Abstracts
Majestic Methodology
Sandra Paziewicz
MSc in Literature and Modernity
Social function of electronically based literary artworks in postmodern capitalism: An interdisciplinary approach to Digital Humanities
While the new discipline of Digital Humanities praises technological advancements for creating possibilities of innovative interactions with literary texts, it does not engage sufficiently with social and political implications of digital expansions. In my research, I consider the impact of technological developments on literary studies and its implications in a wider socio-cultural context. I aim to scrutinize the aesthetics of text in digital form, its reception, production, and possible consequences for literary studies. I argue that democratization and commodification of literature, enabled by new technologies, is responsible for the dramatic shift in the social function of literature. I scrutinize ‘electronic literature’ and argue that it is ruled by what I call the aesthetics of liberal democracy. Perhaps, with the advent of the mass media and the internet, the traditional moral function of literary artwork is vanishing.
10 min. paper
Pablo San Martín
PhD in English Literature
Exploring the Enlightenment from intellectual history and critical theory
My paper will focus on the methodological problems and tentative solutions that have come up during the writing of my PhD dissertation. These problems have mainly arisen because of the attempt I have made at bringing together the methods of critical theory and intellectual history in the study of the conceptions (and consequent attitudes and uses) of myth in the work of Percy Shelley. Inspired by the conceptual framework of the Dialectic of Enlightenment by Adorno and Horkheimer, I originally set out to show how the modern concept of myth was produced by the enlightened critique of the truth-value of myths (sometimes including the Bible), and how simultaneously enlightened consciousness defined itself in this process of negation. This formed the bulk of my first chapter, which deals with Shelley’s early critique of religion and his sources in Hume, d’Holbach and Godwin. It soon became apparent, however, that these critiques of myth, although related by means of direct influence, were coming from very different places, and could not be properly understood isolated from their social, cultural and intellectual contexts―namely, the Scottish, French and English Enlightenments. Ever since I have been exploring the tension between the Enlightenment (with a capital E) as a cultural phenomenon and the highly dehistoricised concept of enlightenment as mental process or type of consciousness employed by Adorno and Horkheimer.
10 min. paper
Jing Jing
PhD in Chinese Studies (1st year)
Discourse analysis in exploring China-EU relations: A methodological approach
Rule-oriented Constructivism is a branch of constructivist theories in the realm of international relations studies initiated by Nicolas Onuf in 1989. Its core arguments include: speech acts can generate rules, and rules yield rule (relationship patterns).1 This paper discusses the possibility and feasibility of a methodological approach which synthesizes this theoretical framework with critical discourse analysis in international relations studies.
The paper consists of four sections: the first section discusses the compatibility of rule-oriented constructivism and critical discourse analysis. The ontological and epistemological bases of both will be presented in order to see whether they can be well-accommodated into each other. The second section presents the analytical framework designed in the form of a stream-lined process guide for discourse analysis. The third section presents sample discourse analyses applying this analytical tool. The last section discusses the advantages and weakness of this analytical model and seeks further improvements.
1 Onuf, N., 1998. Constructivism: A User's Manual, in ed. N. O. P. K. Vendulka Kubálková, International Relations in a Constructed World (Armonk; London: M. E. Sharpe), pp. 58-78.
Eystein Thanisch
PhD in Celtic Studies (3rd year)
‘That which is to come has already been’: Time, knowledge and genealogy and how these diffract the study of medieval authorship
My PhD focuses on the understanding and use of the eleventh-century poet-historian Flann Mainistrech (ob.1056) as an authority in later medieval Gaelic historiography. The idea of the individual human author (and, indeed, the individual generally) in the Middle Ages – and thus the very structure of my research – is, however, deeply problematic.
