Abstracts
Alexander
Dunst (Nottingham)
Post-Schizophrenia, Post-Postmodernism: Dialogical Subjectivity and the
Return of the Other
Cultural
appropriations of schizophrenia play a central role in reformulations of
individual agency after World War II and react to widespread feelings of a
so-called ‘crisis of the subject’. The integration of this originally
medical term into theoretical and cultural discourses effects decisive
reversals in the usage of psychopathology: from the diagnosis of the
psychiatric patient and identification of the Other to the critical
examination of Cartesian theories of subjectivity. Schizophrenia thus
becomes a conceptual metaphor and narrative strategy for the theorization of
new subject positions.
Such
changes are reflected and perhaps most consistently expressed in Fredric
Jameson’s famous work on postmodernism, which adapts earlier theorizations
of subjectivity by Lacan and
Deleuze/Guattari, and presents the culmination
of a cultural symptomatology in critical theory.
Jameson’s conception of a schizophrenic subject places psychosis at the
heart of the human condition. The analysis in this paper of his writing from
the 1970s to the new millennium will point briefly to several critical
intersections: the importance of psychopathological discourses to concepts
of postmodernism and postmodernity; the dilemmas
of left theorizations of agency faced with a poststructuralist politics of
desire, traditional Marxist notions of revolutionary agency, and
contemporary ideas of intersubjectivity; and
finally, the role of psychopathology for re-articulations of the subject in
globalization and post-postmodernism.
This last
aspect, already visible in Jameson’s recent writing, will be explored in
more detail through Jonathan Caouette’s
autobiographical film Tarnation (2004).
Caouette’s documentary will be read here as a
paradoxical self-fashioning in line with a number of complex
Otherings of psychosis in contemporary cultural
production: a narrative re-construction of the self, it plays off current
notions of a “dialogical subjectivity” (Cf., for instance, Zima 2000),
themselves in many ways a reaction-formation to once
pathologized “fragmented” subjective experience, against traditional
images of schizophrenia as chaos and irrationality.
Eva Gruber
(Konstanz)
Repositioning the Racialized Subject
Since the
turn of the millennium, novels by authors as diverse as Jonathan Lethem (The
Fortress Of Solitude), Adam Mansbach
(Angry Black White Boy),
Joyce Carol Oates (Black Girl, White
Girl), Richard Powers (The
Time Of Our Singing), or Denzy
Senna (Caucasia)
clearly capitalize on race as a determining – if complicating – factor in
constituting and positioning the self. In what emerges as a
metadiscourse of the concept of race as such,
the texts appear to critically scrutinize the validity and test the limits
of constructivist notions of race and identity which dominated critical
discourse in the 1980s and 1990s. While certainly not heralding a return to
essentialist paradigms, they nevertheless seem to progress beyond the
(comforting liberal) notion of race as a cultural construct. Their
characters severely struggle with terms such as "construct" or "choice" as
opposed to "authenticity," as well as with the proclaimed fundamental
"unreality" of race in a world which confronts them with race's palpably
real consequences. Thus one of the Strom family's sons in Richard
Powers's
The Time Of Our Singing,
boys envisioned to be "charter citizens of the postrace
place," in retrospect reflects: "I'd been raised to believe in
self-invention. But any self I might invent would be a lie." Half a century
after the Civil Rights Movement, race as a (newly?) meaningful category –
rather than an empty signifier – apparently cannot be left out of the
equation. Frequently tied to a neorealist mode and partly in the form of
fictionalized biography or family chronicle, the texts thus shed a new light
on the racialized subject in contemporary
America.
Dennis
Kersten
(Nijmegen)
Life after the Death of the Author: The Adventures of Robert Louis Stevenson
in Contemporary Biographical Fiction
Over the
past two decades, biographical fiction about historical authors has acquired
prestige as a serious alternative to literary biography. While biographical
fiction as such can hardly be called a new development, many recent
fictional portrayals of authors’ lives are typical products of the times in
the sense that they thematise, if not
incorporate within fiction, contemporary debates about the status of authors
and texts. Without aiming to reverse the poststructuralist declaration of
the Death of the Author, these texts investigate new ways in which the
author’s life may return as a subject in the interpretation of his or her
fiction.
