Time: 5.00 pm

Venue: Royal Holloway, WIN005

A profound suspicion of narrative form is widespread in trauma studies. Not only is trauma seen as de facto inassimilable to narrative understanding, but also stories as such are frequently considered to be ethically problematic in their very attempt to make sense of traumatic experience, because the act of narration is taken to reduce something singular into an account that gives it a general meaning. This paper suggests that such a position largely depends on a subsumptive model of understanding, which underlies, for example, much of poststructuralist criticism of the violence of understanding. This paper explores an alternative, more hermeneutically oriented approach which may make it possible to rethink the ethical potential of storytelling.  The paper also discusses how the current suspicion of narrativity echoes the crisis of storytelling in postwar Europe, when a new generation of novelists (such as the nouveaux romanciers) felt that storytelling is inadequate in responding to the traumatic experience of the Second World War. Contemporary literature, in turn, may help us acknowledge not only the violent dimension but also the ethical potential of narrative. In the light of Julia Franck’s Die Mittagsfrau (2007, The Blind Side of the Heart), the paper analyses, in the post-Holocaust context, the way in which nothing in stories guarantees the actualization of their ethical potential and the way in which narrative identities imposed on us may lead us to repeat harmful emotional and behavioral patterns. The paper examines how seeing storytelling as a process of reinterpreting experience may allow us not only to acknowledge the temporal, inevitably unfinished character of storytelling, and its implications for confronting collective and personal trauma, but also to analyse when narratives enlarge the space of possibilities in which we can act, think and re-imagine the world together with others, and when they restrain or impoverish the possibilities open to us, reinforcing painful repetition of traumatic experience.

Hanna Meretoja

Professor of Comparative Literature, University of Tampere (http://www.uta.fi/ltl/yhteystiedot/henkilokunta/meretoja.html)

 Adjunct Professor of Comparative Literature and Research Fellow, University of Turku(http://www.hum.utu.fi/oppiaineet/yleinenkirjallisuus/en/personnel/meretoja.html)

Sur mes lèvres, Deafness, Embodiment:Towards a Film Phenomenology of a Differently Ordered Sensorium

Jenny Chamarette (Queen Mary, University of London)

This paper sets out to explore the relationships and contacts between a film phenomenology that rethinks the ordered sensorium of the audiovisual, and the persistent issue of situated bodiliness, in particular with regard to differently abled bodies. More specifically again, it aims to explore embodied representations of deafness in Jacques Audiard’s 2003 feature film, Sur mes lèvres (Read my Lips) and also in Nicolas Philibert’s 1992 documentary, Au Pays des sourds (In the Land of the Deaf). Drawing on feminist phenomenological theories of embodiment (Young 1989, Sobchack 2004) and recent work in disability studies and performance studies (Siebers, 2010, Kuppers 2003), this paper engages with cinematic presentations of bodies that experience sound and sight differently, and how those representations might challenge existing cultural delineations of ability and disability. Beyond the ethics of representation, my paper also returns to French film theorist and musicologist Michel Chion’s claim that film is primarily an art of sound, to challenge the bodily-normative implications of such a claim, and to examine the possibilities that a film-phenomenology of deafness might have for rethinking cinema’s connections to the embodied sensorium. 

Bibliography:

Butler, J. (1989), ‘Sexual ideology and Phenomenological Description: A Feminist Critique of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception’ in in J. Allen and I.M. Young (eds) The Thinking Muse; Feminism and Modern French Philosophy, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp85-100.

Chion, Michel (2005 [1991]), L’Audio-vision (son et image au cinema), Paris: Armand-Colin.

Chivers, S. and N. Markotic (2010), The Problem Body: Projecting Disability on Film, Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

Corker, M. and T. Shakespeare (eds) (2002), Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory, London: Continuum.

David, L. J. (ed.) (2010) The Disability Studies Reader (3^rd edn), London: Routledge

Ince, K. (2011) ‘Bringing Bodies Back In: For a Phenomenological and Psychoanalytic Film Criticism of Embodied Cultural Identity’, Film-Philosophy, 15.1, 1-12.

