MLA SPECIAL SESSION AT THE 2012 MLA CONVENTION
Seattle, 5–8 January
Seattle, 5–8 January
SP750 Haunted Travel Writings: Journeys to the East
"Haunted Travel Writings: Journeys to the East" special session aims to extend travel discourse, which in current cultural studies, is treated more as a theoretical site than as a genre. It is a session beyond a "contact zone", "space of transculturation" (Mary Louise Pratt), "a space in-between" (Homi Bhabha), and a translation term for comparative cultural studies (James Clifford). In this special panel each speaker imagines and investigates the haunted aspects of travel writing, from early 20th Century to the present. This special session questions both literal or metaphorical haunting, such as an author's interaction with a foreign land/people/religions, the negative impression left by travel to a foreign land, the idea of the haunted mind (i.e. the troubled artist abroad), travel as escape, cursed foreign relics brought back to a native land, fantastic experiences with the unknown world, unidentifiable beings in movement, or the troubled persistence of memory and the unsettled personal as well as national identity in a foreign place.
In particular, this panel intends to have speakers and audiences review a wide array of recreation and representation of traveling phases; thus, the session invites three unique papers, among 25 excellent abstracts, to address geographical traveling productions with a touch of fantastic blending and translating processes through tropes, cultures, metaphors, histories, and locations. These papers examine not the idea of travel, which often alludes to the poststructuralist theories of displacement and mobility, but concentrates more on the absence or the highly stimulated decentralization of space, identity, and "Asia"--a haunted lack of specific definition.
We will cross-examine travel writings ranging from China, Japan, Korea, Burma. Our first panel examines situations mostly in the so-called "East" but the discussions revolve around a contrast between graphic/narrative, real/unreal, gothic/visual/allegorical. While repositioning emergence of hidden texts, rediscovered journals, and rarely discussed textual-historical movements in imperial delineations of the past, this special session invites future renditions and redefinitions of our understandings about journeys into the dynamic yet debatable ground of transnational identities.
"Haunted Travel Writings: Journeys to the East" special session aims to extend travel discourse, which in current cultural studies, is treated more as a theoretical site than as a genre. It is a session beyond a "contact zone", "space of transculturation" (Mary Louise Pratt), "a space in-between" (Homi Bhabha), and a translation term for comparative cultural studies (James Clifford). In this special panel each speaker imagines and investigates the haunted aspects of travel writing, from early 20th Century to the present. This special session questions both literal or metaphorical haunting, such as an author's interaction with a foreign land/people/religions, the negative impression left by travel to a foreign land, the idea of the haunted mind (i.e. the troubled artist abroad), travel as escape, cursed foreign relics brought back to a native land, fantastic experiences with the unknown world, unidentifiable beings in movement, or the troubled persistence of memory and the unsettled personal as well as national identity in a foreign place.
In particular, this panel intends to have speakers and audiences review a wide array of recreation and representation of traveling phases; thus, the session invites three unique papers, among 25 excellent abstracts, to address geographical traveling productions with a touch of fantastic blending and translating processes through tropes, cultures, metaphors, histories, and locations. These papers examine not the idea of travel, which often alludes to the poststructuralist theories of displacement and mobility, but concentrates more on the absence or the highly stimulated decentralization of space, identity, and "Asia"--a haunted lack of specific definition.
We will cross-examine travel writings ranging from China, Japan, Korea, Burma. Our first panel examines situations mostly in the so-called "East" but the discussions revolve around a contrast between graphic/narrative, real/unreal, gothic/visual/allegorical. While repositioning emergence of hidden texts, rediscovered journals, and rarely discussed textual-historical movements in imperial delineations of the past, this special session invites future renditions and redefinitions of our understandings about journeys into the dynamic yet debatable ground of transnational identities.
Haunted Travel Writings : Journeys to the East
1:45–3:00 p.m., Issaquah, Sheraton
Presiding: Melissa Edmundson Makala, Univ. of South Carolina, Columbia; Pei-Ju Wu,
National Chung Hsing University
1. Mary A. Goodwin, "The Gothic Traveler: Lafcadio Hearn and Angela Carter in Japan"
Mary Goodwin's paper on Lafcadio Hearn and Angela Carters travel experiences in Japan provides new perspectives on the Gothic vision that played a prominent role in their work. Hearn, an Anglo-American literary journalist whose essays and short fiction in New Orleans and the French West Indies evinced a strong penchant for the macabre and the occult, found in turn-of the-20th century Japan his dream home. Drawn to Japan by literary models such as Pierre Lotis Madame Chrysanthème (1897), Hearn eventually married a Japanese woman and became a Japanese citizen, and made a name for himself that endures to the present day in Asia with his observations of Japanese life, customs and history, as well as his reworking of old legends and tales of the weird and supernatural. Nearly a century later, acclaimed British fiction writer Angela Carter spent two years in Japan and produced a collection of stories based in part on her experience in Tokyo. By tracing the various paths these Western writers take to Japan, Goodwins paper revisits Japan as a country that metamorphoses in Hearn and Carters writings into both a scenic location and a symbolic imagination. The idea of the haunted Gothic dimensions of an orient place afar thus suits the cultural unconscious of a land that can perhaps never be revisited after the catastrophic Tsunami.
