Session 1: Gender, Theory and the Avant-Garde
1. “Pushing the Boundaries: Ambivalence and the body in the work of Salvador Dalì”
It is no longer the harmony of the individual parts that constitutes the whole; it is the contradictory relationship of heterogeneous elements.
Peter Bürger in Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p.82.
Contradiction and ambivalence provided both inspiration and frustration for a number of Avant-Garde artists and movements, from the fusion of man, machine, and warfare by the Futurists, to the desirable yet deathly nature of woman for the Surrealists. André Breton declared the goal of Surrealism as the location of the
certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions.[i]
However, I would argue that this is, in fact, an idealistic aim, and one which, if fulfilled, would indicate an end to creative production. Rather, it is the tension and interplay between two seemingly contradictory extremes which allow for both creative and critical potential. In this paper, I will explore the role of ambivalence in relation to the representation of the female body in the work of Salvador Dalí. This is revealed, particulary in the paintings produced by the artist’s paranoiac critical method in 1929, through the figure of the mantis, and through the contrast between male and female bodies. Applying both psychoanalytic and socio-political registers, I will determine the political potential of Dalí’s fragmentation and decomposition of the female form. Does the representation of the female in his work underscore what Michel Foucault termed the ‘sexual saturation’ of the female body? Or do Dalí’s female bodies enable him to rebel against social order through the avant-gardiste privileging of individual elements, over the unity and harmony of the organic whole?
Fiona Noble is currently working towards an MLitt in Visual Culture at the University of Aberdeen, with the intention of beginning her doctoral studies in Film and Hispanic Studies in September. She completed her under-graduate studies at the University of Aberdeen in July 2007, graduating with a Master of Arts degree with Joint Honours in French and Hispanic Studies. Her research interests centre on the representation of the body in Spanish film and visual arts, with her prospective post-graduate dissertation entitled ‘The Diseased Body: Spanish Cinema from Buñuel to Almodóvar’.
2. “Claude Cahun and the French Surrealist avant-garde in the post First World War period”
Claude Cahun, a lesbian artist involved in Surrealism, exemplifies the avant-garde movements’ will to radically transform the symbolic, social and political orders. In an article written in 1933, she notably looks back on her writings of the immediate post-war period to underline the both politically and symbolically revolutionary function that was she had then identified with creation.[ii] This revolutionary ideal explained her commitment in to the surrealist avant-garde as well as to far left-wing circles. Similarly to the surrealist avant-garde, who established conflictual connections with the French Communist Party, her work demonstrates her awareness of the problematic relationship between arts and politics and her opposition to both political and libidinal repression.[iii] Claude Cahun indeed belongs to the generation of radicalized women artists connected with Surrealism, who discussed drew attention to and offered critiques of the extreme gender conservatism of the Inter-war period in France. Through her experimentation in both literary and visual arts, she tackles the problem of male traditional male representation of femininity within the society and within the male surrealist avant-garde, which, as many feminists’ scholars such as Whitney Chadwick have shown, offered a mythified representation of woman as Other. Cahun thus expressed her will to challenge gender conservatism in both symbolical and social spheres. Through textual and visual creation, she engages her work within aesthetical matters with questions of aesthetics as well as engaging her work within material reality, to resist both political ideologies and gender conformism.
Rebecca Ferreboeuf is a PhD Student at Leeds University, working under the supervision of Prof. Diana Holmes. Her research interests are centred on the Inter-war period in France and, more specifically, marginalized women artists and writers connected with the avant-garde movements of the time and their social and political engagements.
3. “Multiplying the radical – to the root – avant-garde: The rhzomatic Merzbau”
Peter Bürger’s statement concerning the avant-garde as a singular mission to “reintegrate art into the praxis of life” reduces both the complexity and the multiplicity of meanings possible in this integration, and the ambiguous definitions of life and art, to stagnation. Theory of the Avant-Garde opens with: “The world of traditional meaning discloses itself to the interpreter only to the extent that his own world becomes clarified at the same time.”[iv] This is premised on the Marxist modus operandi twinning the comprehension of an object with its historical development. This model sees the period subsequent to World War II as the epoch of late capitalism. In fact, in part it is this economic division between pre and post 1945 that quantifies the division between the historical and neo avant-garde. Yet, how are we to consider this within the re-evaluation of post 1945 that Deleuze and Guattari propose as ‘neo-capitalism’. Current research by Gwendolyn Webster substantiated that Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau developed in the 1930s, obscuring his already ambivalent relationship to the historical avant-garde. The dearth of writing on artists in exile during the 1930s and 40s is complicated further by a strategy of inner immigration which results in a unique isolation. Merz is qualified by affirmation ― pro-art and pro-life. Using Deleuzian philosophy this paper aims to demonstrate that there is no zero from which the radical and finite rupture of the 1920s avant-garde can initiate from. Instead it is a multiplicity, “always n – 1”[v] . Premised on becoming, it results in the primary principle of Merz practice ― Formung und Entformung.[vi] Traditional depictions of the avant-garde center it on radicality ― as in radix to the root ― but what happens when we envision an avant-garde that is not radical but rhizomatic.
