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INSTITUTE OF MODERN LANGUAGES RESEARCH
University of London School of Advanced Study
Tuesday, 20 January 2015, 18:00 – 20:00
LINKS Comparative Studies Seminar
DIGESTING TEXTS: COMPARATIVE APPROACHES TO FOOD
Venue: Room G34, Ground Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
Speaker
Ruth Cruickshank (Royal Holloway) with David Lunn (KCL) and Mathelinda Nabugodi (UCL)
Both food and language are essential to human survival, but they also serve complex cultural, political and psychological
functions and affect how we try to make sense of the world, others and ourselves. Food is also an indispensable tool for writers, providing structure, symbolism, the premise for action and characterization. Yet food and language are also ambivalent, bound
up with leftover meanings, tensions and experiences. So, beyond authorial intentions, representations of food carry traces of meanings and of psychological experiences and are vectors for gender, class and ethnic power relations as well as political, ideological
and metaphysical discourses. Panelists will begin by providing perspectives from different periods, geographies and genres, spanning the potential of French critical leftovers, Dalit scraps in Hindi fiction and Shelley’s ‘vegetable diet’ and gestural language
(abstracts below). These approaches will inform the questions we would like everyone to consider in relation to their own research interests and cultural framework so that we can enjoy a really productive discussion after these papers.
We all eat and speak, so we all have something to bring to the table!
Roundtable discussion
LINKS Comparative Studies Seminar
Organised together with Birkbeck College, Goldsmiths, King's College London, Queen Mary, Royal Holloway, SOAS, and University College London
Thursday, 22 January 2015, 17:30 – 19:00
Ingeborg Bachmann Centre Lecture
VISIONS OF THE ABYSS: LOWRY, BOLAÑO AND THE GHOST OF MAXIMILIAN OF AUSTRIA
Venue: Room G35, Ground Floor, Senate House, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU
Speakers:
Patricia Novillo-Corvalan (Kent)
The tragic story of the rise and fall of Maximilian of Austria (1832-1867), the Hapsburg archduke-turned-Emperor of Mexico, has generated scores of legends, dramas, novels, paintings,
and films. The aesthetic appeal of the story resides in its potent mixture of politics, romance, tragedy, and melodrama that resulted in the disastrous fate of its two royal protagonists. Maximilian was executed by a firing-squad in Querétaro, Mexico, and
his proud and beautiful consort, Charlotte of Belgium, descended into madness. This paper conducts a transnational reading of the imperial narrative by examining its representation in French, British, and Latin American art and literature through a comparative
analysis that explores its significance in the works of Edouard Manet, Malcolm Lowry, and Roberto Bolaño.
The lecture will begin with a discussion of Manet’s series of artistic compositions centred on the political theme of the
French invasion of Mexico and its tragic conclusion. Entitled L’Exécution de Maximilien (1867-1869), the paintings represent a thinly-veiled critique that reflects Manet’s profound antagonism to, and denunciation of, the Imperial
regime of Napoleon III. It will then examine Lowry’s association of Maximilian in
Under the Volcano (1947) with the biblical topos of the expulsion from paradise, the motif of Faustian damnation, and the dualistic conception of Mexico as an ‘infernal paradise’. Lowry endorses the age-old construction of the
gringo who is ruthlessly shot by bandits in a Mexico that is defined according to the fatalistic catch-all term ‘abyss’, or its Hispanic equivalent, ‘barranca’. The lecture will conclude with a discussion of Bolaño’s revisionist historiography of Maximilian’s
adventure in his posthumous novel Woes of the True Detective (2011), in which he returns to the theme of the horrors of history as fictionalised in
2666 (2004) by using the narrative of Maximilian as a symbol for the traumatic consciousness of Mexico.