Annual Postgraduate

Research Conference 2009

School of English, University of Kent
Thursday 21st May

BLURRING
BOUNDARIES
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Blurring Boundaries
Annual Postgraduate Research Conference 2009
School of English, University of Kent

9.15 a.m. Arrival, registration, tea and coffee

Welcome by Prof. Bernhard Klein

Session One Chair: Clive Johnson

10.00 - 10.30 a.m. Kate Limond

“The Persistent shape-shifting life of things”: subject-object
relations manifest. A.S. Byatt’s Possession: A Romance

10.30 - 11.00 a.m. Jon Cranfield

Football, Text, Ideology

11.00 - 11.30 a.m. Irene Musumeci

Orientalism and the ‘post-9/11’ Film

11.30 - 11.45 a.m. Tea and Coffee

Session Two Chair: Tara Puri

11.45 - 12.15 p.m. Judy Dermott

“Weather Causes Mass Breakouts of Community Spirit”

12.15 - 12.45 p.m. Tinashe Mushakavanhue

A Post-colonial child and the ambiguity of identity: Personal
Reflections

12.45 - 1.15 p.m. Sarah Horgan

Anglo-Irish Gothic: Protestantism, Paranoia and Passing in
Uncle Silas
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1.15 - 2.00 p.m. Lunch

Session Three Chair: Sarah Horgan

2.00 - 2.30 p.m. Tara Puri

Austerity as Display

2.30 - 3.00 p.m. Clive Johnson

“Mrs Crummles was the original Blood Drinker”: Dickens and
the Blurred Boundaries of the Comic World

3.00 - 3.30 p.m. Monica Mattfeld

“Show Me Your Horse, and I Will Tell You Who You Are”:
Henry William Bunbury and Late Eighteenth-Century Visual
Satires of the Human-Animal Centaur

3.30 Closing address by Professor Donna Landry

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“The persistent shape-shifting life of things”: subject-

object relations manifest. A.S. Byatt’s Possession: A Ro-
mance

Materiality in Possession functions with no fixed identity, often

shifting between states of being. There is a fundamental dichotomy
between objects as possessions (both possessed and possessing) and
their existence despite, and outside, of the subject-object relations
projected onto them.
The accessory in Possession is an exemplary object for under-
standing the novel on its own terms; it is a locus where the various
meanings of possession meet. Accessories within the novel are figured
as possessions, as the excursion to the jet shop in Whitby or Ash’s
gift of the woven May crown to his daughter reveals. Accessories
are also possessed of meaning, representing manifest subject-object
relations. They symbolise relationships between people, as well as
functioning as memento mori, heirlooms, commodities and scientific
discoveries, embodying this sense of the transmutable nature of mat-
ter informing the transmutable identity of objects.
Subject, object and body question each other as solid concepts.
The status of subject and object are ambivalent, as demonstrated by
the manifest spirits that are the objects of the séance-goers. The ‘airy
forms’ that the spirits take questions the nature of the body, acting
as liminal between corporeality and an airy immateriality. The novel
challenges the assumed relationship between subject, object and the
body through materiality and furthermore the materiality itself is
not static, rather it is transmutable both in its matter and identity.

Kate Limond
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Football, Text, Ideology

This paper addresses the role of football within culture and ex-
amines how it functions as a medium of knowledge-production and
consumption. Theories of culture and aesthetics have traditionally
taken a very hard line with sport in general and I argue that the work
of Umberto Eco and Theodor Adorno can throw some light on why
this is so. The football stadium needs no subtle theoretical rhetoric
to make it ‘count’ as culture. It is a medium overflowing with nar-
ratives which are created and consumed in relatively sophisticated
ways. The sports media struggles to impose as many potential nar-
ratives on any particular game, all of which are alive in one way or
another when the ball is in play. Both Eco and Adorno describe the
strange, alienating sense of watching “the senseless movements down
there on the pitch.” Football is reduced, in this formulation to a
series of stark athletic exertions. For Adorno, these exertions are a
potent metaphor for the poverty of mass culture; art becomes, like
sport, a meagre triumph against ridiculously limited, self-imposed
and self-legitimising conditions. The football crowd greet the free-
kick goal like an aesthetic event but surely, Adorno says, there can
be no surprise, no transcendent response when the millionaire who
spends his entire life training to score goals, manages (against no
odds at all) to score a goal. I argue, however, that narrative makes
football beautiful and that the undulating tensions that flow around
the “senseless” movements derive from an ability to decode these
densely packed narrative strands. This phenomenon can be easily il-
lustrated with reference to historical examples where football created
a space for cultural and ideological contests.

