Skip to main content

Paper Abstracts

Panel 1: Literary Mano a Mano

Émile Lévesque-Jalbert (Miami University) “In Search of the Polemos: Sartre and Blanchot”

What is the relationship between literature and the world? During the spring of 1947, Sartre and Blanchot were both working on that particular question. In volume 19 of Les Temps Modernes, Sartre published a chapter of What Is Literature? and Blanchot published an article “Le Roman, Oeuvre de mauvaise foi.” If the philosopher behind The Nausea was arguing the absolute engagement of literature, Blanchot was advocating that bad faith is the only literary attitude possible. Even though their theses are contradictory, the two writers have never acknowledged the dispute. What is a literary debate without any form of polemic? What is an antagonism that happens in theory and uses oblique references as offensive strategy? We find ourselves in front of a comedy: Sartre never refers directly to Blanchot and the only text of Blanchot speaking about Sartre is a smirking homage to Sartre that celebrates his Romanesque success. Ironically, the thinker of engagement refuses to engage in a debate with Blanchot. Working its way through theoretical opposition (prose-poetry, engagement-detachment, health-illness, dialectic-critic), the opposition between the two writers engages the limit and the source of the literary theory. While disarming Sartre, Blanchot is proposing a neutralizing approach to literature. Literature cannot be conceived as a negative force producing a dialectical movement of progress, but rather as a neutral space that holds the opposition together. Then literature is not in a relation between two opposites but is the relation between the two and the polemos would be its horizon.

Charles Akwen (University of Lagos)“Self versus Selves: Negotiating Nigerian Poetry through the Act of Conflicting and Conflating Influences”

The place of literature and art in the human society is open to discussions. Over the years, the writers and their crafts, and how they record, document, report or proffer solutions to societal problems have been put into radical questioning. Plato in his days exiled the poets from the ideal state when he raises the question of the nature of their artistic process which is bordered on the psychology upon which they write. Freud, also has seen the creative writer is a ‘strange being’ who himself cannot explain his power to arouse new and intense emotions in us.’ Unlike Plato, however, Wordsworth, sees the poet as “a man speaking to men” in order to record his own sensations, observations, reflections thereby creating a pleasurable imaginative response that is inseparable from the highest kind of knowledge. To answer the question whether or not poetry is only an expression of the self, Keats observes that “the true poet has no identity and no nature; he is certainly the most unpoetical of all God’s creatures.” Consequent upon the controversial position occupied by writers in the society, their identity(ies) therefore reflect conflicting and conflating interpretations. Moreover, because the writer’s work is capable of adapting to a plethora of constructions and reconstructions, the issue of deliberate antagonism sometimes ensues among them, the public or among readers. This research seeks to explore the contention between two Nigerian writers of international repute, Odia Ofeimun and John Pepper Clark-Bekederemo. Following the publication of The Poet Lied, the latter accused the former of deliberately casting aspersions on him and threatened a legal suit against him and his publisher, Heinemann. As a result, the collection was withdrawn from circulation. However, the said publication is now in circulation through an act of self-publishing about ten years after its withdrawal. This research also seeks to explore the interpretative strategies employed by the Nigerian public; Odia Ofeimun’s ars poetica and his commitment to self and society.

Panel 2: Religion and Textual Conflicts in Early Modern Age

Hannah Bormann (Catholic University) “Authorial (Self-)Correction: Lucy Hutchinson, Genesis Epic, and Regret”

In the preface to Lucy Hutchinson’s Genesis epic Order and Disorder, as she explains her intentions for and the reasons behind the project, strong notes of antagonism emerge, both toward other authors and toward herself. In the former case, as many critics have noted, Hutchinson insistently treats her expansion of Genesis as a “meditation,” one which explores the Creation and original sin within the firm limits of biblical knowledge rather than laying claim to divine inspiration to trespass beyond them as other Genesis epics—most notably Milton’s in the decade before, of course—had done. In addition to this outward hostility, and perhaps more interestingly, one of Hutchinson’s main motivations for creating the epic is self-directed censure; she derides her earlier translation of Lucretius’s De rerum natura, making Order and Disorder what Robert Wilcher calls a type of “private exorcism.” While scholastically impressive, Hutchinson views the source material and her own role in making it available to English audiences as a “poison,” one which is corrected by the “antidote” of God’s word and her adherence to its limits in her own work. In pitting herself against other biblical epic-writers and her own earlier, ambitious labor, Hutchinson seems to undermine her work in a very different way than the usual self-deprecation of women’s early modern writing. Amidst Hutchinson’s own complicated conceptions of gender, intelligence, and the role of education, how does the modern reader comprehend Hutchinson’s motivations? This paper will seek answers by exploring Hutchinson’s ideas of Christian education and authorship.

