Transitions project

THE PROPOSAL

1. AIMS, GROUND PREMISE, TERMINOLOGY, THESIS STATEMENT

The Transitions Project is part of a larger initiative aimed at placing the concept of liminality on the map of literature studies. Much in the present project is a response to current misunderstandings regarding the liminal. We chose to study transitions (rather than, say, hybridity, heteroglossia, dissidence or translation) in order to avoid ‘locative’ readings of liminality and ‘static’ understandings of thresholds. The Transitions Project views the limen dynamically, as inextricably linked to process.

The project shifts the focus of analysis from a topocentric to a liminocentric approach to the textual. It deals not primarily with sites (loci) but with transitions on a threshold (limen)—a threshold which emerges paradoxically as a centre endowed with its own dynamics. This will require at least two ancillary tasks: a statement on the textual field, and a theorisation of liminality that will make it a supple analytical tool.

WORKING TERMINOLOGY

‘Theory’: an array of terms, categories, frames and procedures harnessed to a set of general principles that can be applied to the analysis of literary phenomena.
‘Textual field’: the spatiotemporal domain shaped by folklore, literature, cinema, digital culture, and a long list of semiotic systems; it consists of loci and limina; though it differentiates, it eschews discrimination and compartmentalisation.
Locus and state will be used to identify stable places and situations. ‘Place’, ‘site’, and other terms may be used synonymously.
Limen (i.e., threshold): not a locus but a coordinate line that identifies, separates and joins loci; an index of relation, transit or change that exhibits properties different from those associated with loci and states.
‘Transition’: a spatial, temporal or conceptual process, passage through, or negotiation of physical or figurative thresholds.
‘Liminality’: denotes the condition of that which fleetingly or protractedly occurs on or occupies a threshold.

Liminality and transition presuppose each other: a transition takes place across (ormelse generates) a liminal zone; conversely, for limina to make sense some manner of transition must occur on them. These definitions will be refined in the course of the project.

Transitions are both a central phenomenon in texts and an integral dimension of texts; this is another way of saying that they occur on both the textual and the contextual levels. To understand them we need to understand their forms. A key to their morphology is found in the concept of liminality, but textual criticism has not yet provided an adequate theory for its study. Literary critics may take over some (usually anthropological) notion of liminality in order to examine a restricted corner of the literary field (Duffy 2011); use the limen as a trope for, say, border studies (Robinson 2007) or postcolonial theory (Mignolo 2000); explore liminality in fantasy (Klapcsik 2012) or in trauma narratives (Ganteau and Onega 2014); look at transitions in modernist American literature (Levin 1999); investigate sleep as a liminal phenomenon in literature (Schwenger 2012), and so forth; or else define literature as liminal and move on from there to construct a philosophy (Spariosu 1997). There is nothing wrong with these approaches, but they are not what we do.

The study of limina fails of its purpose if it creates watertight compartments. Ours is a transversal project; we do not work on a corpus but on a concept that surfaces through the entire textual field. We select our evidence from the interfaces between texts, between ‘canon’ and ‘margin’, between ancient and modern, between printed and digital, between the literary and the folkloric. Only this guarantees the comprehensive (rather than local or ad hoc) validity of our approach.

For reasons that are specified below, we believe there is even now a need to prove that liminality is a viable critical concept, and to argue how it is to be understood and employed. Hence, although the project begins with an emphasis on deductive approaches—the application of theoretical positions to practical instances—, it gradually reverses its emphasis towards the inductive—from analysis of the specific instance to the broader type of theoretical statement.

We do not aim to state that ‘everything is liminal’ but to hone the concept of liminality as a tool for the analysis of textual transitions. Accordingly, we do not seek to cover all possible transitions; the great historical changes, for example, lie beyond the scope of the present initiative: because they cannot be tackled before a suitable panoply of tools have been set firmly in place, they are left for subsequent undertakings.

2. PREVIOUS RESEARCH and SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

The phenomenology of lived space begins by exploring “the dialectics of inside and outside” (Bachelard 1957) and this presupposes the concept of a middle which separates, unifies and permits (or prevents) crossing: a threshold. Foucault (1984), Moretti (1998), Dehaene & De Cauter (2008), Ingold (2011), Johnson (2013) analyse the urban context as a space crisscrossed by thresholds. Architectural alterity has a long history in narrative fiction, from Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764) to Miéville’s The City and the City (2009). An entire narrative and critical tradition revolves around urban architectural thresholds, the dialectic of oppression and liberation they generate, and the attendant need to negotiate the “Other”. Surfaces (Stroll 1988, Islami 2014), thresholds (Stavrides 2016), codes (Jencks 1991), frames (Goffman 1974) and transitions (Thwaits & Simkins 2007) provide keys to a theory of the limen.

