Ann Basu: Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America: American fraternity betrayed
This paper will explore some of the ways in which Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America (2004) interrogates and contests the notion of brotherhood in the context of American democratic fraternity. The novel re-imagines 1940s America as a place where Charles A. Lindbergh, a Nazi sympathizer, has become president and has negotiated a neutrality pact with Hitler. I will utilise as a key image the postage stamp commemorating Lindbergh’s record-breaking flight of 1927 from Long Island to Paris; since Roth employs the postage stamp as an important bearer of national meaning and as a prime signifier for national authority, legitimacy, and power relations as America changes leadership from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Lindbergh. The paper asks what it might mean for Americans if Jews, history’s enduring ‘others’, whose status Roth still regards as liminal in America, were irrevocably branded as ‘other’ and thus were no longer considered to be eligible for American fraternity. Roth envisages a betrayal of the democratic fraternal ideal played out in an assimilated American, patriotic Jewish family (also called Roth) containing two brothers, one of whom is influenced by the pro-Nazi ideology of Lindbergh’s America. The paper will connect the fraternal betrayals in the novel with a notion of brotherhood that is ineffective, narcissistic, self-betraying, and subject to the twin maladies of melancholia and paranoia.
The paper will argue that this evocation of failed brotherhood takes on a conspiratorial aspect which dominates the mood of the novel, and which produces the figure of the brother as a conspirator and a traitor. It will also show some of the ways in which the novel comments on what Frederic Jameson calls the conspiratorial text and his notion of “totality as conspiracy”. It will, finally, show how Roth evokes the “perpetual fear” of the final chapter of the novel to comment on America’s recent history.
Mark Blacklock: A Tangled Tale: knots, matter and magic in the 1870s
In 1877 the German astrophysicist Johann Karl Friedrich Zöllner published a paper in the Quarterly Journal of Science, edited by the British chemist and spiritualist William Crookes. 'On Space of Four Dimensions' announced Zöllner’s success in an experiment undertaken with the spirit medium Henry Slade to prove the existence of intelligences in a higher-dimensioned space, a space inaccessible to human observation but nevertheless, Zöllner argued, an empirical reality. Zöllner had attempted a series of experiments with Slade, but the crucial test, that which convinced him of the correctness of his theory, centred on the production of four knots in a sealed cord.
Tracing context for the heterogeneous resources gathered together in this experiment, and focusing on the knot, this paper examines the cultural and scientific significance of this intriguing object in the late Victorian period. Zöllner’s knots drew together stage magic and its symbiotic relationship with spiritualism, the projective geometry of Felix Klein and the transformative properties of space of n-dimensions. They were set against the simultaneous theoretical mathematical and physical work undertaken by William Thomson and Peter Guthrie Tait in their attempts to understand the basis of matter, and which had led them, also, to research knots.
This paper highlights the significance of social groupings and struggles over scientific legitimacy in the construction and reception of this experiment, and suggests that, while fundamentally flawed, Zöllner’s work nevertheless inadvertently raised questions about that of his British rivals. It argues forcefully that Zöllner’s experiments with Slade transformed perception of the concept of the fourth dimension, hybridizing an unstable but highly specialized concept. By way of apology for its scientific focus, the paper concludes with a visual demonstration of how Zöllner was tricked.
Melissa Bradshaw : Confessional Poetry as Ego.
Criticism about Confessional Poetry has diverged widely about the inherent values of the mode, but it is far more unified in its tendency to be drawn to making definitive statements about the poet. Elizabeth Bishop and Sylvia Plath embodied the confessional very differently. My thesis explores the encounter between their poetry and psychoanalysis and in this paper I will look at how Bishop and Plath criticism is drawn to their poetry as if it were the psychoanalytic ego. Freud’s concept of the ego notoriously destabilised with his 1923 paper ‘The Ego and The Id’, but in fact it had undergone constant modification since his 1895 ‘Project for A Scientific Psychology’. I will draw out some of the key characteristics of Freud’s ego - in particular its connotations of unity and coherency - and show how criticism of confessional has applied these as principles to the poetry. In particular the tendency to pathologise Plath based on the evidence of her poems will emerge as revealing some of the essential qualities of the confessional mode. The problem is very well articulated in Lacan’s ongoing critique of ego-psychology and what he referred to as a utilitarian concept of an ego. I will also demonstrate how any possibility for a successful feminine ego was rendered at best contradictory by Freud’s theories, and that though Lacan’s critique is in many ways valuable, it put women under a further (and related) impasse that imagined them as socially inoperable. To what extent do Bishop and Plath embody or refuse such contradictions?
