Panel 1A (Alumni Hall): Caring about Humans
Dominique Hétu (Université de Montréal)
“ ‘The Occurrence of Joy’: Relatedness, Perpetual Breaches and What Matters in the novels Home and Lullabies for Little Criminals”
This paper addresses joy as basic affect and as element of care ethics through the reading of two novels: Marilynne Robinson’s Home (2008) and Heather O’Neill’s Lullabies for Little Criminals (2006). The main argument centres on the idea that joy illuminates our fundamental relationality to others, to the world and to objects. My intentions are plural and interdisciplinary: they combine literary analysis, care ethics and discourse on space to better understand how joy, in texts of fiction, helps recognize our dependency to others. Care ethicist Nel Noddings claims that joy is “a special affect that arises out of the receptivity of caring” and I thus question its place in care ethics, a research field from which literature could benefit (Noddings 132). To better situate this focus on joy and care, I explore fictionalized joyful moments and an enjoyment that emerges through caring and careful relations in difficult environments. Despite hard living conditions and careless treatment by others, the protagonists’s receptiveness sheds light on particular daily interconnections between care and the enjoyment of space and body. My intention is to show how joy can intensify the darkest of events and breaches, and participate in the process of becoming. Often left unexplored, these details of lived experience require a conceptual shift towards care and affect, asking for new sources of transformative and critical thinking. Therefore, exploring joy allows us to reflect differently on moments of connectedness: “[Joy’s] occurrence and recurrence maintain us in caring, … in relatedness” (Noddings 147).
Dominique Hétu is a Ph.D. candidate in Comparative Literature at the Université de Montréal, where she prepares a dissertation on space and care ethics in North American fiction by women. She is also a lecturer in ESL pedagogy at the Université de Sherbrooke.
Caroline Holland (University of Toronto)
“Passage of Joy, Pursuit of Happiness: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Passionate Passing of Self in Salinger’s Seymour”
In recent writings on affect, such as those of Jean-Luc Nancy, the reconceptualization of emotions is crucial to our understanding of self, community, and relation. Joy, for Nancy, once recovered from its inscription within the emotional spectrums of religion and fascism, is iterated as the “fervor for multiple and singular existence.” Always fleeting, alternating disappearance and return, joy presides at the birth of selves whose difference and contact are perpetually renewed. Developments in aesthetic philosophy have helped inspire the recent “affective turn” in literary studies and consequent investigations into the belonging of singularities in the world. Tracing Nancy’s wedge in the binary logic of individual vs. whole, my paper responds to current critical revisitations of self and sociality in J.D. Salinger. Contrary to traditional assessments, Salinger’s texts neither mourn the death of the authentic self, lost in the pursuit of commodity and image under capitalism, nor celebrate the hermitic religiosity of the cloistered self. In the epitaphic novella Seymour: An Introduction, the self’s departure from the scene is inextricable from the text’s joyful turn toward a vision of self as mobile, unmoored, and joyously aware of its existence in relation to others. The passing of the self exposes the myth of its stability; the self never was, never is, and, like Nancean joy, cannot be “found and gathered up” into a closed unity, but is always becoming, and coming again, in joyful passage.
Caroline Holland is a PhD student at the University of Toronto’s Department of English and completed her Master’s and Undergraduate Degrees at the University of Ottawa. Her research, informed by aesthetic theory and ecocriticism, focuses on place, community, and globalization in late modernist and proto-postmodernist American literature.
Shaun Lalonde (Independent researcher)
“Birds, Song and Joy in Leopardi’s ‘La quiete dopo la tempesta’ ”
In the canto “La quiete dopo la tempesta” Giacomo Leopardi describes the world’s re-emergeance from a storm – the waters of the river return to calm, the fields reappear from under clouds, birds take up their song and humans their labours. Thus, as in the medieval topos of the nature introduction, nature is depicted as returning to its joyful state. But, while in typical examples of this scene the poet is inspired to join the birds in song and rejoicing, in Leopardi’s poem the poet turns from nature to express his cosmic pessimism that nature provides for humans only a vain joy (vana gioia). Through a close reading of this poem, my presentation unpacks Leopardi’s idea of joy, both human and animal. It examines how Leopardi develops, yet undermines, the conventions of the nature introduction and its vision of joy, particularly by rejecting the anthropomorphism of the birds’ singing. It then draws on Leopardi’s moral and philosophical writings, such as the Elogio degli uccelli and pertinent passages from the Zibaldone, to set this critique within the context of Leopardi’s anthropological and zoological thought, which, according to Alessandro Ottaviana (2008), attempts to surmount the dualities of these philosophical traditions. Finally, it situates Leopardi’s vision of animal and human song and emotion within the context of the question of the animal as formulated by contemporary philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Derrida. Finally, it concludes that Leopardi’s vision of human joy – that it results from a negation of potency – is a reversal of the traditional definition.
Shaun Lalonde completed his doctorate at the Centre for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto with a thesis on the troubadours and the early Italian lyric. He has studied at the College of Humanities at Carleton University, the École normale supérieure in Paris, and taught in a prison.
Panel 1B: Ecstasy and jouissance
Damien-Adia Marassa (Duke University)
“Stealing (Away) Home: Time Signature, Improvisation, and the Joy of Black Gathering”
Black writing is a cause for its own joy. However improvised or provisional the grounds of black performance and its inscription, it is a scene which remains always an open, if hidden, locale of world-historical celebration and critique. “Black consciousness,” explains Frantz Fanon, “is immanent in its own eyes….I am wholly what I am.” In this paper I will draw from and discuss certain instances of collective and improvised expression which bear on the joy of black gathering(s) by way of a reading of Harriet Jacob’s 19th century Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, contemporary black literary criticism of Saidiya Hartman and Fred Moten, and a unique audio/video recording of an improvisational performance by legendary artists James Brown, Michael Jackson and Prince. Using literary and critical texts to provide context for the analysis of the visual and sonic media, this intervention reads the stage, and stages a reading of the necessary aesthetic and ecstatic joy of black gathering, measuring improvised relation against the time stamp of the raw video data in order to reflect on the in/visibility of black archives, the counter-evidence of black pathology, and the joy of black gathering, hidden in plain sight.
Damien-Adia Marassa is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Duke University. He studies black writing and traditional African religions in the New World. His dissertation comparatively explores such issues in the writings of Machado de Assis and Anglophone black literature of the 19th to early 20th century.
Fan Wu (University of Toronto)
“Habit of You: The Queer Ecstasies of Burroughs, Arthur Russell and My Beautiful Laundrette”
Is it possible to draw a specifically queer understanding of ecstasy, and what would be the implications of such a conception? Through close readings of Arthur Russell’s album Love Is Overtaking Me, Burroughs’s Naked Lunch and Frears’s My Beautiful Laundrette, we come to understand queer ecstasy as the ability to oscillate between different fields of joy through an encounter with a loved object. These texts were chosen for their specific formal qualities (of writing, music and cinema) and the three points along the spectrum of queer ecstasy they each expound: for Burroughs, ecstasy given by the other distorts the body and distends the very field of joy: a boy “[contracts] in spasms of delight. His whole body squeezes out through his cock” (Naked Lunch 76). For Russell, the music and lyrics provide counterpoints for each other, rupturing the language barrier between sound and sense to interweave two fields of joy. In a scene from My Beautiful Laundrette in which the two lead males make love in the office of their laundromat, the ecstasy provided by the other generates a transcendent field of pleasure which lies outside the light of heterosexual notions of joy. This comparative analysis will highlight the intersection between queerness and joy as productive of a dialogic motion which advances both conceptual structures.
