1

IMLR Graduate Forum 2017-18 Programme

Session One: 12th October

Panel: Trans-Epochal and Trans-Cultural Contaminations Paolo Gattavari (UCL) Lucian and the Tradition of Allegorical Fights in Renaissance Literature Marco Malvestio (Padova, Italy) Nazi imagery and Second World War in the work of Roberto Bolaño

Abstracts Paolo Gattavari In my presentation, I would like to focus on a Lucianic topic that drew the attention of numerous humanists, namely the fight between allegorical figures. I would like to highlight how Renaissance writers borrowed and reshaped this motif differently, paying special attention to three works: Leon Battista Alberti's Virtus, a brief composition included in the Intercenales, a collection of short narrative pieces, Maffeo Vegio's Philalates, a dialogue indebted both to Lucian and to Alberti's Lucianic writings, and Pandolfo Collenuccio's Alithia, an allegorical tale comprised in his Apologi Quattuor. I will argue that the different vein imbuing these texts, besides showing how the rediscovery of Lucian was a multifaceted phenomenon, is indicative of the diverse way in which Alberti, Vegio and Collenuccio positioned themselves with regard to humanism itself. Marco Malvestio I would like to propose a presentation about the role of Nazi imagery in the work of Roberto Bolaño. Nazi imagery is a recurrent theme in the whole work of Roberto Bolaño, from El Tercer Reich to 2666, through La literatura nazi en América and Estrella distante, since Bolaño draws a comparison between the crimes of the Nazis and the violence of the dictatorships of Southern America. Moreover, in his work, the Second World War functions as one of the many epiphanies of evil and

2

of its unintelligibility that crowd Bolaño’s novels, such as the vast catalogue of feminicides described in La parte de los crímenes of 2666.

Biographies Paolo Gattavari I am pursuing a PhD in Renaissance Studies at University College of London. My research focuses on the Renaissance rediscovery of Lucian of Samosata, a satirist and rhetorician of the second century AD. The first part of my project examines the establishment of a ‘Lucianic literature’ in Quattrocento Italy, paying special attention to a range of authors including Leon Battista Alberti, Giovanni Pontano and Ludovico Ariosto. The second section discusses the encounter between Lucian and some European leading intellectuals, namely François Rabelais, Thomas More and Erasmus. The third and final part of my thesis explores Lucian’s influence on the so-called poligrafi, a group of sixteenth-century Italian writers who chose vernacular to convey a sharp critique of society and humanism itself. I gained both my Bachelor and my Master degree in Philosophy at Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan, respectively in 2011 and 2013. After having completed my MA, I worked in communications in Milan and I taught Italian language and culture abroad, first in Perth, Western Australia, at Regent College (primary school) and Ursula Frayne Catholic College (high school), and, later on, in the United States, being employed as a Teaching Assistant in the Italian Studies Program at Bucknell University, Pennsylvania. In September 2016 I started my PhD in Renaissance Studies at University College of London, under the supervision of Professor Dilwyn Knox. Marco Malvestio I am a PhD student in comparative literature at the University of Padova. During the academic year 2016/2017 I was visiting research student at the University of Cambridge (Darwin College), and between October and December 2017 I will be holding the same position at Royal Holloway, University of London. My work concerns the representation of World War II in novels from the 2000s. Among the authors I study there are William T. Vollmann, Jonathan Littell, and Roberto Bolaño.

3

Session Two: 16th November

Panel: Perspectives on Medieval and Renaissance Literature and Culture

ManuelMagán Abollo (Madrid/Warburg Institute) Some Ideas of Geography and Space in the Cantigas of Santa Maria Vittoria Fallanca (Oxford) The Design of Montaigne's Essais

Abstracts ManuelMagán Abollo The Cantigas de Santa María are a set poems (many of them contain their own images and music) written in Galician by the King Alfonso X and dedicated to praise the Virgin Mary by singing some of her alleged miracles. Despite being a devotional work, it transcends the religious field and proposes a tour around European, Asian and North African territories through a wide range of geographic references and ways of depicting places or other parts of the space itself, like architecture. Despite the interest of studying space and geography in the Cantigas de Santa María, this type of analysis has never been carried out. Thus, through systematic studies of spatial references, my work aims to make a first reading of the aforementioned medieval corpus under the perspective of Literary Geography and Geocriticism. Moreover, these theories will be applied under the History of Art perspective and using technologies and approaches from Digital Humanities. This communication aims to explain, briefly, the main objectives and work progress of the PhD thesis El espacio en las Cantigas de Santa María, supervised by María Victoria Chico Picaza (Universidad Complutense de Madrid) and Elvira Fidalgo Francisco (Uinversidade de Santiago de Compostela). Vittoria Fallanca My doctoral research looks at the notion of ‘design’ in the Renaissance, with a particular focus on Montaigne’s Essais. Montaigne uses the word design (‘dessein’ in French) in ways that make use of the full spectrum of semantic possibilities offered by the word: from denoting a mental aim or intention to a material plan or drawing. Indeed, writing at a time when the French word for drawing, ‘dessin’, was not yet in use, Montaigne uses its cognate ‘dessein’ in ways that evoke the more material and visual dimensions of design, often, crucially, to characterise his own project, and practice, of writing. In my presentation I consider some instances of the word ‘dessein’ across the Essais to draw out Montaigne’s particular approach to the creative process – both in terms of authorial intention and material production - and then compare these to a selection of uses of the word ‘disegno’ by Italian art theorists active in the years before, during and after the Essais were written. I argue that this comparison affords us important insights into Renaissance attitudes to design and offers new perspectives on Renaissance enactments of the Horatian dictum ‘ut pictura poesis’.

