Session 1: Painful Writing
1st Global Conference
Wednesday 17th February – Friday 19th February 2010
The Women’s College, Sydney, Australia
in association with the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of New South Wales, Sydney
Negotiating Pain: Beyond Nostos to Co-Presence in Flanagan’s The Sound of One Hand Clapping
Jane Fernandez-Goldborough
Avondale College, Australia
Loretta Baldessar argues that “ the emotions of missing and longing motivate kin to construct four types of shared (co)presence: virtual, proxy, physical and imagined, which reinforce the sense of family closeness that characterises … conceptions of health and well-being” in the diasporic context. I argue that underlying this construction of “co-presence’ is a trace of pain, the pain of “homelessness” and “exile”. My interest lies in the way in which the pain of loss/dislocation is treated and overcome by “proxy” in Richard Flanagan’s The Sound of One Hand Clapping through the articulation and redefinition of the meaning of significant objects. These objects mediate to enable the protagonists to overcome the sense of loss and ultimately close the gap between absence and presence. In this sense, these objects perform a “co-presence” function, negotiating the pain of nostalgia and loss and mapping through memory and the imagination a route beyond pain.
Post-Independence Malaysian Short Stories: A Depiction of Racially Inflicted Pain
Nor Hashima Isa
English Language Department, Faculty of Languages, Universiti Pendidikan Sultan Idris, Malaysia
This paper addresses pain and its endurance as portrayed in post-independence Malaysian short stories. After independence in 1957, the diverse races were forced to stay together in a young country that was constantly in turmoil of racial dissatisfactions and prejudice. Every race carried with them racial baggage that clouded efforts of togetherness and nation-building. In 1969 Malaysians bear witness to the bloody May 13 racial riot that took many lives and scarred the nation. The stories from 1966 to 1969 reveal poverty, inter-racial conflicts amongst Malaysians as writers reveals the continuous hardship, social and economic deprivation endured by the lower income Malays. Pain and enduring it is portrayed in terms of instances of conflicts experienced by the characters in the stories. The Malay stories Pengabdian [Submission] by Awang Had Salleh (1966) and Gadis Tionghua di Daerah Pendalaman [The Chinese maiden from the remote district] by Zaid Ahmad (1969) focus to conflicts about inter-racial love and Malay poverty. In these stories the Malays or indigenous people experienced pain when they saw their people deprived of the opportunity to develop economically via higher education. They endured the immense pain to a certain extent and retaliated by accusing the Chinese of being manipulators of opportunities in the new nation. They felt their people were deprived and felt intimidated at Chinese’s economic success. The stories depicted anger and prejudice felt by the frustrated Malays towards the other races. In the young nation the ethnic groups suffered the pain of racial dissatisfaction during the early years of independence that blew out of proportion when their economic and social aspirations were constantly not met. There was a lot of suspicion and racial hatred that may have triggered the racial riot of 1969. Nation building in the country continued to be unattainable and blurred by constant turmoil.
Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)
Eros and Thanatos: The Murderous Struggle of Pain and Desire in Gabrielle D’Annunzio’s Triumph of Death and Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist
Angela Tumini
Department of Languages, Chapman University, California, USA
What can Gabriele D’Annunzio, Italy’s most controversial poet, novelist and playright, possibly have in common with a contemporary Danish film- maker such as Lars von Trier? The answer could be that they both developed a lifelong delight in breaking conventions and rules. D’Annunzio’s novels and poems riddled with sensuality, and his unruly lifestyle and political ideas earned him much scorn and despise by the public and by the Catholic Church. Von Trier’s films are marked by unusual manipulations of sound and image, by hand-held cameras and improvised dialogue, and by real sex and art stills inserted into the narrative which have proved to be disturbing for some of the viewers. A lot of the analogies between these two artists, however, spring from their search for spiritual or heroic transcendence, and from the way in which they underline the fact that evil is inherent to human nature as a pre-existing condition. Both D’Annunzio’s and von Trier utilize their own pain and repeatedly discover that it is impossible to address evil without perpetuating it. Thus, in their works, human nature is revealed as dark, broody and often utterly perverted, especially when dealing with the question of relationship between the two sexes. As an example, I will be using Trionfo della morte/Triumph of Death, one of D’Annunzio’s best known novels which is part of the Trilogia della rosa/Trilogy of the Rose, and Antichrist, von Trier latest and much criticized movie.
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