Fan Wu is an undergraduate student specializing in Literary Studies at the University of Toronto and the co-president of the program\’s student union. Broadly speaking, his interests include aesthetics, cultural studies, queerness and contemporaneity.
Lauren Beard (University of Toronto)
“The Joy of Text: Towards a Postmodern Praxis of Reading in Calvino’s Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore.”
Italo Calvino’s _Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore_ self-consciously enacts several tropes that are constitutive of postmodernism. The novel is about you—the Reader—engaged in reading Calvino’s new novel, or at least an attempt to read the novel, which never appears whole, and is instead dispersed in various fragments which turn out to be beginnings—incipit—of discrete novels by various authors. Calvino’s commitment to formal experimentation may appear heavy-handed, but his purpose is clear: he plays with the Reader’s expectations and his desire for closure, and dismantles the traditional role of the author, casting the Reader as his own author through an enactment of the text. _Se una notte_ focuses on the role of the reader, the pleasure of reading, and the resultant desire for narrative closure. However, in Calvino, closure is impossible; the joy or pleasure of reading the text itself is what remains. The female Reader, Ludmilla, the counterpart to you, takes pleasure in reading, no matter how obscure or convoluted the text may be. Ludmilla is the postmodern reader par excellence; she is the model postmodern reader, as she is attentive in her reading, and reads for pleasure and out of interest, rather than for narrative closure. In this way, Ludmilla provides a counterpart to the not-yet-postmodern Reader, the recipient of the second-person address “tu.” I will consider the text alongside Barthes’ notions of plaisir and jouissance, and suggest that the pleasure of reading is ultimately what is at stake in Calvino’s novel.
Lauren Beard is a Ph.D. Candidate in Comparative Literature at the University of Toronto. Her current research on English, French, Italian, and German modernism examines modernist literary expression as a reaction to crisis at both a formal and subjective level, with particular attention to temporality.
Panel 2A: Traumatic joys
Irina Sadovina (University of Toronto)
“Joy and Trauma in Siberia: Vladimir Sorokin’s Bro and Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales”
In Vladimir Sorokin’s Bro (Put’ Bro, 2004), set in the 1920s Soviet Union, characters are “awakened” to a full realization of their unearthly origins and higher nature by a shattering blow with a hammer made of cosmic ice. The intense ecstatic experience leaves them fundamentally transformed. The protagonist’s personal memories are completely eclipsed: “It all became the past. And detached itself from me. The present was only the new joy of my heart.” Sorokin’s characters are not the only ones to undergo a radically transformative experience in Siberia: in the Stalinist era, millions of people travelled East to meet another kind of shattering blow – the traumatic impact of Soviet labor camps. Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales (1954-1973) is an account of the writer’s experience in the labor camp system. A classic of Gulag literature and one of Sorokin’s favorite books, Kolyma Tales describes the irreversible and violent change caused by the trauma that the Gulag inmates go through. Entering into dialogue with Shalamov’s stories, Sorokin’s novel challenges the reader to consider what is common in the nature of such antithetical experiences as joy and trauma. In the two texts, Siberia is a place where one undergoes a radical experience that exceeds and disrupts the psychological and social order. This paper discusses the possibility of thinking about joy and trauma as related experiences of fundamental rupture by tracing their representation in Sorokin and Shalamov’s texts.
Irina Sadovina is a PhD student at UofT’s Centre for Comparative Literature. Her research focuses on the representations of the Soviet past in contemporary Russian and Estonian fiction. She is also working on a PhD project on the Russian New Age at the University of Tartu.
Andrea C. Valente (York University)
“The ‘Joy of Soccer’ in German and Brazilian Cinemas: Screening Ambiguities from Individual and Historical Narratives”
This paper aims to explore the ‘joy of soccer’ as a trope that can encompass ambiguities of the pleasure principle, in order to deal with traumatic memories embedded into the historical narratives of a country. Hence, this paper leads a comparative study of two awarded feature films from Germany and Brazil that represent the ‘joy of soccer’ as a foreground element in response to individual and collective memories of dictatorship regimes, destruction and trauma. Both films deal with personal and historical traumas intermingled with scenes, in which the country prepares itself for the final match that would award them with the World Cup trophy for the years of 1954 and 1970 respectively. The films are ‘The Miracle of Bern” (Germany, 2003) and “The Year my Parents Went on Vacation” (Brazil, 2006), and have their story centred on a soccer-loving boy in a fighting spirit that symbolically tries to liberate the family from anxieties and fears during the exciting period of the World Cup. This paper takes a psychoanalytic view based on Freud’s and Winnicott’s works, and draws on film theorists such as Robert Stam and Sabine Hake to analyze the content and audio-visual aesthetics of the films in regards to the depictions of the ‘joy of soccer’ (i.e. the German’s “Freude am Fuβbal”l and Brazilian’s “alegria do futebol”) as an ambiguous trope that brings pleasure and pain together to the screens.
Andrea C. Valente is on her third year of doctoral studies at the Graduate Program in Humanities, York University. Her dissertation is a comparative study on translation and adaptation of historical women’s life writing narratives into mediatized spaces based on studies of memory/testimony and generation approach through ethnography.
Gustavo Llarull (Cornell University)
“A More Nuanced Palette of Affective Attitudes: Bleeding, Clenched-Teeth Joy in Laura Alcoba’s Manèges and Albertina Carri’s The Blondes”
The discussion of Laura Alcoba’s hybrid Manèges: Petite histoire argentine (Paris, 2007) and Albertina Carri’s film Los rubios (The Blondes, Buenos Aires, 2003) unveils a species of joy characterized by two features: a) it is actualized as an intersubjective process (e.g., collective self-realization in Elster’s reading of Marx), and not as a passive “feel-good” emotion; b) it appears in a prominent cluster of affective/cognitive attitudes seemingly incompatible with joy: anxiety, fear, disorientation, dissembling. Alcoba’s title is revealing. Manèges as children’s “joyful” merry-go-round, but also as manipulation and pretense, as “manèges trop subtils,” multiplied in a quasi-Leibnizian combinatory, building a more nuanced affective palette, from the narrative perspective of six-year old Laura, in a context of State terror: the Argentinean dictatorship (1976-1983) was annihilating guerrillas like Alcoba’s and Carri’s parents. In Carri’s “search,” the child perspective is also preponderant, though the film unfolds in Carri’s present: the 30-year old daughter of desaparecidos appears in the film, shooting a film about… her parents. The heated, ongoing debates about it are partly due to a) Carri’s refusal to go through the “promise of happiness,” in Ahmed’s turn on Adorno’s dictum; b) Carri’s departure from the quasi-ritualistic, affective-political stance she was expected to take as a daughter of desaparecidos. Shedding light on each other’s works, the authors present a “clenched-teeth joy,” embedded in a rich affective structure. This “joy” speaks to resilience as much as to their original questioning of restrictive forms of memory-construction, opening new ways to think, and to feel, these issues.
Gustavo Llarull (PhD candidate, Cornell) works on Latin American fiction, its contacts with Anglophone literatures and with non-fiction’s rhetorical strategies. Theoretical background: moral psychology (e.g., imagination, emotion, narrative), ethics, agency theory, hermeneutics, critical theory, trauma studies. His work appeared in Chasqui: Journal of Latin American Literature, and in book chapters.
