GLITS: Conference Report

‘Paradox’, 26th June 2010, Goldsmiths

Call for papers: “Paradox occupies a strange territory in between reason and intuition, involving the simultaneous processes of grasping and letting go of the doxa.  As an apparently absurd set of contradictions or oppositions entailing one another, paradox works within, between and among texts in an infinite number of ways, fascinating thinkers and writers from a variety of disciplines, locations and points in history.  This interdisciplinary research conference seeks fresh perspectives on the intersection between paradox and text; how paradox can be deployed in writing; and potential ways it could be harnessed for theoretical or creative gain”.

The theme of ‘paradox’ was intended to attract researchers from a variety of academic backgrounds.  The blurring of literary and philosophical boundaries has been a significant process for many decades, and some would say that the exploration of paradox is one area where literature and philosophy intersect. Philosopher-writers such as Maurice Blanchot and writer-philosophers such as Jorge Luis Borges approach the concept from seemingly opposite perspectives, but perhaps the operation of open questioning or affirmation of paradox is one which can be viewed in both of these “opposite” perspectives.  With this disciplinary blending in mind, paradox was chosen because of its appeal to the reasoning and imagination of writers, philosophers and everyone in between.  The resulting programme was a wide variety of papers which dealt with the following: paradoxes inherent in language, literary applications of philosophical paradoxes, philosophical explanations of literary paradoxes and analyses of paradoxes within certain texts.

 Our plenary speaker, Professor Christopher Norris, began proceedings with his fascinating paper on William Empson, a philosophical literary figure captivated by the potential of paradox within the functioning of a literary text.  Professor Norris focussed on two of Empson’s books in particular, Seven Types of Ambiguity and The Structure of Complex Words, which both present paradox as something beyond the limits of ‘reason’ as conventionally understood.  This is perhaps one of the reasons why it fascinates writers of literature, which is also something which exceeds rational limits.  This link between the functions of paradox and literature was an important initial building block for the thought processes of the day.

The first panel explored linguistic paradoxes, presenting various structural aspects of language and the paradoxes located therein.  Alfie Bown presented the paradoxical aspects of translation; Stephen Lydon discussed language and corporeality in Nietzsche, and Helen Palmer discussed the paradoxical equation of being and becoming within the structure of metaphor.  Each of these three papers approached the problem of language and paradox from different angles, discussing the ‘paradoxical’ nature of language’s simultaneous ideality and corporeality.  The reason why ‘literary’ language is particularly illustrative of paradox is due to its manipulation of this interplay; the figure enacts both idea and object. 

The idea of affirming ‘literary’ paradox as something which makes seemingly impossible things possible continued into the second panel, which turned away from linguistic or structural paradox towards some analyses of how it might affect the realm of fiction. The second panel presented three very different aspects of ‘paradoxical fiction’, with two papers inspired by the important work of Alain Badiou: Simon de Bourcier analysed the affirmation of ontological impossibility within fiction and Jennifer Jane Nutter dealt with the work of Philip K. Dick.  No paradoxical conference would be complete without multiple references to Gilles Deleuze, and one of these was a Deleuzian reading of magical realism from Eva Aldea.  Again, the focus was very much on what these writers allowed to occur within their paradoxical worlds, rather than on the consideration of paradox as a stalemate or dead end.  Science fiction and magical realism are both genres which present occurrences which by our conventional logic we would term ridiculous or impossible, and yet fiction in general presupposes multiple worlds which are by conventional definition paradoxical.  It became clearer by this point that there are many different ways in which paradox is inherent to both linguistic and literary creation.

The afternoon panel moved further away from the philosophical and closer towards the literary, as Catherine Humble dissected contradictions in Carver, Merja Sagulin explored the paradoxical implications of literary adaptation, and Danielle Tran presented an analysis of paradoxical temporality in The Waste Land.  To end the proceedings with a creative exploration, poet Steph Yorke provided us all with a simultaneous reading and analysis of the contradictions in her poem Burger King Crown. 

Of the proceedings from this conference, the papers by Simon de Bourcier and Danielle Tran are published in this current edition of GLITS-e.  Simon de Bourcier’s paper ‘Impossible Objects, Thought Experiments, and the Logic of Fictional Worlds’ discussed paradox from a variety of philosophical and literary perspectives, discussing the ‘conventionally’ scientific theories of thinkers such as Karl Popper and linking them to the much more recent thought of Alain Badiou and his critique of postmodern Deleuzian affirmations of paradox.  Simon kept his discussion within a literary framework by including discussions of how paradox is employed in science fiction classic such as Wells’ The Time Machine.  One of the most important conclusions we drew from the conference was that time is one of the most important factors when thinking of literary or linguistic paradox.  Danielle Tran’s paper ‘Paradox in Time: Movement and Stasis in T.S Eliot’s The Waste Land’ explored temporal paradox in Eliot’s writing through some close reading of The Waste Land and a thorough synthesis of some of the theory surrounding modernist explorations of time.

Helen Palmer