2. Pei-Ju Wu, "Allegorical Journey into a Haunted China: Gao Xingjians Artistic Spaces"
Pei-Ju Wu explores Gao Xingjians Soul Mountain as an allegorical redefinition of China and a reflection of Gao's authorial trauma. As the splited narrators "I" and "you" travel into the mountains, gathering sounds and sights of his imagined homeland, Gao's travel reopens the definition of an enigmatic China, in which artistic spaces of Chineseness are being recreated through Daoist temples, fragmented dreams, endless weaving of retelling past stories and memories. It is the lack of substantial connections with nature, a cadaver-narrative body, which subsequently summon the urgency to travel into the metaphorically undefined communist China.
3. Melissa Edmundson Makala, "Unsettled Ghosts in Alice Perrin's Anglo-India"
1:45–3:00 p.m., Issaquah, Sheraton
Presiding: Melissa Edmundson Makala, Univ. of South Carolina, Columbia; Pei-Ju Wu,
National Chung Hsing University
1. Mary A. Goodwin, "The Gothic Traveler: Lafcadio Hearn and Angela Carter in Japan"
Mary Goodwin's paper on Lafcadio Hearn and Angela Carters travel experiences in Japan provides new perspectives on the Gothic vision that played a prominent role in their work. Hearn, an Anglo-American literary journalist whose essays and short fiction in New Orleans and the French West Indies evinced a strong penchant for the macabre and the occult, found in turn-of the-20th century Japan his dream home. Drawn to Japan by literary models such as Pierre Lotis Madame Chrysanthème (1897), Hearn eventually married a Japanese woman and became a Japanese citizen, and made a name for himself that endures to the present day in Asia with his observations of Japanese life, customs and history, as well as his reworking of old legends and tales of the weird and supernatural. Nearly a century later, acclaimed British fiction writer Angela Carter spent two years in Japan and produced a collection of stories based in part on her experience in Tokyo. By tracing the various paths these Western writers take to Japan, Goodwins paper revisits Japan as a country that metamorphoses in Hearn and Carters writings into both a scenic location and a symbolic imagination. The idea of the haunted Gothic dimensions of an orient place afar thus suits the cultural unconscious of a land that can perhaps never be revisited after the catastrophic Tsunami.
2. Pei-Ju Wu, "Allegorical Journey into a Haunted China: Gao Xingjians Artistic Spaces"
Pei-Ju Wu explores Gao Xingjians Soul Mountain as an allegorical redefinition of China and a reflection of Gao's authorial trauma. As the splited narrators "I" and "you" travel into the mountains, gathering sounds and sights of his imagined homeland, Gao's travel reopens the definition of an enigmatic China, in which artistic spaces of Chineseness are being recreated through Daoist temples, fragmented dreams, endless weaving of retelling past stories and memories. It is the lack of substantial connections with nature, a cadaver-narrative body, which subsequently summon the urgency to travel into the metaphorically undefined communist China.
3. Melissa Edmundson Makala, "Unsettled Ghosts in Alice Perrin's Anglo-India"
Melissa Makala turns focus onto the ghosts of the British Raj in “Imperial Bodies: Disease, Ghosts, and Contagious Superstition in the Anglo-Indian Short Stories of Alice Perrin.” The fear of “unhealthy” bungalows is typically coded language for houses plagued with ghosts, and is a theme that recurs throughout Alice Perrin’s supernatural Indian fiction. It can be read as a symbolic fear of close contact with the Indian locals, a fear which had its beginnings long before the Victorian period. This is also a version of the fear of atavism and degeneration that became more prevalent in the latter half of the nineteenth century, but also points to the growing concern over colonists failing victim to contagious diseases in foreign countries. This fear “mutated” again in the idea of unhealthy houses which spread disease to colonists. For instance, “Old Ayah,” with its emphasis on the maternal power of the Indian nursemaid, also considers the colonial anxiety of sickness and the seeming inability of English children’s constitutions to survive long in a foreign climate. In the story, the child’s sickness remains as mysterious a presence as the ghostly ayah. Other stories, such as “The Summoning of Arnold” and “The Biscobra,” closely link disease with mental strain and the underlying British concern that the Indian climate may be too extreme for British women. Perrin also investigates the deadly effects of native superstition in “Caulfield’s Crime” and “The Biscobra.” In these stories, superstition (specifically, the idea of reincarnation) is treated as a supernatural force that, like the other ghostly forces in their world, causes the eventual sickness and death of one or more characters (both Indian and British).
