2009 GPH Symposium
Representing the Unspeakable
Materials
GRADUATE PROGRAM IN HUMANITIES SYMPOSIUM, 2009
PAPER ABSTRACTS
ZACHARY ASHBY (IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN CULTURES)
"Perpetrators and Victims: Estremida memoria and Spain's Violent Forgetting"
Jesus Moncada wrote Estremida memoria in 1997. The title means “Shaken Memory” in English. It is framed as an investigation for a book that was completely altred by the revelations uncovered by researching the past. In Old Mequinensa, a town on the Catalan Aragonese border on the Ebro river, four bandits hijacked and killed a Government tax collector, the Guardia Civil, and driver that accompanied him on the road to the capitol with the collected taxes. All four bandits and the driver were natives of Mequinensa The bandits were caught, tried and executed. While the collective memory sees the four highway men as perpetrators of violent crime and in some cases denies their origins, the truth is much less clear. The narrative suggests varying degrees of guilt and victimhood. Moncada uses three frames, from two different time periods to get at the heart of this traumatic event in Meqinensan history None of these frames can claim eyewitness authority to the event, only memories of memories of lost eyewitness accounts. This history, in turn, symbolizes for Spanish history since the beginning of the 19th century, especially the Civil War of 1937-1939 of which the Battle of the Ebro took place near Mequinensa. These alternate memories confront the established, official history that relies on the “Pacto de olvido” (Pact of forgetting) understood as official policy during the transition to democracy after Franco's death.
ALEX CHUNG-CHIEN CHEN (HUMANITIES MA)
"The Game of Love Turned Real: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 'The Romaunt of the Page' and the Trobairitz"
The intertextuality of female Victorian poetry and their engagement with the medievalist troubadour tradition has seldom been noted, yet the poetry of the trobairitz perhaps provides the best model for understanding the Victorian poetess' use of medieval images and forms rather than the Sapphic model that is otherwise more frequently employed. In her first medieval ballad "The Romaunt of the Page," Barrett Browning presents us with two stories: a vigorous tale woven by a young page of a lady who loves her husband enough to follow him to war in disguise and to share his travails, set against the sterile story by the knight of male chivalric duty and honor. Like the trobairitz, Browning succeeds in constructing a third “gender” or class in the form of the cross-dressing female page, neither the androgynous domna, the femna, nor the cavallier, but a woman who shares the province of all three. By subtly subverting traditional gender roles and perceptions of these roles through her use of irony and distance even as she engages in the masculine ‘game of love,’ Browning’s ballad is very different from what she purports it to be by publishing it in a journal compiling aesthetic stories of female 'quiescence.' Similarly, the trobairitz produced works using the same language and form as their male counterparts in the same courts, hiding their own interpretations of fin’amor through their irony. Their ironic (often even self-ironizing) voices then become a sorting mechanism for their poems: those who are actually willing to listen will recognize and see past the irony, while those not willing to listen will remain blissfully unaware of complication.
S. GENE LEE (GERMAN STUDIES)
"The Aesthetic of Play-Drive, Schiller's 'Undenkbarer Begriff' ('unthinkable concept')
The secondary literature on Schiller's Aesthetic Letters yields a scholarly consensus on his drive-theory of aesthetics. Per this reading, form-drive and sense-drive are harmonized in the play-drive, which has its object in beauty and its activity in art. This interpretation has consigned Schiller to the dust-heap of an idealist-utopian aesthetic theory, thus distorting and forfeiting a singular innovation in modern aesthetic theory.
This paper will argue an opposite reading: play-drive produces a cancellation (aufheben) of form-and sense-drive. Schiller at one point refers to the play-drive as the 'undenkbarer Begriff,' which stands well for the complexity of this notion. While we might denote the play-drive as a drive without an object, it were better called metateleological. The former designation (the objectless drive) is only one aspect of the play-drive; it is a starting point and far from a full definition. In sketching the consequences of metateleology, Schiller identifies an experience of the sensible world radically different to what is either ordinarily conceived, or accessible to existing conceptual frameworks. This interpretation of the play-drive also effects a radical redefinition of beauty, art, and freedom.
MATTHEW MOORE (DRAMA)
"Challenging Forms: Presence and the Act of Art Happening"
The problem of being present coincides with the notion of the unspeakable on a temporal level: to say "I am here" marks the experiencing body in time and space, but this performative gesture immediately disappears into the past, as Peggy Phelan would say, without a trace. Conforming to the politics of language, which narrates existence, our individual experience fails to live in itself; form and meaning always intervene prior to the process of perception to establish a monolithic view of reality that elides experience.
