Telling Otherwise: Collective and Personal Remembering and Forgetting in Kate Atkinson’s "Life after Life"

This paper aims at exploring collective and personal remembering, as well as the notion of forgetting as a kind of “‘rebeginning’ or finding the future by forgetting the past” (Galloway 3) in Kate Atkinson Costa prize-winning "Life after Life" (2013). In Atkinson’s novel Ursula Todd is born on February 11 1910, dies and is born again and again to undo the traumatic events that caused her previous death(s). The narrator’s retelling of Ursula’s life takes the reader through the two wars, and to different incarnations of Ursula’s life, which finally set things right for her and for her beloved ones. Following Paul Ricoeur’s "Memory, History, Forgetting" (2004) and Marc Augé’s "Oblivion" (2004), where they treat forgetting as being a positive figure, or “the reserve of forgetting” in Ricoeur’s terms, I will discuss the interlocked processes of remembering and forgetting, not only applied to individuals (like Ursula in "Life after Life"), but also to the community. Communal memory is particularly mobilised in the act of telling otherwise: “[t]hrough narrating one’s identity otherwise, a community can work through its past, have an acceptable understanding of itself, and to justice to others” (Leichter 124). Therefore, this paper will also look into the ways in which Atkinson’s novel engages with the concept of collective memory that, operating within an intersubjective model, underlines networks of individual and communal relations

Sensorialidad y joyería hecha con cabello humano en la ficción y cultura neo-victorianas

In this essay I will focus on the role played by hair jewellery, a widespread craft in the nineteenth-century Anglo-American context, in neo-Victorian literature and culture. I will consider hair jewels as objects that are remnants of the Victorian past, but also as personal items that evoke affective responses through the senses. In this take on (neo-)Victorian literature and culture, I will consider the entanglement of subjects and objects, human remains (hair) and jewels, past and present, death and life in contemporary renditions of the Victorian craftwork of hair jewellery. Finally, I will argue that this fictionalisation of Victorian material traces allows us to mediate on the links and associations between the Victorian past and our (sensorial) responses to them, and that it opens up the ways to interrogate the affective relations between subjects and objects, the past and the present, then and now, as well as their impact upon our future.En este artículo me centro en el papel que desempeña la joyería realizada con cabello humano, un arte muy extendido en el siglo XIX y en el contexto anglonorteamericano, en la literatura y en la cultura neo-victorianas. Analizaré estas joyas como objetos que provienen del pasado victoriano, pero también como artículos personales que estimulan respuestas emocionales y afectivas a través de los sentidos. En esta aproximación al neo-Victorianismo, me ocupo del entramado e imbricación que se crea entre sujeto y objeto, entre restos humanos (el pelo) y las joyas, entre el pasado y el presente, entre la muerte y la vida en versiones contemporáneas del arte victoriano de la joyería realizada con cabello humano. En definitiva, mi argumento gira en torno a la capacidad de las huellas materiales de la época victoriana de mediar entre el pasado victoriano y nuestras respuestas sensoriales ya que nos permiten dilucidar las relaciones afectivas entre sujeto y objeto, el pasado y el presente, así como su influencia e impacto sobre nuestro futuro

Sensoriality and Hair Jewellery in Neo-Victorian Fiction and Culture

In this essay I will focus on the role played by hair jewellery, a widespread craft in the nineteenthcentury Anglo-American context, in neo-Victorian literature and culture. I will consider hair jewels as objects that are remnants of the Victorian past, but also as personal items that evoke affective responses through the senses. In this take on (neo-)Victorian literature and culture, I will consider the entanglement of subjects and objects, human remains (hair) and jewels, past and present, death and life in contemporary renditions of the Victorian craftwork of hair jewellery. Finally, I will argue that this fictionalisation of Victorian material traces allows us to mediate on the links and associations between the Victorian past and our (sensorial) responses to them, and that it opens up the ways to interrogate the affective relations between subjects and objects, the past and the present, then and now, as well as their impact upon our future.En este artículo me centro en el papel que desempeña la joyería realizada con cabello humano, un arte muy extendido en el siglo XIX y en el contexto anglonorteamericano, en la literatura y en la cultura neo-victorianas. Analizaré estas joyas como objetos que provienen del pasado victoriano, pero también como artículos personales que estimulan respuestas emocionales y afectivas a través de los sentidos. En esta aproximación al neo-Victorianismo, me ocupo del entramado e imbricación que se crea entre sujeto y objeto, entre restos humanos (el pelo) y las joyas, entre el pasado y el presente, entre la muerte y la vida en versiones contemporáneas del arte victoriano de la joyería realizada con cabello humano. En definitiva, mi argumento gira en torno a la capacidad de las huellas materiales de la época victoriana de mediar entre el pasado victoriano y nuestras respuestas sensoriales ya que nos permiten dilucidar las relaciones afectivas entre sujeto y objeto, el pasado y el presente, así como su influencia e impacto sobre nuestro futuro