Following Van Gennep (1909) and Turner (1969), social and cultural anthropological studies of liminality abound (St. John [ed.] 2008, Thomassen 2014), as well as applications of the concept to various disciplines (sociology, leisure and tourism studies, political science, education, health sciences, cultural geography: Shortt 2015). Prompted by Turner (1982) and Richard Schechner (1985), cultural performance theory has productively engaged liminality with ritual, theatre and communication studies (Schechner 2013). Liminality has been applied to text from the perspective of psychoanalysis, deconstruction, post-colonialism, feminism and Marxist theory (Klapcsik 2012), as in the light of poststructuralist concepts such as intertextuality (Kristeva 1967), dialogism and the carnivalesque (Bakhtin 1981), trace and supplementarity (Derrida 1967), fractals (Mandelbrot 1975), paratexts (Genette 1987), rhizomes and nomadism (Deleuze & Guattari 1980), or thirdspace (Bhabha 1994, Soja 1996). A growing if scattered mass of studies of liminality in prose and poetry are also available in literary criticism, as evinced by developments in Oral Theory (Goody 1987, Amodio 2005), intersectional theory (Sollors 1997, Michelin 2013), women, sex and gender studies (Crenshaw 1989), ethnic and race studies (Gates 1988, Gilroy 1993), postcolonial theory (Bhabha 1994, Said 1994), slave-narrative studies (Bell 1987, Rushdy 1999, Andrews 1988), or approaches to books and writing that query conventional views of text, author, or canon (Stillinger 1991, Lefevere 1992, Williams 2017). All of which reveals a contemporary perception of text or reality as engaged in a liminal negotiation with their “others”: i.e., as unstable, transitional, in process.

However, the academic world often uses ‘liminality’ as little more than a buzz word to re-name standard critical positions, and most often shows scant awareness of what other studies and disciplines are doing. Thomassen (2009: 6), for example, declares that the Liminality and Cultures of Change conference held in Cambridge in February 2009 was “possibly (?) the first conference devoted to liminality”: he was unaware that the LIMEN Research Group had already held five UAM-hosted encounters of the International Seminar on Liminality and Text since 1999. Before the 1990s there was no idea that a general study of liminality should be necessary. There were no groups or networks studying it; researchers were not coordinated; each one studied at best one independent facet of liminality. It has taken precisely the work of our group—a referent in the field—to put the issue of theory on the academic map and to obtain the kind of outlook we now bring to this project.

Our earlier project Systemic Analysis of “Marginal” Literatures (1994-97) problematized notions of canon and margin and differentiated the marginal from the liminal, arguing, inter alia, that the liminal is not a category but a function, and that there are no “pure” textual systems (Aguirre, Quance & Sutton 2000, Soto [ed.] 2002). A second project, Threshold and Text (2000-03), uncoupled the literary from the anthropological; challenging the classic analogy of text to rite of passage, it emphasized the narrative quality of ritual and proposed the concept of a poetics of the threshold. Sutton [ed.] 2002, Bredendick [ed.] 2004, Manzanas & Benito [eds.] 2006, Aguirre 2006). This concept was applied to the wondertale (Aguirre 2007) and, in a third initiative (The Northanger Library Project, 2006-09), to 18th-century Gothic fiction, producing prototypes for morphological analysis (Aguirre & Ardoy 2009), characterization (Sánchez 2009, 2017) and formulaicity (Aguirre 2013). For international recognitions of the value of our work, see Kay & al. (eds.) 2007, Dietrich 2007, Achilles & Bergmann (eds.) 2014.

The project outline references studies that provide evidence for certain claims; only these titles are included in the bibliography. Some early readers challenged the inclusion of, e.g., Foucault’s, Todorov’s or Lefevere’s titles on grounds that these have little to do with liminality; but the first’s heterotopia and the second’s hesitation have conformed Western thinking about specific threshold regions, while the third’s rewriting is one key technical term for a multiformal view of texts. For the rest, to challenge some of these titles a priori as unrelated to our theme is to profess that ‘liminality is about something else’—when, as our project argues, there is precisely no consensus as to what ‘liminality’ means.

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