Kuppers, P. (2003), Disability and Contemporary Performance: Bodies on Edge

McRuer, R. (2006), Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, New York: New York University Press.

Paterson K. and B. Hughes (1999), ‘Disability Studies and Phenomenology: The Carnal Politics of Everyday Life’, Disability & Society, 14.5, 597-610.

Siebers, T. (2006), ‘Disability Aesthetics’ Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, 7.2, Spring/Summer, 63-73 URL: http://www.jcrt.org/archives/07.2/siebers.pdf

________ (2010), Disability Aesthetics, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

________ (2008), Disability Theory, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Snyder S.L. and D.T. Mitchell (2006). Cultural Locations of Disability, London: University of Chicago Press.

Sobchack, V. (2004), ‘Is Anybody Home? Embodied Imagination and Visible Evictions’, in Carnal Thoughts, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 179-204.

Young, I.M. (1989), ‘Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Bodily Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality’ in J. Allen and I.M. Young (eds) The Thinking Muse; Feminism and Modern French Philosophy, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 51-70.

Filmography:

Sur mes lèvres  (dir. Jacques Audiard, France 2003)

Au pays des sourds  (dir. Nicolas Philibert, France, 1992)

Telling, not seeing: blindness and travel writing

Charles Forsdick (University of Liverpool)

The paper is part of a larger project on travel writing and the senses. It draws on recent work in the field of the sensory humanities in order (i) to move beyond the now conventional criticism of the dominance of the gaze in travel literature, and (ii) to analyse the role of additional senses in the genre in the recognition of soundscapes, smellscapes and other reconfigurations of space. Taking as its focus a small corpus of travelogues in French produced by blind and visually impaired travellers since the early nineteenth century, the paper will explore the wider critical implications of exploring this material. Its aim is to highlight a residual discursive normativity in travel literature associated with the experience of the sighted traveller, but it will at the same time suggest the ways in which the travelogues of the blind and visually impaired often reveal sensory dimensions of the travel experience, and provide reflections on alternative modes of engagement with other places and their inhabitants, that are absent from narratives that privilege the visual. Attention will be paid to questions of class and genre, as well as of the historico-technological niche in which the journeys occurs. The French-language corpus will also be supplemented by reference to a number of English-language texts in order to permit comparative reflection on differing national and linguistic traditions. The paper will accordingly constitute a preliminary attempt to outline the wider implications for studies in travel writing more generally of increased critical attention to blindness and/in the travelogue.

Beyond the ‘Narrative of Overcoming’: Representations of Disability in Contemporary French Culture.

Sam Haigh (University of Warwick)

Recent changes in disability legislation in France – changes spearheaded, over the last decade, by the work of Julia Kristeva – have been seen as a sign that France is finally moving from a medical model of disability towards the social model that has predominated in an Anglo-American context since the 1980s. At the same time, within Anglophone disability theory, there has begun to be an interrogation both of the social model itself (for example in the work of Tom Shakespeare, Lennard Davis and Tobin Siebers), and of what many (such as David Mitchell, Sharon Snyder and Thomas Couser) now see as a normative, ‘narrative demand’ for representations of disability to be about the heroic ‘overcoming’ of personal tragedy. It is within this complex and shifting context that the paper proposed here will examine three contemporary French representations of disability: Alexandre Jollien’s philosophical text, Eloge de la faiblesse (1999); Delphine Censier’s photographic work and accompanying memoir, Je, Elle, Une Autre (2005); Luc Leprêtre’s popular novel, Club VIP: Very Invalid Person (2009). These are very different pieces of work, but what they have in common is a refusal to comply with the ‘personal tragedy’ model demanded by ‘mainstream’ culture, and a desire, instead, to represent disability in complex, nuanced and resolutely non-normative ways. What all of them suggest is that disability is far from being a personal tragedy to be overcome, but is a ‘normal’ – as in ordinary – facet of human experience, and one that, like all forms of human experience, can be simultaneously negative and positive; painful and pleasurable, desirable and non-desirable.

