TRAVEL
For directions and maps of Manchester and the campus, see
www.man.ac.uk/about/maps.html. The conference will be held in the Arts Building on Oxford Road (no. 24 on campus map).
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REGISTRATION
Registration fee: £10 (waived if BCLA membership taken up @ £14 Postgraduate/£25 non-Postgraduate). To register, please send a cheque, payable to 'BCLA' (for £10, £14 or £25), to:
Kiera Vaclavik
Department of French
University of Manchester
Oxford Road
Manchester M13 9PL
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PROGRAMME
As at 16 December 2002
10.30 - 11.05
Registration and Welcome
11.05 - 12.00
Introductory Plenary. Dr Rachel Falconer (Sheffield): 'Hell and Back: The Katabatic Imagination in Theory and Practice'
12.00 - 1.15
Session 1: Literary Undergrounds (Chair: Matthew Philpotts, Manchester)
David Ashford: '"By Train to Diss": Literature on the Infernal Underground' [Abstract]
Baryon Tensor Posadas (Singapore): 'Fragmented Narratives and Underground Spaces in the Fictions of Murakami Haruki' [Abstract]
Ursula Schmidt (Mainz): 'Peril and Protection: Subterranean Settings in British and German Children's Literature' [Abstract]
1.15 - 2.15
Lunch
2.15 - 4.00
Session 2: Conceptual Undergrounds (Chair: Mary Green, Manchester)
Jonathan Merrison (Exeter): 'Literary Underground, Fictional Underground: Nouveau roman and the Itinerary of Mise en abyme' [Abstract]
Sarah Dillon (Sussex): 'Palimpsestuous Forgetting: Freud's "Project for a Scientific Psychology" (1895) and the Structure of the Psychical Apparatus' [Abstract]
Timothy Guymer (Essex): '"Underground, Overground, Wombling Free": Laplanche, Fantasy and the Unconscious' [Abstract]
Sarah Dauncey: 'The Underside of Language: Twentieth-Century Theory's Utilisation of Silence' [Abstract]
4.00 - 4.30
Coffee
4.30 - 5. 45
Session 3: Cultural Undergrounds (Chair: Jo Carruthers, Manchester)
Barbara Lebrun (Manchester): 'The Visibility of the Underground: Contradictions in French Music Culture' [Abstract]
Rosie Corbin: 'Descent into the Underground' [Abstract]
Richard Byrne: 'Technology Going Underground: Perception and Imagination from Within the Trenches, 1914-1918' [Abstract]
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ABSTRACTS
David Ashford: '"By Train To Diss": Literature on the Infernal Underground'
This paper will argue that the London Underground has functioned in many fictional works of the past century as a contemporary Hades: an atavistic subterranean space built using the most advanced technology, where writers can realise and criticise the 'buried' evils of the modern metropolis.
The paper will begin by outlining the Underground's early history, describing how, between 1890 and 1910, spectacularly corrupt businessmen expanded the railways under the capital into a vast network. The tunnels were (and remain) dark, deep, stifling and crowded: built to transport a human cargo to its place of work, and back when no longer required. A modern Underworld was being constructed under the streets of London. Greedy and unscrupulous capitalists were forcing the working population into Hell.
The paper will demonstrate how Morris, Wells, Forster and Chesterton used this 'Infernal' Underground to denounce the evils of modern technology, to deplore the inequality and corruption of capitalist society, and to express fear at the threat of spiritual and physical degeneration. The paper will also draw attention to the Underground's role as an underworld of criminal activity in stories by Baroness Orczy and Arthur Conan Doyle.
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Richard Byrne: 'Technology Going Underground: Perception and Imagination from Within the Trenches, 1914-1918'
This paper will explore the necessity of 'seriously imagined' responses to the experience of the Great War on the Western Front due to the nature of its technological battlefield. It will show how 'going underground' seemed to many the logical outcome of the industrialism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Technology had been Man's tools of mastery of the earth, now its power sent men down into the earth out of necessity of self -preservation. Now man was blinded by the walls of earth around him, unable to perceive the technologies which oppressed his being. Inhabiting the earth in a literal sense, the solider began to portray himself in elemental terms. The combination of technology and the subterranean habitat eroded the soldier's sense of civilization, depriving him of his rational faculties. The return to the earth, as with this idea in post -war Nazi propaganda in particular, born to a great extent of that experience, effectively combines technology with anti-modernism.
