Alessandra Boller

At least since the turn of the 21st century, dystopian fiction flourishes once again. Contemporary narratives often ponder the threat posed by hierarchies and humanist concepts and critically reflect on an ideology which has to be overcome in times of rapid (biotechnological) progress, political instability, the loss of species diversity, the widening gap between rich and poor, climate change, glocal (ecological) crises, a crisis of ‘the human’ and similar challenges. Through their engagement with critical posthumanism and the imaginative creation of posthuman beings that defy clear-cut boundaries, biotechnological dystopias often facilitate a less discriminatory world view by revealing and questioning the ideologically motivated amalgamation of non/post/human bodies not conceded personhood. Situated at the intersection point of biotechnological, philosophical, (bio)ethical, literary and cultural discourses, Rethinking ‘the Human’ in Dystopian Times argues for a politics of inclusion and discloses how new viewpoints springing from dystopian extrapolations can allow for a more critical view on human exceptionalism. I point out how especially Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go challenge the ethics of an established western (human) value system, intertwined demarcation strategies based on race, class, gender or species, and the humanist concept of ‘the human.’

Pour l’Irlande, le XIXe siecle a ete une periode d’agitation au cours de laquelle les nationalismes politiques, religieux et culturels se sont meles, par exemple avec les nouvelles notions d’edification de la nation et la creation d’un marche litteraire avec les premiers pas de la nouvelle en tant que genre distinct. Comme nombre de recits publies dans les nouveaux magazines, souvent sectaires, du debut du XIXe siecle, “The Death of a Devotee” (La mort d’un devot) de William Carleton, paru dans la revue protestante The Christian Examiner, and Church of Ireland Magazine en 1829, peut etre considere comme un document historique, comme un instrument utilise par des agents politiques ou religieux, et comme un agent lui-meme participant au modelage de la societe et du marche ou il etait ne. Tenant compte du contexte historique, essentiel a la comprehension de l’interaction entre les composantes du magazine et son agenda religieux, politique et culturel, cet article etudie le role que la fiction breve joue au sein de cette societe fragmentee en montrant comment l’interaction entre le recit de Carleton et ses co-textes agit sur sa reception pour engendrer plusieurs strates de sens.

In the face of global ecological crises, the need for approaches that transcend the limiting thought-structures of Anthropocene discourse and connected (grand) narratives of modernity is more urgent than ever before. Hence, these “mixed-up times” (Haraway) demand alternative epistemologies  that can emerge with and from subversive patterns of reading, writing, and thinking. Ustopian fictions, such as Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam (2013), Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) and Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl (2002), can become tools to think-with and provide empowering alternatives to preconceived frameworks and grand narratives, thus helping to change cognitive structures and prejudiced schemata. The need to overcome anthropocentric discourse and its practices of exploitation resonates in the novels’ themes and forms. Ustopian possibilities relate to SF temporalities and sympoiesis in these novels, whose focus on relations, collaborations and storied matter help transgress binaries and open up viewpoints beyond despair or hope without accounting for simple solutions. By entangling New (Feminist) Materialism and concepts such as Haraway’s Chthulucene, LeGuin’s narrative carrier bags or Barad’s agential realism with these ustopian narratives, this chapter reveals how speculative fictions can allow for the emergence of new patterns of thinking and living.

This article explores how David Hayden’s intermedial, self-reflexive and intertextual short story collection Darker With the Lights On (2017) disrupts reader expectations and established literary and cultural paradigms. I argue in particular that writing and reading surface as playful and transformative acts in these postmodern stories which cast a wide intertextual web by employing references to high and popular culture as well as to canonised and marginalised literary voices. Following Julia Kristeva’s understanding of intertextuality as a politically transformative practice, I analyze how Darker With the Lights On disrupts genre hierarchies and storytelling conventions to disclose an ethics of inclusion. The collection thus engages in the deconstruction of both traditional corpora of reference, such as the national canon, and systems of reference, such as theories of the short story.

The conference "Journeys Across B/Orders in Canadian Studies" (9 - 11 June 2022, Marburg (Germany) pursues a twofold objective: On the one hand, it is interested in an exploration of journeys and borders as well as orders (in the manifold sense of the term) and in the interplay of these concepts in Canadian literature, culture and society, for example. On the other hand, it seeks to explore what Canadian Studies is interested in, how it has developed, what challenges it has been met with, who and what is included or excluded – in short: what borders has it travelled across, what journeys has it undertaken in the last twenty years and what b/orders might it cross in the future.
In line with the interdisciplinary orientation of the Marburg Centre for Canadian Studies, we invite papers that deal with literature, culture, language, geography, and history, for example.
The conference includes panel sessions, a round table discussion as well as keynote lectures and readings by acclaimed authors Larissa Lai and George Elliott Clarke. Confirmed speakers are Prof. Eleanor Ty (Wilfrid Laurier University), Johan Schimanski (University of Oslo) and Prof. Astrid Fellner (Saarland University).