4

Biographies ManuelMagán Abollo Manuel Magán Abollo is a Predoctoral Research Fellow at the History of Medieval Art Departament in the Complutense University of Madrid (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain), where he is working on his PhD thesis El espacio en las Cantigas de Santa María. He has received a B.A. in History of Art from the University of Santiago de Compostela (Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Spain), a M.A. in Medieval Studies and another M.A. in ‘Teacher Training: Secondary and Upper Secondary Education’, both from the same university. Also, he has received the title of ‘expert in Digital Humanities’ by the National University of Distance Education (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia, Spain) In the field of Digital Humanities, he is currently working on two projects: ‘Medievalitis’, a website about Medieval Studies in Spain and Portugal, and a map which index and classify the locations of the Cantigas of Santa María. His other research interests include Medieval Art, Geocriticism and Film Studies. He currently holds an Erasmus+ scholarship at The Warburg Institute (University of London). Vittoria Fallanca I completed a BA in philosophy at the university of Cambridge and an Mst in French at the university of Oxford. My doctoral thesis, also undertaken at Oxford, looks at the use of the word 'dessein' (aim/Intention but also material plan/design) by Montaigne. I argue that the author of the Essais uses this word in such a way as to tease out those aspects of writing that are akin to the process of drawing as understood by some Renaissance art theorists.

5

Session Three: 7th December

Panel: Dismantling Myths: Re-examining the Authorial Voice

Nicole Robertson (UCL) Battle with a Myth: Putting Schnitzler on a London Stage Luke Warde (Cambridge) J’écrit comme je parle’: Céline’s voice, the Célinean voice Charlotte Thevenet (UCL) Deconstruction as a Practice of Parody

Abstracts Nicole Robertson Heinrich Schnitzler (1902-1982), son of the Austrian writer, Arthur Schnitzler (1862-1931), and trustee of the latter’s literary estate, fought for half a century to control his father’s posthumous reputation in Great Britain. These five decades were marked by repeated attempts to counter what Heinrich described as the ‘Gay Vienna’ myth, according to which the city and its artists were ‘nothing but the embodiment of easy living, eternal gaiety, and shallow pleasures.’ Heinrich’s major frustration was that his father’s works were, he thought, only seen in the light of this myth and not for what they really were, namely complex portrayals of human nature. In this paper I consider the ways in which Heinrich sought to exercise control over Anglophone productions of the play cycle Anatol (1892). Drawing on a combination of unpublished correspondence, translation texts and theatre reviews, I assess this transcultural struggle for power over a story. Luke Warde This paper will investigate how access to an author’s voice–––via audiovisual recordings, for instance–––might potentially inflect how we experience what is usually, in critical terms, called authorial voice. These phenomena should not, we are told, interact, a proscription of sorts which finds its genesis in Roland Barthes’ declaration of authorial death in 1968. As I will argue, there exist certain cases in which one is not so easily sequestered from the other, in which our exposure to the author’s voice modulates our experience of an authorial voice. One such case is that of Louis-Ferdinand Céline, whose many interviews are available on digital and streaming platforms such as YouTube. The interviews in question impress us as being heavily performative, or even choreographed. This proves particularly rich terrain insofar as, concurrently, Céline’s literary output was growing more and more biographical. An undecidability opens up between the textual and the biographical, while the task of their disentanglement, if desired, becomes more and more complex. The paper will explore this dynamic, especially the tendency to privilege the ‘real’ of the author’s voice over an authorial voice we, as readers, confect. Before discussing Céline, I will address the issue of these interviews’ intermediality, and in particular, the theoretical implications of their translation from analogue into

6

digital. This approach will engage the writings of Jacques Derrida, Bernard Stiegler and Roland Barthes.

Charlotte Thevenet In the last 30 years, several works drew attention to the close relationship between deconstruction, and the work of Jacques Derrida in particular, and parody. On the one hand, critics saw parody in some of Derrida's texts, not insignificantly they were especially attentive to the ring of parody in some of Derrida's most 'literary' texts like Glas (Leavey & Ulmer 1986), or Signéponge (Saigal 1988). On the other hand, literary theorists found in some of Derrida's quasi-concept, and more generally in his whole work, tools to hone the notion of parody itself (Rose 1993; Phiddian 1995). Both strands of criticism seem to acknowledge that deconstruction and parody have a lot in common, but both have failed to demonstrate exactly how and to what end Derrida's texts put the ancient notion of parody to work. In my paper, I'll explore the many ways parody is present in Glas (Derrida 1974), and how this parodic mode, or tone, is actually demanded by Derrida's philosophical contention. Finally, I'll outline how this use of parody in Glas allows us to rethink the notion of parody anew.