Panel 2B: Laughter, performance and pedagogy
Ann Dunn (University of North Carolina at Asheville)
“The Marriage of Joy and Tragedy: ‘We were as twinned lambs’ ”
Comedy and Tragedy are normally thought of as dichotomies, with the emotion of joy being associated with one and sorrow with the other. I will look at one of Shakespeare’s great tragedies, Othello, and demonstrate the ways in which joy functions in that drama, and is indeed integral to the genre of Tragedy. From the key speeches of Acts I, II, and through the beginning of III.3 to the final words and actions of both Othello and Desdemona, joy is at the heart of both the dramatic conflict and its resolution. In the Elizabethan world, specifically, joy was associated with love, with order (both on the cosmic and mundane levels), with unity, and with pleasure (again, both in the spiritual and physical realms). Taking into consideration all of its associations, Joy is an emotion that is anathema to those who are incapable of feeling, or even of comprehending, it.
Ann Dunn teaches The Medieval and Renaissance World and Arts and Religion. Her awards include Distinguished Teacher of the Year in Humanities, North Carolina Artist of the Year as Director of Asheville Ballet, and numerous poetry awards, including book publications. Her degree concentrations were Shakespearian Studies and Italian Renaissance Literature.
Anne-Claire Marpeau (University of British Columbia / École Normale Supérieure de Lyon)
“Teaching with joy, teaching joy… ‘The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.’ (Shakespeare)”
Starting with Spinoza’s, and then Deleuze’s, definition of joy as “a man’s passage from a less to a greater perfection”(Ethics), we would like to question joy as an heuristic tool and a pedagogical device in a drama-based research perspective. In that purpose, we will compare the fictional character of the fool in different plays and the persona of the teacher: we will indeed start with the hypothesis that teaching is a performance and that the teacher takes on a role. Opening our presentation with a research performance, we will question the specific actions of the fool that could be seen as vectors of “joy”, both as utterances (figures of speech that would be “joyful”) and as an effect: the audience of the fool inside of the play and outside of the play might, or not, experience joy while listening and watching him perform. This will be linked to the question of whether the playwright and the dynamic of the fiction assign to the fool a “teaching” role through the medium of laughter (that we will have to articulate to the notion of “joy”). We will then have to ask what makes this situation of “joyful” communication between the fool and its audience similar to the pedagogical situation of a classroom, and what makes it different. We will observe those relations of power that exists on stage and in a classroom and to finish, open areas of discussion about the use and the happening of “joy” as an effective way to convey knowledge and desire to learn to a student.
Anne-Claire Marpeau did her Masters at the ENS de Lyon in Comparative Literature and Francophonie. In 2012, she successfully passed the Agrégation de Lettres Modernes. She is now a PhD student at UBC, projecting on a joint-advised agreement with the ENS de Lyon in 2014.
Jeannine Pitas (University of Toronto)
“Joyful teaching, joyful learning: On love, laughter and pedagogy in Plato’s Phaedrus”
Every morning I woke up at 5:30 a.m., my stomach knotted with dread. Another battle awaited me. What fun experiences could I expect today? Would my students throw crumpled papers at me when I turned to write on the board? Would they chatter so incessantly that I’d find it impossible to teach? Would they make disparaging comments about my shoes? When I signed up to teach at a prestigious international high school, I had no idea of just how scary teeangers could be. But, as much as I feared the start of each day, I held my head up as I entered the school’s doors. I smiled at colleagues and students. I gripped the chalk firmly and began to write on the board. I can’t say I was happy in my job, but every day I experienced moments of joy – a joy that I have felt in every teaching experience since. My presentation will explore the relationship between teaching, learning and joy as described in Plato’s Phaedrus. With his characteristic irony and humour Socrates explores the relationship between eros and pedagogy, arguing that only in the presence of dynamic passion can true learning occur; otherwise, thought sinks into the stagnation associated with Phaedrus’ first teacher, Lysias. I argue that Socrates’ dynamism (associated with the dialogical process of pedagogy and indeed with speech itself) is essentially a characterization of joy – a joy that lies at the heart of all experiences of teaching and learning.
I am a PhD candidate at University of Toronto’s Centre for Comparative Literature focusing on twentieth century Latin American poetry.
Panel 3A: Temporality: Death and Life
Amina Ben Braïek (University of Manouba / Fayetteville State University)
“The Joyful ‘[easeful] Death’ of John Keats in ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ ”
The present paper addresses the notion of Joy in Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale,” which is foregrounded in his “O for a life of sensations rather than of thoughts.” This approach to poetry and life reveals the poet’s deep concern with feelings, emotions as against reason and thoughts. At the heart of Keats’s poetry lies a commitment to Nature as a source of joy. Powerful feelings are what poetry is for Wordsworth too. Wordsworth dances with daffodils while Keats rejoices the nightingale’s song. I will attempt to show that joy is a poetic vision that extends time in the fanciful, and accommodates Keats with the idea of death before it comes. Keats’s “easeful death” is joyful. The submission to the enchanting world of the Nightingale shows Keats holding his breath softly at a moment of deep joy. He presents the image of death as beautiful and therefore joyful: “to cease upon the midnight with no pain,” “seems rich to die.” Death immortalizes the moment of beauty, the moment of joy. In “Ode to a Nightingale,” time is frozen, joy is never temporal it is immortal and eternal through poetry. Art is an experience of joy, and the poetic world of Keats implies extension in time through “Negative Capability” or imagination, and death is part of human life. The poetic escape from reality is submission to the immediate. It is a consciousness that joy is inevitably tied with pain. Therefore, we will come to the realization that Keats’s poetic experience of joy is unique as it deals with ideas of time, mutability, beauty and consciousness of pain.
I am a Fulbright Scholar at Fayetteville State University. My duties are teaching Arabic and representing my country, Tunisia in cultural events and academic conferences. I got my Bachelor and M. A. degrees. My fields of research are: Romantic Poetry, Cross-Cultural Studies, African-American Literature and Shakespeare.
Kimberley Griffiths (McMaster University)
“ ‘The Most Exquisite Moment of her Whole Life’: Temporality and Joy in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway”
My analysis approaches the concept of joy through a temporal framework, specifically through the joyful moment or moment of jouissance. These moments have a “tendency to recur or repeat” as well as to evoke seemingly past events in the minds of those who experience them, effectively placing the past and the present side by side (Sedgwick qtd. in Haffey 143). These instances are therefore temporally troubling, and, I argue, provide a challenge to normative conceptions of time that place a great emphasis on futurity and progression. My paper mobilizes this concept of the moment of jouissance in an analysis of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, focusing specifically on the character of Clarissa. Moments of temporal disruption – which range from Clarissa’s stepping out into the London streets on a June morning, to her reminiscences about her youthful relationship with Sally Seton, to her ghostly encounter with Septimus Warren Smith – are consistently placed in opposition to notions of linear trajectory and progression, which are represented by multiple symbols of temporal regulation (the bells of Big Ben, Sir William Bradshaw’s “proportion,” etc.). Each of these instances is concerned with the troubling of distinctions between temporal realms (e.g. between the present and the past) and the possibilities for joy and pleasure that are contained therein. Essentially, my paper advocates for the generative potential in attending to alternative conceptions of time, and suggests that temporal incoherence can become a site of vitality and joyfulness. Works Cited: Haffey, Kate. “Exquisite Moments and the Temporality of the Kiss in Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours.” Narrative. 18.2 (2010): 137 162.
Kimberley Griffiths received her M.A. from McMaster’s Department of English and Cultural Studies. Her research interests include queer and feminist theory, particularly in relation to Modernist literature. Her thesis drew on theoretical critiques of notions of progression and productivity in order to consider queer potentialities for temporal disruption.