The word ecology appears to be on everyone's lips today, but it is seldom scrutinized. Even though the term stems from biology and was defined as the "study of the economy, of the household, of animal organisms" (which "includes the relationships of animals with both the inorganic and organic environments") by Ernst Haeckel in the 1870s, it seems to be used interchangeably with terms such as 'environment' or 'environmentalism' today. The revisiting and re-evaluation of ecology, (not only) in the broadest and traditional meaning of the term, becomes increasingly pressing today in the context of ideologies, new scientific breakthroughs or backlashes in the fight against global warming, for example. In 2018, the so called Earth Overshoot Day, which marks the date when humanity has "used more from nature than our planet can renew in the entire year," (overshootday.org) fell on August 1 – the earliest date so far. This day raises awareness of mankind's position within ecology and, by extension, also ties in with human beings' position in a glocal world. Our conference aims at overcoming simplistic conceptions of 'ecology' and at exploring the potential of the term as a perspective, vantage point, concept and epistemological approach. As Tucker and Bates (4) stress, "All ecological study is at once multidisciplinary" and such inter-or multidisciplinary study is needed in order to explore contemporary ecological issues. We thus want to transcend the boundaries of disciplines and approaches to build fruitful relationships and establish bonds between disciplines such as History, Papers can address, but are not restricted to, the following keywords and related questions:  relationships, entanglement, interdependence of human and non-human animals and their environments  environmentalism and sustainability, especially in Canada  cultural, social and media ecologies  ecological impact/ the ecology of technological progress (such as biotechnology)  Canadian eco-s and echoes: eco-religion, eco-feminism, eco-criticism, eco-cinema … We invite proposals for 20-minute papers in English and French. Please send an abstract of max. 250 words plus a short biography (50-100 words) to kanada@staff.uni-marburg.de.

This article discusses three short stories published in Gerard Donovan’s Country of the Grand (2008). It reads one of the short story collection’s most prominent leitmotifs, the car, as a liminal space and a heterotopia of crisis. Furthermore, the article aims at linking these two concepts to ideas about Irish identity and the historical and cultural context of Celtic Tiger Ireland and it draws on a particular theoretical framework: Turner’s concept of the liminal period and the Foucauldian heterotopia of crisis. In Donovan’s short stories, the car is turned into an ambiguous symbol since it carries various meanings and connotations. It is a means by which people move and cross boundaries, which should enable progress and provide connections between places and persons but it is also a space in which characters sit still and seem isolated and static. Hence, this seemingly simple image provides insights about a tension arising between movement and paralysis which Donovan, through his use of symbols and synecdoches, describes as central to Celtic Tiger Ireland and which thus also becomes crucial for his short stories.

This article discusses the interplay between voice and silence in Roddy Doyle’s The Woman Who Walked into Doors (1996). Doyle’s novel transfers hushed up abuses, such as domestic violence and marital rape, to the public sphere. Coming from a working-class Dublin background, protagonist Paula Spencer reveals an urge to tell her story, a feeling that is magnified by the contrasting code of silence concerning her experience that is maintained in the society around her. With Paula, Doyle typifies other wounded, exploited and marginalized subjects, violated and silenced through the structures of a patriarchal society.
The mid and late twentieth century Irish society presented in Doyle’s novel does not seem to follow general moral codes and an ethics of peaceful coexistence.  Examining the paradoxically telling silence which permeates the novel, the chapter addresses the narrative and stylistic means that Doyle employs to create his fictional account of domestic violence and female exploitation as ethical, political and social issues in The Woman Who Walked Into Doors.

This article analyses the notion of nature in Atwood’s trilogy. New species are designed in the laboratories, where a “test-tube evolution” takes place. The once structured world with its hierarchical dichotomies is dissolved, nature and artificially produced species intermix and mingle. Like in many other well-known post-apocalyptic narratives, nature takes over after the demise of humanity – but the trilogy emphasizes that classical notions of nature, regarded as being opposed to human civilization, cannot be maintained any more. Mankind has to acknowledge that biotechnological progress makes it necessary to rethink Western dichotomies and mankind’s attitude towards its position within nature.

The history of Irish literature is, just like the country’s history, characterised by disruptive changes; transformation, newness and innovation are not always achieved by smooth and linear developments but marked by turns, detours and caesuras instead. The very idea of innovation incorporates the notion of subversive potential and a propensity for forms of violence which are discernible in 20th-century and in (post-)Celtic Tiger fiction alike. Short fiction, as a genre essential to Irish literature and culture, therefore is part of a tradition of disruptions in terms of form and content and thus serves as the ideal form to explore innovations and backlashes, violent breaks with antecedents as well as interactions. 

