VOLUME 8 | ISSUE 2 | 2023
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“Introduction”, Michael Rosenfeld, Janine Hauthal, Hannah Van Hove, Mathias Meert, Ann Peeters, pp. 5-7.
“Navigating an Imperialist Tradition: Elias Canetti's and George Orwell's Formulations of French Marrakech”, Ezzahra Benlahoussine, pp. 8-32.
“Unravelling the Visiophonic Knot: Audiovisual Incongruence and Perceptual Glitch in Intermedial Performance”, Rosemary Klich, pp. 33-49.
“Julio Cortázar's 62 / Modelo para armar: Literature outside of the Margins”, Andrés Franco Harnache, pp. 50-67.
“On Playing with the Genre of Crime Fiction: Elizabeth Chakrabarty in Conversation about Lessons in Love and Other Crimes”, Elisabeth Bekers, Sofie Vandepitte, and VUB students, pp. 68-74.
“'Hearing Chracters Speak Over Your Shoulder': Laura Fish in Conversation on Writing as Practice-Led Research ”, Patricia Neves da Costa, Katrijn Van den Bossche, and VUB students, pp. 75-91.
Michael Rosenfeld, Janine Hauthal, Hannah Van Hove, Mathias Meert, Ann Peeters, “Introduction”
Ezzahra Benlahoussine, “Navigating an Imperialist Tradition: Elias Canetti's and George Orwell's Formulations of French Marrakech”
Elias Canetti and George Orwell both attempted to write the city of Marrakech at a very crucial period during the French protectorate. Each of the two writers was beguiled by Marrakech; in part, because of the perceived exoticism of Morocco as well as its degree of cultural difference from the West. Orwell, a political novelist and literary essayist, arrived in Morocco during the colonial period, on the eve of World War II. In 1939, he sojourned in Marrakech where he wrote his journalistic essay, “Marrakech” (1939), which gives a piercing portrayal of the wretchedness of the imperial agenda and its implications on the poverty-ridden city.
Similarly, in 1950, Canetti travelled to Marrakech while it was still under French colonial rule. In The Voices of Marrakesh: A record of a Visit (1968), Canetti provides an autobiographical statement about his encounters with a foreign milieu in Marrakech. Canetti’s own liminality and absence of any cultural affiliation shaped his whole travelogue and placed him in the ambiguous position of the outsider par excellence. However, as a cosmopolitan Jew, Canetti spoke French which allowed him to broaden the scope of his exchanges with the people of Morocco. Canetti was a private intellectual who refrained from making any political or social statements and adopted poetics that resist easy categorization. For Canetti, Marrakech functions as a space in which he embarks on a journey of questioning the self and its pre-established values while attempting to find a way around the relics of the colonial order and establish an authentic encounter with the inhabitants. Like Orwell’s text, Canetti’s account allows for a comprehension of the nature of the encounters between colonial Marrakech and its Western expatriates.
This article explores Canetti’s and Orwell’s negotiation of Orientalist and anti-Orientalist discourses in relation to Marrakech. In order to assess the extent to which both Canetti and Orwell were able to transcend ideological and cultural barriers while writing about the city, I will consider the following aspects: the genre of the narrative and its format, each writer’s ideology and conception of art, and the historical background of the texts. Some of the pressing questions that this article will attempt to answer are: to what extent do Orwell’s and Canetti’s accounts impose or expose the French imperialist agenda in Morocco? Does their poeticization of Oriental poverty undermine their anti-colonialist claims? And, to what extent does Orwell’s text, in particular, support his Marxist project of “exposing the evils of imperialism”?
Keywords: Otherness, Marrakech, literary representation of space, Orientalist tradition, George Orwell, Elias Canetti
Rosemary Klich, “Unravelling the Visiophonic Knot: Audiovisual Incongruence and Perceptual Glitch in Intermedial Performance”
This article examines the convergence and divergence of sound and image in intermedial performance. Intermedial performance has the capacity to deconstruct perceptual integration by presenting sound and image via different media modalities. This article draws on perspectives within film and audiovisual studies in theorising incongruity and develops the notion of ‘perceptual incongruity’. The concept of ‘perceptual glitch’ is offered for application to those moments in which audiovisual stimuli simply “do not compute” (Leszczynski and Elwood). Finally, the article argues that perceptual incongruency and the intentional divergence of audio and visual media in intermedial performance, when recognised within a postdigital framework, can challenge dominant narratives of convergence and totality in the design and analysis of digital and aesthetic experience.