Disability and Sexuality: the poetry of Denis Sanguin de Saint-Pavin (1595-1670)

Nick Hammond (University of Cambridge)

In my short presentation on Saint-Pavin, who frequented the literary circles of seventeenth-century Paris, and who was a particular friend of Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné, I will explore the ways in which he places physical and sexual difference at the heart of his poetry. In one extended poetic self-portrait in particular, he describes his disabled body with almost forensic precision, and in other poems he combines imagery and direct evocation of disability with an equally unflinching representation of same-sex sexuality. Referring to the theoretical writings of Judith Butler and Tobin Siebers, I hope to show how the subjects of Saint-Pavin’s poetry rehearse to a large extent the idea of ‘emerging sexual identities’ (Siebers) that has played a significant part in Disability Theory.

Suggested Reading:

Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (London: Routledge, 1993)

Denis Sanguin de Saint-Pavin, Poésies, ed. Nicholas Hammond (Paris: Classiques garnier, 2012)

Tobin Siebers, Disability Theory (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011)

Ana García-Siñeriz, Esas mujeres rubias (2010): disability, gender, and the medical establishment

Abigail Lee Six (Royal Holloway, University of London)

Esas mujeres rubias [‘Those Blonde Women’] by Ana García-Siñeriz is a Spanish novel presented as a mother’s first-person account of losing her only daughter, Alma, at the age of fourteen due to a condition called Diamond-Blackfan anemia, characterized by short life expectancy and also extremely fair skin, stunted growth, and abnormalities in the upper extremities (Alma is born with one thumb missing). My paper will discuss three episodes which bear out – indeed, flesh out – current disability theory. The first illustrates how certain issues relating to disability can usefully be viewed as part of a continuum of attitudes to body-image and physical appearance more generally rather than considered in isolation. In that respect, disability and feminist theory intersect and can cross-fertilize. The second explores terrain shared with theories of illness, critiquing the medical establishment and status quo; and the third brings both of these overlaps together as we see how unchallenged gender-stereotyped ideas concerning motherhood underlie some medical and public health policies and priorities. Taken together, these three episodes endorse strongly the contention of disability theorists that to a significant degree, the disadvantage and suffering normally attributed to disability have at their core sociocultural attitudes rather than the unavoidable symptoms of a given condition.

Suggested Reading:

Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie, ‘Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory’, NWSA Journal, 14:3 (2002), 1-32

Moser, Ingunn, ‘Sociotechnical Practices and Difference: On the Interferences between Disability, Gender, and Class’, Science, Technology, and Human Values, 31:5 (2006), 537-64

Wendell, Susan, ‘Toward a Feminist Theory of Disability’, Hypatia, 4:2 (1989), 104-24

 ‘Raw data’: autistic aloneness and the category of insight in Elle s’appelle Sabine

Vivienne Orchard (University of Southampton)

Autism has been subject to an explosion of interest, of both cultural and scientific kinds, for a little while now in the Anglosphere.  The kinds of interest to which it has been party are both culturally indicative and strongly constitutive at a discursive level and take various distinctive guises.  Still lacking, though, in this picture, is research of a more cross-cultural nature, a project which some have called for and started to map initially (Grinker).  The cultural context I will focus on here is that of the ongoing dramatic political and institutional struggle taking place currently in France around autism.  Autism remains in a highly unusual position in France, caught up in a ‘delay’ which has ensued from an entirely different diagnostic approach to its causes and to clinical intervention.  In this paper, I will review the impact of the documentary Le Mur, la psychoanalyse à l’épreuve de l’autisme (2011) and the debate which has ensued since it has been banned. In order to explore the possibilities of documentary, as exposé and as testimony, I will then focus on the documentary Elle s’appelle Sabine (2006) made by the French actress Sandrine Bonnaire about her sister, Sabine, in relation to recent work in philosophy which argues for a rethinking of the value of the ‘raw data’ (Silverman) of personal and familial accounts of autism, in order to interrogate the category of ‘insight’, diagnostically, personally and politically.