Viktor Shklovsky argues that the pupose of art is "to impart a sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known...to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception..." Departing from the notion of a necessary slowing-down, I hope to address the issue of “performative time” in three representational examples in order to describe the phenomenological experience of presence in the face of Art. Ultimately, though this experience exceeds narration, the multiplicity of temporal meanings embedded in performed speech opens a space for simultaneous individual and collective meaning. I will explore this temporally situated intersubjectivity by reading a descriptive passage from Huckleberry Finn, a performance/installation derived from the representations of nature in Adalbert Stifter's novels, and a performance piece staged by Goat Island in response to the architecture of the Hagia Sophia in Turkey. Seen as participatory performance, each of these examples embodies a site of co-temporality that foregrounds the process of perception through meiosis.
HEATHER OTTO (HISTORY)
"Maintaining Humanity on the Autre Planete: The Essential Place of Sex and Gender in Studies of the Holocaust"
The Holocaust can be viewed as a watershed moment in the creation of the postmodern world, and it may therefore seem logical to argue that the current status of gender in society is also rooted in this crucial moment. Certainly, a profound change of gender roles, and even the place of gender as a central tenet of human identity, is a striking feature of the experience of the Holocaust, particularly in what became the unique societies of the camps. As it evolved into the Final Solution – a project explicitly intended to eradicate a segment of the human population – the attempt at an erasure of such fundamental characteristics as gender in fact became one of the most horrific features of the Nazi program.
However, this paper argues that even amidst the forced collapse of traditional gender roles in the camp, the persistence of attention to this structure among the victims underscores one of the most personal triumphs of the prisoners. Recognizing the essential role that gender plays in personal accounts from the camps is therefore not only appropriate to academic studies of the human experience in the Holocaust, but it is also in fact crucial to understanding the way in which the Holocaust both fulfills and resists a "post-modern" characterization.
JENNA REBACK (HUMANITIES MA)
"Divided Selves"
In my presentation, "Divided Selves:" The gaze as weapon in El publico, I contend that the central element of Lorca's play is its portrayal of the experience of being subjected to the gaze of a potentially unsympathetic other as both universal and traumatic.
El publico's use of abstract and seemingly coded language has led many critics to conclude that, like many early Lorca works, it depicts an attempt to repress homosexual inclinations in an intolerant society. Yet such a reading is both limiting and incomplete; it disregards the fact that all of the play's characters, homosexual or not, experience the same fears of being harshly judged by the audience. In an attempt to win the audience’s approval, many present themselves insincerely.
I assert that use of abstract language in El publico serves to demonstrate both the artificiality of "performed self" and the universality of the practice of self-performance. Furthermore, I demonstrate that while the experience of being the subject of a gaze is inevitable in human society, it is not necessarily traumatic: though the characters in Lorca's play must stand before the audience, ultimately, they do not all choose to present themselves falsely.
KELLY SUMMERS (HISTORY)
"Jacques-Louis David's Greek Turn: Reconciling Art and Politics in Post-Terror France"
The biography of Jacques-Louis David, the French Revolution's chief prophet-turned-proselytizer, reads like a political thriller. His canon reflects the era's seismic shifts in power, no two paintings perhaps more so than the celebrated Roman history portraits that bracketed France's revolutionary period. Oath of the Horatii (1785), which anticipated the patriotic ideal of masculine self-sacrifice and female passivity that would become a core tenet of republican and specifically Jacobin ideology, contrasts starkly with the 1799 Intervention of the Sabine Women, which dramatically reverses course by celebrating women's pacifist intercession as wives and mothers. The premise of the latter work was conceived during a Thermidorean stint in prison that threatened to fatally compromise the former Terrorist's artistic career. Although both images take their subject matter from episodes in Roman history—a common source for neo-classicists, of course—they diverge markedly in style and message. Indeed, while David's pre-revolutionary and Jacobin paintings had been representative of both France's classical revival dating back to the seventeenth-century master Nicolas Poussin and the Rousseauian tenor of works such as Greuze's anti-rococo family dramas, the Sabine Women marks a distinctly "Greek turn" in his repertoire. Why, at this critical juncture, did David opt to re-make his artistic image according to a Greek ideal popularized nearly half-a-century earlier by the German antiquarian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and why did the ancient Hellenistic model—as opposed to the heroic Roman rhetoric he had mastered—resonate so powerfully in the post-Terror period? Moreover, how did this newly “purified” style shape and reinforce the reconciliatory message David embedded in his much-anticipated return to post-revolutionary high culture? Ultimately, of course, David's self-recreating gamble worked, launching him back into a position of cultural pre-eminence as Napoleon's propagandist of choice. But the question remains as to why the Greek strategy, with its striking aesthetic and gender dimensions, was deployed so effectively at this particular historical moment—a question my paper will seek to address.
