Mardi 3 décembre 2024 Salle 126 Saint-Charles 1
“Past and Present Intertwined: Applying the Palimpsest Metaphor to Neo-Victorian Narratives”.
“A Palimpsestuous Reading of Sarah Waters’s Neo-Victorian Fictions: Tipping the Velvet (1998), Affinity (1999) and Fingersmith (2002)” was the title of my PhD Thesis (defended in October 2022). My starting hypothesis was that the formal and thematic complexity of the novels allows readers not only to empathise with the Victorian characters and enjoy their adventures but also, and most importantly, to see the differences and similitudes between the normative ideas and behaviour of Victorian society and those of the twenty-first century.
In this seminar, I will provide an overview of my thesis project, first, by explaining the methodology that I employed as a common thread for my analysis, that is, the palimpsest metaphor as explored by Sarah Dillon in The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory (2013). This theoretical perspective offers the opportunity of using this metaphor as an effective tool for the analysis of labyrinthine and multilayered literary texts, such as Waters’s neo-Victorian fictions. I will then briefly explain how this theoretical framework was used in combination with further theories in order to explore one salient topic in each novel ⸻gender as performance, the ghostly quality of lesbians, and the role of women and pornography, respectively. By close reading these trio of neo-Victorian novels, one of my main aims was to see how by representing feminist, lesbian and queer women, Waters gives voice to the buried and erased lives of those marginal Victorian women who have systematically been silenced by history, while simultaneously granting the visibility they still lack to their contemporary counterparts.
Lastly, I will provide a more recent example of the application of the palimpsest metaphor that I am currently working on, in order to prove that this methodological framework is very well suited for the analysis of complex and multilayered narratives of all sorts.
Short Bionote.
Elsa Adán-Hernández, from La Rioja (Spain). I hold a PhD dissertation on Sarah Waters’ neo-Victorian fictions, carried out at the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters in Zaragoza, Spain (2022). I am a member of the research group LimLit: Literature Of(f) Limits: Pluriversal Cosmologies and Relational Identities in Present-Day Writing in English, also belonging to the Contemporary Narrative in English Research Group (code H03_23R).
My main research interests concern British and Irish contemporary literature and culture, where I focus on gender, feminist and queer studies, as well as vulnerability studies and transmodernity, exploring different aspects within our contemporary cultural parameters. I am currently working as a lecturer in the Department of English and German studies at the Faculty of Education (University of Zaragoza), where I teach subjects related to Literature and English teaching training.
Contact: elsadan@unizar.es (X account: @ElsaAdan_Unizar)
Participer à la réunion Zoom : https://univ-montp3-fr.zoom.us/j/95633778270?pwd=1zwXrVmRdxc8WT2LgRTTABd...