Proceeding from David Hayden's short story collection Darker With the Lights On (2017), my talk discussed how experiments and innovations are not only forward-looking means but also turn back to the past and to predecessors (e.g. Virginia Woolf's Orlando). Hayden’s puzzling, dreamlike and elusive stories recall formative (Irish) writers and literary history but his apparently modernist experiments are still highly topical. These narratives’ feeling of time- and placelessness is also connected to their manifold topics and the fragmentations as well as linkages they display on various levels. Furthermore, Hayden connects to other innovative, not only Irish, stories and writers and turns to Frank O'Connor's (too) frequently evoked theory of the short story, dissecting these texts to build a new mosaic from their shattered remains. Fragmentation and creation, violence and abjection, disruption and harmony go together well in Hayden's only seemingly paradoxical collection. I explore how Darker With the Lights On, through its uses of intertextuality, of mirroring and shattering, of metafictional techniques and reflection, evokes and contains a whole history of violent but fruitful breaks and thus belongs to a tradition of continuous disruption.

IASIL conference 2018

Proceeding from Zagarell’s definition of narrative of community, and from classic Irish texts classified as such, my talk revisited this genre in the wake of the massive social and economic ruptures at the turn of the 21st century by discussing two publications which I regard as Post-Celtic Tiger short story cycles: Gerard Donovan’s Country of the Grand (2008) and Donal Ryan’s The Spinning Heart (2012).
These texts help explore the effects social and economic caesuras have not only on the psyche of the individual but also on the psyche of the community and a whole nation. The 2008 financial crisis invaded various discourses and rhetorics of gender, race, modernity, generation and cosmopolitanism, and revealed their entanglement. The short story cycles allude to a larger glocal network and render visible a tension between an apparently local and particularly Irish community and the global dynamics it is part, or victim, of.
Taking into account the long established idea of a particular Irishness and the rather recent turn towards a more cosmopolitan identity, I discussed if contemporary narratives of community represent a return to traditions or if they engage in a reimagining of communities after the collapse of euphoria when larger global issues and insecurities reverberate in intra-community conflicts. I maintained that Irish (short) fiction responded to the crisis following the boom by foregrounding how threatened orders affected the (members of a) community. Through individual narratives, which eventually form a complete story, these texts discuss notions of insecurity and fragmentation but also of new beginnings in Post-Celtic Tiger Ireland by dissecting (comm)unity/ies.

The case study I presented is part of a larger project which aims at tracing the intertwined developments and dynamics of a developing literary market, nationalist discourses and the short story in nineteenth century Ireland. This project analyses the reciprocal influences of Irish periodicals and the developing short story genre and furthermore, it examines the interrelations and impacts of the genre and the complex constructions of Irish identities, culture and politics in a time of transition and turmoil.

William Carleton’s “The Death of a Devotee” was first published in the “Miscellaneous Communications” rubric of the Christian Examiner, and Church of Ireland Magazine in 1829. Valuable insights can be drawn from taking both the historical context of the year 1829 and the variety of articles and letters published in this issue into consideration. The preface, for example, comments on the seemingly changed circumstances in the wake of the Roman Catholic Relief Act. Furthermore, there are articles and letters titled, for instance, “Biblical Criticism,” “On Education in Ireland” or “Moral Improvement of Ireland.” However, the issue also contains short fiction and book reviews. Due to a lack of clear distinctions, it is often difficult to distinguish fiction from non-fiction at first glance.

A discussion of Carleton’s story in the context of this issue allows for a glance at the role literature and periodicals played in the socio-political context of the 1820s. The often rather radical Protestant magazine had a distinct editorial agenda and, like other Protestant and Catholic periodicals, engaged in a struggle for religious, cultural and also political hegemony. In order to understand the dynamics at work in this exemplary case, it is indispensable to consider how “Death of a Devotee” is related to the magazine’s political and editorial agenda. Besides, I elaborated on the reciprocal influence of the political situation and the reception and presumed impact of the Christian Examiner in 1829. Finally, my talk illustrated the effects of the proximity of Carleton’s story and other texts; it discussed how this adjacency affects the reception of both fiction and non-fiction elements.

