Secrecy and community in contemporary narrative in English

Reference: FFI2016-75589-P

Funded by Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad.

Main researcher: María Jesús López Sánchez-Vizcaíno.

Duration: 30/12/2016-29/12/2019.

Participants: Mercedes Díaz Dueñas (UGR), Paula Martín Salván (UCO), Mª Luisa Pascual Garrido (UCO) Juan Luis Pérez de Luque (UCO), Gerardo Rodríguez Salas (UGR), Pilar Villar Argaiz (UGR)

Summary:

The aim of this project is to analyse the secret as the main narrative device used by seven contemporary writers in English to articulate the relation between the individual and community. In the narratives selected, the secret works in three main ways, often in dialectical confrontation. First, as the essence or substance (purity, sacrifice/violence, the sacred, political conspiracy) upon which the exclusive and excluding character of the community is built. Second, secrecy – manifested as silence, interruption, marginality, alterity or death – emerges as the space and language of illicit social bonds, forbidden identities and peripheral voices in the face of normative and essentialised forms of community and their discursive codification. Finally, we find communities of secrecy that do not respond to traditional and conventional collective forms based upon national identity, social class, ethnicity/race, gender or sexuality. The secret articulates the disembedding from totalitarian communities, such as the patriarchal state, heteronormative relationships, the colonial empire, or the ethnically/racially pure nation, and the emergence of new relationships and spaces of freedom, based on a secret sharing of love, friendship, or other non-homogenising communitarian bonds, perpetually open to the difference of the other.

In order to do so, we will draw on the role played by the secret in the communitarian thought of Jean-Luc Nancy, Maurice Blanchot and Jacques Derrida, the three of whom have argued against immanent communities, through an ethico-political gesture that puts the emphasis on collective forms characterised by irreducible singularity, secrecy and otherness. In this way we will engage in dialogue with a currently vibrant critical field – the application of communitarian theories to literary criticism – in which the role of the secret in the construction of literary communities remains to be examined. On the other hand, studies on literary secrecy have tended to be either too formalist or too restrictive in their approach, most of them focusing on the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, with a virtual lack of attention to 20th and 21st century literary texts.

As regards our primary corpus, the writers selected are relevant in their substantial engagement with both secrecy and community. Their geographical variety responds to the desire to provide a comprehensive view of the different (trans)national and socio-historical communities, and ethnic and racial identities, to which contemporary narrative in English responds: Jeanette Winterson (English), Toni Morrison (African American), Zoë Wicomb (South African-Scottish), Alice Munro (Canadian), Witi Ihimaera (New Zealand), Anne Enright (Irish) and Jhumpa Lahiri (South Asian American).

Shakespeare’s Political Ontology

Reference: FFI2016-79341-P

Funded by Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad.

Main researcher: Julián Jiménez Heffernan.

Duration: 30/12/2016-29/12/2019.

Summary:

The aim of this project is to describe in some detail what I call the "political ontology" underwriting Shakespeare's poetic and dramatic texts. Although ultimately derived from Bourdieu's use of the term, "political ontology" here designates a down-top organization of reality that, rooted in the lexical resources of Scholastic metaphysics, is available in the surface of the standard Shakespeare text. Only by examining in depth the logic that connects a handful of basic notions like "unity", "singularity", "nature", "change", "decay", "creature", "substance", "accident" or "multiplicity" can we place ourselves in a position to adjudicate on the vexed issue of Shakespeare's political vision. There have been several attempts at pinpointing the ground logic—the DNA, the ur-myth, or sociological condition--that gives a sense of unity to the entire Shakespeare textual corpus. My project, inspired in work by Lupton, Wilson, and post-Heideggerian philosophers, proposes a version of this logic that is not incompatible with some of the existing versions. In fact, I draw indistinctly on the work of critics as different as Hughes and Wilson in order to substantiate some of my points. By moving down-top from ontology to politics, I endeavor to run the gamut of fields (ontology-psychology-ethics-politics) that organize the standard reading of a Shakespeare play/poem. The novelty of my approach lies in its primary grip on ontology. Four basic concepts (singularity, creativity, fatality, community) articulate my reading. They are logically connected and move down-top towards higher degrees of formalization. Although only the fourth, community, is a decidedly political notion, Shakespeare's construal of creativity (based on language-or-money-mediated desire) and fatality (based often on mimetic triangulation) presuppose the political; singularity (the potestas of the unrepeatable creature) is moreover both the condition and the impossibility of the political.