Jon Cranfield
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Orientalism and the ‘post-9/11’ Film

Shot in 2005, Paul Greengrass’ film United 93 is only one text

amongst many responses in popular culture both visual and literary
to the events of 11 September 2001. Aiming to realistically depict
the hijacking and crash of flight United 93 by utilising a third-person
real-time narrative framing and documentary visual style, this text
places itself in the tradition of historical fiction, as well as disaster
movie/literature genres.
However, the film’s ostensible realism hides a profoundly raced
and gendered treatment of the dynamics of exchange between the
generic categories of ‘heroes’ and ‘villains’, translated into the con-
frontation of ‘American passengers’ and ‘Islamic terrorists’ as ideo-
logical opposites - a paradigm of much post-9/11 rhetoric.
This interdisciplinary paper aims to uncover what has been called
an ‘orientalist fear’ and its implications on the construction of Amer-
ican national identity and mythology through fiction - whether in
literature or in film - by applying Edward Said’s theory of orien-
talism to the film’s representation of Islamic terrorists. Crossing
the boundaries between cultural/literary studies and film studies I
will examine how Said’s notion of the ‘East-West’, ‘us-them’ bina-
ries typical of orientalism, manifests itself in the visual and topical
representation of the terrorist.
Thus I hope to demonstrate the persisting strength of Said’s
scholarship, and to pursue his desire for intellectuals to stand against
all-pervasive ideologies such as the ‘clash of civilisations,’ which are
fully involved in the cultural discourse proposed by United 93, in an
effort to better understand the conditions of the post-9/11 world.

Irene Musumeci
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“Weather Causes Mass Breakouts of Community Spirit”

This paper will examine the use of technical and conceptual op-
positions found in the work of James Joyce. My aim in presenting it
is to examine and illustrate the two very different modes of discourse
that give rise to these oppositions and to demonstrate how they are
clearly discernible from his very earliest texts. My contention is
that although they present so very early in the writer’s work, they
remained throughout, and although changing and metamorphosing,
led ultimately to his increasing experimentalism and sense of uni-
versalism. My thesis rests on the theory that these very distinct
approaches have their roots in an alternate loss and strengthening of
selfhood on behalf of either narrator or protagonist and that their
increasingly rapid juxtapositions gave rise to much of his innovatory
work and the illumination of the ordinary. I also hope to demon-
strate how the oscillation between the two modes gives strength and
realism to their separate dualities.
I shall examine how the loss of selfis based on a process of what
I call ‘Dissolution’ - the dissolving of self and consciousness and also
on the use of Romantic Irony which mythologises the self and the en-
vironment. This expansion of consciousness I see as being instigated
by very precise phenomena: weather, light, sexual attraction and
music. The experience is invariably joyous but also binding, involv-
ing as it does whole communities and fellow citizens.? By contrast
the strengthening of selfhood, a process I describe as ‘Alienation’
contracts the consciousness re-inforcing the hardening of egoand its
isolation. This interpretation of Joyce’s work is linked to his interest
in Eastern religions, in Blake and the influence of Theosophy in his
early youth, with the subsequent emphasis on aspects of the Eternal
throughout his work.