In this paper, I examine a text that can be read as a radical de-individualisation of Flann. In Echtra Theidg Mheic Chéin (‘the adventure of Tadg son of Céin’), a little-known late medieval Gaelic romance, Flann’s legendary ancestor, Tadg, visits a fantastical island inhabited by notable characters from medieval Irish historiography who are possessed of apparently supernatural knowledge of its past and future. The structure and focus of history, as presented in this episode, are closely comparable to the structure and focus of Flann’s scholarship. While thus functioning as an origin legend for the intellectual achievements of Tadg’s descendants (the Ciannachta), what does this text imply about authorship? If the structure of history is pre-ordained and insight into it is heritable property, what does it mean to say Flann is its author? In this paper, I argue that Echtra Theidg Mheic Chéin illustrates, on an epic scale, the identities and narratives involved in the medieval conception of the production of historiography that must be negotiated in order properly to appreciate the evidence for the period’s authors and texts.
The Screen under Scrutiny
Michelle Devereaux
PhD in Film Studies
The middle-aged man and the sea: Nature and nostalgia in Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic
Wes Anderson’s 2004 film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou offered the filmmaker a career-unprecedented opportunity to immerse himself in romantic ideas of the natural world. Undoubtedly, the film’s primary aesthetic fixation is that of the kaleidoscopic wonders of the sea, whose treatment is anything but naturalistic. While the worlds of nature and culture are rigidly demarcated at times, they have a profound influence on one another, suggesting a grappling with the loss of the primal essence and sublime experience that characterises so much of Anderson’s vision of humanity.
This paper focuses on the uncanny qualities of The Life Aquatic’s mise en scène, its embrace of modernist ideals of historical progress in narrative, and how both contribute to Anderson’s vision of the sublime. These concepts are related to Freud’s definitions of the aesthetic uncanny, Edmund Burke’s original notions of the sublime and beautiful, and Frederic Jameson’s encapsulation of the postmodern “hysterical sublime.” My paper concludes that, while Anderson toys with a repudiation of human-centric ideas of idealised nature, the film eventually embraces these notions. It displays a picturesque, nostalgic view that undermines sublimity even while containing a strong undercurrent of anxiety about the terror-inspiring mysteries of existence.
James Mooney
MSc by Research in Film Studies
Bertolucci's cave: A Platonic reading of The Conformist (1970)
Halfway through Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (Il Conformista 1970) the protagonist, Marcello Clerici, visits the Parisian home of his former teacher, Professor Quadri. After entering his study, Clerici recounts Quadri’s lectures on Plato’s allegory of the Cave. In what follows, Bertolucci presents us with an explicit visualisation of Plato’s Cave.
I will argue that Bertolucci’s inclusion of the pivotal “cave scene” sets up an analogy between Plato’s Cave and Mussolini’s Italy, which is reinforced throughout the film by various visual elements. Furthermore, I will show how Bertolucci’s use of light and shadow, as well as the motif of blindness and sight, function to emphasise the Platonic distinction between truth and error, as well as the relationship that each of the main characters has to these states. I also claim that the complex narrative structure of the film functions to mirror both Clerici’s epistemic state and the journey of Plato’s philosopher, allowing the spectator to identify with both. Finally, will conclude that, by identifying the source of liberating knowledge as knowledge of the self, rather than the abstract Platonic Forms, The Conformist does not merely illustrate Plato’s original thought experiment, but updates it and, as such, makes a valuable contribution to philosophy.
My paper will be supported by the following video-essay: https://vimeo.com/87781445
Mei-Ling McNamara
PhD in Trans-Disciplinary Documentary Film
Liminal states, invisible acts: Forced labour, trauma and the politics of modern-day slavery in the UK
Britain has seen a dramatic rise in trans-national criminal gangs targeting the most impoverished, vulnerable and frequently ‘invisible’ migrant populations who provide cheap labour to Britain’s hidden industries. Victims also remain targets for criminalisation – by the gangs that exploit them and the authorities that seek their removal. Yet despite the fact that over 5,000 people are being held in forced labour at any one time in the UK, few have ever been prosecuted for labour trafficking crimes, and no victims have received compensation in UK employment courts. These migrants inevitably inhabit a twilight existence – and their testimonies, often marred by psychological trauma, are challenged by an institutional culture of disbelief within the British justice system.