Community and Individual in Modernist Fiction in English

Reference: FFI2012-36765.

Funded by Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad.

Main researcher: Paula Martín Salván (UCO).

Duration: 01/01/2013-31/12/2015.

Participants: Mercedes Díaz Dueñas (UGR), Julián Jiménez Heffernan (UCO), María Jesús López Sánchez-Vizcaíno (UCO), Gerardo Rodríguez Salas (UGR), Pilar Villar Argaiz (UGR).

Summary:

The aim of this project is to examine the narrative work of six representative modernist novelists, namely Joseph Conrad, Henry James, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence from a theoretical perspective sensitive to the interaction between the individual and community. This perspective is grounded on recent philosophical debate on community (Nancy, Blanchot, Agamben, Derrida, Esposito). By integrating in a single theoretical model Jean-Luc Nancy’s recent work on community and the body, Alain Badiou’s meta-ontological refashioning of the idea of subjectivity, and Pierre Bourdieu’s sociological analysis of artistic communities, we seek to reconsider the relation between interiority and exteriority in modernist fiction. The partners in this project, which draws substantially on the research carried out in a previous Project (FFI2009-13244), hope to participate in international conferences, to produce at least eleven articles in refereed journals or essays in collective volumes, to organize an international symposium, and to edit a collection of essays derived from this symposium.

Community and Immunity in the Contemporary Novel in English

Reference: FFI2016-75589-P

Funded by Ministerio de Innovación y Ciencia.

Main researcher: Julián Jiménez Heffernan (UCO).

Duration: 01/01/2010-31/12/2012.

Participants: Mercedes Díaz Dueñas (UGR), María Jesús López Sánchez-Vizcaíno (UCO), Paula Martín Salván (UCO), Gerardo Rodríguez Salas (UGR), Pilar Villar Argaiz (UGR)

Summary:

The aim of this project is to improve the heuristic potential of hermeneutic models currently at work in the interpretation of contemporary fiction in English. This potential improvement is seen as emerging from the comprehensive redefinition of the notions of community and immunity as theorized in continental, post-phenomenological philosophy (Derrida, Nancy, Blanchot, Sloterdijk, Agamben, Esposito, Badiou) in the interests of the interpretation of narrative discourse. This entails a reassessment of the centrality of generic and rhetorical community-building modes such as the romance or the pastoral, virtually anti-communitarian modes like irony and satire, along with the introduction of alternative tropes like the secret, the sacred, the sacrifice or apocalypse. This project aims thus at pursuing further, along lines already broached by theorists like J. Hillis Miller and Derek Attridge, the deconstructionist concern with ethical predicament in literary texts. There will be, however, a preferential focus on Badiou's controversially anti-Levinasian and militantly anti-communitarian conception of ethics as an essentially non-differential and truth-producing realm. Through this theoretical commitment to a re-conceptualized notion of community, we hope to escape both from the excessive formalism of some postmodernist approaches to fiction and from the arguably jejune sociology of some postcolonial readings. The theoretical hypothesis will be tested against a textual corpus made up of the novels of six representative authors: V.S. Naipaul, Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood, Janet Frame, Edna O'Brien and J.M. Coetzee. This corpus will be later extended to include novelists from an earlier generation which may have influenced our six representative authors: Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Robertson Davies, Katherine Mansfield, James Joyce and Alex La Guma.