Ian Q. Rogers (Johns Hopkins University) “Untransliterating Historia: Don Quixote, Hostility, and Crypto-Islamic Textual Production in XVI c. Castile” This paper seeks to offer an alternative reading of the “historiador arábigo” Cide Hamete Benegeli and the Toledan codex that contains the “historia” of Don Quijote in Miguel de Cervantes’ eponymous magnum opus. Namely, I intend to trace the possible ways by which Benegeli and the codex can function to destabilize what I propose to call here the historiographies of hostility (i.e., the etymological semantics of hostility as enmity, principally the historiographical implications of the enduring presence of Islam in the Iberian Peninsula) championed in Spanish Courts under Hapsburg rule. I argue that the Toledan codex, which is rediscovered by an unknown narrative voice in the famous chapter IX of the Quijote, is composed not in Arabic, as is the standard interpretation of the passage, but rather aljamiado, a modality of textual composition whereby Iberian dialects are transliterated using the Arabic alphabet. The production of aljamiado texts surged in Spain during the 16th century within communities of crypto-Muslims as an essential tool for the practice and preservation of crypto-Islam in the wake of edicts of forcible baptisms beginning in 1501. Aljamiado textual production was a protean and clandestine enterprise that cemented crypto-Muslims’ divergent sociolinguistic locus within the orthodox matrix of language and religiosity in Early Modern Spain. Notwithstanding its dissimulative qualities, my intention is not to frame the presence of the aljamiado codex in chapter IX as a mere rearticulation of aljamiado as a reactionary epiphenomenon of Christian Spain’s inquisitorial campaigns for socio-religious homogeneity; rather, I speculate as to the ways in which its presence amplifies the Quijote’s satire of Spain’s historiographies of hostility while simultaneously elucidating the particularities of the history of Islam, Muslims, and the Arabic Language in Spain.

Roundtable

Sarah Yahyaoui (CUNY) and Olivia Tapiero “Three Times in Olivia Tapiero’s Career: Les murs, Espaces and Phototaxie

With Les murs, Olivia Tapiero was the youngest author to ever win the prestigious Robert­-Cliche prize for a first novel. The text was critically acclaimed, featured in numerous mainstream medias, and made Tapiero an epitomical young genius on Quebec’s literary scene. If the praise was objectively positive, the mythification of the young author proved difficult for her and the production of her second book, Espaces, as it brought about a personal, editorial and mediatic pressure to write an equally successful following work. Espaces received milder support than Les murs, and even encountered harsh critique. The recovery from that critique was difficult for Tapiero, who is working on a third book, Phototaxie, while trying to ignore the impossible ideal of the first one, along with the antagonism sparked by the second. It is the articulation of those three different times of her writing in its relation to the the critique that interests me: an almost falsely positive first publication, a devastating second one and a not-­yet-­published writing experience that offers new possibilities.

Panel 3: Text as Radical Critic

Cae Joseph-Masséna (University of Maryland)

“Censuring Censorship: The Troubled Writing of the Feminine in Love by Marie Vieux Chauvet and La main dans le sac by Violette Leduc”

“They have refused the beginning of Ravages. This is murder. Censorship is slicing through your pages. This hidden guillotine.” It is with these words that Violette Leduc writes Simone de Beauvoir to describe the censorship applied to her manuscript. Indeed, when Ravages is released in 1995, it is a truncated text whose first part has been censured by Gallimard who found it to be of “enormous and precise obscenity.”

Simone de Beauvoir also facilitated the publishing of Love, Anger, Madness by Marie Vieux Chauvet in 1968 with the same publisher as Chauvet had sent Beauvoir her manuscript in the hope she could help its publication. The scathing critique of the Duvalier regime contained in the book eventually pushed her family to buy all the existing copies and have Marie Vieux Chauvet write Gallimard to stop its publication. Only a few copies circulated for four decades until official publications finally made her work available in 2005. As for La main dans le sac, the censured opening pages of Leduc’s Ravages, it was finally published in 2014.

These texts point to a genealogy of censorship as well as a genealogy of literary insurrection. Through her relentless description of the Duvalier dictatorship and the Haitian bourgeoisie, Marie Vieux Chauvet explores transfigurations of the feminine in Love, while Violette Leduc delves into the renewed possibilities of language as she decenters the feminine in La main dans le sac. This intervention proposes a comparative reading of these recovered texts that will examine the ways in which the authors trouble the feminine with respective disfiguring modes.

