engleski

The Role of Memory in Irish Gothic Fiction

THE ROLE OF MEMORY IN IRISH GOTHIC FICTION OF THE FIN DE SIÈCLE Drawing on Renate Lachamn's contention that a fantastic text points to a silenced repressed memory, confronting culture with its oblivion, my paper will seek to explore the arbitrary relations between memory and the fantastic focusing on some examples from the fin-de-siècle Irish Gothic fiction. It will explore various mnemonic modes encoded in these texts, in particular nostalgia, and discuss how they transmit moments of cultural and historical cognition. The paper will also discuss the relations between the Gothic memory and anxiety and the haunting past inscribed in these texts as a “return of the repressed”, by relating them to the discourse of class, race, empire colonialism (Cf. Eagleton, Deane, etc.) with particular focus on the role of memory in this context. ESSE Seminar 26 THE FANTASTIC IN THE FIN DE SIÈCLE - CONTENT- Fin de siècle produced the biggest gamut of masterpieces brimming with fantastic and gothic elements, which has only recently been brought under closer critical scrutiny and whose importance has been re-evaluated from various theoretical and interdisciplinary perspectives. This collection of essays aims to provide a platform for rich theoretical and critical insights in the fantastic literature in order to delineate various relations between the fantastic and the fin de siècle and to contextualize its historical and cultural significance. The topics of the essays include, but are not limited to, the relations between the fantastic and gender, canon, popular fiction, fin-de-siècle aesthetics, supernatural, scientific development and progress, temporality, cultural anxiety and social crisis, cultural subversion, literary in relation to other modes of representations, visual and performance. Essays concentrated on a single author/text (e.g. Bram Stoker, Arthur Machen, R. L. Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, Vernon Lee, etc.) favour comparative analyses and cultural approaches. Some essays highlighting the interaction of fin-de-siècle fantastic and gothic literature with other literary periods, both canonical and popular literature, in terms of the reception, intertextuality and their dialogic and cultural implications may also be included.

Irish Gothic Fiction; memory; fantastic

Predsjedala, zajedno s Dr. Eija Ventola, Finska (obje predsjedateljice službeno je pozvao ESSE organizacijski odbor) subplenarnim predavanjem Dr. Nore Sellei, University of Debrecen, Hungary naslovljeno (English Cultural (Gender) Studies at the Communication of (Academic) Cultures - A Central-Eastern European perspective.