Analysing
two examples of the fictional portrayal of the nineteenth-century author
Robert Louis Stevenson (one by Alex Capus, and
one by Alberto Manguel),
this presentation will shed more light on how these novels make a
textualised Stevenson return as a character in
rewritings of his work. Biographical fiction about the author of
Treasure Island and Strange Case
of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde seems to both read Stevenson’s fiction
biographically and, vice versa, read his life through the metaphors and
themes found in his novels and stories. For my presentation, I am especially
interested in the question of how fictional portrayals of Stevenson try to
find a place for the author and the author's life in the reading of his work
- accepting, or even taking their cue from Roland
Barthes’ declaration of the Death of the Author. I will discuss how,
possibly as a consequence of a disillusionment
with scholarly researched and ‘objective’ literary biography, fiction about
historical authors like Stevenson fully explores the possibilities created
by the impossibility of objectivity in life-writing.
Sirkka
Knuuttila
(Helsinki)
The
Postrational Subject and the Challenge of
Expressing Traumatic Memory
Necessitated by our violent historical times, trauma narratives evoke the
idea of a postrational subjectivity rooted in
the historical referentiality of an embodied,
dialogical mind. This breakthrough is enabled by two sequential historical
developments. First, the textual prism of postmodern
self-ironical metanarratives dismantled the
Cartesian ego as the common dominator of knowledge and progress. Then, by
virtue of new neurophysiological research of the
human brain, a paradigmatic shift in understanding the functioning of human
consciousness occurred during the past decade. In the light of brain
plasticity due to continual gene expression, subjectivity is now not seen as
fragmented, but constituted by an autobiographical self, which is gradually
constructed upon a dialogical core self that gives the subject the feeling
of historical continuity.
My
paper explores the aspects of a postrational
subject as capable of perceiving and reflecting the interaction
of self/other in traumatic loss. Since mental functioning can never
be equated with that of the brain itself, I understand the empathic
subjectivity as continually reconstructed in human relationships
and cultural contexts. From this starting point, I propose that
non-verbal, multi-sensory cognition precedes our verbal constructions
of the world. Moreover, I suggest that emotion ubiquitously
pervades the cognitive activity of a socially competent,
empathic subject. As an example, I will examine the sensitive
power of figures of loss by using Friederike
Mayröcker’s late poetry. I will interpret
her metonymies as signs of the embodied mind of a
subjectivity, which is capable of expressing the double affect
of sorrow and love when bridging verbally the temporal delay typical
of traumatic memory.
Hanna
Meretoja
(Turku)
From
problematization to rehabilitation of
subjectivity in the French postwar novel:
Alain
Robbe-Grillet’s In the Labyrinth and
Michel Tournier’s The
Erl-King
In my
paper, I would like to examine how the notion of the subject as the source
of meaning and action was problematized in the
most important French literary movement of the 1950s and 1960s, the nouveau
roman, and how the active, meaning-giving subject was rehabilitated in the
1970s, in the work of the so-called new storytellers. Several critics have
noted a return of the subject, narrative and ethics after the heyday of the
nouveau roman. By analysing novels by two of the most important contemporary
French novelists, Alain Robbe-Grillet, the
leading figure of the nouveau roman, and Michel
Tournier, one of the most important new storytellers, I argue that
this return can be seen in terms of a hermeneutic
reconceptualization of subjectivity, that is, as manifesting a shift
towards a hermeneutic view of the narrative
mediatedness of the subject’s interpretative relation to the world.
Robbe-Grillet
wanted to cleanse the novel from stories and individual characters in order
to disclose the fundamentally meaningless, fragmentary and chaotic nature of
reality. In his In the Labyrinth (Dans
le labyrinthe, 1959) this can be seen e.g.
in the way in which its protagonist is reduced into a mere subject of
anonymous visual perception: for him, the world is a labyrinthine series of
disconnected images that he cannot mould into a meaningful continuum. I
would like to suggest that underlying Robbe-Grillet’s
conception of subjectivity there is a positivistic idea according to which
only that which is independent of human meaning-giving processes is truly
“real”. In contrast, from a hermeneutic perspective, endorsed by
Tournier, also the human experience of the world
is real, and largely narrative in form. Focusing on
Tournier’s The Erl-King (Le
Roi des Aulnes,
1970), I will analyse his view of humans as “mythological animals” whose
manner of orienting in the world is mediated by cultural sense-making
models; moreover, I will draw a parallel between
Tournier’s and Paul Ricoeur’s views on
the narrative constitution of subjectivity.
