Living Languages

Maria Tomlinson gives an overview of this postgraduate student-led conference held on 19 and 20 January 2018 in Birmingham

Conference organisers (l-r): Antonia Wimbush, Polly Galis, Maria Tomlinson

The interdisciplinary, cross-cultural, and bilingual conference ‘Imagining the Body in France and the Francophone World’ took place at the University of Birmingham on the 19th-20th January 2018. It was organised jointly by Maria Tomlinson from the University of Reading, Antonia Wimbush from the University of Birmingham, and Polly Galis from the University of Leeds. The event was generously supported by the Institute of Modern Languages Research (IMLR), the Society for French Studies (SFS), the University of Birmingham and the University of Leeds. During the two days, delegates presented papers on a variety of different disciplines and cultural contexts. It was a celebration of the rich culture and diversity of the Francophone world. Topics ranged from Algerian women’s writing, eunuchs in 20th-century France, and dancing in the Moulin Rouge, to the photographic exploration of transgender identity. The conference included parallel sessions which each explored a different aspect of bodily experience. The papers sparked interesting debate which often continued into the coffee and lunch breaks. The conference also comprised of keynote presentations as well as artistic performances.

Dr Jacqueline Taylor’s plenary session on écriture féminine

Once the delegates picked up their custom-made complementary conference tote bags, everyone settled down to watch the first plenary session. Dr Kate Averis gave a thought-provoking talk about how ageing is imagined within contemporary women’s writing. Kate offered a fascinating insight into Douna Loup’s novel Les lignes de ta paume which celebrates the new forms of intimacy and creativity that women can enjoy in later life. Following Kate’s talk, there were various parallel sessions throughout the day. These included panels such as ‘Abject Bodies? Zombies, Eunuchs, and Menstruating Women’, ‘The (Fe)male gaze’ and ‘Breaking the Binaries of the Body’. Before the conference dinner at Côte Brasserie, the audience were treated to an engaging and interactive performance by Dr Jacqueline Taylor. Jacqueline encouraged the audience members to take off their shoes and sit in a circle around her. She performed her own version of ‘écriture féminine’ by reading from a hand-written scroll, pouring out a box of her personal notes, and showing images of artwork behind her.

The next day included a mixture of parallel panels and plenary sessions. Panel titles included ‘The Exoticisation of the Body’ and ‘Queer(y)ing the Body’. Artist Fiorenza Menini screened her sensual and captivating film Les Attractions Contraires. This was a privilege for all who attended. It was the first time Fiorenza had ever screened her film. The day ended on an absorbing and informative keynote talk by Professor Lisa Downing about right-wing women such as Marine Le Pen and Anne-Marie Waters.

Polly, Antonia, and Maria would like to say a big thank you again to the IMLR and our other sponsors, without whom the conference would not have been possible. They would also like to thank everyone who presented and contributed to the conference. This lively participation ensured that it was an event to remember! The organisers are currently planning a publication.

Maria Tomlinson, Teaching Fellow, University of Reading

Angela Gayton gives an overview of the photographic exhibition run by the MEITS team as part of the Being Human Festival last year:

The 2017 UK-wide Being Human Festival ran between November 17th and 25th, and as part of this, the MEITS team held a photography exhibition in each of its four partner cities (namely, Belfast, Cambridge, Edinburgh and Nottingham). The exhibition theme, “Understanding our Multilingual World”, was met through images submitted by members of the public, bringing to life visual representations of what languages and multilingualism mean to them.

Cambridge venue

The shortlisted images of individual and societal multilingualism were taken not only in participating cities, but also locations spanning the globe, including Canada, Greece, Israel, New Zealand and South Korea. Visitors were invited to reflect individually or collaboratively on common themes that they saw emerging from these diverse images of multilingualism. Their reflections sparked lively conversation with the MEITS team, on universal issues relating to multilingualism in varied global contexts.

We were also delighted to have three of the exhibited photographers attend the Cambridge event; they gave even more in-depth perspectives on their multilingual images, in conversation with Wendy Ayres-Bennett, Principal Investigator of the MEITS project (listen here). The photos of the contributors interviewed at the Cambridge event are below:

Joyce Kim

Nora Mustun

Yamanda Akroune

With thanks to the IMLR for its support.

Angela Gayton, Research Associate MEITS team, University of Cambridge

Join Stephanie Homer in celebrating this year’s DAAD/IMLR Writing Competition – ‘Chatting with Luther’!

Have you ever wished that you could travel back in time and listen to the daily conversations of Martin Luther and his contemporaries, or even wondered what a key figure such as Martin Luther would think of the world today? Wonder no more.

‘Chatting with Luther’ – this year’s DAAD/IMLR Writing Competition – was a huge success and all entrants provided us with exciting mini-dramas; dialogues between Martin Luther and another famous figure (or figures). The most impressive aspect: these conversations were written entirely in German.