Biographies Nicole Robertson Nicole Robertson is in the third year of her PhD at University College London. Her thesis, ‘Arthur Schnitzler in Britain’, explores how power and narrative operate as theoretical lenses through which the translation, adaptation and dissemination of Schnitzler’s dramas in Britain can be understood Luke Warde I've just completed my first year as a doctoral student in the department of French at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Dr. Martin Crowley. Working on Louis-Ferdinand Céline, my research concerns the relationship between body and text, representations of perceptual impairment in literature, and the nature of authorial presence in the wake of the death of the author. Charlotte Thevenet Charlotte Thevenet is a PhD student at UCL (French, SELCS), where she works on the rhetorics of the commentary in Derrida's divided texts.

7

Session Four: 11th January

Panel: Narratives of Loss, Trauma and Migration Caterina Scarabicchi (Royal Holloway) Re-elaborating the Migrant’s Story: Visions of Mediterranean Mobilities in Terraferma and Eden à l’Ouest Claire Amanda Ross (Washington/Hamburg) Ancestral narratives and non-dits in Selam Berlin (2003) Henrietta Lebeter (Royal Holloway) Memorials of Absence: ‘Lost Footage’ in Leïla Sebbar’s La Seine était rouge (1999)

Abstracts Caterina Scarabicchi When in 2015 the dramatic images of Syrian toddler Alan Kurdi, who lost his life in one of the countless Mediterranean shipwrecks, made world news, the momentary reaction of a good part of EU political leaders and citizens was one of commitment in support of migrants’ and refugees’ rights. However, two years on, little appears to have changed in a public debate which still seems marked by indifference towards the migrants’ suffering if not by open xenophobia. If, as Guy Debord claimed in 1967, the abundance of information available in Western societies transforms distant events into a numbing mediatic spectacle, is it then still appropriate to show images of suffering migrants in the hope to mobilize public opinion? This question appears central not only for the mass media, but also for cinema which, in its quintessentially visual nature, inevitably establishes a continuity with the contemporary “spectacle” of Mediterranean mobilities. By comparing Crialese’s Terraferma and Costa-Gavras’ Eden à l’ouest (both released in 2011), my paper will investigate the different aesthetic treatments of migratory events undertaken by their respectively Italian and French directors. Considering how the inflated visibility of migration as a dehumanised and distant vision is questioned and re-elaborated in these two feature films, my paper will shed light on the tension created by European cinema as a space to express commitment towards one of today’s most pressing social dilemmas, but also as a cinema that problematically “borrows” and adapts the story of the “other” to advocate for their rights. Claire Amanda Ross Historical traces and evidence in the family archive tug at the seams of accepted public and even private narratives (Hirsch). And when the equilibrium that keeps these unruly memories in check is disrupted, these suppressed counternarratives can erupt. This is certainly the case in Yadé Kara’s Wenderoman Selam Berlin. The fall of the German-German border unveils such a family secret, as related by nineteen-year-old Hasan Kazan: his father’s decades-long double life (with mistress and child) in East Berlin. In addition to this Cold War-era betrayal, the shifting political ground also casts to the surface other “unruly” elements that precede the birth of the narrator (heirlooms, photographs, family lore).

8

Similarities between the two-generation Väterroman and Hasan’s narration of his break with his father (a Babaroman, if you will) abound (Stehle). However, the past that predates living memory, far from “verschwinden im mythischen Dunkel des Osmanentums,” as Michaela Holdenried would have it (92), also haunts Selam Berlin. The generations preceding migration exist as a spectral presence, not thanks to an active quest for answers on the part of the narrator, as in the conventional Familienroman (Assmann), but in spite of Hasan’s determined disinterest in the past. Like Holdenried (“interkultureller Familienroman,”) I too argue that the novel as belongs to the more recent multi-generational Familienroman, however, for different reasons. More so than Hasan’s adoption of an elderly couple as ersatz grandparents (Holdenried), it is the persistence of unruly (pre-)histories in the background, by means of material and non-material traces in the family archive, that encourages us to consider this as a Familienroman rooted in Aegean history. Selam Berlin asks difficult questions about the enmeshment of “second-generation” Turkish Germans in legacies of trauma and culpability. Henrietta Lebeter On the evening of 17 October 1961, a peaceful demonstration took place on the streets of central Paris to oppose the introduction of a curfew from 20:30 to 05:30 for French Muslim workers of Algeria imposed by Chief of the Préfecture de police, Maurice Papon. Algerian men, women and children participated in the demonstration, which was violently attacked by French police forces and subsequently repressed in ‘official’ memory until the 1990s. This paper identifies instances of fictional ‘lost footage’ of the events of 17 October 1961 in Leïla Sebbar’s 1999 novel La Seine était rouge, with particular attention to memorials, or rather their absence. Sebbar’s use of fictional film and photographic representations of the otherwise undocumented trauma of decolonization and (post)colonialism can be figured in terms of a symptomology which both intersects and diverges from established paradigms of responses to trauma (e.g. Henry Rousso, Anne Donadey and the criteria for Post- traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD, outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorders published in 2013). This discussion offers perspectives on the extent to which Sebbar knowingly employs literary tropes which result in the creation of fictional ‘lost footage’ of Franco-Algerian sites of trauma to destabilize notions of testimony and bearing witness through focus on the plurality, contingency and partiality of trauma. Furthermore, this paper draws attention to broader questions precipitated by the imperative to tell but the impossibility of bearing witness at a time of renewed self-reflexivity and national consciousness in France; haunted by the palimpsestic or overlapping returns of multiple traumas in the present.