PAPER ABSTRACTS
ZACHARY ASHBY (IBERIAN AND LATIN AMERICAN CULTURES)
"Perpetrators and Victims: Estremida memoria and Spain's Violent Forgetting"
Jesus Moncada wrote Estremida memoria in 1997. The title means “Shaken Memory” in English. It is framed as an investigation for a book that was completely altred by the revelations uncovered by researching the past. In Old Mequinensa, a town on the Catalan Aragonese border on the Ebro river, four bandits hijacked and killed a Government tax collector, the Guardia Civil, and driver that accompanied him on the road to the capitol with the collected taxes. All four bandits and the driver were natives of Mequinensa The bandits were caught, tried and executed. While the collective memory sees the four highway men as perpetrators of violent crime and in some cases denies their origins, the truth is much less clear. The narrative suggests varying degrees of guilt and victimhood. Moncada uses three frames, from two different time periods to get at the heart of this traumatic event in Meqinensan history None of these frames can claim eyewitness authority to the event, only memories of memories of lost eyewitness accounts. This history, in turn, symbolizes for Spanish history since the beginning of the 19th century, especially the Civil War of 1937-1939 of which the Battle of the Ebro took place near Mequinensa. These alternate memories confront the established, official history that relies on the “Pacto de olvido” (Pact of forgetting) understood as official policy during the transition to democracy after Franco's death.
ALEX CHUNG-CHIEN CHEN (HUMANITIES MA)
"The Game of Love Turned Real: Elizabeth Barrett Browning's 'The Romaunt of the Page' and the Trobairitz"
The intertextuality of female Victorian poetry and their engagement with the medievalist troubadour tradition has seldom been noted, yet the poetry of the trobairitz perhaps provides the best model for understanding the Victorian poetess' use of medieval images and forms rather than the Sapphic model that is otherwise more frequently employed. In her first medieval ballad "The Romaunt of the Page," Barrett Browning presents us with two stories: a vigorous tale woven by a young page of a lady who loves her husband enough to follow him to war in disguise and to share his travails, set against the sterile story by the knight of male chivalric duty and honor. Like the trobairitz, Browning succeeds in constructing a third “gender” or class in the form of the cross-dressing female page, neither the androgynous domna, the femna, nor the cavallier, but a woman who shares the province of all three. By subtly subverting traditional gender roles and perceptions of these roles through her use of irony and distance even as she engages in the masculine ‘game of love,’ Browning’s ballad is very different from what she purports it to be by publishing it in a journal compiling aesthetic stories of female 'quiescence.' Similarly, the trobairitz produced works using the same language and form as their male counterparts in the same courts, hiding their own interpretations of fin’amor through their irony. Their ironic (often even self-ironizing) voices then become a sorting mechanism for their poems: those who are actually willing to listen will recognize and see past the irony, while those not willing to listen will remain blissfully unaware of complication.
S. GENE LEE (GERMAN STUDIES)
"The Aesthetic of Play-Drive, Schiller's 'Undenkbarer Begriff' ('unthinkable concept')
The secondary literature on Schiller's Aesthetic Letters yields a scholarly consensus on his drive-theory of aesthetics. Per this reading, form-drive and sense-drive are harmonized in the play-drive, which has its object in beauty and its activity in art. This interpretation has consigned Schiller to the dust-heap of an idealist-utopian aesthetic theory, thus distorting and forfeiting a singular innovation in modern aesthetic theory.
This paper will argue an opposite reading: play-drive produces a cancellation (aufheben) of form-and sense-drive. Schiller at one point refers to the play-drive as the 'undenkbarer Begriff,' which stands well for the complexity of this notion. While we might denote the play-drive as a drive without an object, it were better called metateleological. The former designation (the objectless drive) is only one aspect of the play-drive; it is a starting point and far from a full definition. In sketching the consequences of metateleology, Schiller identifies an experience of the sensible world radically different to what is either ordinarily conceived, or accessible to existing conceptual frameworks. This interpretation of the play-drive also effects a radical redefinition of beauty, art, and freedom.
MATTHEW MOORE (DRAMA)
"Challenging Forms: Presence and the Act of Art Happening"
The problem of being present coincides with the notion of the unspeakable on a temporal level: to say "I am here" marks the experiencing body in time and space, but this performative gesture immediately disappears into the past, as Peggy Phelan would say, without a trace. Conforming to the politics of language, which narrates existence, our individual experience fails to live in itself; form and meaning always intervene prior to the process of perception to establish a monolithic view of reality that elides experience.