Henderson Downing : TO THE ROUNDHOUSE: IAIN SINCLAIR AND LONDON’S PLAQUES TOURNANTES
Iain Sinclair's hybrid texts problematize categorization by splicing together diverse forms and genres. Yet his work is repeatedly labelled as ‘psychogeography’. Inevitably, such a highly mutable term requires further interrogation and contextualization. What is psychogeography? How has Sinclair appropriated and modified earlier incarnations of the term? Why has London proved to be a seemingly felicitous site for its re-emergence? Generally disregarded within Sinclair’s oeuvre, the Roundhouse in Camden Town provides a useful port of entry for a preliminary response to such questions. In the burgeoning secondary literature on Sinclair, insufficient attention has been paid to his involvement in the events that revolved around the Congress for the Dialectics of Liberation held at the Roundhouse in 1967. The Congress was organized by the leading figures of the anti-psychiatry movement who sought to explore the revolutionary possibilities for a synthesis between personal and social liberation from the alienation produced by a rapidly expanding consumer society. In his documentation of Allen Ginsberg’s attendance at the Congress, Sinclair establishes the Roundhouse as a focal point for contemplating the political and psychical state of the culture and, more acutely, the counter-culture.
For the avant-garde groups associated with Guy Debord in 1950s Paris, psychogeography was a radical method of studying the psychological impact of the urban environment on individuals. They deployed the term plaque tournante (‘turning place’) to designate a psychogeographical hub where different zones of urban ambience coalesced or became refracted. Similarly, in his labyrinthine ‘London Project’, Sinclair charts several turbulent points receptive to the flow of the city’s social, historical, cultural and emotional forces. A literal plaque tournante (specifically used to signify a railway turntable), the Roundhouse can be positioned retrospectively as the first in a series of hubs that orientate the development of Sinclair’s techniques and preoccupations.
James Emmott: ‘The melody of speaking’: music and morality in eighteenth and nineteenth century elocutionism
In his Lectures of 1762, Thomas Sheridan defined elocution as ‘the just and graceful management of the voice, countenance, and gesture in speaking’. For Sheridan, the principal distinction between humans and animals is to be found in the observation that ‘it is in the power of man, by his own pains and industry, to forward the perfection of his nature’. The proper development of the speaking voice is a prime example of such noble endeavour — since the neglect of speech, Sheridan argued, ‘is not only a characteristical mark of barbarism in all nations, but the sure means of continuing them in that state’.
The rise of the elocutionism movement throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries owed much to the influence of Sheridan and his contemporaries — including John Walker, whose pocket-sized books established the classic form of the elocutionary manual of the period, with the inclusion of a series of example texts for recitation, and their annotation with quasi-musical symbols.
The adoption of musical notation and vocabulary — both technical and metaphorical — in the pedagogy and practice of elocutionary recitation is highly instructive. The production and comprehension of music, a uniquely human capacity, is figured by Sheridan and Walker as being crucial to the cultivation of a manner of speech which is seen as the key to moral integrity. The paper will seek to illuminate some of the correspondences between these themes, in an exploration of the various entanglements between voice and body, music and morality.