Biographies Caterina Scarabicchi Caterina Scarabicchi is a final-year PhD student in Comparative Literature and Culture at Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research looks at contemporary Italian and French representations of migrations from Africa and the Middle East to Europe, with a specific focus on the notions of spectacle and social commitment.

9

Claire Amanda Ross Claire Amanda Ross is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St Louis and a guest scholar at the University of Hamburg. Her awards include a DAAD research grant and Washington University’s Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence, both awarded in 2016/17. She is currently based in Hamburg where she is completing her dissertation on figures of the artist in Turkish German film and literature. Claire is originally from Aberdeen, Scotland and completed her Master’s degrees in German and Cultural Studies at the University of Edinburgh. Henrietta Lebeter Henrietta is a second- year TECHNE-funded doctoral student at Royal Holloway under the supervision of Dr Ruth Cruickshank. Her thesis examines representations of the processes of late-capitalist market economics in fin de millénaire French fictions which are figured as generating ‘everyday’ traumatic symptoms, and the ways in which they intersect with ‘afterlives’ of the trauma of the Second World War and decolonization, provided through ‘lost footage’ of different fictional media within the novels of the corpus.

10

Session Five: 8th February

Panel: Literature and its others: plural arts and mythification Josh Torabi (UCL) The Pact: Music and Myth in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus Nicole Maniero (Cambridge) Difficult Things: The Mythopoetic Power of Objects in Italo Calvino’s Shorter Fiction Daniela Shalom Vagata (Bologna) In the Name of Hebe: The “Art of Dance” in Ugo Foscolo’s “Le Grazie”

Abstracts Josh Torabi This chapter will consider the literary uses of music and myth in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus. Taking as a starting point Nietzsche’s conception of aesthetic mythology in relation to the ‘spirit of music’ presented in The Birth of Tragedy as the foundation of all art, this chapter will explore how and to what effect Mann reacts to this formulation, with the aim of demonstrating how such a reading can enhance our understanding of a famously complex novel by elucidating the major themes, characters and narratives of the text, while simultaneously adding to the reception history of Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. Mann, like many other notable literary modernists such as Joyce and Proust, chose the arduous task of representing ineffable subjects such as music and myth in prose, in a bid to test the limits of language and the novel as an art form. Doktor Faustus operates somewhat uniquely on the intersections of music, literature and philosophy and as such is arguably the best example of a text that deals with the relationship between music and literature in a sustained and privileged way that we have in the West. In approaching this nebulous relationship through a consideration of myth, this chapter will add a unique and illuminating dimension to both Mann scholarship and the study of literature and music that is unjustly ignored. Nicole Maniero Massimo Fusillo’s notion of the mythopoetic power of fetishism (Feticci 2012: 97) is based on his analysis of literary texts where the characters’ object fetishism triggers the production of narratives. Fusillo’s argument suggests the inertness of the fetish and claims how the mythopoetic power is a prerogative of the human protagonist. This research intends to expand and challenge Fusillo’s definition, by examining whether the fetishized object is equally capable of responding and contributing to the character’s narrative production. By focusing on Italo Calvino’s Gli amori difficili (1970), this paper will underline how the fetishized objects have a central position in the entire economy of the collection, as they are not only the interlocutors of the characters’ fetishistic obsessions, but they are also provided with a narrative (mythopoetic) power. Thanks to a careful textual analysis, it will be shown how the apparently ‘inanimate’ things populating these short stories respond to the category identified by Fusillo, since they are responsible for the creation of further narrative dimensions.

11

Daniela Shalom Vagata In this paper I examine the theme of dance in Ugo Foscolo’s fragmental and unfinished hymns Le Grazie. Le Grazie is a mise en scène of a ceremony in honour of the Graces performed by Foscolo as a priest and by three priestess of dance, poetry and music. In Le Grazie the art of dance not only has a social and civil symbolism, but also represents Foscolo’s idea of grace. By examining a series of intertextual references in Le Grazie to dance treatises, to classical iconography of ballerinas and to Canova’s plastic and pictorial works on dance, I also reveal references to the aesthetic debate of arts.

Biographies Josh Torabi I am a third year PhD candidate at UCL based in the School of European Languages, Culture and Society (German). I'm currently an Exchange Scholar at Yale University researching a chapter of my thesis. Please find attached a brief outline of the chapter I'm working on (this may well alter slightly depending on what I find at Yale) and please see here: http://german.yale.edu/people/joshua-torabi for my academic bio. Nicole Maniero I did my undergraduate degree in Lettere Moderne at Università degli Studi di Padova, where I graduated with a thesis on Italo Svevo’s ‘La coscienza di Zeno’. I then furthered my knowledge of European literature through a Master’s degree in Comparative Literatures and Cultures at the University of Kent (2015), where I focused on English, French and German Modernist Literature. Last year, I completed an MPhil in European and Latin American Comparative Literatures and Cultures at the University of Cambridge, and started my work on the poetics of objects in Italo Calvino’s shorter fiction. I am currently undertaking my PhD in Italian at the University of Cambridge under the supervision of Dr Pierpaolo Antonello. Daniela Shalom Vagata Daniela Shalom Vagata graduated and earned a Ph.D. in Italian Literature, specializing in philology, at the University of Bologna. She also earned a Master’s degree in Italian Studies at Indiana University, Bloomington. She has been Specific Associate Professor of Italian Language and Literature at Kyoto University. Daniela Shalom Vagata’s research focuses on Ugo Foscolo’s Le Grazie. Her further studies were devoted to the extravagant tradition of Dantes’s Vita Nova poems, Eugenio Montale’s prose, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s works and to the cinema of Federico Fellini and Luchino Visconti. She also collaborates with the magazines Argo. Rivista di esplorazione and Artribune about Japanese culture and Japanese contemporary art.

