9th Annual McGill University Graduate Student
Symposium on Language and Literature
"Blood Lust, Blood Loss: Representations of Struggle
and Desire"
March 22nd and 23rd, 2003
Montréal, Quebec
Marvellous Desire: Postmodern Literature and
the Limits of Representation
This panel will examine the ways in which
postmodern literature is characterized by a struggle
to redefine the limits of mimetic representation. In
"Theses on the Philosophy of History," Walter Benjamin
argues that "To articulate the past historically does
not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was' [...]
It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at
a moment of danger" (255). The postmodern novel at
once inscribes the desire to reproduce the human
subject at the point of trauma while simultaneously
pointing to the limits of this representation, through
the use of game space, fantasy, historicism and the
marvellous, or "wonder."
Nabokov's Pale Fire, for instance, collapses the
boundary between reality and fantasy through an
exploration of Dr. Charles Kinbote's imaginative
world of longing and exile. Likewise, Jeanette
Winterson examines the desire for—and the
irretrievable nature of—the historical in Sexing the
Cherry, in which the past can only be understood or
retrieved through the marvellous and carnivalesque.
In Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo, political strife and
the historical continuity of racial struggle is
reified through the immortal, and at times,
dangerously substantial, Vodoun "loas." Susan
Sontag's The Volcano Lover, on the other hand,
represents the unstable nature of the historical
subject through an examination of a wondrous
"collection of fates" during the Napoleonic era.
Panel papers may wish to address some of the
following concerns: why are postmodern narratives
obsessed with the historical? Why do postmodern
narratives rely on the marvellous, the fantastic, and
the wondrous to reproduce reality? How is the desire
for the historical subject, or any subject,
represented in postmodern texts, and how is this task
undermined by a postmodern, and perhaps even
post-historic, consciousness? Is postmodern
literature obsessed with historical materialism, and
how is this polemic articulated through the seemingly
insubstantial nature of the marvellous? Similarly,
are representational and historical materialist
limitations truly at odds with a marvellous narrative?
Does postmodern literature ever escape modernist
notions of the historic, or does the postmodern
narrative remain within a modernist, Surrealist realm
of consciousness which Susan Sontag has dubbed "the
baroque cult of ruins?" ("Under the Sign of Saturn"
120).
Paper proposals are invited on these and related
questions. Please send, within the body of the email
(no attachments, please), 250 word abstracts by
February 1st, 2003 to L. Erin Vollick:
levollick@yahoo.ca.
More information can be located on the Conference
Website:
http://www.arts.mcgill.ca/programs/english/symposium9.html
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From the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List
CFP@english.upenn.edu
Full Information at
http://www.english.upenn.edu/CFP/
or write Erika Lin: elin@english.upenn.edu
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