The short story is commonly praised as Ireland’s national genre and scholars do not grow tired of emphasising how Irish writers have excelled in this form (see O’Connor 1962, Rafroidi 1979, d’Hoker 2015). Irish short fiction has often dealt with migration and has linked it to the feeling of going into exile (for example George Moore, “Home Sickness” and “The Exile”, or Liam O’Flaherty, “Going into Exile”). Today, transnational short fiction becomes increasingly noteworthy because it adds a range of new viewpoints and opens up new perspectives on Ireland, Irishness and themes like exile and loss. Bertrand Cardin even wonders “if the writers of the diaspora are not more attached to describing today’s Ireland than the ones who live in the country.” (167)
Contemporary transnational short fiction departs from the above examples and offers new perspectives on migration, diaspora, loss and exile by making use of postmodern and hybrid forms. Connections between loss and identity are often foregrounded and loss  becomes a central theme, especially with regard to community, liminal identities and identity formation in general.
This talk focused on the re-imagining of emigration and diaspora as portrayed in selected short stories from the oeuvre of Irish-American writer Gerard Donovan and Irish-Canadian author Emma Donoghue. Their stories often link migration, diaspora and loss and/of community to issues of gender and age and thereby do not maintain the classic focus on the strong (male) youth leaving Ireland. Based on these observations and ideas, I explored how ambiguity, liminality and hybridity located on both the story and the discourse level of some transnational short stories by Donoghue and Donovan contribute to new ways of exploring migration.

Roddy Doyle once said about Ireland in the 1990s that he “went to bed in one country and woke up in a different one” (Deportees xi), poignantly summarizing the period of transition that Ireland went through.
In my presentation, I presented a reading of the interplay between voice and silence in two of Doyle’s most famous novels published in the 1990s and transferring hushed up ‘private’ problems to the public sphere.
With the above mentioned novels, Doyle gives a voice to characters that stem from silenced groups in a twofold way: his protagonists Sharon and Paula are “marginalised and victimised” (Jeffers 269) women from the working classes, women that are exploited and that men and society in general take advantage of.
The voice Doyle gives to Paula sounds relieved to be able to finally make her suffering from domestic violence public. However, her urge to tell the story becomes most obvious when contrasted with the silence of her mother, her daughters and the people she meets in the hospital and the streets - some events always remain inexpressible. Sharon, in contrast, is a self-confident and outspoken character - only when she is raped, she does not confide in anyone.
I argue that, paradoxically, by providing his characters with two different but equally unforgettable voices, Roddy Doyle makes the reader aware of a silence around taboo topics like domestic violence and rape; a silence that permeates the stories and that is even more telling than any voice can ever be.

When Halberstam and Livingston state that membership in the exclusive club of ‘the human’ means taking up various “crosses of identity, power, gender, authority,” they also point out that “some of the some that we are have been excluded” (Posthuman Bodies 10). ‘The human’ can thus be regarded as a male-centred concept which excludes many human and non-human lives from power and privilege. Eco-feminism recognizes and analyses the entanglement of oppressions (e.g. based on species/gender/ethnicity affiliations) and captures a variety of perspectives on the nature of connections within social and environmental systems of domination.

This plenary lecture discussed contemporary challenges, arguing that eco-feminism today has to incorporate activism, theoretical concepts, critical reflection on global issues as well as multiple perspectives which bear witness to the multilayeredness of intersectional experiences of disenfranchisement and the effects such discrimination has on all groups of living beings. Only a truly ecological and inclusive feminism, which takes as its starting point the basic meaning of the term ‘ecology’ as a network and a web of relations, can powerfully engage in the endeavour to break open ossified thought structures. Such an eco-feminist perspective can render visible the implications of a supposed human domination of what is labeled ‘nature’; it can enable us to realize the deep connection between ecological crisis and oppressive ideologies.  Eventually, it can engender debates about a new ecological ethics that does not stop at the boundaries of rigid categories but actualizes the reality of ecology.

In a glocal world that faces several political, social and environmental crises simultaneously, dystopian fiction, as a space that allows for renegotiations and thought experiments, helps address such crises and dismantles ideological constructs and issues of complicity. Eco-feminist approaches in/to such texts highlight the need for a deconstruction of ideological bias to provide room for new approaches to life and society, emphasising the reality of the global eco-system humankind is part of. Such a reading transcends the much criticized essentializing conceptions of ‘the feminine’ and ‘nature’ and underlines that we have to extend the range of lives that count as intrinsically valuable.
Such ideas are developed and negotiated in the examples of dystopian fiction I discussed in this lecture with an eye to new ecological approaches in literary criticism. Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (2003-2013) and Saci Lloyd’s The Carbon Diaries 2015 and 2017 (2008-2010) discuss the entanglement of the rise of right-wing parties, heedless progress, climate change, anti-feminism, inter-generational conflicts and rampant capitalism. These texts renegotiate current societies’ tendencies and ask for new approaches not only to the position of women but also to those who are disenfranchised through conceptually and materially connected forms of oppression.