Gemma Carroll is completing a Masters in Modern and Contemporary Art at University College Cork, where she also did her undergraduate degree. She is an Assistant Lecturer at the History of Art department at UCC. In February 2008, she was the overall winner of the Circa Art Magazine Undergraduate Critical Writing Competition. She was also a UCC College Scholar in 2008 and was awarded the College of Arts and Celtic Civilization Master’s Research Bursary. Her research interests include Kurt Schwitters’ Merzbau, 1920s Germany, Dada, Constructivism, Expressionism, Deleuzian philosophy and Relational Aesthetic, Freud, Lacan, Guttari, Bataille, and Kristeva in relation to conceptions of sexuality and transgression.
Session 2: Comparative Perspectives on the Avant-Garde
4. “‘nat language in any sinse of the world’: Avant-Garde approaches to language in Joyce and Tzara”
In the early 1920s James Joyce began work in Paris on “Work in Progress,” a linguistically experimental series of vignettes which would, over the course of seventeen years, become his final magnum opus Finnegans Wake, an avant-garde polyglot text woven from non-lexical signs and polysemic puns and portmanteaux. At the same time, in another part of Paris, one of the so-called "presidents of Dada" Tristan Tzara was composing similarly avant-garde poetry and drama, comprised less of non-lexical neologisms than of linguistic experimentations with cohesion and non-sequiturs. Both writers would stretch the linguistic code to the point that readers were forced to decode their writings hermeneutically, the texts forging a plurality of signification which refused any and all attempts at homogenisation, or at reducing them to encodings of a single intended “meaning.” As such, Joyce’s and Tzara’s early 1920’s Paris writings seemingly shift emphasis in the signification process from author to reader, from encoder to decoder. It is this paper’s intention, however, to demonstrate how such writing practices are not a perversion of the linguistic code or signification process, artificially sharing the burden of “meaning” between author and reader through its subversions, but rather result in a deeper understanding to the questions of what language is, and how it works. To this end, these avant-garde texts will be treated, not as “nat language in any sinse of the world” (FW 83.10-12), but as language in every sense of the word. As such, the paper will offer linguistic close-readings of Joyce’s “Work in Progress” sketches and Tzara’s 1921 play The Gas Heart – as well as some of his selected poetry from the time – focusing on their morphemic and lexemic, as well as their syntagmatic and paradigmatic, adherences to and deviances from the linguistic code, contrasting their respective use of non-lexical and lexical signs, puns, portmanteaux, and so on. The ultimate point of investigation will be to enquire if such deviant avant-garde experimentations with deviant signs and syntax can be seen to create “meaning,” and simultaneously undermine language’s claim to an ultimate signified, then what does this mean for our understanding and definition of “language” itself?
Paul Fagan holds a Bachelor of Arts (International) from University College Dublin, and is currently in the final stages of his Masters Thesis on 'Hamlet and Finnegans Wake' at the University of Vienna, Austria, where he is working under Dr. Dieter Fuchs. His paper “Meeting That Kind Of a Being With a Difference: Hamlet and the allusive method in Finnegans Wake” was presented at the XXIst International James Joyce Symposium in Tours France in 2008, and will be published in an upcoming collection of essays on Shakespeare and Joyce, edited by Laura Pelaschiar of the University of Trieste. In February he presented “Forget, Remember! Forget!”: the Metamorphic Influence of Memory and Amnesia in Anna Livia Plurabelle” at the Italian Joyce Foundation’s post-graduate conference and was an invited speaker at the Trieste Joyce School this summer, organized by John McCourt and Laura Pelaschiar. He is also the co-founder of the Vienna Finnegans Wake reading group with Dr. Fuchs.
5. “Soffici between Marinetti’s Futurism and Apollinaire”
Critical literature on the Italian poet Ardengo Soffici has often undervalued the importance of such a poet, critic and painter to the relationship between Italian literature and French culture at the beginning of the XXth century, forgetting his Futurist work. However, Soffici represents a remarkable voice in the Tuscan Futurism and his body of work is complex and problematic in terms of introducing vanguard principles into XXth century Italian literature. Soffici embodied in himself an interesting division between a forced adhesion to Futurism, the only movement to which he could belong in a conservative Italian cultural climate, despite the objectionable manners of its leader Marinetti, and a personal love of Apollinaire, thus embarking on an artistic quest towards a literary renewal. His poems suggest this double influence, but Soffici did not simply copy either Futurist or Apollinaire's methods of renewing artistic and literary languages, proving on the contrary to be a real innovator and “contributor”, as defined by the Italian critic Mario Richter. From a comparative analysis following the chronology of the poems contained in Soffici's Bïf§zf +18 Simultaneità e Chimismi Lirici, Apollinaire's Alcools and Calligrammes and Marinetti's Manifestos, the struggle between Marinetti's distruzione dell'io and Apollinaire's Orphism is remarkable. Though his maître’s influences can be detected in the poems analysed, Soffici turns out not to be a simple 'clone', but an artist who worked in a reciprocal exchange with French vanguards and Futurism in order to introduce new methods of composition to the Italian literary outlook of his time.