Cameron Ellis (Trent University)
“Jouissance and Utopia between Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312 and Shaman”
What I want to do here is discuss the relationship between Jouissance and Utopia from within a psychoanalytic paradigm. Julia Kristeva once asserted the following in an interview when responding to a question regarding the events of May “68: “I am going to use a vocabulary that may shock people, but it can allow us to size up this phenomenon. Infinite jouissance for each person at the intersection of happiness for all… is it anything else but the sacred?” The questions I propose to examine are the following: (1) If jouissance is an ambiguous sensation, i.e., a blend of extreme joy and pain, then how can utopia be conceived as allowing such a high risk of pain and horror? (2) If jouissance is a radically liminal experience, then how might subjectivity in utopia be understood? (3) Does the link between jouissance and the sacred posit a fixed static utopia or a utopia of dynamism? I propose examining these questions against two recent novels published by American author and critic Kim Stanley Robinson: Shaman and 2312. The novels tell the stories about humanity three hundred thousand years in the past and three hundred years in the future, respectively. The two novels frame our present as being on a cusp of radical potential with infinite possibility through the development of emerging technologies and social arrangements. Kim Stanley Robinson is also a writer who captures the affect of pure wonder and estrangement that is specific to the science fiction and utopian imagination. The remarkably spiritual context of both of these novels serves to place the psychoanalytic discourse of Kristeva in a current literary and cultural context.
Cameron Ellis is a PhD candidate at Trent University where he is working on a dissertation that examines the private, subjective and inner-psychic life of utopianism using the novels of Samuel R. Delany and the psychoanalytic and linguistic theories of Julia Kristeva.
Panel 3B: Joyful activism: Subjectivity, History, Philosophy
Hugh English (Queens College, CUNY)
“ ‘Open-eyed in the face of apocalyptic events’: Joy as a Practice”
My paper explores the challenge to claim joy as a practice, as an engaged choice that we can make as we face grief for ourselves, our fellow humans and what Joanna Macy has called the “pain for our world.” I will consider Macy’s writing, activism and “engaged Buddhism” as efforts to re-invent cultural definitions of subjectivity not only to shift our understandings of human life, but also to confront the crisis our species finds itself in: “The question that has haunted me for decades surfaces again. How to live with the knowledge of the destruction we are bringing on ourselves and all life? No amount of activism, prayer, or meditation can alter that knowledge. So how do we stand open-eyed in the face of apocalyptic events, and still find joy in serving life? And, if we can do that, what transformative powers will arise in us?” (Joanna Macy, letter, September 2005). Using Macy’s articulation of active joy as a frame, I will consider Margaret Atwood’s recent dystopian trilogy and Adrienne Rich’s poetics. In Atwood’s grim dystopia, there emerges nonetheless, and perhaps surprisingly, a focus on human efforts to re-invent an ecological and humane world, including moments of joyful celebration, solidarity, survival and transformation. Rich is noted for her capacity to look with open-eyes at human suffering, oppression and violence, but she also offers in both her poetry and in her poetics a sense of lyric poetry as a practice or instrument of “embodied experience,” providing access to human pleasures and joy as resistance to despair.
I teach American Literature, and Gender and Queer Studies in the English Department at Queens College-City University of New York, the largest United States public university system. His current research is on the shifting representations of non-normative genders in autobiography, fiction, and medical and social science discourses.
Natasha Hay (University of Toronto)
“Child’s Play: Benjamin on Perception, Creativity, and Time”
Throughout attempts to appropriate the figure of the child in Walter Benjamin’s work that range from the fiction of W.G. Sebald to the queer theory of Lee Edelman, the frame of reference has generally been either his polemical opposition to Social Democratic efforts to mobilize the working class in the name of their emancipated grandchildren or his fragmentary resurrection of the lost utopia of German-Jewish life in his memoir. Whereas the memory and hope symbolized by the child in “On the Concept of History” and Berlin Childhood Around 1900 are subject to the dangers of nostalgia and deferral, Benjamin’s early writings on the phenomenology of colour and the origin of language recurrently invoke the image of paradise that becomes immediately accessible to the free play of the perceptual and creative faculties of the child. Portraying the pure receptivity of the child as a feeling or mood in which the distinction between subjective consciousness and the object of its knowledge is dissolved, Benjamin shows that the primordial experience of childhood entails an extremity of exuberance that is ecstatic and mundane at once. As the child engages with watercolors and woodcuts which elicit his imaginative and imitative abilities, his inward seeing and its outward expression coincide in their pictorial world. Overturning the security of the bourgeois classroom and household, he begins to construe the ephemeral and mutable nature of historical life that is no longer held together by the self-generative enunciation of the ‘I’. To supplement readings of Benjamin’s historical materialism which primarily grasp its redemptive potential through the prism of mourning and melancholia, my presentation will suggest that childlike modes of perception and creation also hold out a promise of happiness to our recollection.
Natasha Hay is a doctoral student at the Centre for Comparative Literature in Toronto. Her research is primarily concerned with the relationship between the essence of language and the idea of the just community in Benjamin, Heidegger, and Arendt. She enjoys the poetry of Anne Carson and well-tailored blazers.
Tim Clarke (University of Ottawa)
“Grievous Joy and Elegiac Affirmation: Spinoza and the Process of Mourning in the Whitmanian Elegy”
In recent years, the humanities have witnessed an upsurge of interest in Baruch Spinoza and the philosophies of affect that descended from him through the work of such latter day Spinozians as Gilles Deleuze and Antonio Negri. At the heart of these philosophies is the concept of joy, which Deleuze defines in Spinoza: Practical Philosophy as “the increase of the power of acting,” and which he opposes to sadness, the diminishment of acting power. In the field of literary studies, this idea of affective joy has required a rethinking of many of the traditional definitions of genre and the work of literature, nowhere more so than in the problematic case of elegy, the poetry of lament and mourning. With this problematic in mind, my paper will apply affect theory to the example of Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom’d,” an unusually melancholic poem from the poet best known as a joyous celebrant. I will view Whitman through this Spinozian lens in order to reveal the ethics of joyful affirmation that lies beneath the surface of his poetic mourning and through which the elegy transforms sadness into joy, weakness into power, and death’s absence of meaning into meaningful presence. Finally, underlying all of these transformations is the subversion central to Whitman’s poem: no longer understandable merely as the recovery from loss, mourning instead becomes the very affirmation of life.
Tim Clarke is a second-year PhD candidate in English literature at the University of Ottawa. His research interests include American modernism, theories of dissident subjectivity, political interpretations of Spinoza, and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.
Panel 4: Freedom
Felicia Martinez (Saint Mary’s College of California)
“Joyful Madness and Narrative Disruptions in Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote”
Reminiscent of Nietzsche’s Dionysian revelers, joy and pain are constant companions in Cervantes’ glorious tale of his Sorrowful Knight. The man who begins his first sally “with great joy and delight,” also intends to suffer as much as possible in firm commitment to the laws and loves of the virtuous knight errant. Physical beatings, however, soon turn to disappointments, and joy is concurrently mingled, and perhaps confused, with humor, hilarity, and malicious delight. Framing all is Don Quixote’s madness, his compendium of chivalric knowledge spontaneously imagined, a madness both oddly pure and merely imitation. In this paper, I will consider the relationship these seeming discordances have on Cervantes’ process of narration: A knight whose joy is painful, but richly imagined (both as copy and something authentic), is at odds with a world whose joy is cruel, and yet similarly engaged in imaginative storytelling. The narrator suggests that all is madness, a seeming mirror of the parodic and episodic narrative itself. As I will argue, however, Cervantes instead engages his readers in a negotiation between kinds of joy and kinds of madness, asking us each to consider the ways in which narrative disruption makes the potential for finding cracks in our own spirit and happiness a part of imagination and the narrative process itself. Who are we in face of Don Quixote’s joyfulness and “irretrievable loss” (The Birth of Tragedy)? This is the question I will ultimately develop.
