Praise of Motherhood
by Phil Jourdan
When Phil Jourdan's mother died suddenly in 2009, she left behind a legacy of kindness and charity — but she also left... more
When Phil Jourdan's mother died suddenly in 2009, she left behind a legacy of kindness and charity — but she also left unanswered some troubling questions. Was she, as she once claimed, a spy? Had she suffered more profoundly as a woman and parent than she'd let on?
Jourdan's recollections of his struggles with psychosis, and his reconstructions of conversations with his enigmatic mother, form the core of this memoir. Psychoanalysis, poetry and confession all merge to tell the story of an ordinary woman whose death turned her into a symbol for extraordinary motherhood.
Gogol's eloquentia corporis. Einverleibung, Identität und die Grenzen der Figuration, München 1998.
Review by Kirill Postoutenko
- Slavic and East European Journal, vol.44 no.2, p. 319-320, 2000. 9. 1
Vampire Nation: Violence as Cultural Imaginary
“This fascinating and important post-Yugoslav study of violence, especially in relation to Serbia and the Serbs, poses crucial questions about how Serbian violence has been understood from within Serbian culture, from within the Yugoslav and post-Yugoslav framework, and from the external perspective of the European gaze. Tomislav Z. Longinović, one of the world’s leading scholars on South Slavic literature and culture, offers a cultural study that provocatively illuminates the complexities of Serbian identity, the metaphor of vampirism in southeastern Europe, the meaning of violence within an imagined community, and the mental mapping of the former Yugoslavia.”—Larry Wolff, author of Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment
Vampire Nation is a nuanced analysis of the cultural and political rhetoric framing ‘the serbs’ as metaphorical... more
Vampire Nation is a nuanced analysis of the cultural and political rhetoric framing ‘the serbs’ as metaphorical vampires in the last decades of the twentieth century, as well as the cultural imaginaries and rhetorical mechanisms that inform nationalist discourses more broadly. Tomislav Z. Longinović points to the Gothic associations of violence, blood, and soil in the writings of many intellectuals and politicians during the 1990s, especially in portrayals by the U.S.-led Western media of ‘the serbs’ as a vampire nation, a bloodsucking parasite on the edge of European civilization.
Interpreting oral and written narratives and visual culture, Longinović traces the early modern invention of ‘the serbs’ and the category’s twentieth-century transformations. He describes the influence of Bram Stoker’s nineteenth-century novel Dracula on perceptions of the Balkan region and reflects on representations of hybrid identities and their violent destruction in the works of the region’s most prominent twentieth-century writers. Concluding on a hopeful note, Longinović considers efforts to imagine a new collective identity in non-nationalist terms. These endeavors include the emigrant Yugoslav writer David Albahari’s Canadian Trilogy and Cyber-Yugoslavia, a mock nation-state with “citizens” in more than thirty countries.
Download (.doc) De waarheid op de wand: psychoanalyse van het weten
by Hub Zwart
In literaire genres krijgt de verbeelding alle ruimte, maar in wetenschappelijke teksten wordt het beeld met... more
In literaire genres krijgt de verbeelding alle ruimte, maar in wetenschappelijke teksten wordt het beeld met achterdocht benaderd. Van de drie talen die de mens beheerst - die van het beeld, het woord en het getal - gebruikt de wetenschapper doorgaans de laatste twee. En bij voorkeur wordt bestaande beeldvorming in onderzoek door cijfers, geijkte termen en symbolen verdrongen. Nadere beschouwing leert echter dat ook in het wetenschappelijke denken de verbeelding een structurerende rol speelt, bewust of onbewust. In De waarheid op de wand hanteert Hub Zwart een psychoanalytisch perspectief om de fundamentele beelden - archetypen - aan het licht te brengen die aan de basis liggen van de wetenschappelijke wil tot weten.