Documentary film plays an important role in highlighting the hidden human rights abuses that exist in labor slavery today, giving a face to Britain’s ‘other’ workers living inside the country’s shadow economy. A 20 minute paper on recent PhD documentary work on the subject, including brief film excerpts from a new documentary-in- progress, highlighting the plight of Bangladeshi men trafficked into Scotland’s hotel industry, will serve as a basis for discussion on this important issue facing the UK.
People and Politics on Paper
Saverio Leopardi
PhD in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies (1st year)
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and its struggle against marginalisation
Once the main leftist competitor of Yasser Arafat’s formation Fatah within the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the PFLP is today a marginal actor within the spectrum of Palestinian politics. This process of decline started after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon which led to the eviction of all the Palestinian factions from their headquarters in Beirut. Current historiography fails to address this issue and neglects how the PFLP strived to invert this process, a top priority for this formation during the last three decades.
Bearing this latter point in mind, the goal of this paper is to illustrate PFLP’s agenda at the beginning of its decline and also why the first attempt to retain its political weight, namely the creation of an alternative front to Arafat’s growing power in the early Eighties, eventually failed. After an overview on PFLP’s ideology and history before 1982, this paper will treat its attempt to coalesce with other leftist factions, the alignment with Syria aimed at forming a radical block at a regional level and finally PFLP’s commitment to the defence of Soviet role in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Thanks to an extensive study of PFLP’s official publication, it is possible to individuate the factors which thwarted its project in the tendency of the Palestinian left to factionalism, Syrian hegemonic policies and Soviet instrumental support to Palestinian demands.
Far from being exhaustive, this research is the first step on the way for a comprehensive study on the more recent political course of the PFLP.
Deirdre Stack-Marques
MSc in Comparative and General Literature
Voices of the people?: The representation of rural society in the works of Ivan Turgenev and Halldór Laxness
The authors Ivan Turgenev and Halldór Laxness are key figures in the literary traditions of 1850s Russia and 1930s Iceland respectively. Inspired by their travels around Europe and beyond in their youth, their early writing careers were founded upon the plight of the downtrodden peasant of rural society, the victim of unrelenting labour and political corruption.
Turgenev and Laxness may focus on the traditions and structures of rural society, but their novels reject any rose-tinted depictions based upon nostalgia or sentimentalism. Instead, rural folk become the symbol of the need for progress: the authors' early novels mark the beginning of their search for a place for the people and traditions of their homelands in a modern world and society. Therefore, I argue that Turgenev and Laxness act as the voices of their countrymen precisely because they point the way towards the future of the people of Russia and Iceland.
10 min. paper
Fiona Hobbs Milne
MSc in Literature and Society
Rethinking state censorship?: Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man and his sedition trial of 1792
In December 1792, Thomas Paine was put on trial for sedition for his Rights of Man. Although absent from court, Paine was found guilty and his book suppressed, in a landmark show-trial of English censorship history.
There is a general scholarly consensus that state censorship is an unsophisticated, purely top-down act of power. I hope to complicate this, by showing that the censorship of The Rights of Man is better understood as ‘productive’ and ‘distributive’. Paine’s polemic anticipates and responds to the climate of censorship of the 1790s, so that The Rights of Man is shaped by what it condemns: trial and text mutually enable one another. The power dynamics at work in Paine’s trial, far from showing the legal process to be stable and totalizing, are dialogic and playful, and suggestive of Bakhtinian heteroglossia. This is brought out by my reading of the trial itself as a literary product.
10 min. paper
Emily Anderson
MSc in Comparative and General Literature
The 1916 Shakespeare tercentenary celebrations in England and Scotland: How British was Shakespeare during the Great War?
