations. The paper proposes to present the
tales of rap as ones which exploit both the intimacy of the genre of confession and the limitlessness of imagination
and invention. In the paper, the audience of rap music will be presented as ever-conditioned and somewhat
manipulated by the nature of the authorial power and intelligence of the rapper. For rap plays on this sense of
indeterminacy; this inability to distinguish and choose between the subjectivity of its “I” and the exaggeration and
absurdity of its impersonations. As Marshall Mathers raps as Eminem and Eminem raps as Slim Shady, direct
confession and fiction interpenetrate and become interchangeable. Indeed, rap manages to present social, racial,
ethical and religious issues as simultaneously factual and fable-esque, and remains essentially poignant, even when
it speaks of absurdities and celebrates the violent and commercial excesses of today’s society.
Panel 9 – (Re-)Writing Life (and Death) in Contemporary Narrative (14.00 – 15.30)
Chair: Rachelle Gauci
1. Corinne Vella, University of Malta, Malta
Paper: Mr Baverstock, Nicola Barker and My Ideologies
Over the centuries, art not only developed to be a mirror of society but also a window onto society, therefore, both
reflecting society‘s values and traditions as well as providing a commentary of society‘s developing ideologies. As a
result of an interconnectedness of ideology and language, literary commentaries have taken many forms, some proving to
be critiques of the dominant ideology at any given point, while others have taken a reinforcing stance in order to
perpetuate and propagate the status quo. A highly refined critique, denunciation and exposition of a particular set of
beliefs can be found in Nicola Barker‘s short story, ‗For the exclusive attn of Ms Linda Withycombe‘ (2009), which lays
bare patriarchal values in such a way as to condemn them, thus promoting the opposing principles to those found in the
short story as the only values deemed adequate and tolerable. The proposed analysis of Barker‘s novella builds on Carter
and Nash‘s belief that ‗ideology operates through language and serves to construct and reproduce political relationships in
which language users have a key position‘ (1990: 20) as well as on Simpson‘s Language, Ideology and Point of View
which brings together studies done in stylistics and critical linguistics, which through an analysis of the language
employed identify and expose points of view, that is the ‗angle of telling‘ (1993: 140).
2. Conrad Aquilina, Durham University, UK
Paper:„If it‟s a story I‟m telling, then I have control over the ending‟: Revisionism, Representation and
the Re-Written Life
‗Life is what happens to [us] while [we]‘re busy making other plans‘, as Lennon once wrote in a song of his, astutely
reflecting that life and life-time are inseparable and irrecoverable, while the concept of time itself fleeting and irreversible.
Writers have long been aware of writing‘s promise of permanence, especially in the way it ‗documents‘ lived experience,
lending a degree of legitimacy to now past and unlivable (unlived?) events and bringing back to life the defunct. Yet, if
life can be actually ‗written‘ of/about through the referential dynamics of word and world, one might venture that it could
also be re-written, revised and therefore re-visited. Lying behind the concept of revisionism is the belief that writing‘s
potential for revision and correction is an element conspicuously missing from life, as the present hurtles towards an
unpredictable future, while the past has been long spent. For novelist Chuck Palahniuk ‗life never works except in
retrospect. [Thus if] You can‘t control life [then] at least you can control your version‘.
It seems opportune for life and the living to be reincarnated in fiction and art, history and biography, yet it is worth
reminding the reader that a life written may or may not be a life lived. At the centre of this controversy lies the notion of
literary license, or the ability of fiction to permit that which is now closed; a decision taken, an outcome impossible to
reverse, an opportunity to even the scales, a way to bring back the dead – all staples of revisionist narratives. Contingent
upon this postmodernist fiction are the questionable qualities of historical accuracy and authenticity. As Hayden White
(1978) has explained, it is not unusual for history to be thought of as possessing ‗a concreteness and an accessibility that
[a work of fiction] can never have, as if it were easier to perceive the reality of a past world put together from a thousand
historical documents than it is to probe the depths of a single literary work‘.