Felicia Martinez is an Assistant Professor in the Integral Program of Liberal Arts at Saint Mary’s College of California. Her current work considers the relationship between modernist experiments with narrative form and language and ideas about personhood.
Kevin Mitchell (Trent University)
“Camus’ Imperative: Ontological Joy and Existential Absurdity”
At the end of Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus,” he exclaims, “one must imagine Sisyphus happy”. It is as though it is up to us, from where we are, today, to fortify the possibility of happiness in the face of utter despair. Camus leaves it open as to why one must imagine happiness in the face of the absurdity of existence. What role does the imagination have in relationship to the happiness we are expected to conceive? I argue that joy, defined as an awareness and celebration of one’s vitality, is a necessary component to meaningful action. As such, joy is more than an ephemeral emotion. Without the joyous affection of one’s ability – and one’s potential to be creatively inventive – what remains is the opposite – life as an infinite Sisiphyian task only to be endured. It is no accident that Camus’ meditation on Sisyphus comes in the midst of a treatise on suicide. Joy is thus an ontological structure that indicates the overflowing of life in the face of the deadening effects of modernity (as alienated labor), and the ever-increasing occupational model of specialization. Rather, joy is a synthesizing power that transcends the negatively demarcated occupational boundaries of post-Fordist modes efficiency, and instead, forges connections in arrangements of multiplicity. I will begin by commenting on Myth of Sisyphus and draw out the implications for an existential engagement with the world as mediated by joy, and develop a narrative centered on the importance of joy in Camus’ text, and then extend this discussion to an ontological theory of joy as developed by Deleuze’s Spinoza-influenced “ethic of joy”.
Kevin Mitchell is a doctoral candidate in Cultural Studies at Trent University. He works on German Idealism’s influence on contemporary culture, particularly on the Kantian transcendental turn’s impact on popular culture, ideology and the history of the present. He argues that philosophy and culture are mutually implicated.
Ruth Levai (Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem)
“Seeds of joy in Dostoevsky and Bernanos”
The works of Dostoevsky and Georges Bernanos, among their many other profound insights, are rich in moving passages and compelling scenes of unbounded joy, the kind most of us long to experience. Some of the most memorable moments of joy in the Brothers Karamazov occur when Mitya is in prison. Yet I believe the key lies in something that Mitya says to Alyosha: “I see the sun, and if I don’t see the sun, I know it’s there. And there’s a whole life in that, in knowing that the sun is there.” Similarly, Bernanos’ curate of Ambricourt, before one of his greatest experiences of human joy, says, “I knew that God didn’t want me to die without knowing something of this risk–just enough, perhaps, so that my sacrifice should be complete. I have known this poor little minute of glory.” In both cases the emphasis is on the knowledge that each had, above and beyond the conditions in which they found themselves. I propose to further explore how Dostoevsky and Bernanos demonstrate the source of joy as being one of knowledge rather than one of circumstance. Within the framework of this overarching hypothesis I will examine two specific texts, the Brothers Karamazov and the Diary of a Country Priest, revealing six “seeds” of joy watered by this one main source: 1) knowing joy as a prerequisite for freedom rather than a product of it, 2) knowing joy as risk, 3) knowing the difference between joy and pleasure, 4) knowing joy as the ability to love, 5) knowing joy through the truth of giving and 6) knowing joy through community.
I am a third year Ph.D. student at Eötvös Loránd Tudományegyetem in Budapest, Hungary. This year I spoke at the conference of the International Comparative Literature Association in Paris on the topic of “M-theory, Dostoevsky, Droste, Bernanos and st(r)ing.”
Panel 5A: Joies fugaces
Nicolas Picard (Université Paris III – Sorbonne Nouvelle)
“La joie des bêtes dans la littérature animalière de langue française”
Les animaux peuvent-ils ressentir de la joie ? Jusqu’à une période récente, la science, influencée par le modèle béhavioriste et le paradigme cognitiviste des années 1970, trouvait cette question peu pertinente. L’éthologie de terrain et l’éthologie cognitive, ainsi que la neurophysiologie, ont changé la donne et démontré toute la richesse et l’intensité des émotions animales, rejoignant par là-même nos propres observations quotidiennes. Cependant, encore rares sont les chercheurs qui s’intéressent aux émotions « positives » comme la joie, dont l’éthologue Mark Bekoff nous dit pourtant qu’elle est une « véritable épidémie » dans le monde animal. Par ailleurs, si la philosophie et la religion se sont penchées depuis l’Antiquité sur l’émotion de joie, elles ont concentré leurs analyses sur l’émotion humaine. Que nous apprend donc la littérature sur cette question de la joie animale ? La littérature française, en particulier celle de la première moitié du XXè siècle, propose de fait un grand nombre de récits animaliers qui représentent la joie des bêtes : joie des jeux et de la chasse, joies des amours et de l’amitié, joie de vivre. Je souhaite examiner les enjeux stylistiques, éthologiques et philosophiques de ces représentations, à travers un large corpus de textes : des romans, des nouvelles, des bestiaires et des récits naturalistes de Maurice Genevoix, Louis Pergaud, Jean Giono, Gaston Chéreau, Joseph de Pesquidoux, ou encore d’auteurs moins connus comme Jacques Delamain, Charles Derennes, Andrée Martignon, et Charles Sylvestre.
Je suis professeur Agrégé de lettres modernes, doctorant à Paris III. Ma thèse porte sur les « Mondes animaux » dans la prose narrative de langue française 1896-1938 (dir. Alain Schaffner). Je participe aux activités du programme ANR « Animots » (2010-2014), coordonné par Anne Simon (CNRS-EHESS) : colloques, bibliographie.
Laura Tusa Ilea (Independent researcher)
“Figures et stratégies du comique dans le roman La lenteur de Milan Kundera”
Kundera a toujours envisagé un roman absolu où rien ne serait sérieux. Une « Grande Bêtise » pour le propre plaisir. Mais une bêtise qui dévoilerait les règles les plus profondes de l’existence du roman. Pour quelle raison la risibilité au cœur du roman La lenteur pourrait être libératrice ? Parce que le rire est plus adéquat, selon Kundera, à l’incertitude existentielle que toute vérité transcendantale. Quels sont les mécanismes du comique ? Tout d’abord la vitesse de la société contemporaine : afin d’être retenu, il faut donner des réponses rapides, spontanément percutantes ; il faut attirer l’attention. Le premier axiome du comique est donc: sois le premier à voir, à réagir, à sentir, et tu seras acclamé. Le bonheur moderne est l’extase de la vitesse. Le deuxième axiome du comique est celui qui concerne la visibilité publique des personnages : désirée, reniée, méprisée, convoitée, la visibilité publique est la consécration du « danseur ». La photographie, marque profonde du monde contemporain, est le symbole des deux régimes : de la vitesse et de la visibilité publique. Le comique est donc quelque chose d’extrêmement « sérieux ». C’est un sujet qui a préoccupé beaucoup de penseurs (Schopenhauer, Bergson, Freud), d’anthropologues (Plessner) et d’écrivains (Umberto Eco). Le rire qui l’accompagne devient l’équivalent de l’élan vital, à la base de l’évolution créatrice. Le rire est une sorte de tension qui débouche dans une direction inattendue. Le rire et le comique constituent chez Kundera une variante alternative de l’histoire, sa mise à nu.