Judy Dermott
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A Post-Colonial Child and the Ambiguities of Identity:

Personal Reflections

The intention of the paper is to use my personal narrative to de-

fine the post-colonial child in Zimbabwe. Since I was born in 1983 a
few years after Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980, it officially makes
me, in the most literal sense, a post-colonial offspring. But what does
post-colonial mean? Is post-colonial an abstract condition? What
are the contradictory implications of being post-colonial? What hu-
man creatures have been created as a result of post-colonialism? As
much as I will engage with post-colonial theorists in this paper, my
life experience of being born and raised in post-colonial Zimbabwe is
the primary basis of my argument. In other words, the manifesto of
this paper is simply: Who Am I?

Tinashe Mushakavanhu
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Anglo-Irish Gothic: Protestantism, Paranoia and Pass-

ing in Uncle Silas

The Protestant Ascendancy class in Victorian Ireland were plagued

by thoughts of their own negation. The traditional insecurities that
had been so embedded in the Anglo-Irish psyche in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries acquired a greater sense of urgency as the
years moved towards 1900. The Act of Union, the dissolution of
Grattan’s parliament in Dublin and growing agitation for Catholic
Emancipation and land reform combined to make Ireland in the Vic-
torian era a more inhospitable terrain for the besieged settler class
than it had ever been before. In literature, a constant search for a
tangible and solid sense of identity, made much more urgent by the
changing social and cultural conditions of the day, typified the writ-
ings produced by these Irish Anglican elite in the nineteenth century,
writings that were often expressed in the Gothic form.
Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu was one such writer and his Gothic
novel Uncle Silas is in many ways a meditation on the uncertainty
and insecurity that haunted the Anglo-Irish condition in the period.
It is a text fundamentally about identity and the insecurity, paranoia
and the general uneasiness felt by the Protestant elite in Victorian
Ireland in relation to this issue. Just as the Anglo-Irish actively
sought a new identity to inhabit in the nineteenth century, Uncle
Silas is a novel about the difficulties of maintaining a fixed sense of
self in a world where nothing is what it seems, where nothing stays
the same, and where boundaries are constantly blurred.
This paper will seek to explore the ways in which Uncle Silas may
be said to truly be a text characterised by the three key facets of the
Anglo-Irish identity question in the Victorian period; Protestantism,
paranoia and passing.

Sarah Horgan
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Austerity as Display

The body was a highly visible, and more significantly, a readable

cultural symbol in the Victorian period and its signifying ability was
vitally linked to the clothes that covered it. The awareness of clothing
as something that has potential for both restriction of identity as well
as expression of it permeates much of Victorian literature. It is quite
curious then that a large number of Victorian heroines choose, more
often than not as an overt and considered measure, to dress in a style
that can only be described as austere, at a time when propriety of
dress meant an appropriate display of familial status.
In a paradoxical inversion, austerity itself becomes a kind of dis-
play, as well as the appropriate setting for a certain type of moral
and intellectual integrity. In the process of self-construction, the
seemingly apparent binary between display and restraint becomes
increasingly blurred, and the latter itself becomes more visible be-
cause of its very marginality.
However, clothing is a complex means by which an individual
negotiates with the world, and this display of austerity has a pro-
fuse range of often contradictory meanings circulating around it. In
this paper I attempt to examine the power and signification that is
infused into this unfashionable sartorial decision by the heroines of
Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Villette. Though these women don’t observe
the rules of fashion, they don’t exactly flout those of decorum either
- instead, they carve out a space within existing fashion norms, ex-
tending the area between the acceptable and the unacceptable, and
creating personal spaces within a very public mode of articulation.
It is this third space that will be the focus of my paper.