Mila Milani has just begun doctoral research in Italian Studies at the University of Manchester. She completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Bologna and was a student of the Collegio Superiore, school of excellence of Alma Mater. She graduated with honors in 2006 from the Faculty of Languages and Literature (First Degree in English, French and Portuguese). She completed her First Degree dissertation on the relationship between Soffici and Apollinaire, entitled “Soffici & Apollinaire: Chimismi, Alcools, Simultaneità and Calligrammes between Futurism and Orphism". An article on this topic was published in 2007 in the Italian literary journal Poetiche. She has worked as an intern at the Italian Department in Trinity College Dublin and as a translator at the European Parliament in Luxembourg. She wrote her Masters dissertation on “Cesare Pavese's translation of James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man during Fascism", which she defended in March 2009, thus completing with distinction her two-year Masters Course in Comparative Literature. An article on this topic is forthcoming in Poetiche.
6. “Between Repudiation and Homage: European Influences in Polish Poetic and Visual Avant-Garde, 1918-1930”
The specificity of Polish avant-garde is to be sought in its unique socio-historical context. Its ideals were partly channelled into the modernist movement called Young Poland (1891-1939) that was reaction against positivism, individualism, idealism and mysticism. Between 1918 and 1930 the ideals of Young Poland constituted a target for vivacious attacks of emerging avant-garde artists. They mimicked Young Poland’s sentimentality, opposed its spiritualism with materialism, intuition with intellect proposing to replace concept of the poet/artist-priest with that of the poet/artist-craftsman. Polish avant-garde poets and visual artist had no precursor to follow, and therefore, their rebellion was absolute. Poets such as Anatol Stern, Aleksander Wat and Bruno Jasieński were inspired by Mallarmé, Apollinaire, Mayakovski, T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Inevitably, Polish Avant-Garde was constructivist and intellectual and repudiated the concepts of the unconscious, associationism, and chance which constituted the core of dada and surrealist manifestos. While being influenced by formalism and the zaum poetry of Russian futurists, Polish artists created their own theoretical concepts. For instance, Witkacy proposed to follow the method of ‘pure form’ that was to replace mimetic representation with formal experimentation. The polyphonic visual forms presented by Polish artists (Witkacy, Chwistek, Kobro, Strzemiński) accentuated non-visual aspects of disparate actuality. Moreover, deconstruction, deformation and defamiliarization confronted spectator with opaque reality that could not be understood from an existing horizon of expectations. Resulting from this discontinuity and multiplication of ‘the real’ were meant to highlight the complexities of everyday life. This paper will explore two reactions of the Polish avant-garde to European experimentation: passionate assimilation and open repudiation. It will also attempt to sketch the distinctiveness of the Polish avantgardists’ creativity demonstrating its intellectualism, formalism and constructivism on concrete examples.
Kamila Pawlikowska is a 1st year PhD student of Comparative Literature at the University of Kent. She completed an MA in Sociology at the University of Nicolai Copernicus in Toruń (Poland) and an MA in European and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Kent at Canterbury (UK). In her research she investigates cases of cross-fertilization between literature and sociology in relation to representations of the body in realism and modernism. She focuses on English, Russian and Polish literature. Kamilla is also a part-time lecturer in the School of European Culture and Languages and in the School of Social Policy and Social Research at the University of Kent.
Justyna Stepien is a 2nd year PhD student at the Department of British Culture and Literature, University of Lodz, Poland. She is currently an Erasmus exchange student at the University of Bolton, where she is completing her research on the popular culture of Swinging London. Her research interests include postmodern culture, visual arts and its correspondence to literary works of art and contemporary theatre.
Session 3: New Approaches to Futurism, Vorticism and Dadaism
When La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France appeared in 1913, it was hailed as the "first simultaneous book." In its original incarnation, it consisted of a two metre long poem, bounded on one side by a brilliantly coloured abstract painting. Variously read as an artist's book, a picture-poem and a simultanist artwork, it is the striking result of collaboration between the poet, Blaise Cendrars and the Orphist painter, Sonia Delaunay. Their intention was for poem and pochoir image to be 'read' simultaneously. The poem itself describes a marvellous, cacophonous and colourful journey on the Trans-Siberian railway from Moscow to Kharbin and on to Paris. It sings of the terror and wonder of travel; of prostitutes, poetry, painters, war and the magnetic pull of Paris. “Il n’y a pas de futurisme[ix],” declared Blaise Cendrars, and later “je ne crois pas à un nouvel isme[x]”. Although the poet eschewed the constricting “étiquettage” of critics, this hallucinatory travelogue is dynamized by the very spirit which drove the ricostruzione futurista dell'universo envisioned by Marinetti. Indeed, the process of its construction exemplifies the model of interdisciplinary art-practice expounded by the Futurists. In this paper, I will consider La Prose not as a text of literary Futurism—Cendrars’ lyrical ecstasies transcend mere manifesto-dicta— but rather as a synthetic, simultaneous artwork; an artefact of pre-war optimism which formally and conceptually enacts the Futurist sublation of art into life-praxis. As the narrative jags back and forth across time and space, La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France reveals itself as a potentially sacred text of the avant-garde which celebrates in every line the joyous communion of art and life.