Suggested Reading

Hacking, Ian, The Social Construction of What? (Cambridge MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1999)

Hacking Ian, ‘Why physics is easy and autism is hard’,  in F. Darbellay, M. Cockell, J. Billotte (eds),  A Vision of Transdisciplinarity: Laying Foundations for a World Knowledge Dialogue, 6–39, (Boca Raton, FL: Taylor & Francis, 2008)

Hacking, Ian, ‘Autistic Autobiography’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Biological Sciences, 364, 1522, 27 May 2009, 1467-1473

Hacking, Ian, ‘How We Have Been Learning to Talk About Autism: A Role for Stories’, 261-278 in Kittay, Eva Feder and Licia Carlson, eds, Cognitive Disability and its Challenge to Moral Philosophy, Wiley Blackwell, Malden MA and Oxford, 2010

Hacking, Ian, ‘Autism Fiction: A Mirror of an Internet Decade?’, University of Toronto Quarterly, 79.2, Spring 2010,  632-655

Murray, Stuart, Representing Autism.  Culture, Narrative, Fascination, (Liverpool: Liverpool Universitiy Press, 2008)

Nussbaum, Martha, Frontiers of Justice:  Disability, Nationality, Species Membership (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2006)

Osteen, Mark (ed), Autism and Representation, (London and New York, Routledge, 2007)

Silverman, Chloe, Understanding Autism: Parents, Doctors and the History of a Disorder, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011)

The pain of itching

Prof Naomi Segal (Birkbeck College, London)

For André Gide, writing in a journal entry of 1931, the pain of itching is that no one takes it seriously: it is comic rather than tragic. For psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu it is, like all skin conditions, an appeal (Le Moi-peau [The Skin ego], 1985). The biblical ‘leprosy’, the condition for which one was separated from society, is probably psoriasis, the problem from which Gide suffers, like Job or like Irène, the protagonist of Lorette Nobécourt’s La Démangeaison [Itching] (1994). The visibility of skin conditions is essential to their effect of stigma, even of the ‘stigma fall-out’ (Ray Jobling, 2000) that spreads to the subject’s human and physical environment just as dead skin cells shed themselves beyond the supposed borderline of the epidermis. But Irène turns the stigma to triumph through revolt and perversion, Gide uses the motif against his most saintly comic protagonist, and Job turns abjection to holy purpose. This paper will examine how being inside and being outside; visibility and sensation; submission and revolt, separation and sympathy, the social and the anti-social, gather around this most complicated of symptoms.

Suggested Reading :

Anzieu, Didier, 1995. Le Moi-peau (Paris : Dunod, [1985])

Gide, André, 1954. Journal III : 1939-1949 ; Souvenirs (Paris : Gallimard)

Gide, André, 2001. Si le grain ne meurt, in Souvenirs et voyages, ed. by Pierre Masson (Paris : Gallimard)

Hello (unsigned caption), 1997. 15 September

Jobling, Ray, 2000. ‘Psychosocial issues in dermatology’, in eds. Esther Hughes and Julie van Onselen, Dermatology Nursing: A Practical Guide (Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone), 93-101

JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh (Philadelphia PA: Jewish Publication Society, 2000)

Nobécourt, Lorette, 1994. La Démangeaison (Paris: Les Belles Lettres)

Richards, Peter, 1977. The Medieval Leper (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer)

Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1951. Le Diable et le bon Dieu (Paris : Gallimard)

Winman, Sarah, 2011. When God was a Rabbit (London: Headline)

On not being deaf to the blind

Kate Tunstall (Worcester College, Oxford)

This short paper draws on some of the material used in my recent book, Blindness and Enlightenment (Continuum/Bloomsbury, 2011), which focuses on the recourse to the figure of the man born blind in philosophical and literary writing in French in the early modern and Enlightenment periods. Drawing on this material, I ask whether for writers such as Montaigne, Descartes, Gassendi, La Mothe Le Vayer, and Diderot, blindness was thought of as, to use the term in the title of this research project, a tragedy, or not. Time permitting, I shall also consider by way of comparison a couple of novels that are not explored in the book, one from the late eighteenth century by Maimieux, the other by Collins, and perhaps make reference to a couple of movies. I hope also, as the title of the paper suggests, to be able to say something about the importance of metaphor.