In my interpretation of the (re)written life, I focus on the ways narrative revisionism of personal experience, lived time
and memory is accounted for by the playful and often controversial inversion of the memorialisation or historicisation
process. In particular I view revisionism in terms of a (dis)closure of events and (non)sense endings as ‗the real, the true
and the told‘ (Berlatsky, 2011) keep switching places in several removes. Select historiographic readings from McEwan‘s
Atonement, Orwell‘s Nineteen-Eighty Four, Atwood‘s The Handmaid‟s Tale, Barnes‘s The Sense of an Ending and
Fowles‘s The French Lieutenant‟s Woman*, all fiction employed to chronicle biography or history, will provide crucial
examples of lives rewritten or re-presented.
* For conference purposes, the paper will extensively focus on three of the above (McEwan, Atwood, Barnes).
If the paper is eventually selected for publication, it may be adapted to include further study on all the novels
mentioned above.
3. James Farrugia, University of Malta, Malta
Paper: Life and Nothing (To Be Frightened Of)
In his memoir Nothing to Be Frightened Of (2008), Julian Barnes writes of inevitable biological extinction in terms of the
human perception of death. Indeed, the pun in the title hints that it is precisely such nothingness that we are frightened of.
Barnes‘s thanatology employs an elusive and droll English style in the consideration of various narrative truths or fictions
that we resort to in the face of death: the Christian God, his own family history, and various relevant historical and literary
simulacra.
There is no painless return to some divine soteriology or supreme fiction. But in writing about death, Barnes both tightens
his hold on life and implicitly extends its duration; in thinking about and fearing death he affirms life. He recalls the
position of Hélène Cixous in Derrida‘s H.C. for Life, That Is to Say…(2006), who is on ‗the side of life against death, for
life without death, beyond a death whose test and threat are none the less endured […] in the soul of the writing.‘ But such
a position – implicit or explicit, conscious or unconscious – is deeply problematic. As Derrida, in response to Cixous,
says: ‗I would attempt to be convinced of life [….] but I am and remain for life both convicted and convinced of death.‘ It
is Barnes, the avowed thanataphobe, and his problematic affirmation of life in the consideration of death that this paper
wishes to explore.
Panel 10 – Writing Life Beyond Limits (14.00 – 15.30)
Chair: Leanne Borg
1. Caleb Sivyer, University of Cariff, UK
Paper: Visualising Queer Life in Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve: Cinema, Scopophilia, and the Sutured
Subject
In The Passion of New Eve (1977), Angela Carter writes about the lives of two gender-ambiguous characters: a man
surgically transformed into a woman, and a man playing the role of a woman on the cinematic screen. These complex
lives are interlinked through both the consumption of visual images and through physical contact. The undecidability of
these gendered lives leads Carter to explore the possibilities of narrative technique in order to write these queer lives. Her
narrative style blends the verbal and the visual, the seen and the said. The cinematic phrase ‗persistence of vision‘ is
repeated throughout the narrative, and functions as a reading strategy for connecting the moments of her characters‘ lives.
Frequent attention is paid in the narrative to the way things look and the way her characters see the world, often mediated
through the cinema and the cinematic. This attention to the visual regularly halts the forward momentum of the plot in a
similar way to how Laura Mulvey argues fetishised images in a film slow the forward movement of its narrative. There is
thus a tension between the movement of the writing which drives the plot forward, and the visual scenes which freeze
narrative time in order to show us how the characters see and are seen. In my paper, I explore this productive tension
between the visual and the verbal in order to tease out the way in which Carter writes about gender-ambiguous life. I
argue that her narrative involves writing about life in between the page and the screen, the said and the seen, the material
and the imaginary, as well as the masculine and the feminine. Life, specifically gendered life, is written as something
dynamic in her text, as something in the interstices of various normative categories and modes of being.
2. Aysegul Salamis Sentug, Independent Scholar
Paper: New Forms of Fiction in the Modern Age: Does Meta-Fiction Pose Any Special Problems for
Philosophical Theories of Fiction?
The self-conscious, reflexive style of fiction is called metafiction in which its fictional status continuously and
systematically draws attention to its relation to reality. A fictional text is not a static entity, and its being metafictional
enhances its dynamic in a dialectic way since there is a revealed utterance about the artefact of the fiction. Due to this
implicit awareness, a meta-fictional representation differs from a standard fictional discourse and hence it requires a
different approach. In metafictional narrative, the figure of the author is significant attribute that varies from standard
fictional discourse. The controlling ―author‖ no longer resides alone in énonciation: since in metafiction, the ―author‖ is a
capacity to be filled, a role to be interpreted by the reader. Different to standard fiction, not only the interpretational
variations, but also the nature of the structure makes the author 'to be filled'. This reciprocal process is enhanced by the
increased popularity of participatory and interactive discourses. With the increase in popularity of social media and the
digital age of writing and reading, metafiction could be the new form of fictional discourse.