Linda Grant: The Male 'Amazon' and the crisis of the lover: Catullus' Attis and Sidney's Pyrocles
The figure of the Amazon seems central to classical Greek culture and epitomises the ‘creation of alterity’ (Blok 1995): gender-dissonant, ethnographically other, both sexually dominant and yet also objects of male sexual aggression and rape, they are the site for a complex nexus combining warfare, gender and eroticism. Yet given the Romans’ overwhelming concern with the exploration of elite masculinity and especially its association with the erotics of violence, it seems puzzling that they do not appropriate the figure of the Amazon. Virgil’s Camilla might be a quasi-Amazonian figure but she appears to be a singular individual rather than part of an Amazon community, and even Ovid’s Metamorphoses where we might expect to meet Hippolyta, Penthesilea or Antiope does not make a spectacle of them. However, I would like to argue in this paper that Catullus’ Attis (c.63) both appropriates Amazonian elements and serves to function ideologically as a partially Amazonian figure while at the same time resisting the categorisation of ‘Amazon’ in interesting ways.
The Amazon is a surprisingly pervasive figure in the literature of the English Renaissance. The second half of my paper will explore a single manifestation of this figure in Sidney’s ‘Old’ Arcadia, where the problematics of this androgynous figure are complicated by also being an instance of male transvestism in the sexual pursuit of a woman. Once again gender, sexuality, and a form of compromised heroism combine in this enigmatic figure.
Maggie Inchley: New Voices of Theatre 1997-2007
My paper will identify the most important ways in which voices, and hence the social and individual identities of New Labour’s citizens, were validated in the period of Tony Blair’s office as prime minister from 1997- 2007 in theatre within the political and social context. Drawing on specific works on the voice by Steven Connor and Mladen Dolar as well as cultural theorists such as Walter Ong I will illustrate the way in which the voice has long been associated with the inner self and the formation of individual subjective identity. I will identify key features of the voice that are believed to enable this process, including the ‘sincerity’ that cultural theoretician Paddy Scannell takes as a sign of democracy, as well as the ‘spontaneity’, ‘transparency’ and ‘freedom’ that are all guarantors of vocal fidelity to the inner self of the speaker. In this particular period, when the influence of Habermasian philosophy on Giddensian ideology was strong, the formation of individual identity occurred within an ethos of empathetic inclusion and democratic participation of all voices equally in society, while the fear of political and media ‘spin’ and dishonesty placed more onus on the voices of theatre to demonstrate their sincerity, moral unimpeachability, and fidelity to a truthful individual identity.
I will demonstrate the above with regard in the first place to the way the voice is trained for performance in drama schools and the theatre industry by using the work of eminent voice trainers in the theatre such as Cicely Berry, Patsy Rodenburg and Kristin Linklater. Secondly, I will briefly illustrate how the processes and rhetoric of new writing theatres such as the Royal Court, the Bush, and the Soho Theatre, are evidence of how the scripting of the voice attracted highly moralised associations of freedom and iconoclasm, which were products of the onus on theatres' voices to be pure, truthful and trustworthy.
Liana Saif: Ficino’s Commentary on Plato’s Symposium and the Arabic Theory of Astral Influences
My doctoral thesis is on the impact of the theory of astral influences, as formulated by the Muslim astrologer Abu Ma’shar al-Balkhi (787-886), on the renaissance of magic. The work I am focusing on is the influential Book of the Great Introduction to the Judgments of the Stars; in which Abu Ma’shar proposes a unique theory that explains how the planets and stars influence the sublunary world. He utilizes Aristotelian physics to rationalize astrological predictions explaining that the world below is connected to the world above through formal causation. An astrologer is aware of the causal affinities between the planets and their effects on Earth and hence can make a prediction. This hypothesis was then taken up to serve a magical theory illustrated by influential texts on astral magic such as the Picatrix and Al-Kindi’s De radiis. Abu Ma’shar’s Great Introduction and these texts on magic were very popular amongst the occultists of the twelfth-century renascence and the Renaissance.