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Rosie Corbin: 'Descent into the Underground'
In this paper I propose to look at descent into the underground, and specifically how the underground can become a haven for those much-maligned from the dominant section of culture that rules 'on ground'. Descent into the underground implies a physical retreat from the open into somewhere dark and secretive, but this is no Miltonesque hell. The subterranean alternative has a blood that flows beneath mainstream culture, and one that allows its subjects to be elevated beyond the restraints of not just the underworld, but of the commonplace 'world' altogether.
I will be looking at John Waters' Pink Flamingos, a film that celebrates the 'filthiest people alive'. The films centres around archetypal trailer park trash, the refuse of American society. The lead character Babs 'Divine' Johnson, a man in drag, does not operate within the strict boundaries of American 'normalcy'. Already villified, Divine throws all caution to the wind with fantastic aplomb, and embraces an alternative lifestyle. Johnson's descent into filth and squalor opts for the lowest common denominator and culminates in Babs eating dog faeces. It seems Babs has sunk as low as she can go, but inversely she has risen to become a success. Through his descent, Divine has not withdrawn from society, but has actually been elevated to star status.
I will be looking into the parallels between the grime and dirt of Babs Johnson, and that of the 70s punk scene. The disparate characters inhabiting the dark and dangerous CBGBs were unified by their difference. They found a language and lifeblood that would run counter to the discourse of middle America. In the UK, the punk scene appeared a more political movment, intent on kicking against and subverting the reigning regime. Descent is to dissent, and create a space of your own, a space that is not exclusive, but merely requires the understanding of 'good, bad taste', fabulous filth and all!
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Sarah Dauncey: 'The Underside of Language: Twentieth-Century Theory's Utilisation of Silence'
Twentieth-century theory is noted for its prepossession with language and signifying practices. This paper seeks to explore the subversive underside of such conspicuous theoretical concerns: the equal but more covert preoccupation with silence as language's precondition and 'other'. A fascination with silence amongst theorists is both extensive and diverse. Exemplary thinkers are: Wittgenstein, Freud, Benjamin, Blanchot, Macherey, Lacan, Steiner, Sontag, Irigaray, Kristeva, Spivak and Derrida.
Despite the variety of theory which makes use of silence, it can be categorised as either 'cultural' or 'ontological' following the import accorded to the motif. Within 'cultural' formulations - such as socio-economic, feminist, and postcolonial theory - silence is utilised to expose hegemonic operations, linguistic dispossession, and sites of repression. In contrast, theory discriminated as having 'ontological' interest in silence attributes to it a transcendental signifying capacity - disassociated from language's contingency - or, following poststructuralism, grants it a constitutive role at the heart of language.
These two approaches to silence can be regarded as mutually exclusive: the institution of the motif as an ineradicable aspect of language (exemplified by Derrida's philosophy) poses problems for 'cultural' theory which seeks to mobilise its radical properties; in turn, 'cultural' uses of silence put the poststructural muting of the subject into question because if all subjects are muted how can those silences as a consequence of oppression be exposed or recovered? Is it possible for these apparently mutually exclusive uses of silence to co-exist without disrupting each other's projects? This paper will attempt to forge a way out of the critical impasse residing between 'cultural' and 'ontological' conceptions of silence by putting them into dialogue.