Sarah Hayden completed a BA in French and English and MA in English Modernities at University College Cork. She is currently a doctoral student and IRCHSS Government of Ireland scholar in the Schools of English and French at UCC. Her research concerns the multifarious means by which European avant-garde movements reconstructed concepts of the art world for the twentieth century and explores the ideological and formal influences of these revolutions upon the depictions of creativity, the artist and the art world in the work of Mina Loy and Djuna Barnes.
9. “A guide to dissolute Berlin”
In Peter Bürger’s significant opus, Theory of the Avant-Garde, he emphasises the effort of the avant-garde praxis to destroy the ‘shell of the no-longer beautiful’ and put forward an art which could pass ‘desublimated over into life’, a statement which astutely echoes the Berlin Dadaists passionate proclamation of intent, made over fifty years before: ‘the highest art is one that manifests in its consciousness the countless problems of the present day, that seems to have risen out of the explosions of the previous week, and that takes its form from immediate contact with the conflicts of the present[xi]’. This paper investigates the historical and political conditions under which a unique Avant-Garde emerged in Weimar Berlin, one which challenged and subverted not only the traditional methods of art-making, but its means of distribution and the circumstances of its reception. The inspiration for this paper comes from the same publication from which I drew its title, Führer durch das lasterhafte Berlin (Guide to a Dissolute Berlin), published by George Grosz and Curt Moreck in 1929. This is simply one of a plethora of illustrated publications in which art and language are combined to create mass-circulated, critically-charged art, one which meets the spectator in the lived experience of everyday life and thus demands a reaction. The Malik Verlag publishing house, founded by Wieland and Helmut Herzfelde in 1916, created an arena of possibility in which the apt critical illustrations, caricatures and montages of the Berlin Dadaists could by circulated. The city of Berlin itself became the site of their reception, ‘a gallery turned outward to the city streets[xii]’. In examining a series of leftist journals published by the Malik Verlag, focusing particularly on the satirical caricatures of George Grosz, an understanding of the unique political circumstances in which the Weimar avant-garde emerged becomes discernable, illuminating a time in which the artist occupies the position of both outside observer and inside veteran, laying bare the distasteful underbelly of a war-torn republic teetering upon the edge of dissolution.
Jean O’Donovan’s areas of interest include Cafe Culture in Austria and Germany at the turn of the twentieth century, Weimar Germany art and politics, psychoanalytical methodologies, and as regards contemporary art, theories of photography and memory. Her undergraduate dissertation explored the subject of portraiture within Viennese art at the turn of the twentieth century. She is currently completing an MA in Modern and Contemporary Art at University College Cork. Her MA thesis, on which this paper will be based, is concerned with the retrospective analysis of the Weimar avant-garde under the conditions of its own emergence. She is very interested in the heightened importance of visual culture at this time and is also investigating the appropriation of imagery from medieval German prints within Weimar art, specifically Albrecht Dürer’s Apocalypse series. On the basis of her final examinations was awarded the title of College Scholar and is a part-time assistant lecturer in the History of Art department.
Session 4: Avant-Garde Poetry
10. “Atelier 17 and the Europa Poets”
Atelier 17 in Paris was founded by the British engraver S.W. Hayter in 1927 as a studio for teaching, research and print-making but above all for artistic collaboration. According to critic Eunice Martin, “Atelier 17 was not just a workshop where, under Hayter’s guidance, one learnt by doing, but also a meeting place […] where a cosmopolitan circle of friends also provided each other with inspiration for intellectual experiments”.[xiii] Pablo Picasso, Jean Arp, Juan Miró, Max Ernst, Marc Chagall and Alexander Calder all worked in Hayter’s experimental studio. Central to the legacy of Atelier 17 are a series of collaborations between a group of young Irish expatriate poets and Atelier 17 artists who developed engravings in response to their poetic works. The key personas behind these collaborations were S.W. Hayter and the Irish-Russian poet, literary agent, critic and publisher George Reavey (1907-1976). Reavey’s poetic origins date from his student days at Cambridge (1926-1929) where he was co-founder of the interdisciplinary review Experiment, alongside poets William Empson and painter Julian Trevelyan (who also studied at Atelier 17). In Paris, Reavey founded the Europa Press with the core objective to produce “limited editions in collaboration with modern artists and engravers”. Hayter produced engravings for Reavey’s collections Faust’s Metamorphoses (1932) and Nostradam (1935), as well as for Brian Coffey’s poems Third Person (1937). Atelier 17 artists Max Ernst and Pablo Picasso collaborated on a collection of Paul Eluard’s love poems Thorns of Thunder (1936), published by the Europa Press in English translation by Reavey, Samuel Beckett, Brian Coffey and others. Other engravings came from the New-Zealand born artist John Buckland-Wright and Pavel Tchelitchew. This paper will explore the origins of Atelier 17 in the late 1920s and the collaborations between Irish poets and European artists. It will address the movements of Dadaism and Surrealism and give a unique perspective on Irish literature created at the heart of the European avant-garde.