12

Session Six: 8th March

Panel: Making Space: Perspectives on Modernity, Gender and Avant-garde

Marta Riccobono (Pisa Normale/Cambridge) Classical Echoes and Gender Identity in the Political Verses of Female Sicilian Writers of the Risorgimento (1840-1870) Alessandra Rosati (Goldsmith) Gendered Spaces of Modernity: Woman and the City in 1920s and 1930s Europe Emily Fitzell (Cambridge) Nude Descending a (Miniature) Staircase: Duchamp & the Stettheimer Dollhouse Rossella Maria Bondi (Oxford Brookes) In the Proximity of Futurism: Savinio and Apollinaire Between Rupture and Tradition

Abstracts Marta Riccobono The research project I would like to present tries to investigate how (and to what extent) gender issues influenced the construction of the national identity of women in Italy in the years of the Risorgimento. Starting from the fundamental studies about the relationship between gender and national identity already carried out both in the historical and literary field by scholars like Alberto Mario Banti, Simonetta Soldani, Helena Sanson and others, I would like to analyse this matter from a philological point of view. In particular, I investigate the political verses of those Sicilian women writers – such as Giuseppina Turrisi Colonna, Lauretta Li Greci and Concettina Ramondetta Fileti – that were strictly involved in the revolutionary project that led to the Italian Unification in 1861. Alessandra Rosati This paper explores the multiple connections of woman and the city in interwar Europe. Particular emphasis will be placed on Weimar Berlin, known as the ‘Whore of Babylon’ for its lawlessness and sexual licentiousness. Referring to both female and male-authored texts, such as Irmgard Keun’s Das Kunstseidene Mädchen (1932) and Erich Kästner’s Fabian (1931), it will be shown that the emergence of new gender dynamics and ideals, specifically the New Woman, was experienced in ambivalent ways and reflected in cultural texts of the time. As a result, this study raises a broader question: to what extent the image of the woman depicted in novels expresses the (male) anxieties about the blurring of traditionally gendered roles and the more general concerns with the changing sociopolitical climate of those years? The issue will be discussed in connection with the specificity of the female (developmental) trajectory in the metropolis, as it will allow the generic concept of

13

the Bildungsroman as primarily a nineteenth-century and male category to be questioned. Emily Fitzell in 1919, duchamp produced a miniature version of his painting nu descendant un escalier for a dollhouse made by his friend carrie walter stettheimer (now housed at the museum of the city of new york.) this paper will consider how this downsized painting relates to the other versions of nu, as well as duchamp’s other reproductions and re-scaled works, such as the boîte-en-valise. it will discuss questions of scale and perception in relation to the idea of an aesthetics of movement. Rossella Maria Bondi My paper is about the relationships of the Italian writer, painter, musician and playwright Alberto Savinio (his real name is Andrea de Chirico, brother of the famous painter Giorgio de Chirico) and of Apollinaire with the Futurist movement. I would like to show how the first avant-garde movement of the 20th century, born in Milan in 1908, has had an impact on the two artists’ aesthetics. In fact, despite their distancing from Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s noisy declarations, many works of Savinio and Apollinaire have borrowed lots of elements from Marinetti's Electric dolls(1909), The Music-Hall (1913) and The Futurist synthetic theater (1915) in order to surprise the spectator. This cross fertilization allows both a re-appraisal of Futurism and an analysis of Savinio's and Apollinaire's works produced during the First World War.

Biographies Marta Riccobono I am a PhD candidate in Italian Literature at Scuola Normale Superiore, working on the construction of female national identity in Italy and on its literary representation. From October 2017 to March 2018 I will spend a period of research at Cambridge University. My academic interests include gender studies, women’s writing and Italian cultural studies. Alessandra Rosati I am a PhD student in Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths University. My project explores how modernist experimentation relates to the classical Bildungsroman model, by focusing on European urban novels of the 20s and early 30s from a comparative perspective. Emily Fitzell I am a phd student at trinity college, cambridge. my doctoral project, based in the french department (mml), explores the relation of perception to movement and memory in modern literature, art and architecture, with a focus on the oeuvres of marcel duchamp, jorge luis borges, georges perec and samuel beckett. as a graduate researcher, i have given papers at international conferences and have been invited to give talks at workshops and events in the uk and france. i also have a chapter forthcoming in the volume ‘beckett beyond the normal’. alongside my academic work I have held editorial positions and undertaken artist’s residencies to work on