Markus M.
Müller (Trier)
Adolescence Forever Lost or Regained? Aging Subjects in North American
Novels
From the
days of ancient cultures into our 21st century, the images and
stereotypes around old age and aging – orginally
based on accurate reflection – have become fossilized. In our young
Millennium, however, we witness a changing scenario calling for more
diversified representations: Across Western civilizations, populations are
aging, while birth rates continue to decline and core families dissolve into
patchwork patterns. If many cultures have been fostering a youth cult, and –
especially in the 20th century – a parallel "ghettoization
of old age" (Chris Gilleard), the fact that the
older people are beginning to outnumber the younger ones has drastic
consequences: More fit, socially functional and demanding than ever, but not
(yet) exempt from the laws of biology, the growing number of aging
individuals is gaining political ground – and simultaneously seen as
mirroring a future human condition. Unprecedentedly
visible, and audible, these aging subjects have begun to alter collective
consciousnesses.
Current
American and Canadian novels interrogate many implications of societal and
personal aging. They do so in distinct narratives of loss and decline,
rebellion and adventure, in often astonishing reconfigurations of the old(est)
characters; they echo gerontological knowledge
and concepts, depict dementia, incontinence,
nursing homes, offer insights into the cultural constructions of race,
gender, age. Comparing ten texts in this context, I would like to pursue
questions such as the following: Can more traces of the myth of eternal
youth – as national mythopoeisis would lead one
to expect – be found in American samples, such as Philip Roth's The Human
Stain? If yes, is the departure by some characters into fantastic,
emancipatory journeys – cf. Suzette
Mayr's The Widows – part of a Canadian
equivalent? How instructive, realistic, upfront can these sometimes
allegorizing fictionalizations be? Finally, if late life is indeed a second
adolescence, as sociologists infer: Which existential qualities are
regained, which lost, by these aging / maturing subjects?
Anja Müller-Wood
(Mainz)
Being 'Me'
and Being Dead: The New Materialism in Contemporary British Fiction
The term
'material' abounds in contemporary critical discourse; however, is it all
too often exclusively applied to the world of (inanimate) objects and
things. Critics have focused at length on clothes, jewellery, books,
buildings, furniture, trinkets, tokens, vehicles, tools and machines as
sites where human experience is alternatively expressed or challenged, yet
in so doing they have avoided engaging with the materiality closest to home:
that of our bodies. Even the most 'subversive' conceptualisations of
subjectivity, with their underlying desire to transcend the material, hereby
perpetuate an age-old division between body and spirit, one that only a
thorough and consistent materialism may help to bridge. Materialism is not a
new worldview, but it has gained renewed momentum over the past two decades
thanks to the insights gained by the 'Life Sciences.' As we know from
neuroscience, cognitive theory and evolutionary psychology, subjectivity –
the sense of 'me-ness' – is essentially the product of the body: there is no
selfhood independent of the body, no epiphenomenal mind autonomous from the
brain. Whether we like the thought or not, the infinitely variable and
complex psychological experiences, social relationships and cultural
products of which human beings are capable are the result of our bodies'
intricate, almost instantaneous, and largely unconscious biochemical and
–physical operations.
Literature, as I will illustrate in my paper, has provided a particularly
lively forum for the exploration of this rapidly accumulating knowledge
about ourselves, so much so that it is possible
to speak of a 'new materialism' in British fiction. Jim
Crace's Being Dead (1999) provides a particularly moving
example for this literary trend – a novel which traces in minute and loving
detail its brutally murdered protagonists'
processes of decomposition and entwines this relentless process of decay
with a backward-looking reconstruction of key events of their shared lives.