The commemorative celebrations for the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death that took place in 1916 were vital to England’s mobilisation for total war (Habicht 449). Commentators used Shakespeare’s figure and works as symbols of the British Empire’s unity and power, and also linked him to a nationalistic, idealised image of Englishness (which they contrasted with highly critical views of German culture) (Hendley 25-26). In my research, I ask ‘did Shakespeare’s figure and works contribute to cultural mobilization in Scotland during the Great War in the same way that they did in England?’
To gauge attitudes to the tercentenary, I apply content and discourse analysis to a large range of texts addressing the celebrations, from newspaper articles to sermons. In general, Scottish observers treated Shakespeare as a cultural possession and suggested his importance as a symbol of imperialism. They reflected English writers’ attitudes, indicating that Shakespeare was seen as ‘British’ rather than ‘English’ during the Great War.
I elucidate Shakespeare’s association with the synecdoche that presents ‘English’ as ‘British.’ I also clarify the extent to which Shakespeare united English and Scottish culture at a historical moment when Britain’s unity, and the unity of the British Empire, was of especial political importance.
Works Cited:
Habicht, Werner. “Shakespeare Celebrations in Times of War.” Shakespeare Quarterly 52.4 (2001): 441–55. Print.
Hendley, Matthew C. “Cultural Mobilization and British Responses to Cultural Transfer in Total War: The Shakespeare Tercentenary of 1916.” First World War Studies 3.1 (2012): 25–49. Print.
Reflections on Reception
Susanna Grazzini
Between an MSc in Italian Studies (completed) and a PhD in Italian Studies
Acquainted with Carlo Emilio Gadda: The atypical reception and translation of an Italian modernist in the English-speaking world
Carlo Emilio Gadda is considered one of the most innovative writers of the 20th century thanks to his originality in language and content: pluristylism, lively expressionism, richness of dialects and different registers, philosophical and psychological references are his recognised trademarks. Although many scholars have underlined the relevance and the affinity with the greatest realists, modernists and postmodernists (such as Cervantes, Swift, Balzac, Joyce, Kafka, Conrad, Céline and Beckett), his circulation and reception emerge as a crucial issue and this is also intensified by an unresolved inclusion in the canon of European literature.
Many aspects of Gadda’s life and production have been taken into consideration in order to clarify his limited reception in the Anglophone world: the scarce number of English renditions, the alleged inadequacy of William Weaver’s translations, the author’s intrinsic untranslatability, and the mismatch between Gadda’s narration and the interests of the wider readership in the English-speaking world. In the present work, I aim to re-evaluate previous positions on Weaver’s translations and to provide a possible answer to one of the core questions: Why is Gadda still unrecognized while Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco (to name but two writers that were extensively translated by Weaver himself) are so widely and successfully known?
Lana Orešić
PhD in Literature, Performing Arts, Film and Culture (3rd year) at the University of Zagreb, Croatia, and visiting research postgraduate student at the Sanskrit Department in Asian Studies, LLC
What's love got to do with it?: Questioning traditional interpretation of the Gāhākosa, an anthology of classical Indian love poetry
The Gāhākosa is a 2nd century anthology of classical Indian poetry (kāvya) written in the Prakrit (Middle Indo-Aryan) language. It is traditionally taken to be a collection of love poems, presenting themes such as lovers’ first glances, secret meetings, married love and infidelity. Among these, it also includes poems which simply give general statements about life, the character of people or descriptions of natural scenes, etc. However, due to its reputation as a guide in all matters of love, its commentators from later centuries tend to interpret all the anthology’s pieces as love poems. They thereby introduce characters and set up contexts for them which are very distant from what is actually stated in the poems.
In my paper I will explore some existing interpretations of the poems by traditional commentators and those found in relevant treaties of poetics, where they are explained as love situations, presenting the logic that seems to be employed in attributing such interpretations, especially referring to the theory of suggested meaning or dhvani.
In conclusion, I shall present my own views on the extent to which it is advisable to adopt or ignore this type of interpretation of the Gāhākosa.