Suggested reading:

Clark, Vanities of the eye (2007)

Collins, Poor Miss Finch (1872)

Diderot, Lettre sur les aveugles (1740) [in Eng. trans. in Tunstall, see below]

Jay, Downcast Eyes (1994)

La Mothe Le Vayer, ‘D’un aveugle-nay’ (1653) [in Eng. trans in Tunstall, see below]

Maimieux, Charles de Rosenfeld, ou l’Aveugle inconsolable d’avoir cesse de l’etre (1799)

Tunstall, Blindness and Enlightenment (2011)

Whose Disability? Challenging Stereotypical Representations of Epilepsy

Maria Vaccarella, (Centre for the Humanities and Health and Comparative Literature Department, King’s College London)

This paper aims at exploring the problematic application of either medical or social disability models to epilepsy, an often invisible neurological condition, which nonetheless might abruptly manifest itself in the form of seizures. Loss of motor control, shaking and incontinence, as well as bruises and wounds caused by sudden falling, suddenly and dramatically increase the visibility of epilepsy and have been associated with stigmatizing practices throughout centuries and societies. At the same time, contemporary cultural representations of epilepsy often resignify the convulsive body as a source of and vehicle for subjective illness depictions. These innovative ways of conceiving disability in literature and performing arts will be the focus of this analysis. Anticipated key themes will be the creative reappropriation of tonic-clonic movements and impairment of consciousness, the reconfiguration of medical voyeurism and the management of narrative unreliability.

-                    Rhodes, P., Nocon, A., Small, N., Wright, J., “Disability and Identity: The Challenge of Epilepsy,” Disability & Society, Vol. 23, No. 4, June 2008, 385–395.

-                    Stirling, J., Representing Epilepsy: Myth and Matter, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2010

Time. 5.00 pm

Venue: Royal Holloway, room WIN005

For the podcast of this session, click HERE.

The Day Nina Simone Stopped Singing is a semi-autobiographical narrative by Lebanese author Darina Al-Joundi, which recounts her coming-of-age during the Lebanese civil war and explores the entwining of socio-historical trauma and personal experience. Al-Joundi was raised in an unorthodox household: her father, a Syrian political exile, wanted to raise his daughters as “free women” in a society which made this “freedom” unrealizable, constraining Darina within other, equally harmful, stereotypes. The analysis thus examines the quest for one woman to find a secular “freedom” in a society characterized by religious conflict and gender inequality, and reveals this quest to be fraught with personal and social trauma. It will conclude by evaluating possibilities for “freedom” in exile in France, considering the extent to which Al-Joundi’s representation of the “free woman” challenges traditional dichotomies between East and West regarding notions of liberty, particularly as they are incarnated by women.

Whose Tragedy? Cultural Representations of Disability 

A ‘Trauma History Fiction’ Workshop

Royal Holloway, University of London

March 21^st 2013, 11am-6pm

Organised by Dr Hannah Thompson, RHUL

Received wisdom tells us that disability is a wholly negative occurrence to be avoided or cured wherever possible, a disaster which blights an individual’s life and causes terrible suffering and hardship. This way of thinking about disability, which has been defined as the ‘personal tragedy model’, is so pervasive as to have become the standard framework for defining and discussing disability. 

But recent work in Disability Studies offers an alternative way of conceiving disability.This new model, the ‘personal non-tragedy’ approach, works to challenge the meanings of notions such as ‘normality’, ‘cure’ and ‘beauty’ which underpin the negative way in which disability is traditionally conceived. In so doing, ‘personal non-tragedy’ seeks to valorise disability as a positive – even desirable – facet of individual and collective experience. 

This one-day workshop will explore ways in which representations of disability and the disabled in literature, film and the visual arts conform to or undermine the ‘personal tragedy’ model and how such representations might contribute to, or hinder, the development of the ‘personal non-tragedy’ model. ‘Disability’ will be understood in the widest possible way, encompassing, for example, physical and mental impairment, sensory deprivation, and conditions which are either permanent or temporary.