Laura Tusa Ilea est docteur en Philosophie de l’Université de Bucarest (2005) et en Littérature comparée de l’Université de Montréal (2011). Actuellement elle est attachée de recherche au Senselab et au Centre d’Études Interdisciplinaires sur la Société et la Culture à l’Université Concordia, Montréal. Elle a publié quatre livres en littérature et en philosophie, parmi lesquels sa thèse doctorale Littérature et scénarios d’aveuglement-Orhan Pamuk, Ernesto Sábato, José Saramago. Elle a publié des articles dans plusieurs revues (Studia Phaenomenologica, Investigaciones fenomenológicas, Hermeneia, Arguments). www.laura-t-ilea.com
Lucie Taïeb (Université de Brest)
“Joie, fleurs, pleurs : Virginia Woolf et Friederike Mayröcker, phénomonologues d’un état instable”
Les expressions figées évoquant une « joie pure », « joie sans mélange », sont trompeuses. Qu’il s’agisse des personnages de Mrs Dalloway ou de la narratrice des proses de Friederike Mayröcker, les affects sont décrits dans un flux sans cesse mouvant, où la joie cède souvent la place aux larmes et à la mélancolie. Le sentiment de joie, porté à son incandescence, semble si poignant qu’il ne peut se maintenir : il s’obscurcit sans tarder d’une angoisse de mort. De tels mouvements se retrouvent à la fois chez Virginia Woolf et Friederike Mayröcker, poétesse et prosatrice autrichienne contemporaine, grande lectrice de littérature anglo-saxonne. Chez l’une comme chez l’autre, les fleurs, omniprésentes, cristallisent une joie de vivre qui explose en de brèves épiphanies. La temporalité du sentiment de joie est donc singulière, puisqu’il semble tout à la fois ancré dans un continuum, et en même temps agir comme accélérateur de la perception du vécu : la joie délivre une forme de lucidité fulgurante, qui donne à voir, dans la rose délicate dont le parfum réjouit, une rose déjà fanée, la mort qui rôde sur toute chose. S’il est question chez Woolf de saisir le réel dans son chatoiement, Mayröcker quant à elle s’inscrit dans une temporalité qui est aussi celle de l’écriture et de la lecture. Faire de la « joie » un objet d’analyse me permettra donc de montrer, à la lumière d’exemples textuels précis, comment la littérature se confronte à l’intensité tragique de la vie.
Docteure en littérature comparée et maître de conférence en littérature germanique, je m’intéresse particulièrement aux écritures poétiques de la seconde moitié du XXe siècle. Je suis également traductrice de littérature autrichienne.
Panel 5B: Liminal joys
Stefanie Heine (University of Zürich)
“Liminal Joy, Trembling Breath”
According to Jean-Luc Nancy, “touching is the limit and spacing of existence. But it has a name, it is called ‘joy’ […]. No doubt this name only signifies the limit of all signification.” (Corpus) In “Shattered Love”, he claims that joy “happens, it arrives as it departs, it arrives in departing and departs in the arrival, in the same beat of the heart.” For Nancy, joy, especially once it is mediated through language, is located at a limit, it has to be pinned down in the interval between determinable states, it takes place as a syncope – between systole and diastole, or, I would argue, as a breath. In my talk, I want to explore erotic articulations of joy through breathing, using the example of Serge Gainsbourg’s song “Je t’aime moi non plus” (featuring Jane Birkin). Taking place at the border of the body and marking the boundary between life and death, breath is as such liminal. Within the context of language, it is at the verge of signification, not meaningful as such, but anatomically constitutive for the articulation of meaningful sounds. In Gainsbourg’s song, the joy of “l’amour physique” is reflected very much in the manner outlined by Nancy: the repeated line “je vais et je viens” underlines that joy is involved in a rhythmical movement between being prevenient and already gone on the level of the lyrics. The singing is then interrupted by Jane Birkin’s orgasmic breathing, suspending the words’ meaning and marking the space of joy performatively as an effect of presence.
Studied English, Philosophy and Comparative Literature (University of Zürich). 2010: School of Criticism and Theory, Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y. Research Assistant at the Department of Comparative Literature, University of Zürich since 2011. PhD at the University of Zürich on Virginia Woolf and Impressionist painting, graduation 2012.
Margeaux Feldman (University of Toronto)
“When Joy becomes Jouissance: Lana Del Rey, Death Drive, and the American Dream”
In Politics, Philosophy, Culture (1988), Foucault states that he hopes that he’ll “die of an overdose of pleasure of any kind.” Another word for Foucault’s real pleasure would be jouissance, which, as Scott Wilson notes in The Order of Joy, is associated with “a risking of death, playing the game to the limit” (2008). My paper draws upon Wilson’s text and Lacanian psychoanalysis to show that joy lives a double-life: sometimes it can be pleasurable and oftentimes it can be cruel. Turning to contemporary culture, I explore this double-life and the tension between joy and jouissance by looking at the lyrics and music videos of Lana Del Rey. For Del Rey, the joy and mirth so often associated with the American dream is haunted by the reality that joy, when wrapped up in and dependent upon capital, can quickly turn into an unfulfilled and life-threatening longing for jouissance. Del Rey’s album Born to Die (2012) presents a melancholic and dark vision of the American dream, one that resonates with Foucault’s wish to die of an overdoes of joy; on her single “National Anthem,” Del Rey sings “Drinking and driving, excessive buying, overdose and dyin’ on our drugs and our love and our dreams and our rage.” What Del Rey’s music highlights is that jouissance, like Freud’s death drive, can bring us to the brink of self-annihilation, only to save us by revealing that the fantasy of having it all (and more) is unobtainable and necessarily so.
Margeaux Feldman is a PhD student at The University of Toronto specializing in critical theory. Her dissertation draws upon Lacan, Derrida, and Butler to look at representations of liminal bodies and in-between spaces in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature, including the works of Melville, McCullers and Faulkner.
Victoria Cate May Burton (University of King’s College)
“Joy as Intensity”
In the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the psychoanalytic explication of desire gives way to a conception that is dynamic and productive. Jacques Lacan articulates desire as a perpetual drive whose source is an insatiable lack intrinsic to the experience of oneself. Deleuze and Guattari respond by shattering the notion that desire relies on negation, arguing that desire is a process that we undergo, in which, there can arise a joy independent of pleasure. They take up Antonin Artaud’s idea of a Body without Organs and explore the world of desiring that is coextensive with the body itself, and which defies the hierarchical organization of the body. The position of joy in this matrix of experience is not at all the position presupposed for it by societal norms. Considering masochism as an instance of making oneself a Body without Organs, Deleuze and Guattari shift the ground under our frame of reference for desire. The body does not gain pleasure by traversing pain. Rather, pain is a way of producing connections on one’s body based on a desire the principle of which yields these kinds of connections. The insistence on seeing desire as positive renders binary oppositions moot. Desire is an intensification, and the experiences in which intensity arises can be various. In order to expand on this problem, my presentation will discuss the implications of this positive desire for joy, and arrive at the concept of a permeable separation between joy and despair.
Cate May Burton is a graduate of the Contemporary Studies undergraduate program at the University of King’s College. She will go on to research the ethics of psychoanalysis and the experiences of time in Marcel Proust and Gilles Deleuze. She loves poetry from before her epoch.
Panel 6: Space matter(s)
Stephanie Fung (University of British Columbia
“Unbounding the Affective City: Reconceptualizing Joy and Urban Space in Dionne Brand’s What We All Long For”
From spray-painting graffiti to drawing fantastical images of the city among other artistic endeavors, Dionne Brand’s racially marginalized characters in What We All Long For create new worlds that help them resist the normative subjectivities imposed by national ideologies of “happy multiculturalism.” The Surrealist art form of the “exquisite corpse,” particularly, a method by which a group of words or images is serially and discretely assembled by a group of artists, functions as a mise en abyme for the city. Her characters reimagine Toronto by introducing their histories and experiences into various hybrid art forms. They engage in the cosmopolitan project of making a world. This paper considers alternatives to the nationalist drive for a multicultural society and what it means for migrants to inhabit, transform, and transgress oppressive spaces of mandated joy. I argue that the hope for survival for these characters lies in their continual efforts to (re)world space through aesthetic means. The struggle to create alternative worlds can also, in a way, be a struggle to undo institutionalized forms of joy so that the worlds we may long for become possible.