October 2017 marked the 500th anniversary of Luther’s publication of his 95 theses which, in turn, sparked the Reformation. The opportunity to re-imagine Luther in different dialogues could not be missed and our entrants rose to the challenge. The authors have engaged with the task of writing mini-dramas with incredible creativity and wit. The diverse conversations that they created addressed social issues that we are confronted with today, such as Brexit, mobile phones, and racism. The winners were selected on the creativity of their work, engagement with the topic, and impressive use of the German language which brought Luther to life.

The critical and creative engagement displayed by the winners was highly impressive. Their unique, provoking and entertaining texts included scenarios in which Martin Luther and Dawkins explore the parallels between the late medieval church and the European Union; Luther and Jacob Rees-Mogg have a particularly heated discussion; a Graham Norton show; a conversation with JK Rowling and Vivienne Westwood; and a Twitter Battle with none other than Donald Trump!

The winners, who fell into the categories of ‘Secondary School’, ‘Undergraduate’ and ‘Other’ , were welcomed to Senate House and took part in a drama and translation workshop. (Unfortunately, some of our winners were unable to attend due to the snowy conditions across the UK.) The afternoon was led by the group ‘Foreign Affairs’, who, between them, have years of experience in theatre, acting, and translation for the stage.

After warm-up exercises (crucial for any actor), the winners worked with the actors and brought their texts to life. With energy, the group, ‘Foreign Affairs’, conveyed their passion to the winners and opened up the winning dialogues, encouraging our winners to play with their own words, their intonation, pace and volume. With an exciting twist, a range of different scenarios were thrown at the texts, testing our winners’ improvisation skills. For example, how would the conversation sound if the characters were talking like a football coach or reporter?

Under a time pressure of approximately twenty minutes, the final workshop task was to produce a group translation which was to be presented at the prize-giving event held at the British Library that evening.

Family, friends and remaining winners, who had fought through the adverse travel conditions, convened at the British Library’s Knowledge Centre for the prize-giving event, with wine, and nibbles. After a welcome and introduction by Georg Krawietz (DAAD), Godela Weiss-Sussex (IMLR) and Susan Reed (BL), the winners successfully presented their group translation.

The highlight of the evening, however, was seeing the winning texts performed with the help of the ‘Foreign Affairs’ actors. The dialogues were greatly entertaining and provoking, and the mini-dramas gathered chuckles from the audience when Graham Norton introduced his line-up, when Trump and Luther ended their Twitter-war with an “Auf Wiedertweeten!”, and when JK Rowling introduces herself as ‘also very famous’.

There was an engaging mix of politics, entertainment, and social ‘hot-topics’, as well as inventive time-travel which brought these famous figures together in conversation. The unique and witty mini-dramas playfully challenged Luther’s beliefs and intentions and explored the effect that Martin Luther has had on today’s society.

Congratulations to all of our winners! We were deeply impressed by your creativity and intelligence, and for daring to voice these conversations, with their satirical and political spin.

Secondary School Pupils:

• • 1st Prize: Victoria Adjei (North London Collegiate School). Luther gegen Dawkins: Ordensmann und Atheist politisieren
  • 2nd Prize: Panayotis Galatis (City of London School). Dialogue between Lucas Cranach the Elder and Grayson Perry
  • 3rd Prize: Alex Davies (King’s College School, Wimbledon). Die Situation: das Graham Norton Show: Martin Luther, Graham Norton, Damien Hirst

Undergraduate students

• • 1st Prize: Chris Dobson (University of Edinburgh). Twitter Battle between Trump and Luther
  • 2nd Prize: Abbie Gordon (Durham University). A conversation with Vivienne Westwood
  • 3rd Prize: Annie Davies (University of Exeter). A conversation between Luther, Noel Fielding and Sandi Toksvig
  • 4th Prize: May Wall (Durham University). ‘Vor der Himmelspforte, Martin Luther begegnet Jo Cox’

Others (non-students)

• • 1st Prize: Dr Cyril de Beun (KU Leuven). Martin Luther and Jacob Rees-Mogg (and Erasmus)
  • 2nd Prize: Taimia Mahmoud. JK Rowling and Martin Luther

A further thanks goes to our prize-givers (Susanne Frane, Patrizia Crivelli and Georg Krawietz), the German Embassy, Embassy of Switzerland, Austrian Cultural Forum, Goethe Institute, Oesterreichischer Akad. Austauschdienst, The National Archives, and the British Library.

Without this support and the genius of our authors, we would not have been able to eavesdrop on Martin Luther’s most fascinating conversations!

Stephanie Homer, MPhil/PhD student, IMLR

On 24 November 2017 Catherine Davies, IMLR Director, accompanied a group of nine A’ level students and their teacher Señorita Eloísa Amo del Río, from the Alexandra Park School (APS), North London, to see the Cervantes Theatre production of Federico García Lorca’s rural tragedy, La Casa de Bernard Alba, in the English version.