Brief CV:
Associate Professor Mary Goodwin of National Taiwan Normal University is currently working on the Asian ghost tales of Rudyard Kipling and Lafcadio Hearn. Goodwin received her degree from the University of Virginia in 2007, and her most recent book chapter, The Garden and the Jungle: Burnett, Kipling and the Nature of Imperial Childhood, branches out into Childrens Literature. As a prolific writer, Goodwin will have two essays published on Kiplings ghastly women and Taiwanese missionaries (forthcoming in 2011), in which she will examine the gender and moral order in colonial India as well as heroic memoirs from missionaries in Taiwan. Her earlier works focus on Elizabeth Bishop, Pearl Buck and Gertrude Stein (Cambridge Scholars Publishing February 2010 & 2007) but her transnational experiences in Taiwan have been adding both environmental and philanthropic concerns into her recent editorial works for local publishers and newspapers. She serves currently as copy editor for Concentric Literary Journal.
Associate Professor Mary Goodwin of National Taiwan Normal University is currently working on the Asian ghost tales of Rudyard Kipling and Lafcadio Hearn. Goodwin received her degree from the University of Virginia in 2007, and her most recent book chapter, The Garden and the Jungle: Burnett, Kipling and the Nature of Imperial Childhood, branches out into Childrens Literature. As a prolific writer, Goodwin will have two essays published on Kiplings ghastly women and Taiwanese missionaries (forthcoming in 2011), in which she will examine the gender and moral order in colonial India as well as heroic memoirs from missionaries in Taiwan. Her earlier works focus on Elizabeth Bishop, Pearl Buck and Gertrude Stein (Cambridge Scholars Publishing February 2010 & 2007) but her transnational experiences in Taiwan have been adding both environmental and philanthropic concerns into her recent editorial works for local publishers and newspapers. She serves currently as copy editor for Concentric Literary Journal.
Pei-Ju Wu is an Assistant Professor at National Chung Hsing University in Taiwan. Wu's areas of specialization include identity discourses, cosmopolitanism, and travel in Twentieth-Century Novels, and her current teaching and research interests are multi-ethnic and Transnational understandings of identity, Globalization and Literature, and Taiwanese Natural Writings and Eco-Cinema. Wu received her degree from the University of South Carolina in 2009 and is currently working on a book project tentatively entitled "Cosmopolitan Identity: Toward a Literary Theory of Migration and Cultural Imagination" (forthcoming 2013). Instead of fortifying the concept of tolerance, which normally hinges on negativity, her project advocates a constellation of factors that indicate plural affiliations, urging the opening of imaginative spaces and transcultural narrative experiences.
Melissa Makala specializes in nineteenth and early twentieth-century British literature and teaches at the University of South Carolina. She just completed a scholarly edition of Alice Perrin's East of Suez (1901) and is currently working on a project examining womens writing and the supernatural. Her essays have appeared in English Studies, English Language Notes, Persuasions, The North Carolina Literary Review, Notes and Queries, and The CEA Critic. She has essays forthcoming on the haunted house stories of Charlotte Riddell and Margaret Oliphant in Gothic Studies and on the Anglo-Indian ghost stories of Bithia Mary Croker and Alice Perrin in the collection, White Women and British India.
Melissa Makala specializes in nineteenth and early twentieth-century British literature and teaches at the University of South Carolina. She just completed a scholarly edition of Alice Perrin's East of Suez (1901) and is currently working on a project examining womens writing and the supernatural. Her essays have appeared in English Studies, English Language Notes, Persuasions, The North Carolina Literary Review, Notes and Queries, and The CEA Critic. She has essays forthcoming on the haunted house stories of Charlotte Riddell and Margaret Oliphant in Gothic Studies and on the Anglo-Indian ghost stories of Bithia Mary Croker and Alice Perrin in the collection, White Women and British India.