Sandra Paziewicz
MSc in Literature and Modernity
Social function of electronically based literary artworks in postmodern capitalism: An interdisciplinary approach to Digital Humanities
While the new discipline of Digital Humanities praises technological advancements for creating possibilities of innovative interactions with literary texts, it does not engage sufficiently with social and political implications of digital expansions. In my research, I consider the impact of technological developments on literary studies and its implications in a wider socio-cultural context. I aim to scrutinize the aesthetics of text in digital form, its reception, production, and possible consequences for literary studies. I argue that democratization and commodification of literature, enabled by new technologies, is responsible for the dramatic shift in the social function of literature. I scrutinize ‘electronic literature’ and argue that it is ruled by what I call the aesthetics of liberal democracy. Perhaps, with the advent of the mass media and the internet, the traditional moral function of literary artwork is vanishing.
10 min. paper
Pablo San Martín
PhD in English Literature
Exploring the Enlightenment from intellectual history and critical theory
My paper will focus on the methodological problems and tentative solutions that have come up during the writing of my PhD dissertation. These problems have mainly arisen because of the attempt I have made at bringing together the methods of critical theory and intellectual history in the study of the conceptions (and consequent attitudes and uses) of myth in the work of Percy Shelley. Inspired by the conceptual framework of the Dialectic of Enlightenment by Adorno and Horkheimer, I originally set out to show how the modern concept of myth was produced by the enlightened critique of the truth-value of myths (sometimes including the Bible), and how simultaneously enlightened consciousness defined itself in this process of negation. This formed the bulk of my first chapter, which deals with Shelley’s early critique of religion and his sources in Hume, d’Holbach and Godwin. It soon became apparent, however, that these critiques of myth, although related by means of direct influence, were coming from very different places, and could not be properly understood isolated from their social, cultural and intellectual contexts―namely, the Scottish, French and English Enlightenments. Ever since I have been exploring the tension between the Enlightenment (with a capital E) as a cultural phenomenon and the highly dehistoricised concept of enlightenment as mental process or type of consciousness employed by Adorno and Horkheimer.
10 min. paper
Jing Jing
PhD in Chinese Studies (1st year)
Discourse analysis in exploring China-EU relations: A methodological approach
Rule-oriented Constructivism is a branch of constructivist theories in the realm of international relations studies initiated by Nicolas Onuf in 1989. Its core arguments include: speech acts can generate rules, and rules yield rule (relationship patterns).1 This paper discusses the possibility and feasibility of a methodological approach which synthesizes this theoretical framework with critical discourse analysis in international relations studies.
The paper consists of four sections: the first section discusses the compatibility of rule-oriented constructivism and critical discourse analysis. The ontological and epistemological bases of both will be presented in order to see whether they can be well-accommodated into each other. The second section presents the analytical framework designed in the form of a stream-lined process guide for discourse analysis. The third section presents sample discourse analyses applying this analytical tool. The last section discusses the advantages and weakness of this analytical model and seeks further improvements.
1 Onuf, N., 1998. Constructivism: A User's Manual, in ed. N. O. P. K. Vendulka Kubálková, International Relations in a Constructed World (Armonk; London: M. E. Sharpe), pp. 58-78.
Eystein Thanisch
PhD in Celtic Studies (3rd year)
‘That which is to come has already been’: Time, knowledge and genealogy and how these diffract the study of medieval authorship
My PhD focuses on the understanding and use of the eleventh-century poet-historian Flann Mainistrech (ob.1056) as an authority in later medieval Gaelic historiography. The idea of the individual human author (and, indeed, the individual generally) in the Middle Ages – and thus the very structure of my research – is, however, deeply problematic.