Questions discussed during the workshop might include: 

• What are the ethical implications at stake in the representation of disability?
• How is the reader or viewer implicated in such representations?
• Who can speak about disability? Does speaking about disability mean different things across the disabled/non-disabled divide?
• Are the two models exhaustive / mutually-exclusive / co-dependant? Are there other ways of thinking about disability?
• What is the role of the metaphorical or the symbolic in representations of disability? What are the implications of metaphorical readings?
• What is at stake in the experience of the reader/viewer/writer when discussing or responding to disability?
• Is ‘disability’ a useful term of reference? Is it possible to generalise disability to this extent? Would more specific terms be more or less helpful?

 This workshop will take place as part of Royal Holloway’s ‘Trauma Fiction History’ series (http://traumafictionhistory.org/) at c4cc, 16 Acton Road, London (http://www.creativecollaboration.org.uk/index.php). It is the result of thinking which began with the ‘Nineteenth-Century Monsters’ seminar in March 2010. (http://traumafictionhistory.org/2010/03/nineteenth-century-monsters/)

As well as providing a forum in which to discuss Disability Studies’ relationship to cultural production through a predominantly (although not exclusively) French perspective, it is hoped that this workshop will be the first step in establishing a network of colleagues working on Disability Studies in Modern Languages with a view to an eventual AHRC Networks Grant.

About the Organiser:

Dr Hannah Thompson is a Senior Lecturer in French at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has published widely in nineteenth-century French literature, and her second book, Taboo: Corporeal Secrets of Nineteenth-Century France is forthcoming with Legenda. She is beginning a new project on blindness in French literature and culture and is particularly interested in Disability Studies’ relationship with French Studies. Her blog ‘Blind Spot’ (http://hannah-thompson.blogspot.co.uk/) uses elements of the ‘personal non-tragedy’ model to highlight the sighted world’s fraught relationship with the blind and partially blind.

Participants

Dr Jenny Chamarette, Queen Mary, University of London

Prof Charles Forsdick, University of Liverpool

Dr Sam Haigh, University of Warwick

Dr Nick Hammond, University of Cambridge

Prof Abigail Lee-Six, Royal Holloway, University of London

Dr Vivienne Orchard, University of Southampton

Prof Naomi Segal, Birkbeck, University of London

Dr Hannah Thompson (Organiser), Royal Holloway, University of London

Dr Kate Tunstall, Worcester College, Oxford

Dr Maria Vaccarella, King’s College London

Programme

11-11:15 Registration and Coffee 

11:15-1:15pm Session One 

Whose Disability? Challenging Stereotypical Representations of Epilepsy

Maria Vaccarella (Centre for the Humanities and Health and Comparative Literature Department, King’s College London)

Sur mes lèvres, Deafness, Embodiment: Towards a Film Phenomenology of a Differently Ordered Sensorium

Jenny Chamarette (Queen Mary, University of London)

Beyond the ‘Narrative of Overcoming’: Representations of Disability in Contemporary French Culture.

Sam Haigh (University of Warwick) 

1:15-2pm: Lunch

2-3:30:  Session Two 

Ana García-Siñeriz, Esas mujeres rubias (2010): disability, gender, and the medical establishment

Abigail Lee Six (Royal Holloway, University of London)

The pain of itching

Naomi Segal (Birkbeck College, London)

‘Raw data’: autistic aloneness and the category of insight in Elle s’appelle Sabine

Vivienne Orchard (University of Southampton) 

3:30-4: Tea 

4-5:30 Session Three 

Telling, not seeing: blindness and travel writing

Charles Forsdick (University of Liverpool)

On not being deaf to the blind

Kate Tunstall (Worcester College, Oxford)

Disability and Sexuality: the poetry of Denis Sanguin de Saint-Pavin (1595-1670)

Nick Hammond (University of Cambridge)

For the podcast of Professor Provencher’s talk, click HERE.