Daniel Hengel (CUNY Graduate Center) “The Unnamable: And the Art of Resistance”

The call for resistance to the techniques of power employed by agents of both State structured homogeneity and individualizing subjecthood echo throughout Beckett’s The Unnamable (1953). Beckett’s unnamable ‘narrator’—a bodiless amalgam of subjectless voices—complicates, reorders and dismisses the course of power. Written in the wake of World War II’s previously unimaginable horrors, Beckett’s text is a labyrinthine remonstration of fascism and the devastating effects of unmitigated ideological indoctrination. The Unnamable’s extraordinary inscription of resistance reconstitutes the body and language outside the fields of representation.

Grappling with the very recent scholarship of Jacob Lund—“Biopolitical Beckett: Self-desubjectification as Resistance” (2009)—and Mohammadreza Arghiani—“Diminishing I’s: The Unnamable’s Absent Subjecthood and the Disintegration of Meaning in the Face of Foucault’s Panopticon” (2012)—this essay reads Beckett’s novel as a unique protest text that resists language’s ability to qualify and quantify the subject. His deconstruction of the subject-object divide through the obfuscation of pro and proper noun allocation destabilizes language’s power over the self, which, in turn, problematizes the concept of the subject—as both a self and a casualty of the State—and disabuses ideologically engendered processes of individualization. Like The Great War before it, World War II demanded “the mighty recasting of literary forms.” Fascism’s wanton destructiveness required new modes of representation forever altering the “distribution of the sensible.”

In The Unnamable Beckett creates a textual tympanum that exists in the space between the subject and the object. The ‘subjectlessness’ of the text necessitates a new form of signification. The current scholarship addressing the narrative agency absent from The Unnamable often reifies Beckett’s creation in archaic terminology that does not accurately represent the singular specificity of Beckett’s prose. The narrator, Beckett’s narrator, he, they, the unnamable, the committee, the voice, Mahood, Basil, Worm are insignificant and misleading significations of a voice without a voice. In their place this essay introduces a new means of representing Beckett’s Unnamable.

Drawing on the writings of Michel Foucault, Pierre Bourdieu, Samuel Beckett and Goran Therborn I propose a reading of The Unnamable that seeks neither to codify the speaking voice along familiar lines of representation or misconstrue the uniqueness of Beckett’s literary effort. I call this non-narrating narrator the Vocalisor. The Vocalisor is “in words, made of words, other’s words . . . [it is] all these words, all these strangers, this dust of others” it has “nothing to do, that is to say nothing to say, no words but words of others” the Vocalisor is the passage through which language is heard, misunderstood and forgotten as words flow “in at one ear and incontinent out through the mouth, or the other ear.” The Vocalisor is that (not who) which expresses the text’s resistance to established systems of order.

Jacob Levi (Johns Hopkins University) “Rameau’s Nephew and the Enduring Criticism of Philosophy”

Diderot’s dialogue Le Neveu de Rameau combines a fascinating publication history of trans-European intrigue and pirated translation, with daunting philosophical questions that trouble Hegel and enthrall Foucault. To avoid enflaming censors, Diderot circulated his dialogue to the happy few in his book club, notably Queen Catherine of Russia. Goethe’s 1805 translation was the dialogue’s first publication in any language. He wrote Schiller, with Rameau, “a bomb exploded in the middle of French literature.” Despite its apparent legerity, Diderot and Goethe recognized Rameau was a dangerous text, one which questioned the entire philosophical-literary enterprise in which they were engaged.

Rameau masquerades as a Socratic dialogue: “Moi,” the moraliste, and “Lui,” the prodigal nephew of the composer Rameau, meet in a Paris café and discuss philosophical questions: genius, truth, music, money, etc. After some discussion and even more disagreement, the dialogue ends with neither interlocutor convinced of anything. Rameau proves dangerous because it is an exercise in philosophical self-criticism at its highest degree: Lui questions the value of philosophy itself, and he is completely immune to the philosopher’s reasoned arguments. For Hegel, Lui is the paradigmatic self-alienated subject, estranged from not only his own ends, but also those of others. Foucault claims Rameau is an anti-Cartesian lesson on the essential role of madness in philosophy, the antipode of reason.

In my paper, I explore how Lui’s immunity to reason proves an inexhaustible – if not dangerous – question for philosophers, and why Diderot’s seemingly innocent dialogue has gripped philosophers for two centuries.