Familial Traces: Photography and Trauma in Doris Lessing’s Auto/biographical Narratives

This paper deals with the use of photography in Doris Lessing’s auto/biographical writings, particularly, Under My Skin: Volume One of My Autobiography, to 1949 (1994), and more recently, Alfred and Emily (2008). Both works deal with Lessing’s personal and collective trauma: her strained relationship with her mother, and her struggle for recognition, as well as the pernicious influence the Great War had upon Lessing’s parents, and by extension, upon Lessing herself. Trauma studies, as seen in the winter-spring 2008 special double issue of Doris Lessing Studies entirely devoted to trauma in Lessing’s work, have provided nuanced readings into Lessing’s take on trauma in her production. Although the (im)possibility of recovery from trauma has become a recent focus of interest in Lessing studies, as in the double issue, there has been no specific reference to the relevance of photography and/in trauma. The aim of this paper is to examine personal photographs as relevant cultural documents in Lessing’s auto/biographical texts, and her engagement with personal and collective trauma, by paying attention to a neglected aspect: the use of family photography.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Lorna Gibb’s A Ghost Story (2015): An Assemblage of Matter and Spirit.

Much has been written on Victorian Spiritualism and the spiritualist medium, who was, in general terms, female with some notable exceptions like Daniel D Home, for example. Since the 1980s feminist historians like Alex Owen, Janet Oppenheim, and more recently, Christine Ferguson, Pamela Thurschwell, Richard Noakes, and Claudie Massicotte, have unearthed the relevant role played by women in nineteenth-century Spiritualism. This movement evolved from disembodiment (the connection between the medium and the spirits from the afterlife was first proved to be successful through sound) to embodiment with materialisation mediums as with the notorious case of Florence Cook who materialised the spirit Katie King, the enigmatic spirit celebrity of the 1880s. In this paper I will discuss Lorna Gibb’s A Ghost Story (2015), which offers a different take on the story of the spirit celebrity, Katie (and John) King, Interestingly, the narrator is the disembodied voice of the ghost, a first-person narrative voice that moves in and out of time and space, but it intervenes in people’s lives, and possesses the body of several mediums and spiritualist believers in their seánces and theatrical acts, like those of the Davenport brothers. The novel shows a clear rejection of binaries such as human/nonhuman, matter/spirit, embodiment/disembodiment, and in so doing it underlines the fluidity of the multiple elements (bodies, parts, terms) involved in Spiritualism, and in séances particularly. My aim will be to examine the shifting relations between those elements, as well as the tension between human-nonhuman, matter-spirit through an assemblage lens, drawing on social theorists such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, as well as Bruno Latour.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech

Neo-Victorian Orientations towards the Fictional Writer: Jane Harris’s - The Observations

https://www.canal-u.tv/video/la_forge_numerique/neo_victorian_orientations_towards_the_fictional_writer_jane_harris_s_the_observations.53221Jane Harris’s The Observations (2007) narrates the story of Bessy Buckley, an Irish girl who searches for work and finds it in Castle Haivers, employed by Arabella. While learning how to become a maid-of-all work, she is asked to keep a record of her daily activities by her mistress. This mystery is solved when Bessy discovers Arabella’s “The Observations”, her own record of the maids’ progression at home, an experiment she conducts for her to find out the distinctive features of the perfect maid. However, the novel unfolds an expected course of actions, which will shift Bessy’s position from being a vulnerable subject to a resilient one, precisely by the writing her story. In this paper I will focus on the character of Bessy, a maid who finds redemption and improvement through friendship, bonding and care, and who pens her story, thus becoming a writer. The act of writing is then coupled with ethics of care, which underlines issues of vulnerability and resilience in a Victorian context through a contemporary lens.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tec

Crafting, Collecting, and Clubbing in the Victorian Drawing Room

In her volume Inside the Victorian Home (2003), Judith Flanders scrutinizes the space of home and domesticity as a microcosm of the ideal society of the nineteenth century. Considering Flanders’ ideas as a point of departure, the aim of this paper is to explore the sociocultural representation of domesticity as a rupture of the traditional perception of Victorian society from the point of view of the theory of separate spheres. To this purpose we consider the middle-class home as a crossroad between the public and the private, the Victorian drawing room as an interstitial space of negotiation between public and private, as well as the Victorian domestic environment as porous and fluid.Universidad de Málaga. Campus de Excelencia Internacional Andalucía Tech