However, despite its devastating premise, _Being Dead_ is far from a
pessimistic novel. Already the title of Crace's
book suggests that death possesses a vivid intricacy all its own; this is
subsequently explored as the novel affirms the characters' place in a larger
natural context whose harsh inevitability may be more dignifying than the
cultural rituals that seek to deny death. An ultimate physical fact that
cannot be transcended, death is nevertheless a powerful vehicle for the
workings of the imagination. In the novel, it triggers not only a
retrospective evaluation of two lives, it is also a source for their poetic
re-imagining, and as such allows Crace to
underline the function of art as a uniquely human answer to the devastating
reality that he so unflinchingly faces.
Sascha
Pöhlmann
(München)
‘The
Solipsist Errs’: Narrating
I² in Shelley Jackson’s Half Life (2006)
Shelley
Jackson’s first novel Half Life, published in 2006, creates a complex
parallel world which is not quite this one; it is populated by “twofers”,
siamese twins, who coexist with one-headed
“singletons”. Using Boolean operators as a structuring device, this text is
narrated from a unique first-person plural perspective, and it not only
raises questions of personal and social identities, but also demands a
classification that goes beyond the postmodern.
One way of doing so would be to use McHale’s distinction of modernist and
postmodernist fiction along lines of epistemology and ontology; in my
presentation, I want to argue that Half Life employs a variety of narrative
strategies that ultimately conflate the epistemological and ontological in a
vast meditation on identities and selves, combining textual and visual
devices to confront readers with a narrator whose unreliability is
unprecedented in more than one way, and indicating one way in which to think
beyond postmodernism.
Nicole
Schröder
(Paderborn)
Narrating (My) Self: Subjectivity in Recent American Novels
In recent
years, questions of identity and subjectivity as well as ways of
representing and constructing the self have become increasingly important
and also, in a way, increasingly ‘popularized’ with virtual platforms such
as MySpace, Second Life, Open BC or more
generally the genre of the blog offering
numerous possibilities (and reasons) to think about constructions and
representations of ‘the self’. What lies at the heart of these media, one
could say, is the ongoing construction of a self in a ‘textual’ form rather
than in a direct, face-to-face situation. Such a concern with the ‘textual’
dimensions of the self, the textual production of subjectivity, can also be
found in some of the more recent American novels. Here, too, the
construction and representation of the self through the act of narration is
a central concern so that acts of reading and writing as well as
intertextual references, often in a
self-referential manner, become important aspects of the novels and their
plots. Signs, letters, books, manuscripts and other texts play significant
roles as the characters attempt to decipher their multiple meanings. Hence,
images of locks and keys, of losing, hiding, searching and finding abound.
Looking at Jonathan Safran
Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005), Nicole
Krauss’ The History of Love (2005), and
Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in
Calamity Physics (2006), I will discuss this interest in the textual
dimension of the self arguing that there is a close relation between the
narrative construction of subjectivity and the textual fabric and narrative
structure of the novels.
Pieter
Vermeulen
(Leuven)
Beyond
Melancholy: Lyric Subjectivity in Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker
My paper
discusses Chang-Rae Lee’s 1995 novel Native Speaker as an example of
a broader attempt in the contemporary novel to find formal means to move
beyond the melancholy (de-)construction of subjectivity that dominated
poststructuralist and postcolonial theory and literature. Where the early
phase of poststructuralism considered the
subject to be structurally melancholy because of its
being-in-language, later forms of theory have been marked by an insistence
on historical losses and on legacies of suffering as crucial
components of subjectivity. I argue that one way to characterize the “post-postmodern”
novel is by paying attention to the formal means through which it construes
a model of subjectivity that is no longer determined by an investment in
loss, but that instead affirms the continuation of life beyond a life marked
by loss, and beyond the opposition between mourning and melancholy.
Chang-Rae
Lee’s novel is at the same time an ethnic novel chronicling Korean
American life in the late 20th century, a spy-thriller,
and a first-person memoir of love lost. While all three of these
generic indicators imply a certain melancholy refusal to let go
of a lost object (or of shared legacies of loss), I show how the
plot and the texture of the novel manipulate these investments in
order to arrive at a subject-position that has survived its determination
by loss. Taking my cue from Sara Guyer’s
recent theorization of the relation between the lyric and the notion
of witness, I designate this “lyric subjectivity,” which is sustained
by lyrical elements in the novel’s composition, as a “life beyond
life,” a subjectivity beyond consciousness, as a mode of life tied
to neither redemption from loss nor a continued melancholy investment
in loss.
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