Denis M. Provencher, Marie Curie International Incoming Fellow, Nottingham-Trent University & Associate Professor, University of Maryland, Baltimore County

Title: ‘Maghrebi-French Disidentifications: Queer Performances of Gender, Religion, and Citizenship’

Abstract
This talk builds on recent work in anthropology, critical discourse analysis, and performance studies to examine the queer performances of gender, religion, and citizenship by self-identified gay Maghrebi-French men from my recent fieldwork in France. As a point of departure, I draw on José Esteban Muñoz’s notion of ‘disidentification’, which he defines as a strategy of resistance that ‘works on and against dominant ideology’ and that ‘tries to transform cultural logic from within’ a dominant system of identification and assimilation (1999: 11-12). In my own analysis, I examine how two French interviewees of Maghrebi descent, Toufik (2Fik) and Ludovic, ‘disidentify’ or draw on and reshape dominant ways of being and belonging in contemporary France. First, I consider a series of interviews with Toufik (2Fik), a performance artist and photographer, who works from within dominant Western notions of feminism to rewrite longstanding images of Islam in France. I will also present a series of his parodic photographs, which capture encounters between ‘liberated’ and ‘conservative’ Muslims and question dominant images of the subordinate veiled woman, heteronormativity, and traditional masculinity associated with Maghrebi-French families. Next, I consider my interview with Ludovic Lotfi Mohamed Zahed, founder of the French association Homosexuels musulmans de France (HM2F), and analyze his recent essay/autobiography Le Coran et la Chair (2012) to show how his work as an activist, scholar, and religious thinker functions from within dominant Islam and readings of the Coran to reconstruct the ‘good’ practicing Muslim and ‘good citizen’. Indeed, Toufik’s and Ludovic’s stories will help us to see how they must ‘straddle competing cultural traditions, memories, and material conditions’ in their queer performances and they must devise ‘a configuration of possible scripts of self/selves that shift according to the situation’ (Manalansan 2003: x) in order to be heard both in contemporary France and in their families of origin.

When the First Player dissolves in tears as he recites scenes from the fall of Troy, Hamlet exclaims at the intensity of the actor’s identification, by contrast with his own frozen feelings and incapacity. Hecuba’s tragedy becomes the emblem of empathy, produced more intensely by dramatic representation than by real life.
Recent, near obsessive returns to the Iliad and the matter of Troy, refract current conflicts, and these renderings and revisionings act upon the emotions and attitudes of the spectator and the reader. Marina Warner will explore the way this return to the most ancient war in literature, especially in the work of women writers and artists, makes a claim for the function of art and realigns the question of catharsis.

Marina Warner is Professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex, and currently visiting professor at NYU Abu Dhabi. She is a writer of fiction, criticism and history, and her many publications include studies of art, myths, symbols and fairy tales, as well as novels and short stories. She is the author of (among others): Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976) a provocative and highly influential study of Roman Catholic adoration of the Virgin Mary; Monuments & Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form (1985); Managing Monsters: Six Myths of Our Time (Reith Lectures) (1994); No Go the Bogey-man: Scaring, Lulling and Making Mock (1998), a study of the male terror figure from ancient myth and folklore to modern obsessions; Signs & Wonders: Essays on Literature and Culture (2003); and Phantasmagoria (2006), which traces the ways in which ‘the spirit’ has been represented across different mediums, from waxworks to cinema. Professor Warner was elected a Fellow of the (2006), which traces the ways in which ‘the spirit’ has been represented across different mediums, from waxworks to cinema. Professor Warner was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature| in 1984 and of the British Academy in 2005. In 2008 she was awarded a CBE for services to literature, and is currently President of the British Comparative Literature Association. Her most recent book, Stranger Magic: Charmed States & The Arabian Nights, published by Chatto & Windus in 2011, is a groundbreaking study that shows how magic helped to create the modern world, and how it is still deeply inscribed in the way we think today.

Venue: Royal Holloway, room IN243

Speaker: Professor Colin Davis, Royal Holloway, University of London

Title: ‘Traumatic Hermeneutics, Jean Renoir, and the Memory of War’

Trauma poses one of the problems of interpretation in a particularly potent form: how can we tell that what we insist on finding is actually present in the interpreted work? As Thomas Elsaesser has put it, ‘If trauma is experienced through its forgetting, its repeated forgetting, then, paradoxically, one of the signs of the presence of trauma is the absence of all signs of it’. Trauma may be most devastatingly present when it is most vehemently denied. This paper sketches some of the methodological problems involved in interpreting trauma, and then looks more closely at some of the later films of the great French director Jean Renoir. After the critical and commercial failure of his masterpiece La Règle du jeu in 1939 and the invasion of France by Germany in 1940, Renoir moved to the US, where he lived for the rest of his life. The 13 films he made after 1940 have been largely neglected in comparison with his work of the 1930s. Some critics depict Renoir as having abandoned his earlier political interests, now preferring colourful, superficial spectacle to social commentary. The paper suggests that this is a misreading, and that the bright surfaces of Renoir’s later films screen – in the double sense of ‘mask’ and ‘put on display’ – traumatic experiences. Trauma inhabits these films even if it only indirectly disturbs their apparent cheerfulness.