For this conference, I will focus on the third chapter which discusses the influence of this theory on the works of the magus/philosopher Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499). Current research has been focusing on the Neoplatonic discourse of Ficino’s astral magic; I will argue that the basis of Ficino’s theory is not Neoplatonism but Abu Ma’shar’s theory of astral influences and that Ficino employed Neoplatonic rhetoric to describe Arabic/Aristotelian conceptions on astrology and magic. Furthermore, current research has been treating Ficino’s Three Books on Life, in which the author discusses magical ways of prolonging life and bettering the health of intellectuals. I will argue that it is Ficino’s Commentary on Plato’s Symposium is his most magical work in which the theory of astral magic is most clear. Although the latter text does discuss talismanic and astral magic more explicitly, the influence of Abu Ma’shar and the Arabic works on Ficino’s understanding of astral magic and its relationship with the theory of generation and corruption is discussed more elaborately in the Commentary.
Lucy Scholes: Sister Texts: Wuthering Heights and The Parasites
As Juliet Meyerson, in her introduction to the 2005 Virago reprint observes, Daphne du Maurier's novel The Parasites (1949) bears a striking resemblance to Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights,written a century before in 1847. Despite publishing work that encompassed a multitude of genres, du Maurier remains primarily known as the author of Rebecca (1938), a gothic romance that owes an obvious debt to another Victorian classic, Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre (1847). Critics have made much of this connection, with particular resonance in the field of literary feminism, however scant attention, by comparison, has been awarded to her other Brontë-inspired text.
At the heart of both Wuthering Heights and The Parasites lie complex and often tempestuous sibling relationships oscillating between love and hate. The brother-sister dyads are envisaged as containing two halves of a single being leading to a familiarity in the other that is both comforting and threatening at the same time. In the first part of this paper I use Juliet Mitchell's recent work on siblings to explore the central role played by ambivalence in the relations between Brontë and du Maurier's fictional siblings. Mitchell revises Freud's original theory that sibling relationships are built on hostility and rivalry alone, arguing instead that love too plays an important part. Then, in the second part of the paper I explore how incest is both explicitly and implicitly configured in these texts arguing that the very structure of the novels themselves ultimately mimic the closed economy narratives that are being told.
By focusing on the brother-sister bond depicted in both novels this paper not only draws previously unmentioned parallels between the two texts, but also explores and illustrates new theories about the importance of sibling relationships and their structural dynamics.
Cathryn Setz: “A bird in the hand is worth two… on the lips? Leonardo’s Kite, Freud’s Vulture – and Max Ernst’s Life-long ‘Self’”
Archaeologists and palaeontologists speak of hominid bipedalism and note that the fossil record of our lineage documents the primacy of our two-footedness over the development of the human brain by at least two million years. Alphonso Lingus, in his work on avian intelligence, writes of something which connects foot and brain, or two feet and the brain. Such an approach brings to the fore an important connection – in natural science – between humans and birds. This paper, as part of a broader piece of writing aimed at making discursive links between animality in modernist and early modernist literature would try to focus on the ‘case’ of Max Ernst’s ‘bird-man’ self (called Loplop), and his obsession with Leonardo da Vinci’s dream of a bird – itself a curious moment in the “Great Master’s” canon. Ernst incorporates da Vinci through the bird. He appropriates – through the avian collection of characteristics both verbal and visual – the notion of the genius and artistry, even an origin myth is entwined in this circle of influence. Through comparison and contextual work I would open the question: in both Renaissance Italy and the European avant-garde, what do these birds mean? What of ‘meaning’ as inscribed within an animal – is the question of how language works here just as important? I would draw on Freud’s notorious 1919 reading of Leonardo, underlining the various birds which modernism puts into flight. This raises important questions of the ways modern art seeks to challenge coherent ideas of the human with its assumed superiority over nature, and the fact than even through Ernst’s bleakly destructive aesthetic of affective slippage with his scraped, pasted, etched, painted and textual birds – there is a story of something more freeing and important in the ways expression can overcome itself and look beyond the empty category of ‘human nature.’
Jonathan Tee: Amplifiers, loudspeakers, mics and tape: sound 'reproduction' – or doing new things with new types of sounds in the immediate post-Second World War period?
