Session 8: Fictional Fear and Postmemory
Session 8: Fictional Fear and Postmemory
Chair: Raffaela Santi
Hawthorne’s Short Fiction: Compassion or astigation for Those Fated to Fear and Horror
Naela Danish
Department of English
Whether in fact or fiction, reality or romance, legend or life, fear and horror has always been the cynosure of a premise that has lured people to its fold to contemplate incessantly as to its role in human life and to ensure its feasibility in their lives. The involvement of fear horror and terror in generating a state of volatility in human temperament dates back to the times even before that of the advent of Adam and Eve to the earth. Man was created in the presence of Mephistopheles and ever since has conceded to either engendering fear and horror, or allowing his innate character to be victimized by it.
Moving towards modern literature written on the aspect of constructing new and challenging facets of fear and horror in individual viewpoint, the short fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne explores the aspect of generating fear and horror, even in the most peacefully congenial surroundings, in an extremely explicit manner. He displays the fact that human character is inadvertently dedicated to the observation of fear and horror.
The psychosomatic correspondence is presented in a compelling and forceful style because Hawthorne drives his source and authority from the fact hat his lineage afforded to him the vibrant and challenging amalgamation of the Salem witches with his ancestral loyalties towards Puritanism. This paper will focus on the ethos of fear and horror as portrayed by Hawthorne in understanding the human psyche, with reference to “Young Goodman Brown” and The Scarlet Letter.
Hawthorne displays that characters are torn between being good the evil. This traumatic crisis rises to a crescendo when they expose themselves to avenues of fear and horror. At first, their innocence and ingeniousness is the cause of their vulnerability and later, their blatantly vehement nature persuades them to become the source of instigating fear and horror.
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Postmemory in Speigelman’s Maus
Siao-Jing Sun
Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Sun Yat-sen University in Republic of China, Taiwan
The two volumes of Art Speigelman’s celebrated comic books, Maus, entitled “My Father bleeds History,” and “And Here My Troubles Began” indicate the central role of the narrator, Artie, telling his father’s survivor story. Artie as the second generation of the Holocaust survivors grows up under the shadows of traumatized parents. Maus though is entitled with A Survivor’s Story, actually depicts the narrator’s postmemory of the Holocaust and his own trauma. Here postmemory is adopted from Marian Hirsh’s idea that postmemory characterizes the experience of those who grow up dominated by narratives that preceded their birth, whose own belated stories are evacuated by the stories of the previous generation shaped by traumatic events that can be neither understood nor recreated. (22)
Hirsh indicates that familial photographs as “visual narratives” and “prose pictures” may reveal concealed and unacknowledged relations between the viewers and photography. Based on Roland Barthes’ theories of photographs, Hirsh aims to look for the relations beyond the familial pictures that compose one’s postmemory. To adopt Hirsh’s idea of postmemory, I intend to go back to Barthes’ ideas of “stadium” and “punctum” in Camera Lucida and base on Hirsh’s idea of postmemory to investigate two kinds of spectators’ postmemory of Maus: one is the narrator who has direct relation with the pictures he presents, and the other is the readers who perceive the memory indirectly from the narrator.
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Sexing the Doppelgänger: A Recourse to Poe’s Ligeia
Susan Sencindiver
Department of English, University of Aarhus, Aarhus C, Denmark
The fictional doppelgänger resists narrow categorization and definition, yet exhibits a peculiar feature: it is claimed to be the exclusive property of the male gender. As a sole male phenomenon, the doppelgänger would seem to underpin the essentialist scheme of a gendered identity. However, as the doppelgänger decisively decenters the idea of a unified subjectivity, it cannot be presumed that gendered identity remains miraculously intact. I seek to extend the traditional critical approaches to the iconography of the doppelgänger narrative by inquiring how the otherness of sexual difference forms a conceptually coherent nucleus at the interface of recurring and intertwining associations of both the uncanny and the doppelgänger motif. To this end, I shall resuscitate and demonstrate the theoretical and practical value of the castration complex, aspects underdeveloped in recent theory, by relocating it as a significant analytical terminus of the uncanny. Doppelgänger narratives are racked with the persistent themes of the unreliability of vision that pertain to the transposition of symbolic castration. It is not only blindness that figures as a displaced trope for castration, but also the sight of the castrated female and sexual difference; a danger circumvented by veiling the female body. However, this veiling remains tenuous as the uncanny dialectic between veiling and unveiling also operates according to a fetishistic logic in which sexual difference is both disavowed and affirmed. This fetishistic logic and the doppelgänger, moreover, become two versions of the same doubling-mechanism, in which the self is narcissistically protected from castration and death by duplication of the phallus and self respectively. However, the repressed returns as other: sexual difference – one in which womb is equated with tomb – indelibly marks the alterity within male subjectivity and the latter’s concomitant crisis. To substantiate this framework, this paper will read Poe’s “Ligeia” as a paradigmatic example, in which Ligeia emerges as a terrifying Medusa-like doppelgänger.
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