Dr. Sandra O’Connell is an independent scholar, writer and editor based in Dublin. She is currently working on a critical study and collection of essays on the Irish-Russian poet, publisher, literary critic and translator George Reavey (1907-1976), due in 2010 by The Lilliput Press. In April 2007, she was director of the George Reavey International Centenary Symposium at the School of English, Trinity College Dublin, an interdisciplinary event with lectures by scholars and poets from Ireland, the UK, USA and Russia. In May/June 2009 Sandra was Research Fellow at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre, University of Texas at Austin.
11. “Aesthetic Suicide: An allegorical reading of Lorca’s Suicidio en Alejandria”
In the period leading up to what some would regard his most innovative work, Poeta en Nueva York [Poet in New York], a collection of poetry whose designation 'Surrealist' is still problematic today, Federico Garcia Lorca wrote to art critic Sebastià Gasch that he was in the process of creating “poesía para abrirse las venas” [poetry to opens one's veins]. This graphic assertion was made in 1928, the year following the first exhibition of his drawings, at a time when Lorca was becoming increasingly interested in the process behind the creation of images and text and the interplay between the two. During this period, his intense friendship with painter Salvador Dalí, which immersed the poet in the world of the Catalan avant-garde, led to both collaboration and criticism. It was at this time that he published a number of experimental prose poems, known as the Narraciones, some with accompanying illustrations. Although the Narraciones have been touched upon by certain scholars such as Havard and Harris, there has been little critical attention paid to individual poems. This paper will perform an in-depth textual analysis of the prose poem Suicidio en Alejandria [Suicide in Alexandria], examining in tandem the illustration of the same name. An allegorical reading of the text will aid our interpretation of its complex aesthetic and seek to illustrate that Lorca used avant-garde techniques to challenge traditional notions of love and to express a break from his previous traditional aesthetic. It will also be argued that the narrative can be read across both image and text. The aim of this paper is to raise questions about the interplay between visual and textual expression while unravelling a unique and vibrant aesthetic created by a poet/playwright better known for his more traditional gypsy ballads.
Tara Plunkett completed a BA in French and Spanish at Queen's University (2005) and moved to Edinburgh to study for an MSc in Translation and Public Service Interpreting at Heriot-Watt University (2007). She then returned to Queen's University in November 2008 to undertake doctoral study in Hispanic Studies. Building upon undergraduate studies in Spanish Surrealism, her doctoral study investigates the expression of identity and desire in Hispanic Surrealist imagery and text under the supervision of Dr Terry McMullan and Dr Roberta Quance. She is researching how these issues were expressed differently by male, female and homosexual artists and poets. This investigation aims to raise important questions about the interplay between visual and textual communication and the expression of desire itself. The inclusion of both male and female artists will broaden the perspective by examining any notions of a specifically gender-based sensibility, and serve to illustrate the female position within the Surrealist Movement, a movement which has often been deemed misogynist and homophobic.
12. “The Reach of Revolutionary Aesthetics: A Comparative Study of the Influence of the European Avant-Garde on the work of the American and Québecois poets, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gaston Miron”
The influence of the european avant-garde and its intention to "reintegrate art into the praxis of life" had an enduring and far-reaching legacy which has been notably demonstrated in the work of the American and Québécois poets, Lawrence Ferlinghetti (1919- ) and Gaston Miron (1928-1996) who pursued remarkably parallel careers in the fields of poetry and publishing over the second half of the 20th century and who helped pioneer new eras in American and Québecois literature. The renown of both poets lies in their firm commitment to the public interest. This was reflected in their political activism, in the anti-establishment ethos of their publishing houses and in the topical subject matter of much of their poetry. This paper will concern itself with how the avant-garde was received and interpreted in these two poets’ distinct literary and cultural contexts and how it informed America’s Beat Generation, where Kerouac’s ‘spontaneous prose’ bore a striking similarity to André Breton’s definition of Surrealism as ‘psychic automatism in its pure state’, and Québec’s Refus Global manifesto of 1948 which served as a precursor to Miron’s poetic career. It will also examine how the avant-garde manifested itself in various ways in the poetry of both men. The influence of the avant-garde also provides an interesting point for comparison regarding the potentially contentious issue of how a European model was to be integrated into the American and Québecois literature of this period. The primary texts for analysis are Ferlinghetti’s These Are My Rivers and Miron’s L’Homme Rapaillé, both collections of the poets’ selected works.