Adam Schoene (Cornell University) “Diderot’s Silent Fermentation”

Although Diderot did not write an openly political treatise, his emphasis on silence and bodily gesture in his theatrical and aesthetic writing helps to illuminate his political antagonisms, as I will examine within the context of his polemical satire, Le Neveu de Rameau. I will argue that its silence serves a corrective function, with its embodied expression offering a more direct access than the spoken word to a fermentative passion that serves a political role. This is most apparent in the pantomime of the titular figure of Rameau’s nephew, or Lui, in his virtuosic ability to passionately portray the full orchestra of humanity through his gestures, mimicking its traits and emotions to reveal the imitative nature of social life, and challenging others to break through the fastidious uniformity which education, conventions, and proprieties introduce: “He is like a grain of yeast that ferments and restores to each of us a part of his natural individuality. He shakes and stirs things up, makes us praise or blame, makes the truth come out, disclosing the worthy and unmasking the scoundrels.” I will analyze how the nephew’s pantomime exposes social and political contradictions, and stands in opposition to dialogic opponent Moi, for whom silence takes on a different sense, in affirmation of individual agency. In addition to the silence in dialogue, I will also address its function in the nephew’s pacte tacite, which inverts the “cry of nature” to reveal a deeper truth of unspoken aggression, with fermentation as the driving force.

Panel 4: Author vs. Readers in American Literature

Leah Becker (New York University)

“Does Melville Hate You? Questioning Dispossession versus Subversion in Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade

In her book The Feminization of American Culture, Ann Douglas asserts, “The Confidence-Man is Melville’s most elusive work: it marks his final dispossession of his readers…If his readers are dispossessed, so is Melville.” Ultimately, Douglas claims that Melville ended his novel-writing career with this book because it was his way of showing sentimentalists just how poor their genre really was. What can a critical reader make of Douglas’ claim? Did Melville “dispossess his readers” in the sense that he isolated himself from the sentimental reading public? Or did he oust sentimental readers from their own genre in pointing out its pitfalls? Or did he achieve both simultaneously? Modern readers and critics have no problem claiming that Melville is a subversive, and even hostile writer; a good reading of The Confidence-Man can easily prove that. However, the term “dispossess” does not occur regularly in the critical conversation surrounding Melville’s hostility. Why?

My paper uses contemporary reviews of The Confidence-Man as well as modern theories on “suspicious readers” (Felski) and “subversive politics” (Lee) to ultimately argue that Melville’s subversive satire—while it did dispossess him of the sentimental readership whose genre he so snidely infiltrated—did not completely dispossess him of readers, but rather created a space within that genre for the only readers who could fully understand him: his future readers. Melville needed suspicious readers—readers willing to question otherwise standard American principles—in order for books like The Confidence-Man to succeed.

Amanda Bailey (West Virginia University) “Author vs. Reader: The Metafictional Battlegrounds of The Garden of Eden and Pale Fire

Some literary works woo their readers, taking them by the hand and leading them to a place of relative safety and comfort. Others inspire their readers to great levels of empathy or self-reflection or even, occasionally, real change. But then there are the works that take the opposite tact. These are the baiters, the manipulations, the ones that tease and taunt and torment their readers to no end—or rather, to a very indeterminate end of unrest. These texts are antagonistic in that they purposefully pit their readers in opposition to their authors: they are—in opposition to the “normal” reader/text relationship—the bad boys of literature. In my approach to such texts, I argue that the metafictional appearance of antagonism between an author and a reader necessarily results in a parallel experience between the actual reader of the text and the text itself (and vicariously its author). I look for evidence of what I believe to be the primary metaphors of reading which facilitate this fraught readerly experience: (1) “Reading as Performance” and (2) “Reading as an Encounter with Sensory Bodies.” By pinpointing the language and imagery of these two metaphors found within the narratives, I investigate two antagonistic reader/author relationships as demonstrated by the readerly experience within and of Ernest Hemingway’s The Garden of Eden (1986) and Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire (1962). Both works involve reading as a site of conflict in which readers resist but ultimately must relinquish control of their readings to the conquering author.