Tara Puri
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“Mrs Crummles was the original Blood Drinker”: Dick-

ens and the Blurred Boundaries of the Comic World

Comedy is a literary mode which deals in the subversion of or-

der. It breaks and blurs boundaries of forms, bodies, definitions and
identities. It is also the mode which itself defies definition, order
and identity. This paper will seek to outline the nature of the comic
worlds that Dickens creates, focusing on his early fiction.
The theatrical world of Mr Crummles’s company in Nicholas
Nickleby, is a world of blurred boundaries: shifting identities, trans-
formations and ambiguities. Actors become their characters, they
use theatrical modes of behaviour when off stage, children become
adults, adults become children, animals become actors, and words
begin to lose their capacity to define meaning. The physical world
of the theatre is comically deceptive. Costumes, lighting, faces and
bodies are manipulated and transformed. The world of The Pick-
wick Papers, is equally ambiguous and deceptive. In the theatre of
the trial of Bardell against Pickwick, the lawyers create an almost
surreal alternative to reality, in which benevolent, innocent Pickwick
is a monster, and in which a warming pan is a dark reference to
hidden passion.
Dickens plays with the fluidity and polymorphous qualities of
the comic world. This paper will show how his distinctive approach
to comedy, while one of his defining characteristics as a writer, is
rooted in the comic traditions of the novels of his childhood, and the
traditions of thought on comedy that can be traced to Aristotle.

Clive Johnson
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“Show Me Your Horse, and I Will Tell You Who You

Are”: Henry William Bunbury and Late Eighteenth-Century
Visual Satires of the Human-Animal Centaur

Termed the ‘Second Hogarth’ and the ‘Raphael of Caricaturists’,

Henry William Bunbury (1750-1811) was one of the most famous
visual and textual satirists of his day. Bunbury, who was from the
landed aristocracy; frequent exhibitor at the Royal Academy; friends
with notables like Sir Joshua Reynolds, Horace Walpole, and Samuel
Johnson; Equerry to the Duke of York and Lieutenant Colonel of
the West Sussex Militia, would appear to be an interesting and in-
fluential subject of scholarly investigation; however, only a handful
of scholars have examined his work, and when they have done so,
they have focused on his biography and his non-equestrian images
in place of his most famous and socially influential satires, which
were satires of horsemen. When Bunbury’s equestrian images have
been discussed they are approached from a perspective far removed
from horsemanship tradition and its engagement with human/animal
classifications, boundaries and interactions.
With this context in mind, in this paper I will analyse various
horsemanship satires by Bunbury, and will argue that the definitions
and boundaries of ‘human’ and ‘animal’ were not so much undergoing
solidification, the usual scholarly argument, as redefinition at the end
of the century. The horse-man illustrated subject was one capable
of varied and complex symbolism, nuanced meaning and great socio-
political influence; however, this diversity, I argue, is undecipherable
without approaching the equestrian subject of illustration and carica-
ture - the visual and embodied centaur - as one intimately bound up
with equestrian theory and practice. Bunbury’s equestrian images,
satirized and ideal, must be considered through contemporaneous
horsemanship discourses, with special attention given to horsemen’s
practice of physiognomy and pathognomy.

Monica Mattfeld
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Closing address

The ‘Blurring Boundaries’ conference could well have been named

‘Changing Tracks’. The exciting work presented foregrounded reflec-
tions on theory and method as much thematic content. There was
a general interest in porous borders, whether between cultures or
between genres, an interest in bringing things together that have
been formerly kept apart. This phenomenon resonates with Bruno
Latour’s questioning of the project of modernity and its heavy invest-
ments in purification, separation or suspicion of hybrids, and main-
tenance of strict boundaries. Approaches varied from ‘thing’ theory
to ideology critique, from the Saidian critique of Orientalism to ques-
tions of the visionary and the mystical. Relations between subjects
and objects were boldly featured in various ways, ranging from the
new animal studies to the functioning of exotic textiles and fashion
within fiction. Both Donna Haraway’s term naturecultures and Katie
King’s term pastpresents capture something of the dynamism and
complex imbrication of the subject/object, East/West, human/non-
human, colonised/de-colonised, proper/improper distinctions being
explored. Aesthetics featured not so much alongside as with, and
within, politics: the aesthetic effect might be a free kick in football,
counter-ideological audience compulsion in cinema, or the matter of
beauty as constituting meaning. We heard a great deal about the
language of capitalism and the marketplace, and about the limits of
consumerism as a vocabulary of aspiration. Failures to de-colonise
lead to distrust, and a re-wiring of affect into self-doubt and the
search for alternatives. We heard much about self-doubt: on the part
of the West, on the part of intellectuals, on the part of the Anglo-
Irish Protestant Ascendancy. Attention to otherness and passing
remains a preoccupation, for which Lauren Berlant’s work on the
prosthetic body remains relevant. The new body of work on affect
by such scholars as Sarah Ahmed, Jonathan Flatley, and the late Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick that contributes to a new history of the emotions
appears as germane to our concerns as does a reinvestigation of com-
edy and comic theory in Dickens, the figure of the vampire as an
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Anglo-Irish fetish, or the kinaesthetic symbiosis of horse and rider