In this paper, I examine a text that can be read as a radical de-individualisation of Flann. In Echtra Theidg Mheic Chéin (‘the adventure of Tadg son of Céin’), a little-known late medieval Gaelic romance, Flann’s legendary ancestor, Tadg, visits a fantastical island inhabited by notable characters from medieval Irish historiography who are possessed of apparently supernatural knowledge of its past and future. The structure and focus of history, as presented in this episode, are closely comparable to the structure and focus of Flann’s scholarship. While thus functioning as an origin legend for the intellectual achievements of Tadg’s descendants (the Ciannachta), what does this text imply about authorship? If the structure of history is pre-ordained and insight into it is heritable property, what does it mean to say Flann is its author? In this paper, I argue that Echtra Theidg Mheic Chéin illustrates, on an epic scale, the identities and narratives involved in the medieval conception of the production of historiography that must be negotiated in order properly to appreciate the evidence for the period’s authors and texts.
The Screen under Scrutiny
Michelle Devereaux
PhD in Film Studies
The middle-aged man and the sea: Nature and nostalgia in Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic
Wes Anderson’s 2004 film The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou offered the filmmaker a career-unprecedented opportunity to immerse himself in romantic ideas of the natural world. Undoubtedly, the film’s primary aesthetic fixation is that of the kaleidoscopic wonders of the sea, whose treatment is anything but naturalistic. While the worlds of nature and culture are rigidly demarcated at times, they have a profound influence on one another, suggesting a grappling with the loss of the primal essence and sublime experience that characterises so much of Anderson’s vision of humanity.
This paper focuses on the uncanny qualities of The Life Aquatic’s mise en scène, its embrace of modernist ideals of historical progress in narrative, and how both contribute to Anderson’s vision of the sublime. These concepts are related to Freud’s definitions of the aesthetic uncanny, Edmund Burke’s original notions of the sublime and beautiful, and Frederic Jameson’s encapsulation of the postmodern “hysterical sublime.” My paper concludes that, while Anderson toys with a repudiation of human-centric ideas of idealised nature, the film eventually embraces these notions. It displays a picturesque, nostalgic view that undermines sublimity even while containing a strong undercurrent of anxiety about the terror-inspiring mysteries of existence.
James Mooney
MSc by Research in Film Studies
Bertolucci's cave: A Platonic reading of The Conformist (1970)
Halfway through Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (Il Conformista 1970) the protagonist, Marcello Clerici, visits the Parisian home of his former teacher, Professor Quadri. After entering his study, Clerici recounts Quadri’s lectures on Plato’s allegory of the Cave. In what follows, Bertolucci presents us with an explicit visualisation of Plato’s Cave.
I will argue that Bertolucci’s inclusion of the pivotal “cave scene” sets up an analogy between Plato’s Cave and Mussolini’s Italy, which is reinforced throughout the film by various visual elements. Furthermore, I will show how Bertolucci’s use of light and shadow, as well as the motif of blindness and sight, function to emphasise the Platonic distinction between truth and error, as well as the relationship that each of the main characters has to these states. I also claim that the complex narrative structure of the film functions to mirror both Clerici’s epistemic state and the journey of Plato’s philosopher, allowing the spectator to identify with both. Finally, will conclude that, by identifying the source of liberating knowledge as knowledge of the self, rather than the abstract Platonic Forms, The Conformist does not merely illustrate Plato’s original thought experiment, but updates it and, as such, makes a valuable contribution to philosophy.
My paper will be supported by the following video-essay: https://vimeo.com/87781445
Mei-Ling McNamara
PhD in Trans-Disciplinary Documentary Film
Liminal states, invisible acts: Forced labour, trauma and the politics of modern-day slavery in the UK
Britain has seen a dramatic rise in trans-national criminal gangs targeting the most impoverished, vulnerable and frequently ‘invisible’ migrant populations who provide cheap labour to Britain’s hidden industries. Victims also remain targets for criminalisation – by the gangs that exploit them and the authorities that seek their removal. Yet despite the fact that over 5,000 people are being held in forced labour at any one time in the UK, few have ever been prosecuted for labour trafficking crimes, and no victims have received compensation in UK employment courts. These migrants inevitably inhabit a twilight existence – and their testimonies, often marred by psychological trauma, are challenged by an institutional culture of disbelief within the British justice system.