Elk wetenschapsgebied blijkt eigen archetypen te kennen, die vooral opdoemen in tijden van crisis. Voor de geneeskunde is dat bijvoorbeeld de gedachte van een nieuwe, onbekende, besmettelijke ziekte, voor de milieuwetenschap het idee van een mondiale klimaatverandering resulterend in massasterfte en voor de economie een catastrofale beurskrach. Dergelijke beelden kunnen de waarheid vertekenen en vragen om een kritische benadering, wat niet wegneemt dat doemscenario's zo nu en dan harde werkelijkheid worden.
Hauntings I: Narrating the Uncanny
Co-edited with Martin Doll, Rupert Gaderer, Jan Niklas Howe, Catherine Smale
The essays collected here aim to explore several aspects of the notion of the uncanny from multiple angles that... more The essays collected here aim to explore several aspects of the notion of the uncanny from multiple angles that emerged in the course of the workshop “Phantasmata – Techniques of the Uncanny” held in April 2009 at the Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry (http://uncanny.ici-berlin.org). The issue will be divided in two parts, under the common title of 'Hauntings': the first will focus on 'Narrating the Uncanny', thus stressing the presence of the uncanny in literature and other media; while the second, 'Uncanny Figures and Twilight Zones', will inquire into the political implications of the uncanny and the specific figures and themes that can be connected to it.
Fear Within Melting Boundaries, ed. by Lee Baxter and Paula Brăescu (Oxford: ID Press, March 2011), pp. 45-54. ISBN: 978-1-84888-053-5
by Lizzy Welby
'The Monstrous Feminine: Confronting the Horror of Female Fecundity in Angela Carter’s The Passion of New Eve'
The Pleasure of the Feminist Text: Reading Michèle Roberts and Angela Carter
Amsterdam and New York, NY: Rodopi, 2009 [GENUS: Gender in Modern Culture, vol. 11].
"I would regard myself as a feminist writer, because I'm a feminist in everything else and one can't... more
"I would regard myself as a feminist writer, because I'm a feminist in everything else and one can't compartmentalise these things in one's life." (Angela Carter)
"When I became a feminist in 1968, I felt that I'd come home: the first home I ever had that was feminine. And it was very wild and theatrical and erotic, the early feminism." (Michèle Roberts)
Angela Carter and Michèle Roberts share a keen interest in gender and sexual identity, but many of their topics seem to mark them as opposites: Roberts’s fascination with the impact of religion, motherhood and autobiography on female identity covers areas that Carter shuns in her writings. In reading these two authors parallel and in contrast to each other, this monograph follows a triple objective: it provides a comprehensive critical introduction to the works of Roberts, explores aspects of Carter’s work that have not yet been analyzed sufficiently (religion, motherhood, and masculinity), and uses both authors to explore motifs and strategies of feminist writing. The analyses of both authors’ works are supplemented by close readings of a wide range of theoretical perspectives (especially French feminism and psychoanalysis) and concise theoretical outlines of the topics covered (radical feminism, religion, motherhood and fatherhood, masculinity, fairy tales, romances and chick lit, and history and auto/biography).
Table of Contents:
(1) Introduction: The Pleasure of the Feminist Text
(2) Exploring/Challenging Radical Feminism(s)
(3) Feminism and Faith – Feminist Faith?
(4) Mothers, Fathers, Couples – Negotiating Intimate Relationships
(5) Writing Masculinities
(6) Popular Genres: Sexy Fairy Tales, Feminist Romances, Chick Lit
(7) History and Auto/Biography
(8) Conclusion
Le cabinet d'autofictions
sous la direction de Simon Harel, Alexandre Jacques et Stéphanie St-Amant
Ne vivons-nous pas un tourment des formes, une brutale déflagration des modes de raconter qui ne cesse de buter sur... more
Ne vivons-nous pas un tourment des formes, une brutale déflagration des modes de raconter qui ne cesse de buter sur cette écriture de soi, à la fois impossible et nécessaire, rebelle et souhaitable, qui laisse surgir la pulsation de l'inconscient ?
Avec les contributions de Cindy Baril, Sylvie Boyer, Jocelyn Girard, Mélanie Gleize, Olivier Hamel, Simon Harel, Alexandre Jacques, Stéphanie St-Amant