14

poetic and sculptural projects. i am currently in new york working on a concrete installation. Some of my pieces have been published and featured in small exhibitions and I have twice been awarded the powell prize for serious verse. Rossella Maria Bondi Rossella Maria Bondi enjoys a colourful career as researcher, musician, Bodleian Library guide, and academic invigilator at Oxford Brookes University having recently retired from the post of music teacher in the Italian public school system of Naples. She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature at Oxford Brookes University with a thesis entitled: “In Search of the New Man: Alberto Savinio and the Avant-Garde in Paris (1911-1937)”. Her main research focus is early twentieth-century Italian and French Literature. In 2015 she presented two papers: “Giorgio de Chirico and Alberto Savinio: the Aesthetic of the Faceless Man during World War I”, for the conference Les Gueules cassées: disfigurement and its legacies, University of Exeter, 12-14 March, 2015, and “La genèse du mythe moderne: Savinio et les surréalistes”, for the conference French Studies, University of Cardiff, 29 -1 July, 2015. Her recent paper “From Marinetti to the De Chirico brothers: the aesthetic of the faceless man in the early 20th century” was presented for the Society of Italian Studies Biennial Conference at the University of Hull, 27-30 June, 2017. She is currently reviewing two academic articles on Futurism, Apollinaire, Savinio, and the beginning of twentieth-century French Avant-Garde to be submitted to the journals Word and Image and Nottigham French Studies. She is also revising her thesis for publication as a monograph with L'Harmattan. As musician Rossella holds a degree in piano performance and opera singing from the Italian Conservatorio Giuseppe Martucci. She has made radio broadcasts and performed as a soloist in ensembles in Italy and England mainly at the Holywell Music Room in Oxford. Her repertoire is increasingly focussed on Neapolitan and Occitan songs, and Arie Antiche from the sixteen and seventeen-century.

15

Session Seven: 12th April

Panel: The Quest for Meaning between Science and Religion Chiara Bechis (Royal Holloway) The “Quest for Meaning”: Tasso’s Religious Anxiety and Spiritual Research in the Last Decade of His Life and Production (1585-1595) Marie C. Chabbert (Oxford) Religion at the Limits of Epistemological Reason: Deconstructing Religious Truth-Claim and the Notion of Belief with Georges Bataille and Jean-Luc Nancy Sarah Goeth (Hamburg) Novalis’ Concept of Analogy as Mediation between Science and Aesthetic Letizia Cristina Margiotta Science and the Mysteries of Existence: Some Literary Examples of Chemists in Pirandello and Balzac

Abstracts Chiara Bechis The study of Tasso’s spirituality and position in front of some crucial religious issues of his age has long attracted critical attention, often leading to unwarranted generalization and commonplaces. Particularly, it is still alive the idea that any attempt of the author to be compliant with the religious standards of his time indicates an irredeemable loss of his more authentic poetic voice. This negative prejudice affected mainly Tasso’s last works, considered as a literary paradigm of the Counter-Reformation. Only in recent years some scholars have questioned these assumptions and re-evaluated Tasso’s religiosity and later production. Following this research trend, my presentation will discuss the metaphysical tension that animates Tasso’s last works, aiming to trace its origin and reasons. Rather than a formal conformation to the dictates of an authoritarian Church, Tasso’s religious turn comes at the end of a strenuous spiritual quest and reflection upon the role of the poet himself. A detailed analysis of some passages from Tasso’s letters, theoretical and poetic last works (Gerusalemme Conquistata, Rime sacre, Giudicio sovra la Gerusalemme riformata, Mondo creato) will reveal how crucial along this path was the close reading and interpretation of the church fathers as well as Dante’s Comedy, regarded as the main model for a poetry that leans toward the truth. Marie C. Chabbert Ever since Durkheim published Les Formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse in 1912, religion has been understood, in social sciences but also by the general public, in terms of the category of belief. Religion is commonly described as a set of beliefs around which a community of believers is organised, following rituals deriving from these beliefs. Centuries of theological and philosophical reflections identified belief with a subjective certainty paradoxically requiring absolute objective uncertainty, in opposition to propositional knowledge. Yet as Jean-Luc Nancy notes in La

16

Déconstruction du christianisme, belief is comparable to propositional knowledge in that both share the same epistemic function; both foster truth-claims, which is why religion and science, but also different religious dogmas, are perceived as rivals. In the past few decades, however, anthropologists highlighted that associating religion with the category of belief is deeply ethnocentric for it merely corresponds to the reality of religion in early-twentieth-century Judeo-Christian Europe. Many non-Western religions consider that beliefs – if they do admit beliefs at all – are less important than other aspects of religious life. As Latour, Viveiros de Castro, Holbraad and many other thinkers suggest, religion might be about something else than belief and epistemological truth. But what? I will argue in this paper that clues can be found in the work of Georges Bataille and Jean-Luc Nancy. In their respective work, both thinkers reflect on the potential danger of religion as a dogmatic institution. More precisely, I contend that they challenge – or, to use Nancy’s term, “dis-enclose” – the latter in order to leave room for the lived spiritual reality of religion, which Bataille calls the sacred and Nancy, faith. Accordingly, I will suggest that both thinkers take up and revisit the Kantian project to “curb knowledge in order to make room for faith”. Sarah Goeth The principle of Analogy is essentially for Novalis’ Thinking. Novalis uses Analogy as an instrument that is not based on the Renaissance paradigm of a metaphysical world vision. Instead, he believes in an absolute order of the universe that allows an analogical thinking but denies the approach of the absolute itself. Therefore Novalis’ “Analogistic” gives way to establish similarities between heterogeneous elements in the world and also between different sciences. The use of analogies is a poetic method to establish an in-between-position that does not synthezise the opposites but combines contrasts in a similarity-relationship. This aesthetic alternating principle is firstly a way to solve Kant’s gap between the subjective and the objective world and secondly a dynamic form of knowledge-concept. Knowledge and poetic are based on the same potential of imaginative thinking whereas the “two cultures” of science and aesthetic are no longer a valid description. Letizia Cristina Margiotta The aim of this work is to analyze the role of science and the figure of the scientist (particularly the chemist) in some short stories by Luigi Pirandello, such as Dal naso al cielo and La buonanima. The behavior of the characters and their strange attitude towards society and even towards their own family is affected by their distorted conception of science: too much trust in a scientific view of life make these chemists rational but heartless, because they are totally absorbed in their studies. Other men (included, maybe, Pirandello) search the answers to the main questions of existence, concerning both people and the world in philosophy, mysticism and religion. To better understand these themes in a wider and comparative perspective it could be useful also to examine the novel La recherche de l'absolu by Honoré de Balzac, in which the protagonist try to discover, through chemistry, the essence of everything but fails and ruins all his life.