This was Lorca’s last play, completed in June 1936 two months before his assassination at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. The play was also put on by the Cervantes Theatre in a Spanish version, which was almost sold out, but the students preferred to see it in translation for a first viewing. It’s interesting to note that many of the students spoke another language at home (Turkish, Arabic and Polish) or had a Spanish parent.

The theatre is small and cosy, the perfect venue for a small production requiring minimal stage props and scenery, in this case an austere black and white Andalusian interior. The acting was incredibly powerful, at times overwrought, and the sense of confinement and frustration almost overbearing. The sound effects were not what were expected. There were no Andalusian folk songs sung by the harvesters, but rather a strange, low moan that caused some consternation in the audience – presumably it aimed to express monstrous, pent-up sexual desire.

Below are some of the students’ opinions of the play and the production:

‘Attending the theatre to watch La Casa de Bernarda Alba has been an immensely intriguing and educational experience. Each actress has portrayed a powerful adaptation of their character, which has provided the audience with an undeniable comprehension of their situation, in relation to Lorca’s life. From beginning to end, the frustration and tension is intensified by the desire for freedom, in a suffocating and overbearing atmosphere imposed by Bernarda Alba. Watching Lorca’s play as a live adaptation has provided a realistic idea of how Lorca intended his work to be watched, and has definitely brought the characters and the setting to life. The theatre production has encapsulated the raw emotions of the characters’ situation, and how this has contributed to the overall tragedy of the play.’ Zoe Rock 13 E student.

‘Watching La Casa de Bernarda Alba in a theatre was a great experience. It really helped me understand the concept of the play better, and I have a clearer picture of what the characters are truly like. I believe that this will help me when I do my essays for the play. Thank you for the opportunity.’  Eda Melek Year 12 student.

‘The play was better than expected and even in such a little space, it was acted out very well and it was fun to watch and felt like you were in the room with the actual family.Very good.’  Dylan Lacey Year 12 student

‘The La Casa de Bernarda Alba trip to the Cervantes theatre was a trip that I enjoyed very much. The entire experience was a very fun trip because of the people on the trip but also because of the actual play itself. It turned out to be quite funny and better than we expected it to be. It was also very educational as the play we went to was in English, so it helped to me to consolidate my knowledge on the play and further my understanding of it. The play itself was also very good as the actresses were amazing. Watching’ La Casa de Bernarda Alba’ helped me gain more details about the play as it was easier to see the emotions expressed by each character and so I was able to understand the message of the play. It was a really great opportunity. I am glad I went. ¡lo pasé bomba! ’ Asmaa Abdelfattah Year 12 student.

‘Going to the Cervantes theatre to watch La Casa de Bernarda Alba was a truly eye-opening experience. Watching the play as opposed to just reading it has definitely helped my understanding by allowing my to really visualise the story of Bernarda and her daughters. Overall,I can say I enjoyed going to the Cervantes theatre and hope I can go back again soon to watch the Spanish version.’  Lottie Amin

Catherine Davies, Professor of Hispanic & Latin American Studies
Director, IMLR

IMLR Visiting Fellow, Corinna Deppner, talks about the research she undertook whilst at the IMLR

Senate House, University of London

From 1 October to 30 November 2017 I was a Visiting Fellow at the Institute of Modern Languages Research (IMLR) at the University of London. The objective of my stay there was to research my postdoctoral project “Interreligious encounters in mystical worlds of experience of the early modern era. Emotion research as a passageway between literatures of the 16th and 20th centuries”. Since October 2016, I have been pursuing a project on religious encounters in mystical worlds of experience at the Institute of Romance Studies at the University of Erfurt. During my stay in London, I consulted the holdings of Senate House Library and the British Library. The Department of Latin and American Studies at Senate House Library, deserves special mention. Their collections have enabled me to deepen my research on notions of mysticism in the work of Brazilian author Clarice Lispector, whose literature is an essential primary text of my investigations, and which I am questioning regarding structural compatibility with the work of the Spanish Golden Age mystic, Teresa of Ávila. Here is a brief insight into the results of my two months of research.

The narratives of the Brazilian author Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) feature a minimalist plot and the presence of interior female perspectives. Because of their emotionally charged structures, her novels have been described as “modern-day mysticism”. Attempts at interpretation of this kind have recourse to the Spanish mysticism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the principal impetus for which is held to come from John of the Cross and Teresa of Ávila.

