Event overview
Goldsmiths Literature Seminar
Naomi Booth (Goldsmiths)
'Self-Shattering Textualities: Ian McEwan's Atonement and Freud's Primal Scene in Pieces'
Leo Bersani describes the value of Freud's writing as residing in a place of brokenness, in its status as a self-shattering discourse. Bersani is most interested in the ways in which Freud's thought fails to be what it posits itself as, the way in which its attempt at knowledge is necessarily self-shattering, constituting a 'problematizing of the act of knowing', and modeling 'the precariousness of representational discourse itself'. I propose the concept of the 'Urszene' or 'primal scene' as a prime moment in Freud's thought where this brokenness might be seen to instructively operate, and will read McEwan's novel Atonement as an exploration of the primal scene and the self-shattering text.
Alice Condé (Goldsmiths)
'The Decadent Cruel Woman, Masochism, and the Dynamics of Control'
Female cruelty in nineteenth-century Decadent writing is a device through which feelings of powerlessness and anxiety are articulated. This anxiety is related to female nature and the threat it poses to the male artistic domain. The cruel woman of A. C. Swinburne's Poems and Ballads (1866) is an example of female sexuality (re)written as a narrative of cruelty. The torment felt by the masochistic poet is his own overwhelming desire, which he projects on to the female figure as though it were a torture inflicted by her. He fights against lack of control by creating a scenario of apparent surrender. Yet, paradoxically, as creator he maintains control of this surrender.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 15 Mar 2012 | 6:30pm - 8:00pm |
Accessibility
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