Keywords: incongruence, perception, glitch, headphone theatre, intermedial performance
Andrés Franco Harnache, “Julio Cortázar's 62 / Modelo para armar: Literature outside of the Margins”
Julio Cortázar’s practice as a photographer helped him develop the acclaimed short story Las babas del diablo [Blow up] and explore the photo-literature genre stemming from the Surrealist movement, particularly in the works Último round [Last Round] (1969) and Prosa del observatorio [From the Observatory] (1972). Despite its significance, the role of Cortázar’s photographs in his works and creative process has not been sufficiently examined. This paper will focus on Cortázar’s article and photo series La muñeca rota [The Broken doll] (1969), and the novel 62 / Modelo para armar [62: A Model Kit] (1968). Through the analysis of the additional material found in Cortázar’s photographic archive at the Centro Gallego de las Artes de la Imagen in A Coruña (CGAI), and through applying Vilém Flusser’s concept of the photographic gesture (1984; 1993), I propose that 62 / Modelo para armar is an intermedial novel that should be read together with the pictures of La muñeca rota. Although this photographic series could be simply interpreted as a paratextual element in the creative process of the novel, its aesthetic scope, composition and technical qualities, in dialog with the surrealist photography of Man Ray, Hans Bellmer, and Jacques-André Boiffard, as well as Cortázar’s collaboration with the artist Julio Silva, make it an autonomous work that, combined with the novel, approaches what Nachtergael identifies as neo-literature (2017; 2020), a literature pushing outside the margins of the book. This case study proposes an intermedial reinterpretation of one of Cortázar’s major works, now mostly forgotten, as it puts forward the idea of Cortázar, not only as an influential Latin-American writer, but also as a Latin-American photographer and artist in tension with both American and European photographic and literary traditions.
Keywords: Julio Cortázar, photo-literature, photographic gesture, neo-literature, surrealism
Elisabeth Bekers, Sofie Vandepitte, and VUB students, “On Playing with the Genre of Crime Fiction: Elizabeth Chakrabarty in Conversation about Lessons in Love and Other Crimes”
In this interview, Elizabeth Chakrabarty discusses her debut novel Lessons in Love and Other Crimes (2021), a literary crime novel-cum-queer romance that follows its Indian-British protagonist Tesya as she tries to navigate life — and love — after experiencing a series of hate crimes in academia. In her conservation with Prof. dr. Elisabeth Bekers and pedagogical assistant Sofie Vandepitte at Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Chakrabarty speaks in depth about her novel’s generic hybridity, the (im)possibility of closure after hate crime, and her plans for her second novel.
Keywords: British literature, postmodernist literature, literary crime fiction, queer romance, racism, trauma
Patricia Neves da Costa, Katrijn Van den Bossche, and VUB students, “'Hearing Chracters Speak Over Your Shoulder': Laura Fish in Conversation on Writing as Practice-Led Research ”
Dr. Laura Fish is a Black British writer of Caribbean parentage. She is Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Northumbria University and a Fellow of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. Her third novel Lying Perfectly Still (forthcoming in November 2024) is set during the 1990s AIDS crisis in Eswatini (formerly Swaziland) and was inspired by her own experience in aid and development work. This interview, in which Fish talks about her new novel and her earlier novel Strange Music (2008), took place on 30 March 2023 in the African diaspora bookshop Pépite Blues, while Fish was writer-in-residence at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB). Patricia Neves da Costa (board member of WeDecolonizeVUB) conducted the interview and moderated the subsequent Q&A session. Jana De Wolf (MA student in Linguistics and Literary Studies at VUB) subsequently transcribed the interview, which was then edited by Katrijn Van den Bossche (doctoral candidate at VUB’s Centre for Literary and Intermedial Crossings).
Keywords: Black British literature, Laura Fish, Lying Perfectly Still, Strange Music, aid work, rewriting