as a key to character: ‘Show me your horse, and I will tell you who
you are’. ‘Show me your boundary, your border, and we might learn
together how to trespass it to good effect’.

Donna Landry, FRAS

Professor and Director of Research
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Biographies:

Kate Limond is a a second year MA by research student, work-

ing on materiality in A.S. Byatt’s fiction. The title of her thesis is
‘Subjects and objects in the fiction of A.S. Byatt.’ ([email protected])

Jonathan Cranfield is a doctoral student in the School of English

in the University of Kent. His research interests include the work
of Arthur Conan Doyle, The Strand Magazine, Late - Victorian and
Edwardian Literature and, more generally, ideology and culture in
the 21st Century. He is a member of the British Association of Vic-
torian studies, enjoys teaching Romantic poetry to undergraduates
and hopes one day to get a proper job. ([email protected])

Irene Musumeci is a second year PhD (Film) student at the Uni-

versity of Essex and a sessional teacher in the School of English
(Kent). Her thesis deals with responses to 9/11 in American cinema
2001-08. ([email protected])

Judy Dermott is in her second year of PhD (part time), and is

researching the concept of Joyce as a visionary artist, looking at his
links with Blake, Swedenborg, and Theosophy. ([email protected])

Tinashe Mushakavanhu is from Zimbabwe and a research stu-

dentin the School of English. His research is a comparative study of
the philosophical anarchism of the Romantic poet, Percy B. Shelley
and the late Zimbabwean writer Dambudzo Marechera.
([email protected])

Sarah Horgan is a first year PhD student who has come to Kent
from University College Cork, Ireland. Her research is focused on
vampirism in nineteenth-century literature and its relationship with
concepts of nationality. ([email protected])
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Tara Puri is a third-year PhD student, researching a thesis entitled

‘Fabricating the Self: Women’s Body and Identity in Victorian Lit-
erature.’ She is also a sessional teacher for the School of English and
is interested in the Sensation Novel, Victorian domestic narratives,
and 19th century fashion studies. ([email protected])

Clive Johnson is a first-year PhD student researching the comic

writing of Charles Dickens. He was previously a secondary school
English teacher. ([email protected])

Monica Mattfeld is a first year PhD student, and her thesis title
(preliminary) is: ‘Spectacular Masculinities: Visible Centaurs and
Virtuous Horsemanship in the British Long Eighteenth Century.’
([email protected])
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Acknowledgements

The organisers
(Sarah Horgan,
Clive Johnson
and Tara Puri)
would like to thank
Christine Hooper,
Alison Priest
and Helena Torres,
for their help and guidance in planning this event.

Thanks are also due to

Professor Bernhard Klein
and Professor Donna Landry
for their support and encouragement throughout.

And, of course, to all those who attended and contributed on the

day itself; without such enthusiastic participation the conference
would not have been the success it was.
“ Alice, from her height, apprehends the
mirror as a pure surface, a continuity
of the outside and the inside, of above
and below, of reverse and right sides.

(Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense)

”