Panel 5: Authors vs. Themselves

Paolo Frascà (University of Toronto) “Coming Out (of the Drawer): Umberto Saba’s Self-Censorial Letters”

Ernesto (1975) is an unfinished homoerotic novel by Triestine author Umberto Saba. The novel, characterized by many indisputable autobiographical underpinnings, is published two decades after the author’s death. Through Saba’s letters, we understand that he did not mean to ever publish Ernesto. The manuscript was meant to remain strictly locked up in a drawer, and the keys to the drawer were to always stay in his daughter’s possession (she will see to the posthumous publication of Ernesto), because “even if it were publishable, it would be incomprehensible.” This strong and, at least temporarily, successful attempt at self-censorship cannot be born out of anything other than a very personal and intimate relationship with the text itself, along with a strong sense of shame and fear. Saba himself had been trapped in a closet for his entire life, and he was not going to let Ernesto escape from a simple drawer; not, at least, until his last breath. This paper will explore the author’s strong desire to explicitly verbalize his darkest secrets through Ernesto, matched by the insurmountable fear of not being understood and accepted expressed in his letters. The dialectic between the overt and rebellious nature of Ernesto and the censorial authority of the letters is representative of an unresolvable inner conflict, which will regrettably delay the publication of what is described by critics to be the most resonant example of a (potential) Italian queer literary tradition.

Tatiana Nuñez (CUNY Graduate Center) “Textual Self-Antagonism in Rousseau’s Confessions

Autobiography is in a unique position in relation to other literary genres because of its assumed veracity, which is contentious in light of structuralist reticence to consider the author at all. It is much more difficult to divorce the autobiography from its subject because its point of interest is the biographical background, as well as any discrepancies between reality—however well we can assess that—and its reportage by the writer. One source of discomfort is textual self-antagonism, or instances wherein the author questions their constructed consciousness or memory of events; the question is whether this action undermines or augments an autobiography’s authority. The first part of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions (1782) contains instances of this doubt, which the reader can discern without external knowledge: “I am writing entirely from memory, without notes or material to recall things … there are gaps and blanks that I cannot fill except by means of a narrative as muddled as the memory I preserve of the events” (128). Rousseau was already a public figure when he wrote his autobiography, which makes the inclusion of self-antagonism incongruent with an awareness of audience and their potential criticisms. In the Confessions, this conceit operates in the disparity between truth and personal memory. The questioning of recollection creates a self-critical tone without seriously undermining the text; the very power of this authorial voice is that it asserts control over the reader while pretending not to. My analysis will be based less on intention than on style, specifically how the text articulates this hostility rhetorically and stylistically.

Richard LeBlanc (Cornell University) “Antagonism and Orientalism in Nerval’s Aurélia

At the beginning of Aurélia, the narrator says he is going “Towards the Orient.” In this paper, I interpret these revealing words by analyzing how this answer extends into the question of Orientalism in Nerval’s Aurélia. Unlike the previous commentators, I defend the thesis that in Aurélia Nerval articulates four constructed antagonisms that shaped his relation to 19th century Orientalism. The first antagonism was pointed out in Edward W. Said’s analysis of Orientalism and shows Nerval’s absorption of the constructed East-West opposition. In the second antagonism, this East-West opposition becomes the contextual source of his “self-banishment” or “auto-banissement” from Europe. The third antagonism, noticed by many, is in Nerval’s fascination with the Orient and turns out to be a self-antagonism between two parts of the self reflected in the Orient. Although these last two self-antagonistic experiences of the Orient reveal a critique of Eurocentrism, I use the intuitions of certain commentators to argue that these self-antagonisms were turned into a fourth case of antagonism which became through Aurélia a suicidal “self-banishment.” Taking position in the literature, this paper demonstrates Aurélia’s path from cultural antagonism, to self-banishment, to self-antagonism, and to suicide as a series of antagonistic reactions to Orientalism’s discourse of exclusion.

Mushira Habib (University of Maine) “Kaiser Haq’s English Poetry: Published in the Streets of Dhaka”

Bangladeshi poet Kaiser Haq’s poetry collection, Published in the Streets of Dhaka: Collected Poems 1966-2006 (2007), ends with a note by the poet himself, titled, “An Apology for Bangladeshi Poetry in English.” A note defending or explaining the author/poet’s work is not that uncommon in literature, but one may ask why Haq has to apologize for his medium of expression. It is not that difficult a question to answer for postcolonial readers and writers all over the world, who are often considered traitors to their native languages and nationalist sentiments because of using the language of their colonizers. Haq’s situation is worse as he is from Bangladesh, a nation that fought for and won its liberation on the basis of Bangla: its national language. Through a selection of Haq’s poems, my paper attempts to foreground postcolonial tensions around identity, fidelity and authorial intent from the perspective of a Bangladeshi poet, writing in English. As Haq argues, despite the acquisition of one’s mother tongue while still in the womb, with enough exposure to English growing up in the womb, a postcolonial child like him can also be born with an internalized aptitude for English. My paper intends to highlight such navigations and negotiations of Bangladeshi realities in his English poetry, defiantly published in the streets of Dhaka.