Muireann Leonard graduated in January from the MA in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at the University of Limerick. Her interest in the field of Comparative Literature stemmed from a desire to combine more closely her undergraduate subjects of French and English. She graduated from NUI Galway in 2005. Her principal areas of interest lie in Beat literature and French-Canadian culture, having lived in Québec for two years. Her MA thesis was entitled ‘Poets of their Time, Poets of the Timeless: A Comparative Study of the Public and the Personal in the Work of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Gaston Miron’.
Session 5: Translating the Avant-Garde
13. “Visual ‘surrealisation’, ludic translation of Surrealism”
Surrealism was a major European movement in the 20th century avant-garde, still influencing current practices. The Surrealists explored the senses, in particular the visual, to discover and exploit images created by word association and by the echoes and interferences between art and poems. Their use of typographies, fonts, colours, collage and photographs served the purpose of shock or challenge. This paper focuses on the translation of Surrealist texts, from French into English, incorporating Surrealist practices into the translation process. It involves a visual ‘surrealisation’ of Surrealism in translation. Visual ‘surrealisation’ refers to the enhancement of the visual aspect of the Surrealist language and practice using the Surrealists’ own visual techniques and practices. The case studies in this paper experiment with automatism, particularly with word association and collage because of their central importance in Surrealism. Automatism, derived from automatic writing, was a driving force in the Surrealist practice and encouraged impulsive freedom of association. This approach, visual ‘surrealisation’ of Surrealism, revolves around a number of issues, including the question of seeing and reading and the notion of game in both literature and translation. Visual ‘surrealisation’ enables to revisit Surrealist practices and reinvigorate them while defining their limits in the translation process.
Elise Aru joined University College London in September 2007, after completing her MA and BA at the University of East Anglia in Norwich. She is now in the second year of her PhD in Translation Studies, investigating the use of visual forms as a constraint, (re)translating Surrealist texts, specifically poetry, looking at practices derived from automatism. She is particularly interested in the visual effects produced by word association and collage and how to deal with them in translation. Above all, her main angles of analysis are the notions of game and constraint in the translation process and the role of the translator in relation to these notions, addressing two main questions: how does automatism become liberating in the act of writing? And to what extent is it possible to reproduce similar liberation in the act of rewriting that is translation?
14. “‘All the energized past, all the past that is living’: Ezra Pound between translation experiments and avant-garde”
This paper intends to focus on the contribution of Pound's translation experiments in marking the passage from Imagism to Vorticism. In such regard, a key importance needs to be assigned to the series of 12 articles published in The New Age under the title of “I Gather the Limbs of Osiris”. In these articles Pound claims that such as Osiris' limbs re-gathered become the source for a new life, in the same way, translation can be a method through which words can recapture their intrinsic energy if they are ‘brought over’ in a different space and time, thus being at once ‘made new’ and charged with the power of tradition. The reflection on translation also influences the importance of Pound’s avant-garde experiments as it tries to find a compromise between the authority of the tradition and the demands of modernity. Indeed, if it is true that the modern arts have “an advanced or avant-garde duty, to go ahead of their own age and transform it", it is also worth noting –as De Man would suggest- that it becomes impossible “to forget the past in the name of modernity, because both are linked by a temporal chain that gives them a common history.” Pound’s avant-garde experiments are paralleled and influenced by his work as a translator: 1) The early phase of Imagism -which aims to capture the luminous details, to achieve the 'mot juste' through precision and objectivity - is highly inspired by Pound's dealings with the translations from the Provençal and Tuscan poets of the 13th century as seminal models for his poetry; 2) The radical articulation of Vorticism also derives from Pound's reading of Chinese ideograms and the related attempts at translations of Li Po. The passage from the image to the vortex, as the "point of maximum energy" can be brought about only if taking into account the added value coming from the visual arts, and in this sense Chinese characters offer a simultaneous aesthetic appreciation of language and object that makes them become things in action, in progress, thus endowed with a further energy.
Giovanna Epifania graduated in English and Spanish literature at Università degli Studi di Bari, Italy, in 1999. She holds a two-year degree for Intepreters and Translators (Diploma biennale di interprete e traduttore) obtained at the S.S.I.T (Scuola Superiore per Interpreti e Traduttori). She is currently a second-year PhD student in Translation Studies: Theory and Practice at the English Department of the Faculty of Foreign Languages and Literatures (University of Bari, Italy). Her research project is focused on Ezra Pound's translation strategies while working on two different English versions of Guido Cavalcanti' s poems. She is particularly interested in literary translation theory and practice during Modernism since it challenges the dominance of the so-called "transparent discourse", by cultivating heterogeneous discourses and in general avoiding "fluency" in translation.