Stephanie Fung is a first-year Master’s student in the English department at the University of British Columbia. Her current research interests include questions of place, aesthetics, and identity in Canadian and world literature.
Julia Polyck-O’Neill (Brock University)
“Civil Delirium: Lisa Robertson, Douglas Coupland, and the ‘Joy’ of the Vancouver Suburbs”
Lisa Robertson and Douglas Coupland share a similar interpretation of the Vancouver’s residential architecture and urban planning: they both adopt an ironized fascination with its notorious suburbs. While both published essays in the exhibition catalogue for Baja to Vancouver: The West Coast and Contemporary Art (2003), their works are not often associated; however, in a mutual interrogation of Vancouver’s suburban regions, their writings, when juxtaposed, generate an intriguing dialogue between narrative and geography, between subjectivity and material culture, and between contemporaneity and nostalgia. In Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (2003) Robertson’s prose poetry engages in a linguistic exploration of the suburb as cliché and a “source of negative ontologies”. Coupland’s novels, such as Girlfriend in a Coma (1998) and Hey Nostradamus! (2003), adopt a less experimental narrative voice, subtly imbued with Marxian analysis and focalized questions of identity. Considered through the lens of Walter Benjamin’s writings on narrative and alienation from The Arcades Project (1927-40), as well as according to Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of “habitus” and Edward W. Soja’s theory of “thirdspace” as developed in Postmetropolis (2000), I argue that both Robertson and Coupland characterize the suburbs as memorative signs, articulating the recent-but-unreachable-past, when the neighbourhoods were conceived as hopeful utopic gestures. Their joy is acerbic, personalized, and focused on what, to many, is both a mundane and unglamourous subject.
Julia Polyck-O’Neill holds a BFA in Visual Arts and English (University of Ottawa), an MA in Studies in Comparative Literatures and Arts (Brock University), and is currently a PhD Candidate in Brock University’s Interdisciplinary Humanities program, specializing in Culture and Aesthetics.
Sarah Piazza (Yale University)
Music and Metafiction: Creative Reading in Le cahier de romances
Creole and French lyrics to romantic ballads color Raphaël Confiant’s autobiographic portrait of boyhood in Fort de France, Martinique in Le Cahier de romances (2000). The narrator and author figure Raphaël delights in the sonorous pleasure of listening to sung and spoken Creole. He also discovers a delectable refuge in reading French novels. Le cahier shows how vicarious experiences, like appreciating music and reading, cause pleasure by momentarily suspending reality. In addition to provoking pleasure, representations of writing, reading, and song also problematize aspects of Martinican society, such as racial and linguistic hierarchies. I argue that the way in which vicarious experiences inspire Raphaël to question his childhood space convert them from simple pleasures into forms of joy. Confiant reveals that creating and appreciating music and literature are not merely an evasion of reality but rather constitute a transformative reimagining of the past and the present. Intertextual representations of reading in Le cahier de romances invite us to creatively interpret the complex relationship between different vicarious experiences and Martinican society as represented in the novel.
I am currently working on a doctorate in Comparative Literature at Yale University after earning my Master of Arts in Spanish with an emphasis on Latin American literature. The paper I propose is part of my thesis prospectus that examines uses of popular music in Hispanic and Francophone Caribbean narrative.
Elizabeth Geary Keohane (University of Toronto)
“Inscribing joy into journeys: Michaux, Paulhan and Bouvier”
My paper considers the central role played by humour in the travel writings of three French-language authors: Henri Michaux, Jean Paulhan and Nicolas Bouvier. I will look at ‘Ecuador’ by Michaux, ‘Guide d’un petit voyage en Suisse’ by Paulhan and ‘Journal d’Aran et d’autres lieux’ by Bouvier. Humour first of all operates as a lens through which each author makes sense of his journey. Humour also serves as a means of negotiating the difficulties that beset each of the journeys described in these texts. But more importantly, however, the use of humour sees each author gain a sense of enjoyment from the writing up of his journey that often compensates for the perceived joylessness of the journey itself. Indeed, it will be noted that although each author has a different approach to and a differing level of success in eliciting laughs and wry smiles from his reader, there is an abiding sense that the jokes are first and foremost for the benefit of the writer. James Clifford sees much of twentieth-century travel writing in terms of “a post-symbolist poetics of displacement”. With writers such as Michaux, Paulhan and Bouvier engaging in “less stable encounters with the exotic”, humour provides a centre of gravity in their travel texts. Writing about a journey not only entails digesting one’s travels; imbued with humour, it will also be seen to reconfigure failures – especially linguistic failures, failures of communication and translation in foreign lands – into a source of enjoyment.
I am currently a Sessional Lecturer in French at UTSC and a Senior Research Associate at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. I hold a PhD in French Studies from Trinity College Dublin. I have published an article on Michaux in ‘French Studies’.
Panel 7: Politiques de la joie
Michaël Trahan (Université de Montréal / Université Paris Diderot – Paris 7)
“La cure d’idiotie de Valère Novarina : une politique de la joie”
Les formes de la joie sont nombreuses qui traversent et portent l’œuvre étonnante de Valère Novarina. Mettant de l’avant une exigeante physique de la parole, l’écrivain et dramaturge franco-suisse développe en effet depuis une quarantaine d’années une conception radicale de la littérature et de ses modes d’action politique, où la joie occupe une place centrale. Car la «cure d’idiotie» que cherche à opérer ce théâtre est un exorcisme poétique, joyeux et anthropoclaste, par lequel celui qui écrit tente de sortir de lui-même. Il s’agit d’une pratique mystique qui n’est pas sans lien avec l’abandon à ce que Giorgio Agamben appelle «Genius» pour parler de «notre vie même en tant qu’elle ne nous appartient pas.» C’est un sacrifice de soi qui prend le contre-pied d’une conception monadique du sujet, et qui ouvre sur une joie impersonnelle dont il faut aujourd’hui penser les effets sur les processus de subjectivation à l’œuvre dans le langage et le texte littéraire. C’est sur cette expérience souveraine de la joie que repose la politique de la littérature qui est celle de Valère Novarina : «Si ce théâtre produit quelque chose d’utile», écrivait-il en 2009, «c’est quelque chose de l’ordre de la joie.» Voilà ce qu’il s’agira ici d’expliciter, en montrant comment et pourquoi la paradoxale «sortie d’homme» que l’auteur place depuis longtemps au coeur de l’expérience littéraire rend possible une certaine politique de la joie.
Michaël Trahan est doctorant en littératures de langue française sous la direction de Lucie Bourassa et d’Évelyne Grossman. Ses recherches portent sur les limites du lisible dans le champ poétique français contemporain. Son premier livre est paru en 2013 chez Le Quartanier.