The main aim of this paper is to explore whether the philosophical theories of fiction are applicable to self-conscious
metafiction, and if so, to what extent. After giving the structural nuances of some forms of metafiction, the main focus of
the essay will be on four different philosophical accounts; interpretation account, aesthetics account, emotion account and
truth account. The significance of metafiction in modern times should be analysed due to the fact that it could help us
understand the nature of fiction. It is one of the most crucial forms in this era in terms of writing life.
3. Janice Sant, Cardiff University, UK
Paper: In Absentia: Fictional Testimony in Hélène Cixous‘s The Day I Wasn‘t There
In Demeure (1998), Jacques Derrida argues that Maurice Blanchot‘s L‟instant de ma mort poses a serious challenge to the
(seemingly) incontestable distinction between testimony and fiction. It seems counterintuitive to bring the act of testimony
under the rubric of fiction; no circumstance, it may be said, could be further from the truth. And yet, as Derrida maintains,
Blanchot‘s elliptical text calls this distinction into question and, in so doing, dislocates the tranquil boundaries between
fiction and non-fiction.
Focusing on this strange entanglement between testimony and fiction as explored in Demeure, this paper proposes to shed
light on Hélène Cixous‘s The Day I Wasn‟t There (2000). Forty years after her son‘s death, the narrator of the novel feels
suddenly compelled to ask her mother and brother, both loving guardians of a son she had left in their care, how things
unfolded on the day her son died. Suffice it to say, however, that both possible witnesses are reluctant to testify and that
when, upon the narrator‘s insistence, they do so, they offer conflicting evidence. As it hovers tantalisingly between the
autobiographical and the realm of so-called fiction, this ‗Book‘, like Blanchot‘s text, not only opens up the possibility of
bearing witness through fiction, but also asserts that—if one is to be honest with oneself—there is no other viable way.
Taking Derrida‘s provocative claim that the testimonial act is ‗poetic‘ and ‗inventive‘ as its impetus, this paper seeks to
explore the paradox inherent in such a position through a reading of Cixous‘s novel.
Saturday 23 March
Panel 11 – Aesthetic Autobiography (16.00 – 17.30)
Chair: Elsa Fiott
1. Katryna Storace, University of Malta
Paper: Writing For Her Life: Virginia Woolf and Autobiographical Memory in A Sketch of the Past
This paper stems from a deep dissatisfaction of readings of Virginia Woolf‘s work belonging to established theoretical
discourses that ruminate upon the biographical and psychological implications of Woolf‘s obsession with the events and
experiences of her own life, explaining away her fiction through associations between her life and her art. It is true that
Virginia Woolf is obsessed with her own past, and that the past returns, again and again, in metamorphosed form within
her fiction. It is also true that fictional characters bear startling resemblances to real-life persons. There is however, it will
be argued, a different, altogether more vital reason for the persistence of autobiography in Woolf‘s writing. This will be
traced through Woolf‘s own musings on the subject in her posthumous memoirs, ‗A Sketch of the Past‘. It is in her
childhood memories that she uncovers the origins of her impulse to write: in those visionary ‗moments of being‘ that
impart to her an intransient truth, and which she dedicates her entire career to unveiling in the form of writing. This
endeavour, it will be seen, is ever doomed to failure. Writing, it will be argued, is always derivative: always an act of remembering, recollecting, re-visioning the visionary moment.
Those called by the vocation of writing are thus caught in a double-bind: in the face of the Blanchotian Absolute, they are
damned to write; writing for their lives, however, they have no choice but to succumb to death the moment their vocation
is threatened by failing faculties. Altogether, these considerations give a new nuance to the phrase ―writing life‖.