17

Biographies Chiara Bechis I am currently exploring Dante’s ideological and cultural impact in the work of Torquato Tasso (1544-1595), the poet of Gerusalemme Liberata. The purpose of my research is to analyse how deeply Tasso’s invention, verses and thought have been moulded by Dante’s auctoritas as well as to show how Tasso challenged his predecessor, aiming to be the new official Christian poet in the age of Counter-Reformation. Marie C. Chabbert Marie Chabbert is a D.Phil. candidate in Modern Languages at the University of Oxford, where she conducts interdisciplinary research on religion, community and violence in contemporary French culture and thought. Her DPhil thesis most particularly focuses on the work of Georges Bataille, Jean-Luc Nancy and Gilles Deleuze, who, she argues, lay new ontological grounds for the development of an alternative articulation of secular and religious perspectives in the however – sometimes aggressively – secular French intellectual environment. Key to such a project is Marie’s training in French politics and the anthropology of religion, which she respectively received as an undergraduate at the Institut d’Études Politiques de Paris and, later, as a M.Sc. student at the London School of Economics. Moreover, Marie also completed an M.Phil. in European Cultures at the University of Cambridge and another B.A., in French Culture, at La Sorbonne Paris-IV. In addition to these intellectual endeavours, Marie is an Executive Committee member of the European Interfaith Youth Network of Religions for Peace, the largest international coalition of representatives from the world’s religions dedicated to promoting multi-religious cooperation for peace. Sarah Goeth Sarah Maria Teresa Goeth, M.A. is currently a Research Assistant at the German Department at the University of Hamburg. Her research interests include German Literature in the 18th and 19th Century, the relation or the impact of science and/on literature, the use and circulation of metaphors in different discourses, and picture theory. Her doctoral dissertation analyses the rhetoric figure »analogy« in the context of science, philosophy and literature in the 18th and 19th century. Sarah Goeth studied in Munich and Passau and holds a Master of Fine Arts from the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Munich. After her master’s degree, she received a scholarship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) and taught at the University of Binghamton, New York, for one year. Then she was granted a scholarship by the NFS eikones (Basel, Switzerland). This graduate programme allowed her to collaborate with researches of different disciplines to analyse and discuss the question of the »picture as an artefact«. Letizia Cristina Margiotta Letizia Cristina Margiotta has obtained a Master degree in Classics at Università del Salento with a thesis on Pirandello’s short stories and, at the same time, she has attended ISUFI, an institute of high formation which provides interdisciplinary courses, included language courses (English, French and German). Having been selected by various call for papers, she took part as a lecturer at the

18

interdisciplinary event Rete di Idee (Udine, 14-16 November 2014) at the International conference about Pirandello Iconografie pirandelliane. Immagini e cultura visiva nell’opera di Luigi Pirandello (Leuven, 8-9 June 2017) and at the MOD convention La modernità letteraria e le declinazioni del visivo (Bologna, 22-24 June 2017). She collaborates with the reviews Aghios – Quaderni di studi sveviani and Oblio – Osservatorio bibliografico della letteratura italiana otto-novecentesca.

19

Session Eight: 10th May

Panel: Questions of racism and belonging in a (post)human world Margaret May (IMLR) Links between Domestic Objects and Identity in Early and Late 20th-century German Jewish Fiction. Sean Matharoo (University of California, Riverside/ Ghent, Belgium) Eco-Racial Realism in French and American Cosmic Horror Alexandre Leskanich (Royal Holloway) Human Homelessness in the ‘Anthropocene’

Abstracts Margaret May This paper explores the relationship between material culture (as manifest in domestic and personal possessions), remembrance and the (re-)construction of identity in fictional works by German Jewish authors from both the early twentieth century and recent decades. It focuses on the significance of domestic objects in attempts either to establish or to reconnect with a (possibly illusory) sense of rootedness and belonging. Specific examples of different approaches to this broad theme in works from the two periods are compared in the light of the disorientation and 'deterritorialisation' of memories caused not only by the Holocaust but also by German reunification. Sean Matharoo This paper first addresses French author Guy de Maupassant’s influential short story “Le Horla” (1886-1887). Maupassant describes the arrival to Earth of an invisible entity from beyond, an arrival that implies for their narrator the obliteration of the human species by extra-dimensional beings. The horror of “Le Horla,” therefore, is global in scale. This global configuration illuminates the horror genre’s penchant for speculating on nonhuman realities that horrify us in order to then return us to our environments with a sense of shared ethical responsibility. In “Le Horla,” that is, the narrator is horrified by the threat of human extinction, which I suggest resonates profoundly with today’s pressing concerns about global warming and mass species extinction, rendering it generative to ecological studies of literature. I emphasize the narrator’s reflections on the strange phenomena he perceives, which veer uncontrollably into delirious prose and metaphysical abstraction. This allows me to explain the short’s story’s unprecedented aesthetic and ontological influence on the literary genre of cosmic horror, popularized later by American author H. P. Lovecraft. But, by universalizing the human, I argue that Maupassant’s cosmic horror ultimately neglects histories of human inequality, as evidenced by the environmental effects of Western industrialization and colonial expansion. Such universalization is only amplified as the narrator of “Le Horla” insists that the invisible being has come to terrorize Rouen from Brazil—which France colonized in the 16th century. Moreover, his creeping descent into madness results in numerous