Isabelle Galichon (Université Clermont-Ferrand)
“ ‘Si mes phrases sourient, c’est parce qu’elles portent du noir’ ”
Christian Bobin dans son texte « L’homme-joie » suggère que la joie qui émane de son écriture procède de la part sombre de son existence. Nous nous intéresserons à des textes dont on pourrait penser qu’ils sont exempts de toute expression de joie tant le sujet-écrivant est confronté à une situation que l’on peut qualifier d’altérité radicale : l’oppression nazie. A partir du Journal d’Hélène Berr , d’Une vie bouleversée d’Etty Hillesum , mais encore du Journal de Ravensbrück de Nelly Gorce et des Lettres de Poméranie de Georges Hyvernaud , nous souhaitons analyser les différentes formes de joie que l’écriture manifeste, alors même que le sujet-écrivant est sous le sceau des lois anti-juives ou en captivité en Allemagne. Il s’agit, tout en préservant une unité historique et une expérience commune du nazisme, d’appréhender deux types d’oppression dans leur singularité, vécues par des femmes et un homme, d’origine française et hollandaise. Nous pourrons discerner, dans les textes, deux grandes expressions de la joie : l’une liée à la physis, la joie émanant d’une contemplation de la nature ; l’autre procède de l’éthique, à travers l’exercice de l’écriture de soi comme pratique du souci de soi, au sens foucaldien. Il s’agira alors d’analyser comment ces récits de soi s’inscrivent dans une veine élégiaque, comme expression deleuzienne de la « grande plainte », dans la mesure où la joie naît du dépassement de la plainte, par un processus d’écriture de résistance.
Docteur en Littérature française et francophone, membre associé de l’équipe d’accueil CELIS ; diplômes : Maîtrise de Langue et Civilisation espagnoles (1996), Le récit de soi comme écriture de résistance face au nazisme : du sentiment à l’acte (thèse de Doctorat, 2013, à paraitre)
Simon Harel (Université de Montréal)
“La joie simple des Montréalais”
La festivité et la joie de vivre montréalaise représentent actuellement d’insupportables lieux communs. Chaque Québécois serait-il un clown qui s’ignore ? un humoriste en devenir ? un improvisateur déjà mis en scène ? L’actualité récente – printemps érable en tête – nous enseigne le contraire et l’on me permettra de faire preuve d’un esprit querelleur. Les discours actuels qui, dans l’espace médiatique montréalais, mettent l’accent sur la créativité intrinsèque des Montréalais, leur joie de vivre, sont de belles impostures qui nous transforment en autochtones qu’il convient d’aller observer à l’intérieur de leurs réserves naturelles. À ce titre, « nous » ne serions pas si différents des Noirs et des Créoles de New Orleans, des bluesmen que l’on visite dans les villages qui parsèment le Delta du Mississipi. Le propos est dur, certes. Il veut simplement indiquer que la mise en valeur de la festivité ou de la joie dans l’espace public n’est pas autre chose qu’une stratégie commerciale à haute échelle qui plutôt que de permettre la diffusion de la culture, encourage des formes d’expressions artistiques qui s’intègrent à ce que j’ai appelé dans un autre contexte une ambiologie. Dans le contexte montréalais, il nous apparaît que les lieux dits de la festivité, de la joie populaire, de l’expression débonnaire d’une créativité en acte, bien qu’elle corresponde à des réalités perceptibles à Montréal, tendent à se transformer en cliché sans grande résonance culturelle.
A 2009 Trudeau fellow and a member of the Royal Society of Canada, Simon Harel is a full professor at the Université de Montréal, where he directs the Department of Comparative Literature. The author or editor of over thirty publications, Harel is interested in intercultural issues.
Panel 8: Affirmative Ethics
Alla Ivanchikova (Hobart and William Smith Colleges)
“Dangerous Feminisms and the Politics of Joy”
Unhappiness and inability to enjoy have been long associated with the state of being oppressed. In her Pursuit of Happiness, Sarah Ahmed talks about unhappy queers (lonesome subjects leading discontented, unfulfilled lives) and feminist killjoys (agents who are not only themselves unhappy but also preying on other people’s joy). In this paper, I explore whether joy is, or can be a part of the feminist tradition and what it would take for a feminist to experience and revel in joy. I examine examples from the tradition I call “dangerous feminisms” – the subterranean trend in feminist history that has not been fully explored or even recognized by critics until recently. Halberstam stumbles upon it in the Queer Art of Failure (she calls it “shadow feminisms”). Nickolchina talks about dangerous daughters in her work on matricide in literature. Dangerous feminisms come into foreground as powerful claims to joy in their refusal to both conform to the images of femininity the dominant culture offers to women and to engage in political activism or thoughtful critique of the dominant culture. Instead, dangerous feminisms offer a dark vision of “burning the entire house down” and revel joyfully in the forces of insanity and violence. From the madwoman in the attic to Virginia Woolf’s call to arms in Three Guineas (where she claims that women need only three things, that is “rags, matches, and petrol”) to Lady Gaga’s version of violent femme feminism, we see examples of joy amidst the flames of destruction. Why is there joy in destruction? Why do shadow feminisms persist? What is the place of the feminist claim to joy in the feminist “canon”?
Alla Ivanchikova received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the State University of New York at Buffalo. She is currently an Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, New York. Her research focuses on queer theory, globalization, and transnational approaches to literature.
Raili Marling (University of Tartu)
“Killjoys and joy in feminist politics, art and fiction”
Feminism is habitually not associated with happiness or its less restrained sister joy. Rather, feminists have been known as killjoys, a perspective recently cogently presented by Sara Ahmed (2010). The political relevance of the killjoys and other affect aliens is compelling in a context of today’s ubiquitous emphasis on happiness. Yet joy can potentially also be an alien affect. Joy disrupts and resists critical scrutiny and perhaps even representation. Building on a dialogic reading of the work of Sara Ahmed (2010), and Rosi Braidotti (2006), the paper will discuss the potential feminist politics of joy. This should not be seen as an uncritical turn to the affirmative, but rather as an attempt to locate a transformative politics in the disruptiveness of joy. The political potentialities of joy and killjoys will be translated into a reading of women’s art and fiction in Estonia, a country traditionally associated with neither joy nor feminism. I will discuss the Estonian feminist art collective ‘Sheer Joy’ (2002-2003), in the context of other Estonian women’s texts. This discussion will be placed in a broader context of the power of women’s laughter (cf Isaak 1996) and its use in fiction and feminist action.
Raili Marling is an Associate Professor of American Studies and Senior Researcher in Comparative Literature at the University of Tartu, Estonia. Her primary research interests are discourses of gender and power, comparative literature, politics of masculinity and tensions around gender in the post-socialist context.
Grant Dempsey (University of Western Ontario)
“Becoming and Compassion: On the Importance of Joy”
Gilles Deleuze’s dichotomization of judgment and creation is a crucial foundation for the development both of affirmative ethics, and of alternative modes of and dispositions towards aesthetic engagement. A close and creative interrogation of the opposition of the figures of the judge and the witness, the latter of which Deleuze associates with creative power, and of the centrality of that opposition in the ontology of becoming provides occasion for a fresh conceptualization of compassion—of feeling-together—in terms of affect and the importance of injecting such work into contemporary critical thought. This concept of compassion is to be grounded specifically in Deleuze’s distinction of the virtual and the actual, insofar as the virtual-oriented act of bearing witness, which cannot properly be committed alongside the actual-oriented act of passing judgment, has, in part, the result of a fusion of powers, a fusion of potentials or virtual dimensions, through the opening of subjects to pre- and extra-subjective fields. It is compassion that allows one to bear witness to life in this way, for compassion is the tendency and the capacity to pursue the production of a richly singular event by means of the hard achievement of a sincere and joyful openness towards both its immanence and its imminence. The importance of predominant joy even in and for critique will thus be directly investigated. If through compassion one witnesses life, then through joy one moves towards creative responses to it.
Grant Dempsey is a second-year MA student at the University of Western Ontario’s Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism. He is predominantly interested in the works of Gilles Deleuze. He has also done work in videogame studies and in the study of Sanskrit literature.