2. Aykun Ozgen, Sabanci University (Istanbul), Turkey
Paper: Writing Life Writerly: Orhan Pamuk‟s Istanbul as an Aesthetic Autobiography
In 2006 Orhan Pamuk became the first Turkish writer to receive the Nobel Prize. Prior to this, three years earlier, his
memoir Istanbul: Memories and the City was published. Pamuk, who has always been an experimental writer, now blends
his life and that of the history of Istanbul in a memoir which closes with his triumphant decision ―I am going to be a
writer.‖ Although genre definitions can be seen as problematic, as readers we have to admit that they also propose new
approaches to texts and thereby enrich our reading, particularly of autobiographical fiction such as that of Pamuk. A new
theory of this genre, ―aesthetic autobiography‖, has been identified/proposed by Suzanne Nalbantian in Aesthetic
Autobiography: from life to art in Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Anais Nin (1994).2 According to
Nalbantian, these writers share an aesthetic as they transform lived data into fictionalized discourse. By locating these
writers‘ works under the umbrella of aesthetic autobiography, common elements of this creative process of artistic
transmutation (or aesthetic recreation) emerge. In Sterling‘s review of Nalbantian's book, these common elements are
identified as: ―perception‖, ―selectivity‖, ―dislocated or amplificated place‖, ―intervention of artifacts and appearance of
artists‖, ―transformation of the quotidian‖, ―the creation of evolving personalities‖, and ―the intervention of subjective
time which interrupts chronological time‖.3 In this paper I will discuss how Orhan Pamuk's memoir Istanbul: Memories
2
Nalbantian, Suzanne. Aesthetic Autobiography: From Life to Art in Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Ana's Nin. New
York: St. Martin's Press, 1994. Print.
3
Sterling, Richard L. Rev. of ―Aesthetic Autobiography: From Life to Art in Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Ana's
Nin‖, Suzanne Nalbantian. The French Review 72.1 (1998): 133-134. Print.
and the City, can also be included under this umbrella (reinforce the analogy) of ―aesthetic autobiography‖. My discussion
will depict each element above from the memoir, with the intention to uncover this book‘s ―hidden symmetry‖.4
3. Mohsen Jabbari, University of Tehran, Iran
Paper: The Fact, the Truth, and the Real: Elizabeth Bishop and Confessional Poetry
Confessional poetry came to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s in the work of Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Sylvia
Plath, John Berryman and Allen Ginsberg, and still continues in the poetry of such poets as Sharon Olds and Mark Doty.
As an alternative to the impersonal Modernism of T. S. Eliot, confessional poetry revisited issues of lyric subjectivity and
autobiography, thus giving momentum to a new poetics. A close friend of the confessional poet Robert Lowell, Elizabeth
Bishop wrote in an equally distinctive voice, fusing a minute attention to detail (in line with Pound‘s Imagist dictums)
with a candor only to be found in confessional poetry. Bishop‘s oeuvre has received an increasing amount of literary
criticism since her death in 1979, and her poetic legacy survives in the work of a number of noteworthy contemporary
poets such as the British Jo Shapcott among others. Drawing on poststructuralist French psychoanalysis and philosophy
(as encountered in the work of Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Julia Kristeva), the present paper aims to differentiate
Bishop‘s poetics from that of both the confessional poets and the Modernists preceding them, and to illustrate the unique
ways in which she creates new models of experience which merge poetry into life and vice versa. In doing so, it will
borrow its theoretical basis from Lacan‘s Ecrits: A Selection, Deleuze‘s Essays Critical and Clinical and Kristeva‘s
Revolution in Poetic Language; as for Bishop‘s poetry, this study will provide examples from her last collection
Geography III.
Panel 12 – Writing Ephemeral Life (16.00 – 17.30)
Chair: Aaron Aquilina
1. Omar Basalamah, King Abdulaziz University, Saudia Arabia
Paper: Writng Characters: Textual (De)Construction of Identities in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night
Despite being credited with 'creation' more than most after God, Shakespeare seems to identify himself as merely a writer
of dramatic texts, which he often punctuates through the consistent use of textual terminology as well as the meta drama
of the play-within- the-play. It is only as components of a written text that the characters are conceived, presented and
given a sense of identity. Applying a post-structuralist reading, I propose that in Twelfth Night, Shakespeare's characters
are written in such a way as to expose their textuality and they also seem to deal with each other's identities almost
exclusively as / in writing. The act of penning texts that would replace a lover, and the creation of a fictional lover in a
written letter not only construct every character's identity, but also reconstruct, deconstruct and temporarily erase it
leaving nothing but the trace. The notion of engraved identities around which the great tragedies revolve gives way, in the
festive Twelfth Night, to ephemeral identities that are scribbled and comically drawn to celebrate the possibilities of
temporary transformations of ladies into gentlemen and servants into masters. As the characters write a text of their own
and incorporate it into a scene that they create, Shakespeare once again temporarily suspends the fictive illusion to draw
our attention to the textuality of his theatre. Echoing Shakespeare, Fabian dismisses the reality of the stage he and the
other characters construct as "improbable fiction", reminding us of the even more improbable fictitiousness of the text in
which he is written as a character rather than realistically created as a person.