20

deaths of his servants, allowing us to reconsider the ethical responsibilities of the human when confronting the limitations of a humanist post-Enlightenment philosophy that writes the others to the Western liberal subject as nonhuman. Indeed, much cosmic horror of the 20th and 21st centuries reiterates the fear of the other central to Maupassant’s short story, making it an urtext for the genre. However, rather than suggest in a reactionary mode that the genre of cosmic horror is somehow conservative to its core, I propose, in the second part of this paper, that Jordan Peele’s recent American film Get Out (2017) offers an alternative form of cosmic horror that uses the structure of the genre—which remains valuable to ecocriticism—but reroutes it to emphasize the role of the racial in organizing modern thought. Peele’s film describes a young interracial couple’s trip to the woman’s parents’ estate. We come to discover that, for years, the woman’s white family has been kidnapping black people to hypnotize them and transplant their brains into them to achieve a kind of immortality. Other black people are hypnotized and made into “servants.” I argue that Peele’s manipulation of sound and image—and the fear of what’s lurking outside of the frame—concatenates a global configuration of extinction in the form of a racist cult that targets all black people. Put differently, it may be understood to be a rewriting of the cosmic horror genre that has its origins in Maupassant’s “Le Horla,” but it pushes further to emphasize the racial. I conclude, however, by contending that reading “Le Horla” alongside Get Out helps us locate an eco-racial realism that emphasizes the entangled realities of ecological crisis and racism, thereby pressing against the universalizing impulse of much ecocriticism. Alexandre Leskanich It seems counter-intuitive to call the ‘Anthropocene’ a time of homelessness. Surely this term denotes instead a new humanism, the final victory of Homo sapiens over nature? But this humanism is one of disappointment, despondency, anxiety. Hardly triumphal, the epochal emergence of an ‘age of man’ threatens to eventually eradicate human existence. The human world has already betrayed the ideational inadequacy of the human mind, its ethical ineptitude. This anthropogenic world powered by the fossil economy has proved inimical to life, even human life. It may finally prove fatal. Indeed, today the human world exhibits nothing less than comprehensive ecological failure. This condition must call into question the idea that the world can still be considered a hospitable home for the human species; a benevolent incubator. Indeed, there are signs of tiredness, of frustration as even the world fashioned by the human mind evades human comprehension. It defies meaning; it lacks purpose. Climate change - and the planetary depletion of resources to fuel them - shatters dreams of infinite progress. Instinctively the mind recoils from a world it recognises less and less; it opts to retreat, to escape from a situation for which it was never prepared. It searches for remedies. The cosmic expansion of the human species is proffered by techno-enthusiasts as a viable and necessary undertaking if we are to avoid eventual extinction. Even the human body, as transhumanist proponents of the ‘singularity’ claim, is no longer an adequate or reliable receptacle, ridden as it is by disease, deformity, and eventually death. The need to escape from an increasingly inhospitable planetary environment frequently figures as the subject of fiction, films, and television series. These intellectual and cultural tendencies speak to the feeling - as well as to the ecological

21

and climatic evidence - of human insecurity, to our planetary precariousness. In short, to human homelessness.

Biographies Margaret May Margaret May is a part-time MRes student in the second year of her degree in German Studies at the IMLR. Her research interests include German Jewish writers, particularly women, from the early and late twentieth century, and memory studies. She is working on fictional representations of the relationship between material culture, concepts of rootedness and the construction or reconstruction of identity. Sean Matharoo Sean Matharoo is a Ph.D. candidate of Comparative Literature at University of California, Riverside, where he studies Francophone, Anglophone, and Arabic speculative media and philosophy. He has published an article, book reviews, encyclopedia entries, and interviews in Horror Studies, Science Fiction Studies, the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, Science Fiction Film and Television, The Eaton Journal of Archival Research in Science Fiction, Horror Literature Through History, and The Los Angeles Review of Books. He has a book chapter on Tobe Hooper, Bruno Dumont, affective space, and metaphysical horror forthcoming in The Spaces and Places of Horror and an article on J.G. Ballard, noise, and the Anthropocene forthcoming in Green Letters. As the recipient of a 2017-18 Fulbright U.S. Student Award, he will begin to write his dissertation at Ghent University in Belgium later this year. Alexandre Leskanich I read history (BA & MA), philosophy (MSc), and political theory (MSc) at the universities of Leicester, Edinburgh, and the London School of Economics and Political Science. I am currently a PhD student in the Department of Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at Royal Holloway, University of London, researching the political and philosophical ramifications of the ‘Anthropocene’.