15. “Writing into the Future by Recounting the Past—The Mandarin Translation of James Joyce’s Ulysses”
Translation, like missionary, bears the mission of introducing a foreign culture into another. This mission involves not simply the exchanges of two or more languages, but a communication of a deeper level content, i.e. culture. Yet, language itself is always one of the major difficulties for a translator, as very often language, which is very much culturally defined, has its limit to convey the multiple layers of meaning of another language. Thus, a translator must always negotiate between the original text and the translation. Translation itself is an endless process of negotiation. To translate James Joyce’s Ulysses into Mandarin exemplifies this endless process of negotiation. There are two Mandarin translations of Ulysses until this day, and each one applies different approaches to translate Joyce’s writings. The different approaches each translation uses create significant differences not only between themselves but also between the original text and the translations. Each translation thus becomes an experiment of the Chinese language. Focusing on the Mandarin translation of “Oxen of the Sun” episode in Jin Di’s and Xiao Qian’s versions, this paper explores and analyses the different approaches the two translations adopt to show how these translations are challenging not only Joyce’s Ulysses but also the limit of the Chinese language.
Chih-hsien Hsieh is a PhD student of University College Dublin. His research topic is “Sound and Technology in James Joyce’s Ulysses,” in which he wants to explore how gramophone, telephone, radio, and film are presented and represented in Ulysses. He is also a freelance translator since 1999. His current project is translating New Dubliners, an anthology of short stories published in 2004 as the one-hundred-year-celebration of Joyce’s Dubliners, into Chinese.
Session 6: Theatre and the Avant-Garde
16. “Bernard Shaw’s Irish characters and the rise of reverse snobbery”
Many critics have emphasised the avant-garde nature of Bernard Shaw’s views with regard to feminism, socialism, vegetarianism and even sanitary living. Little has been written, however, about the fact that, through the careful contrast of English and Irish characters in his plays, he helped make “reverse snobbery” a commonplace of 20th century art and thought. By making the childhood poverty and struggle against prejudice endured by his Irish characters seem like an advantage in life compared to the material comfort and public school educations enjoyed by many of his English characters, Shaw helped create a new kind of underdog hero – the colonial from an oppressed race having to deal with spoiled, politically unrealistic, dangerously sentimental imperial overlords or social superiors.
David Clare is a PhD student at University College Dublin and is writing his thesis on "The Stage Englishman in Irish Literature". He has a B.A. in Social History from Boston University and an M.A. in Anglo-Irish Literature & Drama from University College Dublin. In March 2009, he spoke at the ASECS Conference in Richmond, Virginia on "National Identity in the Works of Maria Edgeworth" and in May, he read a paper on Irish-American reactions to Marie Jones's play "A Night In November" at the ISTR Conference in Sligo. His paper on C.S. Lewis's Irish background is currently under consideration for publication by an Irish studies journal.
17. “‘The margins of the nation displacing the centre’: The Rejection of the Wider European narrative: Sean O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie”
With The Plough and the Stars, O’Casey had fractured and disrupted the narrative of the 1916 Easter Rising. In doing this he had created a dichotomy between the ‘theatrical’ 1916 and the ‘actual’ 1916. On the Abbey stage, these became competing narratives; with O’Casey’s ‘theatrical’ narrative questioning the ‘actual’ narrative of the Easter Rising. Subsequently, in rejecting The Silver Tassie the Abbey directorate denied O’Casey’s play the forum to explore what had become a forgotten part of the Irish historical narrative, even as early as 1928. Homi Bhabha describes this as ‘the margins of the nation displace[ing] the centre.’ In The Plough and the Stars, O’Casey displaces the centre of society with the margins by making the Rising of 1916 appear on the periphery of the now human tragedy. With The Silver Tassie, O’Casey does the same by placing the soldiers of the Irish regiment at the forefront of the stage rather than the fight for independence. This paper will explore O’Casey’s theatrical critiques of the narratives of Irish history, and in particular the competing narratives of his plays. It will also look at the Abbey theatre’s somewhat isolationist stance, rejecting not just a European theatrical style in Expressionism but denying an undoubted European narrative that Ireland was inherently a part of.
Conor Plunkett holds a degree in Theatre and Media Drama with English Literature from the University of Glamorgan (2000). He then completed a Masters by Research, with a thesis entitled ‘An exploration of the political, artistic and personal relationships of Sean O'Casey, culminating in the rejection The Silver Tassie by the Abbey Theatre’, University of Glamorgan (2006). He is currently a third year PhD student at Queen’s University, Belfast working on the absence of Expressionist plays from the Irish theatrical canon.