Documentary film plays an important role in highlighting the hidden human rights abuses that exist in labor slavery today, giving a face to Britain’s ‘other’ workers living inside the country’s shadow economy. A 20 minute paper on recent PhD documentary work on the subject, including brief film excerpts from a new documentary-in- progress, highlighting the plight of Bangladeshi men trafficked into Scotland’s hotel industry, will serve as a basis for discussion on this important issue facing the UK.
People and Politics on Paper
Saverio Leopardi
PhD in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies (1st year)
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) and its struggle against marginalisation
Once the main leftist competitor of Yasser Arafat’s formation Fatah within the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), the PFLP is today a marginal actor within the spectrum of Palestinian politics. This process of decline started after the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon which led to the eviction of all the Palestinian factions from their headquarters in Beirut. Current historiography fails to address this issue and neglects how the PFLP strived to invert this process, a top priority for this formation during the last three decades.
Bearing this latter point in mind, the goal of this paper is to illustrate PFLP’s agenda at the beginning of its decline and also why the first attempt to retain its political weight, namely the creation of an alternative front to Arafat’s growing power in the early Eighties, eventually failed. After an overview on PFLP’s ideology and history before 1982, this paper will treat its attempt to coalesce with other leftist factions, the alignment with Syria aimed at forming a radical block at a regional level and finally PFLP’s commitment to the defence of Soviet role in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
Thanks to an extensive study of PFLP’s official publication, it is possible to individuate the factors which thwarted its project in the tendency of the Palestinian left to factionalism, Syrian hegemonic policies and Soviet instrumental support to Palestinian demands.
Far from being exhaustive, this research is the first step on the way for a comprehensive study on the more recent political course of the PFLP.
Deirdre Stack-Marques
MSc in Comparative and General Literature
Voices of the people?: The representation of rural society in the works of Ivan Turgenev and Halldór Laxness
The authors Ivan Turgenev and Halldór Laxness are key figures in the literary traditions of 1850s Russia and 1930s Iceland respectively. Inspired by their travels around Europe and beyond in their youth, their early writing careers were founded upon the plight of the downtrodden peasant of rural society, the victim of unrelenting labour and political corruption.
Turgenev and Laxness may focus on the traditions and structures of rural society, but their novels reject any rose-tinted depictions based upon nostalgia or sentimentalism. Instead, rural folk become the symbol of the need for progress: the authors' early novels mark the beginning of their search for a place for the people and traditions of their homelands in a modern world and society. Therefore, I argue that Turgenev and Laxness act as the voices of their countrymen precisely because they point the way towards the future of the people of Russia and Iceland.
10 min. paper
Fiona Hobbs Milne
MSc in Literature and Society
Rethinking state censorship?: Thomas Paine’s The Rights of Man and his sedition trial of 1792
In December 1792, Thomas Paine was put on trial for sedition for his Rights of Man. Although absent from court, Paine was found guilty and his book suppressed, in a landmark show-trial of English censorship history.
There is a general scholarly consensus that state censorship is an unsophisticated, purely top-down act of power. I hope to complicate this, by showing that the censorship of The Rights of Man is better understood as ‘productive’ and ‘distributive’. Paine’s polemic anticipates and responds to the climate of censorship of the 1790s, so that The Rights of Man is shaped by what it condemns: trial and text mutually enable one another. The power dynamics at work in Paine’s trial, far from showing the legal process to be stable and totalizing, are dialogic and playful, and suggestive of Bakhtinian heteroglossia. This is brought out by my reading of the trial itself as a literary product.
10 min. paper
Emily Anderson
MSc in Comparative and General Literature
The 1916 Shakespeare tercentenary celebrations in England and Scotland: How British was Shakespeare during the Great War?