Following the initial invention of rudimentary devices of sound recording and 're'-production in the second half of the Nineteenth Century many more developments were necessary before these new auditory technologies had coalesced, around the 1940s, into 'sound systems' capable of producing high quality amplified stereo sound. These included, for example, the invention of microphones, amplifiers, loudspeakers, magnetic tape, stereo and the electrical recording process.
My research is concerned with exploring how these changes in the auditory resource sets available to people in the immediate post Second World War period altered how activity could be differently structured through the deployment of amplified sound. My theoretical approach to writing about sound is influenced by music sociologist Tia DeNora 's conceptualization of people 'doing things' with music, and my contention is that these changes enabled individuals to engage in different ways of experiencing, being in, and creating their surrounding world.
My paper will consider the nature of electrically amplified sound and its relation to non-electrical sound production. This will enable me to focus on one of the questions I am exploring in my research: did these new auditory technologies usher in an age of auditory 're'-production, of 'copies' and 'originals'? Or is it more useful to conceive of them as enabling the production of new types of 'original' auditory spaces, virtual horizons of sound that are deployed by individuals engaged in the active production of sound and meaning?
Tony Venezia: ARCHIVE OF THE FUTURE: WATCHMEN AS HISTORIOGRAPHIC NARRATIVE
This paper will read Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ graphic novel Watchmen as a historiographic archive. Watchmen foregrounds history as text by constructing an alternate historical timeline in which America wins the Vietnam War and Nixon is elected for four terms. The narrative schema emphasises its own textual materiality, shuffling genres, media and sub-narratives to compile a fragmented but coherent holistic sequence. This archival master narrative parodies, alludes, and comments on its own structural hierarchies of representation, constituted by a combination of textual addenda such as autobiography, journalism, and psychiatric reports, alongside the referencing of visual styles from the history of comics from the ubiquitous superhero, to pornographic ‘Tijuana Bibles’, to the notorious EC horror comics of the 1950s. An archive needs an archivist, and in this case the reader is partially guided by the figure of Rorschach, a detective flâneur who literally re-constructs the narrative for the reader as well as being profoundly implicated in the unfolding action. This narrative re-construction reveals tensions sequentially, visually and textually within the graphic novel, tensions that highlight the contingent qualities of the archive. I will attempt to explore the way the graphic novel engages with history and literary history, and is ultimately an open text - an incomplete archive. This paper will track these archival remnants, drawing on literary theory as well as formalist models of reading comics and graphic narratives within a historical and materialist framework that takes into account Watchmen’s status as a system of signification and a material object.
Isabelle Zahar: The Literae in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse: mutually-informing literary investigations into ‘textual loving’
Among the many types of lovers’ discourses complexly explored by Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, the spectral presence of the epistle – mediated, dictated, paraphrased, interpreted, and finally cited – is never far away, accompanying the affair from beginning to end with a sometimes enigmatic status. Despite taking up relatively little of the poem’s verse, the lovers’ final letters of complaint and curtailed agency ‘re-write’ and re-focalise much of their narrated text. Given the reader’s foreknowledge of the affair’s outcome, and the inevitable futility of such epistolary composition, what purpose might be served by Chaucer’s departure from his sources, and inclusion of the literae? This will be the first of several questions in the paper, the aim of which is to investigate how the staging of lovers as readers and writers is germane to the literary and ethical issues of the poem.
Through Troilus and Criseyde’s purported words, the poem’s reader is confronted with a withering exposé of love’s precariousness and equivocations. As such, Chaucer’s poem has confluences with Roland Barthes’ work, which reconsiders the ‘completely forsaken’ modern status of the lover’s discourse, even as it displays its ‘little narcissisms, psychological paltriness…its only grandeur is to be unable to reach any grandeur’. A crucial issue raised by Troilus and Criseyde’s correspondence is that of alterity, which emerges from an analysis of their texts as either loquacious (exhibiting a sort of textual promiscuity,) or as self-censuring (demonstrating a muffled protest against the strictures of language). It is thus that the paper starts to ask whether the ways in which medieval discourses of love centred on textuality, might be linked to the historical development of a twentieth century account of subjectivity that sees its ethics as one bound to otherness.