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Sarah Dillon: 'Palimpsestuous Forgetting: Freud's "Project for a Scientific Psychology" (1895) and the Structure of the Psychical Apparatus'
'Palimpsest' is defined in the OED as 'a parchment or other writing-material written upon twice, the original writing having been erased or rubbed out to make place for the second; a manuscript in which a later writing is written over an effaced earlier writing'. What is significant about the palimpsest is that the effaced writing is actually still partially visible. The palimpsest is thus a textual structure defined by its doubleness, defined by its layered structure and by the existence of one text buried under another. From his early 'Project for a Scientific Psychology' (1895) through to his later discovery and metaphorical use of the child's toy named the 'Mystic Writing-Pad', Sigmund Freud was continually seeking a structure for the psychical apparatus which would allow for the contradictory requirements of both perception and memory. Arguing that in some sense Freud's 'Project' lies underneath all of his psychoanalytic writings, although it is not referred to in any of them, this paper engages with in what sense Freud thus forgot the project. If one considers the psyche and memory to be structured palimpsestuously, something we will see Freud strangely both can and cannot do, it becomes clear that memory is in fact inhabited, always already, by forgetting. The underground of the unconscious is thus not an eternal reserve and archive of all memories, but a stratified structure of forgettings.
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Timothy Guymer: '"Underground, Overground, Wombling Free": Laplanche, Fantasy and the Unconscious'
The Freudian Unconscious is presented by the programme for this conference as a theoretical presentation (one might even say Vorstellung) of an underground, and is indeed generally understood as the dark continent within, from which terrifying shapes and forms emerge to disrupt the smooth surface of consciousness.
Freud's summary of the therapeutic aim of the psychoanalytic process, 'wo Es war, da soll Ich werden' (where It/Id was, there I/Ego should come to be) disrupts this picture by presenting psychoanalysis as a process of incorporation of the contents of the Unconscious, structurally excluded, according to the 'Dark Continent' theory, from consciousness. Dreams are one of the elements which disrupt this radical separation as well as forming the interpretative focus of the analytic process (the closest part of the process to literary concerns), and as such figure heavily in this exploration.
Self-translation is particularly propitious territory for the exploration of these ideas from a literary perspective because of its direct implication of personal identity in literary processes, and because of the processes set in train by the writer's return to a text s/he is supposed to 'own'. This will be explored through Beckett's career-long relationship with his creation Godot, and his several returns.
Laplanche, through his insistence on the consistency of conscious and unconscious fantasy and his formula of detranslation and retranslation as the process and aim of psychoanalysis, will provide the main theoretical material for this paper, which will include an examination of Benjamin's Pure Language as embodied by the self-translator.
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Barbara Lebrun: 'The Visibility of the Underground: Contradictions in French Music Culture'
Appearing in the 1980s in France, the French rock music style of rock alternatif was initially set up in 'independent' labels which refuted the profit-led mediatization of mainstream music and sought another way to develop their artists, relying especially on the word of mouth. The genre gained an iconic 'underground' status as its absence from TV and radio broadcast legitimized its anti-capitalist and protest discourse.
This identity, however, soon proved problematic as music majors bought over these 'independent' labels. Moreover, as some artists sought to develop their careers further, they were confronted by the commercial reality of their profession. In addition, the French tradition of expressing 'resistance' in cultural objects gradually legitimized and somewhat 'coopted' rock alternatif, making it visible in official and elite circles.
This paper examines the contradictions shaping the 'underground' identity of French rock music. It underlines the fact that this identity is a social and cultural process arising from conflicts between the media, the artists and the audience. Examples taken from audience research carried out in 2000 show that music audiences, in particular, create meaningful but reductionist definitions as to what constitutes an 'underground' music culture. Following Bourdieu, this paper highlights the social constructedness of cultural identities, and the inherent elitism to identifying quality and 'dissidence' in presumably 'hidden' places.
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Jonathan Merrison: 'Literary Underground, Fictional Underground: Nouveau roman and the Itinerary of Mise en abyme'
The underground: 'characterized by avant-gardism and experimentation, the rejection of current trends or norms, anti-establishment tendencies and minority appeal'. What better describes the French nouveau roman?
The underground: 'under the surface of the ground'. One possible approach to the study of the fictional underground is Genette's model of diegetic stratification. The fictional ground is diegesis: fictional reality. What lies above is the extradiegetic: reality. The fictional underground is an unlimited stratification: metadiegesis, metametadiegesis, metametametadiegesis, ad infinitum. This is the domain of the mise en abyme, figure par excellence of the fictional underground, emblem of the literary underground.