The commemorative celebrations for the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death that took place in 1916 were vital to England’s mobilisation for total war (Habicht 449). Commentators used Shakespeare’s figure and works as symbols of the British Empire’s unity and power, and also linked him to a nationalistic, idealised image of Englishness (which they contrasted with highly critical views of German culture) (Hendley 25-26). In my research, I ask ‘did Shakespeare’s figure and works contribute to cultural mobilization in Scotland during the Great War in the same way that they did in England?’
To gauge attitudes to the tercentenary, I apply content and discourse analysis to a large range of texts addressing the celebrations, from newspaper articles to sermons. In general, Scottish observers treated Shakespeare as a cultural possession and suggested his importance as a symbol of imperialism. They reflected English writers’ attitudes, indicating that Shakespeare was seen as ‘British’ rather than ‘English’ during the Great War.
I elucidate Shakespeare’s association with the synecdoche that presents ‘English’ as ‘British.’ I also clarify the extent to which Shakespeare united English and Scottish culture at a historical moment when Britain’s unity, and the unity of the British Empire, was of especial political importance.
Works Cited:
Habicht, Werner. “Shakespeare Celebrations in Times of War.” Shakespeare Quarterly 52.4 (2001): 441–55. Print.
Hendley, Matthew C. “Cultural Mobilization and British Responses to Cultural Transfer in Total War: The Shakespeare Tercentenary of 1916.” First World War Studies 3.1 (2012): 25–49. Print.
Reflections on Reception
Susanna Grazzini
Between an MSc in Italian Studies (completed) and a PhD in Italian Studies
Acquainted with Carlo Emilio Gadda: The atypical reception and translation of an Italian modernist in the English-speaking world
Carlo Emilio Gadda is considered one of the most innovative writers of the 20th century thanks to his originality in language and content: pluristylism, lively expressionism, richness of dialects and different registers, philosophical and psychological references are his recognised trademarks. Although many scholars have underlined the relevance and the affinity with the greatest realists, modernists and postmodernists (such as Cervantes, Swift, Balzac, Joyce, Kafka, Conrad, Céline and Beckett), his circulation and reception emerge as a crucial issue and this is also intensified by an unresolved inclusion in the canon of European literature.
Many aspects of Gadda’s life and production have been taken into consideration in order to clarify his limited reception in the Anglophone world: the scarce number of English renditions, the alleged inadequacy of William Weaver’s translations, the author’s intrinsic untranslatability, and the mismatch between Gadda’s narration and the interests of the wider readership in the English-speaking world. In the present work, I aim to re-evaluate previous positions on Weaver’s translations and to provide a possible answer to one of the core questions: Why is Gadda still unrecognized while Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco (to name but two writers that were extensively translated by Weaver himself) are so widely and successfully known?
Lana Orešić
PhD in Literature, Performing Arts, Film and Culture (3rd year) at the University of Zagreb, Croatia, and visiting research postgraduate student at the Sanskrit Department in Asian Studies, LLC
What's love got to do with it?: Questioning traditional interpretation of the Gāhākosa, an anthology of classical Indian love poetry
The Gāhākosa is a 2nd century anthology of classical Indian poetry (kāvya) written in the Prakrit (Middle Indo-Aryan) language. It is traditionally taken to be a collection of love poems, presenting themes such as lovers’ first glances, secret meetings, married love and infidelity. Among these, it also includes poems which simply give general statements about life, the character of people or descriptions of natural scenes, etc. However, due to its reputation as a guide in all matters of love, its commentators from later centuries tend to interpret all the anthology’s pieces as love poems. They thereby introduce characters and set up contexts for them which are very distant from what is actually stated in the poems.
In my paper I will explore some existing interpretations of the poems by traditional commentators and those found in relevant treaties of poetics, where they are explained as love situations, presenting the logic that seems to be employed in attributing such interpretations, especially referring to the theory of suggested meaning or dhvani.
In conclusion, I shall present my own views on the extent to which it is advisable to adopt or ignore this type of interpretation of the Gāhākosa.