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- Whiteley, Giles, 1981-
(författare)
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Blanchot’s L’ârret de mort : Allegory and the Trauma of History
- 2016
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Blanchot’s L’ârret de mort (1948) has long been recognised as a seminal modernist text, but after Derrida it has tended to be read for its ‘writerly’ qualities. Perhaps for this reason, while scores of readings have focused on Blanchot’s meditations on questions such as the nature of writing, on the figure of night and language, and on parallels to his monumental ‘La Littérature et le droit à la mort’ (1948), the question of history as it is developed in the récit (the spectre of the Holocaust, ‘nach Auschwitz’) has been discussed (e.g. Hess 1999; Rothberg 2000) but not fully examined, nor have the ways in which L’ârret de mort may be reread after the publication of the semi-autobiographical L’instant de ma mort (1994). This paper will examine Blanchot’s translation of history and trauma in the récit, framed through a theoretical discussion of the nature of allegory as translation. Comparing Benjamin’s influential discussion of allegory in his Trauerspiels (1928) with Blanchot’s discussion of similar themes (somewhat differently) in ‘Le langage de la fiction’ (1949), the idea of allegory as a response to historical trauma will be introduced to challenge the idea that ‘there is simply no place for hermeneutical or rhetorical considerations’ (Shaviro 1990) when reading L’ârret de mort. The text operates as an allegory not simply of traumatic French political history (the Munich Crisis, Operation Paula, and more obliquely, the Holocaust), but of Blanchot’s own traumatic history, his experience of surviving a firing-squad recounted in the later récit. It is precisely insofar as Blanchot’s allegory refuses simplistic metaphrase (for instance, in the ways in which the very precision of the text’s dating is displaced - was 13th October 1938 a Wednesday or Thursday?) that we know it to be allegory as such: it is only thus that we know that what is at stake here is not simply a question of mourning but melancholia, the trauma of history, of a wound (τραύμα) which can never be fully healed.
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| 2. |
- Whiteley, Giles, 1981-
(författare)
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Myth and Melancholia : Schelling on Aesthetic Autonomy
- 2016
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- This paper will seek to examine Schelling’s philosophy of art, in particular in how it develops between his Naturphilosophie of the System (1800) and his 1840s lectures on positive philosophy. Schelling’s philosophy is widely misunderstood, marginalized in a syntactic footnote of the journey from Kant to Hegel, but his philosophy of art is even less fully comprehended. By showing how Schelling breaks from Kant in the late 1790s and early 1800s, this paper will reposition him at the forefront of the aesthetic debates of the German idealists. Schelling’s theory of art, based upon a cultural and historical reconsideration of the Bewusstlosigkeit prior to the work of art as such, focuses more and more on the complex historical and social relationships between myth, art and society, and in so doing compares with the work of two key later German philosophers of art, Benjamin and Heidegger.
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| 3. |
- Whiteley, Giles, 1981-
(författare)
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A Note on Some Unidentified Sources in Mansfield’s Reading from 1907
- 2017
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Ingår i: Katherine Mansfield and Russia. - Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press. - 9781474426138 ; , s. 190-193
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Bokkapitel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This chapter examines a number of unattributed quotations taken from Katherine Mansfield’s journals of 1907, documenting her previously unknown reading of the works of three popular Edwardian novelists: Anthony Hope Hawkins, Henry Seton Merriman and Horace Annesley Vachell.
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| 5. |
- Whiteley, Giles, 1981-
(författare)
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Cosmopolitan Space : Political Topographies in ‘Lord Arthur Savile's Crime’
- 2017
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Ingår i: Victoriographies. - : Edinburgh University Press. - 2044-2416 .- 2044-2424. ; 7:2, s. 124-142
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This essay responds to Julian Wolfreys’s suggestion that Oscar Wilde’s London is primarily psycho-geographical by seeking to read his texts within the historical and spatial context of late nineteenth-century London. Taking as a test the short story ‘Lord Arthur Saville’s Crime’, this essay deploys the critical insights of Henri Lefebvre to suggest that Wilde’s city writing engages more closely with London life than has been hitherto suggested. Following Lord Arthur on his three perambulations across the city, from Hyde Park and Piccadilly to Covent Garden, through Soho, and finally from St James’s to the Embankment, the article focuses particularly on the ways in which Wilde’s use of what might easily be assumed to be an incidental location, namely Cleopatra’s Needle, invites us to reread the text’s revolutionary politics within the context of the French Revolution. Concluding with a discussion of Wilde’s treatment of London’s ‘cosmopolitan space’, the essay shows that the way in which seemingly stock imagery deployed in Wilde’s representation of the city may in fact be read as part of a wider and complex engagement with both the politics and the aesthetics of space.