18. “Half Beast-Half Angel: Djuna Barnes Nightwood and German Expressionist Drama”
Existing studies of German Expressionism and the English-speaking avant-garde (Weisstein and Mitchell, 1973, Levenson, 1984, and Richardson, 1997) have tended to place the German movement outside the interests and identities of Anglo-American modernism, arguing that socio-political differences between the countries after World War One severely restricted cross-cultural influence. This paper will argue that Barnes’ modernist novel Nightwood (1936), is part of the legacy of German Expressionism, owing a particular debt to the movement’s innovations in stagecraft. The very distinctive performance styles and production techniques that evolved around directors such as Max Reinhardt and Leopold Jessner mean that it is not enough to consider the texts of Expressionist dramas that appeared on the European stage at this time. The playwrights themselves gave little guidance beyond basic stage directions. Barnes’ sense of Expressionist theatre would have been shaped by the particular performances and productions responsible for interpreting these plays. The Schrei performance style, with its intense, ecstatic patterns of speech and movement, was referred to by the Expressionist Kasimir Edschmid as reviving the ‘baroque’ quality of German national theatre[xiv]. It became a way of embodying the animal and spiritual extremes of human nature, and was exemplified in the performances of proto-Expressionist Frank Wedekind. Using manifestos, correspondence, and contemporary accounts wherever possible, this presentation will trace Barnes’ contact with the movement, and will ask whether the novel can be seen to be strictly representative of Expressionist work. I will examine the ‘baroque’ quality of Expressionist stagecraft, and its recreation within the nightworld of Barnes’ novel, questioning why artists working within different avant-gardes, using different genre, would seek to resurrect these forms and ideas at this particular point in history.
Kate Armond is currently a second year PhD student at the University of East Anglia, and her PhD is examining the relationship between German Expressionism and Anglo-American Modernism, focusing in particular on the work of Wyndham Lewis and Djuna Barnes. She begins teaching at the university in October, and will be an associate tutor on the ‘Modernism’ and ‘Literature in History’ modules. Kate was the conference organiser of ‘Looking Back on the End of Time – Modernism and Beyond’, an interdisciplinary conference held at UEA on 4 September. She will be co-editor of the published conference proceedings, and author of the journal introduction, with Professor Randall Stephenson as author of the preface. Kate has presented some of her research on links between Expressionism and Modernism at the ‘Dialogues’ philosophy/literature conference at UEA in March 2009, and at the Bloomsbury Modernists Seminar in London, April 2009. She presented a paper on Wyndham Lewis and Kandinsky at ‘Looking Back on the End of Time – Modernism and Beyond’ in September.
[i] Cited in Lippard, Lucy R. (ed.) Surrealists On Art (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1970, p.99).
[ii] Claude Cahun, Ecrits, Ed. Jeanna-Michel Place, Paris, 2002, p. 538.
[iii] Gen Doy, Claude Cahun, a sensual politics of photographs, I.B. Tauris, London, New York, 2007, p.13.
[iv] Bürger, Peter, Theory of the Avant-Garde: Theory and History of Literature, Volume 4, (trans. Michael Shaw + Intr. Jochen Schulte-Sasse), University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1984. p. 3.
[v] Deleuze, Gilles & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, (trans. & forward Brian Massumi), Continuum, London & New York, 1987. p. 6
[vi] Formung und Entformung which can only be circumnavigated into the English language variously translate as forming and unforming, becoming and unbecoming, and metamorphosis. In the interrelation of the translations available, it could be said that all metamorphosis is founded on becoming and unbecoming.
[vii] Cendrars, Blaise. In Interview with Michael Manoll (October-December 1950). Trans. William Brandon. The Art of Fiction No. 38. Paris Review. (2004): 12. From Blaise Cendrars vous parle. Paris: Editions Denöel, 1966.
[viii] Marinetti, F.T. “On the Subject of Futurism: An Interview with La Diana” Published in the first issue (January 1915) of the Neapolitan magazine La Diana. Berghaus, Günter. F.T. Marinetti, ed. F.T. Marinetti: Critical Writings. Trans. Doug Thompson. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006,143-4.
[ix] Cendrars, Blaise. Crépitements, le neuvième poème elastique. Oeuvres Complètes. Vol.1. Paris: Le Club Francais du Livre, 72
[x] Cendrars, Blaise. Aujourd’hui. Oeuvres Complètes. Vol. 6. Paris: Le Club Francais du Livre, 37.
[xi] M. Kay Flavell, George Grosz: A Biography (Yale University Press, New Haven 1988), 307.
[xii] Patrice Petro, Joyless Streets: Women and Melodramatic Representation in Weimar Germany (Princeton University Press, New Jersey 1989), 92.
[xiii] Martin, Eunice. 1993. “The Livres d’Artiste”. In Hacker, P.M.S. 1993. Gravure and Grace. The Engravings of Roger Vieillard. Oxford: Ashmolean Museum and Scolar Press.
[xiv] Kasimir Edschmid, Schauspielkunst, in ‘Das deutsche Theater der Gegenwart’, p118-120.