The mise en abyme proliferates in the nouveau roman due to its propensity to subvert diegetic stratification. Lucien Dällenbach and Jean Ricardou develop a conception of mise en abyme based on the subversion of Genette's model. But because of the figure's tendency to subvert the conditions responsible for its coming-into-being, the foundations of their model tend to shift under the weight of the conception developed. We are confronted with a double conception: mise en abyme A, the point of departure, dependent on diegetic hierarchy; mise en abyme B, the point of arrival, independent of diegetic hierarchy. For Ricardou, the shift from mise en abyme A to mise en abyme B is emblematic of the radicalization of the nouveau roman. But I will argue that because of the essentially subversive nature of mise en abyme, conception A is incoherent, conception B inapplicable. In my analysis of Triptyque by Claude Simon, crucial in the nouveau roman's articulation with the nouveau nouveau roman, I will show that where there is mise en abyme there is neither classical stratification nor post-modern non-stratification but both tendencies concurrently.
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Baryon Tensor Posadas: 'Fragmented Narratives and Underground Spaces in the Fictions of Murakami Haruki'
Much has been written on the concern for notions of individual identity and their fragility in the fictions of Murakami Haruki (1949- ). This struggle of the individual narrative with the threat of conflation with the metanarrative of the Japanese state or 'system' is reflected in Murakami's use of images of underground spaces.
These images of underground spaces permeate the fictions of Murakami. However, there are a number of variations of these that can be found in his novels. Two dominant images are the subway tunnels of Tokyo seen in his two longest novels Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985) and the wells in his The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1995). This paper is concerned with how Murakami uses these images of underground spaces in his fiction as conduits to a hidden 'other world' of fragmented memory and identity. It contrasts the simultaneously self-sufficient and alienating maze-like space of the subway system and the pockets of 'lost' spaces of the wells and their narrative functions. Subsequently it shows how, in their juxtaposition, Murakami's exploration of fragments of forgotten narratives/histories (such as those relating to World War II in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle) that have been marginalized and excluded by the ideology of this metanarrative of the Japanese state is given shape.
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Ursula Schmidt: 'Peril and Protection: Subterranean Settings in British and German Children's Literature'
Subterranean worlds belong to the most popular exotic settings in British children's literature. They can represent both shelter and peril, sometimes even simultaneously. In animal stories or stories featuring nonhuman characters, caves, warrens and burrows are the natural habitat of the nonhuman protagonists. Therefore, these underground places mostly take the form of cosy homes symbolizing shelter, protection and a feeling of belonging.
In the context of adventure stories, however, a subterranean setting usually adds to the element of danger and threat to the protagonist's life. Deserted mines, labyrinths and caves differ profoundly from the well-known surroundings of child protagonists. They do not have to be far away but can be situated nearby. This closeness to the everyday realm of experience or the supposedly safe surface heightens the feeling of disturbance connected to the potential or often very concrete danger.
In J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit these two different aspects occur within the same text, namely in the form of Bilbo Baggins's dwelling and the tunnels in which he meets Gollum. The opposing natures and functions of subterranean settings can also be found in the works of German authors writing for children, such as Michael Ende and Walter Moers. The aim of this paper is to show that in British and German children's books underground worlds reflect the confusion young protagonists experience in their childhood and adolescence. Especially the labyrinths in William Nicholson's Firesong (2002), the third part of his The Wind on Fire trilogy, and in Walter Moers' Die 13½ Leben des Käpt'n Blaubär (1999; translated as The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear) are not only places of initiation but also represent the complexity of the process of growing-up.
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CONFERENCE CO-ORDINATORS
Kiera Vaclavik (
kiera.e.vaclavik@stud.man.ac.uk)
Jonathan Hensher (
j.d.hensher@stud.man.ac.uk)
Joseph McGonagle (
joseph.m.mcgonagle@stud.man.ac.uk)
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