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| 6. |
- Whiteley, Giles, 1981-
(författare)
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Cosmopolitan space: traversing London with Oscar Wilde
- 2017
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Taking up Julian Wolfreys’s suggestion that Wilde’s London is primarily psycho-geographical (1996), this paper responds by situating the topography his texts within the historical and spatial context of late nineteenth century cosmopolitan London. The significance of such an approach is twofold: it serves both to problematize the critical heritage (e.g. Brown 1995) which has tended to read Wilde’s cosmopolitanism as primarily a Kantian intellectual project rather than a product of his embodied experience of London, and it serves as an important case-study to help think-through the ways in which fin de siècle writers incorporated the insights of realist literary representations of the city in an aesthetics of space which anticipates modernism. Using the critical insights of Lefebrvre (1974) to suggest a more engaged treatment of the city at work in Wilde’s writing, this paper will focus primarily on ‘Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime (1887) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890/91), showing how Wilde constructs a London full of ‘curious effects’, to consider what is at stake in this representation of the city in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the ways in which Wilde locates his action at loaded locations, such as Cleopatra’s Needle, what becomes apparent is the way in which the questions of politics and the revolutionary consistently underwrite his representational space, a cosmopolitanism based upon deconstructing national boundaries (and demonstrating how the fin de siècle city itself deconstructs discreet borders), so that London is figured variously as ‘bric-à-brac’ and as an art work which is constitutively ‘foreign’, containing alterity within it. The paper shows the way in which seemingly ‘stock’ imagery deployed in Wilde’s representation of the city may in fact be read as part of a wider and complex engagement with both the politics and the aesthetics of space.
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| 7. |
- Whiteley, Giles, 1981-
(författare)
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Cosmopolitanism, Decadence and the Vernacular at the Fin de Siècle : Walter Pater and the Possibility of a Poetics for an Unpoetical Age
- 2017
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Konferensbidrag (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- It is curious that the mid-Victorian period, which saw Britain at the height of its imperial pomp, also witnessed the emergence of a deep insecurity over the status of English as a poetic literary language. Contextualized alongside Matthew Arnold’s break with poetry, this paper will focus on one influential fin de siècle response to this problem in Walter Pater’s historical novel Marius the Epicurean (1885). Set during the Rome of the Antonines, the novel historicizes a series of contemporary anxieties, allowing Pater to muse on the status of English as a literary language through a discussion of the use of Latin as a vernacular language during the age of Marcus Aurelius. The focus in particular will be on the chapters ‘Euphuism’ and ‘A Pagan End’, in which Marius’ friend Flavian constructs his new literary program, asserting ‘the rights of the proletariate of speech’, and writing the (anonymous) Pervigilium Veneris. Contextualising these passages alongside firstly the theme of cosmopolitanism, the utopian dream of the κοσμοπολίτης that frames so much of the novel, both historically and in contemporary fin de siècle discourse, alongside the (here related) discourse of decadence developed in these chapters and in Pater’s essay on ‘Style’ (1888), the paper will conclude by examine Pater’s own English as a kind of vernacular, one at once scholarly, decadent and cosmopolitan, mixing ‘racy Saxon monosyllables […] with those long, savoursome, Latin words, rich in “second intention”’, to consider seriously Mallarmé’s suggestion that Pater was ‘le prosateur ouvragé par excellence de ce temps’.
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| 10. |
- Whiteley, Giles, 1981-
(författare)
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“Inverted Rites” : Reading Girard reading Pater reading Shakespeare
- 2017
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Ingår i: Anthropoetics. - 1083-7264. ; 23:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- This essay traces the provenance of René Girard’s familiarity with Walter Pater’s idea of “inverted rights” in relation to Shakespeare’s Richard II. It demonstrates the likelihood that Girard likely did not have extensive first-hand knowledge of Pater’s essay “Shakespeare’s English Kings,” but learned about it from Ernst Kantorowicz’s book The King’s Two Bodies. The essay continues by argued that Girard does not give proper credit to Pater’s astute anthropological insight regarding the inherent doubleness of the originary rite of coronation, which carries within itself the shadow of the “inverted rite” of deposition.
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