Session 3: Literary Perspectives

3rd Global Conference

Friday 6th November – Sunday 8th November 2009
Salzburg, Austria

The Beast and I
Nadine Farghaly
University of Salzburg, Austria

During the last decades, romance fiction has evolved as much as other genres; normative heroes and heroines have been joined by werewolves, vampires, shape shifters, and dragons to name but a few. Although these new protagonists function under the same laws as more normative characters, it needs to be acknowledged that there is one trait that seems to belong dominantly to paranormal romance fiction, bestiality. Using Katie MacAllister’s Silver Dragon and Aisling Grey series and J.R. Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood series this paper analyzes how these authors reshape and reinterpret the aspects about bestiality in their stories. Both authors use explicit animal descriptions; MacAllister’s dragons need to mate in their dragon form and Ward’s character Rhage shares his body with a beast. Different theories about sexuality as well as bestiality and theorists like Michel Foucault will be used not only to interpret and evaluate these stories, but also their influence on the romance genre and, more importantly, the readers. This work examines the possible reasons for the inclusion of bestiality in these paranormal romance novels. What makes this topic acceptable today? How is it perceived by the audience? This paper demonstrates what draws readers to these kind of stories and how this new trend influences not only their reading habits, but also their perception of these kinds of sexual activities. In how far are intimacy and love affected by these “abnormal” pairings and how do the authors’ ideas reflect modern desires?
Considering that the romance novel genre occupies over 50% of the book market and is read by millions of people (dominantly women) all over the world, this new development needs to be analyzed thoroughly. I illustrate how these beasty protagonists are able to reshape societies view of “abnormal” sexual practices synthesizing examples from both the Black Dagger Brotherhood and the Dragon series with the critical cultural theories of Michel Foucault, Gaston Dubois-Desaulle and the works of Midas Dekkers and Paul Vincent.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)

Auden’s ‘Thanksgiving for a Habitat’
Heidi Hartwig
Department of English, Central Connecticut State University, USA

This paper will explore the theme of the public and private contexts of intimate relationships through an analysis of a poetic sequence entitled “Thanksgiving for a Habitat” by the poet W. H. Auden. The sequence devotes a poem to each room of the poet’s house in Kirchstetten, Austria (about 120 miles from the conference site), describing the home as a space that simultaneously fosters intimacy with friends and lovers (dead and alive, absent and present) and secures a sacrosanct privacy. While several types of personal and interpersonal intimacies are carefully delineated in this sequence, this paper will focus on the poems dedicated to those of friendship and hospitality. The rooms belonging to these intimacies are of course the dining room and the guest bedroom (“Ours yet not ours, being set apart / As a shrine to friendship”). More surprisingly, Auden’s study–the first room in the house tour sequence, so structurally the crossover point from the prologue’s consideration of the house’s public situation to a consideration of the home’s interior spaces—although considered utterly private (“an antre / more private than a bedroom even, for neither lovers nor / maids are welcome”) is the most admissible of old intimacies. The poem about Auden’s study is an elegy for Louis MacNeice (Auden’s friend, fellow poet, and collaborator) and touchingly inviting: “From now on, as a visitor / who needn’t be met at the station, / your influence is welcome at any hour in my ubity, / especially here, where titles / from Poems to The Burning Perch offer proof positive / of the maker you were, with whom I / once collaborated . . .” “Thanksgiving for a Habitat” is most interesting for just such description of cosmic intimacies (Whitmanian in theme) alongside quite worldly ones (Horatian in theme and style).

‘The Twine That Kept the Slats Held Together’: Planetary Love in Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Are Orphans and Never Let Me Go
Susan Jung Su
Department of English, NTNU, Taipei, Taiwan

Featuring the love between several homeless figures in his more recent novels (When We Were Orphan [2000] and Never Let Me Go [2005]), the contemporary Japanese-British novelist Kazuo Ishiguro evokes an alternative planetary sense of intimacy which tends to extol an ability to go beyond the confines of filiation, nationalities, cultural identities, and, in the case of the more Orwellian apocalyptic Never Let Me Go, the present-day rigid definition of “human beings,” thereby projecting a broader, utopian vision of unselfish love.

My essays will start from an impressive image mentioned in When We Were Orphans, when the orphan-protagonist Christopher Banks, an Englishman raised up in Shanghai, China, during the First World War, recollected a unique moment in his childhood, when his best friend Akira, a Japanese who also grew up in Shanghai, pointed to one of the slatted sun-blinds hanging partially down over a window, mentioning to him the philosophical remarks he heard from a Japanese monk: “We children…were like the twine that kept the slats held together….We often failed to realize it, but it was we children who bound not only a family, but the whole world together. If we did not do our part, the slats would fall and scatter over the floor” (73). This orphan image will be the focus of my essay. I intend to analyze how Ishiguro, when asserting in several interviews that he is an “international” writer, does have a broad scope of looking at the human relations by projecting a panoramic view of human destiny in his novels. Here I want to use two of his more recent novels, notably When We Are Orphans and Never Let Me Go, to argue that in creating a group of orphan characters, Ishiguro proposes a planetary love with which human beings are likely to transcend filiality and challenge our habitual ways of looking at ourselves. This planetary love—here I am thinking of the term in the light of G. Spivak—is exactly that which makes possible the other in ourselves to surface. It is through this othering of ourselves that Ishiguro compels us to confront the need to love the other as well as the moral imperative to eradicate our deeply-rooted prejudice.