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questions:

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Venue: 11 Bedford Square, room GSB2

Dr Ruth Glynn, Senior Lecturer in Italian, University of Bristol

‘Trauma and the Leaden Years’

The legacy of Italy’s widespread and prolonged experience of political violence in the period known as the ‘anni di piombo’ (years of lead, c. 1969-83) has begun to be interrogated through the prism of trauma theory. This paper sets out the case for pursuing such a reading of the anni di piombo as cultural and collective trauma paying close attention to issues of repression and hypervigilance in Italian cultural and legal responses to those years. It then turns to address, more specifically, the traumatic import of women’s participation in the political violence of the anni di piombo, with reference to critical perspectives on the roles traditionally assigned women in discourses relating to culture and nation.

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Dr Giuliana Pieri, Senior Lecturer in Italian, RHUL

‘Trauma and Memory after Fascism: Italian Art and Fascist Violence’

This paper will focus on Italian art in the period 1938-46 ca. As Italian Fascism entered its final phase, Italian artists began to show a  new violent imagery in their works. This paper will focus on war art and its contemporary and postwar reception as a means to interrogate the difficult and still debated legacy of Italian Fascism in Italy. I began to reflect upon the possible links between trauma theory and the reception of Fascism in postwar Italian culture when I curated the exhibition Against Mussolini: Art and the Fall of a Dictator (London: Estorick, 2010). Some of the images which will be the focus of my talk can be found in the exhibition website: http://mussolinicult.com

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Venue: 11 Bedford Square, room GSB2

Speaker: Dr Dora Osborne, University of Nottingham

Title: ‘What Remains: Trauma and the Archive in Contemporary German Memory Culture’

The archive stands in complex relation to history and fiction, perhaps no more so than when it carries the traces of traumatic impact. The notions of Trauma, Fiction, History, brought together in this research group, are of critical concern to post-1945 German Studies. In their configuration they ask questions of memory and witness, but also, increasingly and urgently, of the archive. What kind of archive material remains ‘after Auschwitz’? And how is this used by artists and authors in the attempted representation of Germany’s traumatic past? Drawing on examples from recent German-language literature (Durs Grünbein) and visual art (Anselm Kiefer), this paper will consider the relation of archive to Trauma, Fiction, History.

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Introduction by Colin Davis .

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Les Remords d’Oreste (1862), by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825-1905)

Date: Friday 13 May 2pm

Venue: 11 Bedford Square, room F1

Speakers:

Dr Katherine Ibbett, UCL, ‘Perp talk: Trauma and the triumph of Louis XIV’

Dr Joseph Harris, Royal Holloway, University of London, ‘Tragic trauma? Remorse, repetition and the Orestes myth’

On the face of things, there seems something ineradicably modern about trauma as a concept. Born, as ‘traumatic neurosis’, alongside modern psychoanalysis at the end of the nineteenth century, and revitalised within deconstruction at the close of the twentieth, trauma theory has also been shaped by a series of – it is sometimes supposed – uniquely modern catastrophes: World War I, the Holocaust, Hiroshima, Vietnam. So what if anything can trauma theory reveal of other historical periods? Is to speak of trauma in the early modern period, for example, merely to indulge in futile anachronism? Or can trauma theory still teach us something about early modern violence and the mental scars it left behind? More provocatively, perhaps, can early modern texts tell us anything of trauma theory itself: its assumptions, its blind spots, its own unspoken past? In the second of a two-part mini-series on ‘Trauma and the Early Modern’, Katherine Ibbett and Joseph Harris interrogate modern and early-modern discourses on trauma and the tragic.