4
―But if I dwell any longer on military coups and political Islam (which has much less to do with Islam than is commonly thought), I
risk destroying the hidden symmetry of this book.‖ (Istanbul, p.183)
2. Naomi Kruger, Lancaster University, UK
Paper: „Storyless Spaces‟: Contemporary Dementia Fiction and the Difficulty of Narrative
‗Storyless spaces, like black holes, suck ferociously on whatever comes into their orbit in their need to be occupied.‘
Jenny Diski, The Dream Mistress.
The experience of advanced dementia would seem to be necessarily unwritten. It is a condition that brings a diminishing
future as well as a shrinking past, [the prospect] of being confined to ‗an eternal present‘, trying ‗to make sense of a world
that has become… a permanent and often terrifying question mark.‘ Is it possible to tell meaningful stories about the
inability to tell stories? Why would one attempt to narrate from within a disintegrating consciousness, to represent loss of
language and perception in the very medium that is being eroded?
By touching on some recent fiction that has attempted to represent the experience of dementia from the ‗inside‘ and
reflecting on my own work in progress (a polyphonic novel partly narrated by a character with Alzheimer‘s disease) I will
attempt to answer these questions. Why is it important, in this case, to write the unwritten and what are the moral, ethical
and aesthetic challenges of such a task? Andrea Gilles asserts that ‗our selves are fed by our narratives, the story of our
past and our imagined futures.‘ Ultimately I am interested in what happens when we are confronted with these narrativeresistant spaces. What, if anything, can literature tell us about the experience of dementia and what can our attitudes to
dementia tell us about our continual need for narrative?
3. Irene Scicluna, University of Malta, Malta
Paper: In Sickness and In Health; Till Death Do Us Part: Art, Disease and Posthumanism
[…] it should come as no surprise that I propose to start, and to end, with the question of the human (as if there were any
other way for us to start or end!).‘ Judith Butler.
This paper takes its cue from the intriguing art exhibition title What‟s Wrong with Me? Art and Disease hosted about a
year ago at the Toledo Museum of Art, Ohio. Whilst the exhibition itself was interesting in its own right, it was the titular
question „What‟s Wrong with Me‟, and its multifaceted link with the two terms that follow it –art and disease – that took
center stage there, and will be adopted as the driving force of this essay.
Standing on its own, the question „What‟s Wrong with Me‟ reveals a sensitive facet of humanity in that it invokes
contemplation and condemnation of the self as a flawed being. It implies a certain desire to prevail over those said flaws.
Secondly, and perhaps more poignantly, it points to an ambiguity: what is, in fact, wrong with the human? Does our
assumed unsatisfactory state have a direct correlation with art and disease – whether that involves a combination of the
two, one taking precedence over the other, or perhaps, the eradication of both?
This paper shall contend with these possibilities, exploring what art and disease mean to humanity and what it would
imply, therefore, to exist without them. It is immediately apparent that the questions put forward so far, center decidedly
on the human. As pointed to in the epigraph, the human is quite literally the be-all and end-all: ‗as if there were any other
way for us to start or end!‘ The object of the ‗starting‘ and ‗ending‘ that Butler speaks of there, is the essay she is writing.
Her assertion however, can be appropriated to a more macrocosmical issue: does everything start and end at the human, or
is there perhaps more to be said, pre-human and post-human? The subject of this paper is precisely the end of the human.
If we should dispel art and sickness, which – as this paper suggests – are ‗married‘ to the human condition, then we shall
come to the end of the human, and the start of the posthuman. Would posthumanism, therefore, step in to administer
immunity against art, and cure us of our artful disease?