Viktor Shklovsky argues that the pupose of art is "to impart a sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known...to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception..." Departing from the notion of a necessary slowing-down, I hope to address the issue of “performative time” in three representational examples in order to describe the phenomenological experience of presence in the face of Art. Ultimately, though this experience exceeds narration, the multiplicity of temporal meanings embedded in performed speech opens a space for simultaneous individual and collective meaning. I will explore this temporally situated intersubjectivity by reading a descriptive passage from Huckleberry Finn, a performance/installation derived from the representations of nature in Adalbert Stifter's novels, and a performance piece staged by Goat Island in response to the architecture of the Hagia Sophia in Turkey. Seen as participatory performance, each of these examples embodies a site of co-temporality that foregrounds the process of perception through meiosis.
HEATHER OTTO (HISTORY)
"Maintaining Humanity on the Autre Planete: The Essential Place of Sex and Gender in Studies of the Holocaust"
The Holocaust can be viewed as a watershed moment in the creation of the postmodern world, and it may therefore seem logical to argue that the current status of gender in society is also rooted in this crucial moment. Certainly, a profound change of gender roles, and even the place of gender as a central tenet of human identity, is a striking feature of the experience of the Holocaust, particularly in what became the unique societies of the camps. As it evolved into the Final Solution – a project explicitly intended to eradicate a segment of the human population – the attempt at an erasure of such fundamental characteristics as gender in fact became one of the most horrific features of the Nazi program.
However, this paper argues that even amidst the forced collapse of traditional gender roles in the camp, the persistence of attention to this structure among the victims underscores one of the most personal triumphs of the prisoners. Recognizing the essential role that gender plays in personal accounts from the camps is therefore not only appropriate to academic studies of the human experience in the Holocaust, but it is also in fact crucial to understanding the way in which the Holocaust both fulfills and resists a "post-modern" characterization.
JENNA REBACK (HUMANITIES MA)
"Divided Selves"
In my presentation, "Divided Selves:" The gaze as weapon in El publico, I contend that the central element of Lorca's play is its portrayal of the experience of being subjected to the gaze of a potentially unsympathetic other as both universal and traumatic.
El publico's use of abstract and seemingly coded language has led many critics to conclude that, like many early Lorca works, it depicts an attempt to repress homosexual inclinations in an intolerant society. Yet such a reading is both limiting and incomplete; it disregards the fact that all of the play's characters, homosexual or not, experience the same fears of being harshly judged by the audience. In an attempt to win the audience’s approval, many present themselves insincerely.
I assert that use of abstract language in El publico serves to demonstrate both the artificiality of "performed self" and the universality of the practice of self-performance. Furthermore, I demonstrate that while the experience of being the subject of a gaze is inevitable in human society, it is not necessarily traumatic: though the characters in Lorca's play must stand before the audience, ultimately, they do not all choose to present themselves falsely.
KELLY SUMMERS (HISTORY)
"Jacques-Louis David's Greek Turn: Reconciling Art and Politics in Post-Terror France"
The biography of Jacques-Louis David, the French Revolution's chief prophet-turned-proselytizer, reads like a political thriller. His canon reflects the era's seismic shifts in power, no two paintings perhaps more so than the celebrated Roman history portraits that bracketed France's revolutionary period. Oath of the Horatii (1785), which anticipated the patriotic ideal of masculine self-sacrifice and female passivity that would become a core tenet of republican and specifically Jacobin ideology, contrasts starkly with the 1799 Intervention of the Sabine Women, which dramatically reverses course by celebrating women's pacifist intercession as wives and mothers. The premise of the latter work was conceived during a Thermidorean stint in prison that threatened to fatally compromise the former Terrorist's artistic career. Although both images take their subject matter from episodes in Roman history—a common source for neo-classicists, of course—they diverge markedly in style and message. Indeed, while David's pre-revolutionary and Jacobin paintings had been representative of both France's classical revival dating back to the seventeenth-century master Nicolas Poussin and the Rousseauian tenor of works such as Greuze's anti-rococo family dramas, the Sabine Women marks a distinctly "Greek turn" in his repertoire. Why, at this critical juncture, did David opt to re-make his artistic image according to a Greek ideal popularized nearly half-a-century earlier by the German antiquarian Johann Joachim Winckelmann, and why did the ancient Hellenistic model—as opposed to the heroic Roman rhetoric he had mastered—resonate so powerfully in the post-Terror period? Moreover, how did this newly “purified” style shape and reinforce the reconciliatory message David embedded in his much-anticipated return to post-revolutionary high culture? Ultimately, of course, David's self-recreating gamble worked, launching him back into a position of cultural pre-eminence as Napoleon's propagandist of choice. But the question remains as to why the Greek strategy, with its striking aesthetic and gender dimensions, was deployed so effectively at this particular historical moment—a question my paper will seek to address.