Teresa of Ávila

Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582) came from a Jewish family which underwent baptism at the time of the Inquisition and persecution, and whose members attempted to survive as conversos. It is necessary to ask by what factual and methodological approach the experiences of the culture of the Spanish Siglo de Oro – a Christian culture, yet at the same a culture shaped by the inquisition and persecution of the Jews, a culture to be seen as crucial to the work of Teresa of Ávila – can bear comparison with that of Clarice Lispector. Clarice Lispector was born in 1920 in the Ukraine. She was given the Hebrew name Chaya. In 1921 Lispector’s Jewish family, having fled the pogroms, emigrated to Brazil.

A starting point for this cross-historical overview is the assumption that the timeliness ascribed to the poetry of the mystic of the Siglo de Oro is to be traced to transformations which, on the one hand, draw their meaning from reformulations of referential Biblical texts, and on the other show themselves to be prefigurations of modern writing styles.

There are three specific connecting points which I use for the comparison of the two authors:

Mystic-religious patterns and inner exile
Linguistic-philosophical paradigm of mystical speech
Gender-specific approach resulting from a re-reading of mysticism and modernity

During my stay at the IMLR, I focused on the last aspect. It goes back on the assumption that mystic discourse provides a possibility for forms of feminine articulation located outside male ascription. In her ideas about the mystical and the hysterical, Luce Irigaray argues that the location of feminine speech is a place of speechless, unconscious corporality, which yet mirrors what is lacking. Thus, to Irigaray, hysteria and mysticism become possibilities of a feminine, non-linguistic discourse in maleness: in the “phallocentric” order which excludes her, the hysteric reflects her speechlessness in her bodily symptoms, and mysticism marks the other extreme from Descartes’ logicisation of the ego: a personal pleasure of women which occurs at the high point of their submission to the order of the Other – God – and, with the extinction of the ego, ensures a maximum ecstasy beyond all logic. Although the declared aim of Cixous and Irigaray was to overcome this feminine impotence of speech, Kathrina Reschka’s study emphasises stillness as a form of feminine literary articulation, not to be considered as impotence, but as an entry to an ineffable world. In the discourse of mysticism Reschka finds confirmation of her assumption to the extent that in Mediaeval mysticism stillness generated fullness, since it was in such stillness that the voice of God spoke to the mystic.

This positive connotation of stillness in mysticism is then the Holy Silence – as Cixous and Irigaray formulate it – to be borrowed and utilised for Lispector’s eventless literature, whose reductionist plot strains towards expression with ever new word and sentence constructions. For mystics the adequate form of expression is silence, as a reaction to the collapse of the language system, which at the same time releases a speaking or writing which continues to infinity. An enlarging interpretation of hysteria enables us to see silence as that caesura which attempts to overcome impotence of speech by the generation of ever new forms of representation.

Accordingly, the perspectives in Lispector’s writing, her dissociations, for ever breaking out in numerous directions and largely defying logical ascriptions are paired with a radical negativity which becomes manifest in descriptions and evocations and at the same time seems to be the source of her writing. Also present therefore is that very silence – the negation of speech – which is evoked as a form of literary articulation with feminine connotations, as a free, non-referential area. Thus the painful narratives of her novels amount to an abandonment of any search for identity. “Giving up is a revelation” Lispector writes at the beginning of the last chapter of The Passion according to G.H. And continues: “Finally, finally, my casing had really broken and without limit I was.”

When it comes to the relation between women’s writing and mystic writing as reflected in the representations of hysteria, a line of reference to the literature of Teresa of Ávila is Teresa’s vision of the inner castle. What is reflected there, out of a withdrawal, is comparable on the one hand – as she suggests herself – to the quality of delineation possessed by a crystal; on the other hand, used psychologically, it indicates the splitting of identity.

Teresa of Ávila described the mystic soul as “a castle, formed of a single diamond or a very transparent crystal, and containing many rooms, just as in heaven there are many mansions […] [and] in the centre, in the very midst of them all, is the principal chamber in which God and the soul hold their most secret intercourse”. In her description the soul appears separated into dwellings, into an infinite number of chambers pertaining to the architecture of heaven, as a palace, further as a palm, and particularly as a crystal. We note the search for ascriptions of the representations portrayed in this description. The change in ascriptions, which in the description of the inner castle, too, circle round a hidden reference in the manner of signifiers indicates an attempt to provide with attributes something which is, in its core, non-representable. Clarice Lispector’s narratives are not in their motifs linked to the metaphor of a building, an arrangement of rooms, a path or any other comparable reference. The unique feature of her linguistic images, upon which a presentation of non-presentation is inscribed, is the creation of crystalline structure as a linguistic architecture. In this presentation, despite the successive arrangement of events, responses to the inner life are overlaid by a breaking in of the outer world, descriptions of sense impressions encounter interlaced perception surges. These mood images alternate with depictions of relations which are not infrequently endowed with unexpected attributes. This applies to all novels in which individual facets deploy their effect like the reflections of a crystal.

Corinna Deppner, IMLR Visiting Fellow (2017/18)