Research

CURRENT PROJECTS

21. Weltkongress der International Comparative Literature Association (21st World congress of the International Comparative Literature Association)

XXIst Congress, University of Vienna, Austria, July 21 – July 27, 2016

Congress Theme: Die vielen Sprachen der Literaturwissenschaft

Paper: "The Visual Language of Hans Bellmer and Djuna Barnes"

Fairy Tales, Memory, and the Modernist Imagination

Book for Northwestern University Press (Under Advance Contract) Editor Phyllis Lassner

Fairy Tales, Memory, and the Modernist Imagination, is a comparative examination of several significant cultural expressions of World War II. Drawing upon theories of language and trauma, I analyze representations of fantasy and the grotesque in works by American author Djuna Barnes, German artist Hans Bellmer, British-born painter Leonora Carrington, and Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann as they relate to instances of their personal and historical memory.

This critical review of popular culture and oral narratives (i.e. fairy tales) in the works of artists responding to the events of WWII, demonstrates that fairy tales are more than utopian counter-narratives to horror; rather, they open a critical space in which we may think about their relationship to history and function as a key to conceptualizing fantasy’s reemergence as a predominant aesthetic in post-war art.

RECENT PROJECTS

Trespassing Memory - Issue 3

Issue Editor, Trespassing Journal, Istanbul Turkey

As a result of recent developments in the fields of literary theory, psychology, anthropology, and history, there has been a radical shift in the concept of memory. No longer thought of as simple recollection or a retrieval of “stored ideas,” memory is now conceived as a reflexive process, one informed by the social and cultural realities of the remembering subject. For some, memory is an inescapable condition for dealing with the present – an uncanny “weight” that demands, yet resists, articulation. And for others memory is a way to rethink the inherent pluralism of time – a tool used to liberate oneself from the confines of historical or national narrative. As evidenced in the numerous literary meditations on remembrance by authors such as Orhan Pamuk and John Banville, for example, and in the political and scientific concerns about new technologies and how mass media archives the past, the topic of memory has become an increasingly salient field of inquiry.

As part of our commitment to publishing original and innovative research, the editors of Trespassing are now soliciting essays that address the topic of memory and its shifting role in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Transnational and transdisciplinary in scope, this issue will investigate lines of inquiry concerning the relationship between fiction and memoir, memory’s relationship to material objects, and the interrelations between mass media and collective memory. How, for example, does memory shape our identity and place in culture? What is the relationship between memory and desire? In what ways is history shaped through the dynamics of remembering and forgetting? And perhaps a more pressing question in light of our increasingly digitized world: Do certain forms of social media and digital technology threaten our capacity to remember the past critically? Or do they open up new spaces for the thoughtful evaluation and resolution of what were once conflicting representations of the past?

Areas of exploration and inquiry include but are not limited to:

• The Media of Collective Memory

• Rethinking Museums as Site of Cultural Memory

• Memory and Desire

• Hipster Subculture: Parody and Pop Culture

• Memory and the Culture Industry: “Instagram,” Facebook’s “Timeline,” “Tumblr”

• Photography as Memory

• Contemporary Forms of Elegy

• Autobiography through Film or Television

• Memory and Neuroscience

• The Language of Trauma

• Rethinking Nostalgia

• Automatism and Aleatory Memory

• Memory and the Oral or Folk Tradition

• Memory, Violence, and Fantastic Forms

Prospective contributors should submit an abstract of approximately 500 words and a brief resume by April 1, 2013 to editor@trespassingjournal.com or aheney1@johnshopkins.edu

Selected authors will be invited to submit full papers (of maximum 9000 words) according to the style guidelines. Acceptance of the abstract does not guarantee publication since all papers will be subject to double-blind peer-review. Submissions are accepted in English.

See more at: http://trespassingjournal.com/?page_id=528#sthash.1wuR9M5N.dpuf

Theorizing the Fantastic in Twentieth-Century Art

Editor, Cambridge Scholars Publishing (Under Contract)

This volume is an edited collection that explore the evolving function of fantastic forms in twentieth-century art and the ways in which the language of the fantastic is engaged with the modern artist’s investigation of social and political concerns such as the rise of technology, the construction of memory, feminist politics and spiritual bankruptcy. Works addressed include Čapek’s R.U.R., the science fiction of Philip K. Dick, Djuna Barnes’s Repulsive Women, Angela Carter's Wise Children, Julio Cortázar's Letter to a Young Lady in Paris, and the films of Jacques Tati, among others.