SLL 1. Margins and Thresholds: An Enquiry into the Concept of Liminality in Text Studies This volume elaborates a working theory of liminality for the study of texts. Three different problem areas are selected for the testing of the theory: how popular fiction constitutes a threshold field between literature and folklore; how the symbolic role attributed to the figure of woman in myth places her on the threshold between culture and nature; and how the structure of a rock concert performance is shaped by a recurring set of generic liminal attributes that endow it with an archetypal quality. The study of thresholds, whether at formal, positional, or structural levels, whether thematic, symbolic, or narrative, whether in written, oral, iconographic or performative text, is a most useful analytical strategy and the authors strongly encourage a redrawing of cultural maps so as to make central room for the concept of the limen.
SLL 2. A Place That Is Not A Place: Essays on Liminality and Text The essays collected here represent a further exploration of thresholds and issues of canonicity in relation to text. Liminality is considered here in terms of genre, structure, theme, cultural conventions, ideology, and history. Sutton borrows concepts and theory from cultural anthropology and semiotics to theorize the relationship of liminality to performance text; Lopez and Pujals explore language as a mediating threshold in the work of contemporary poets; Aguirre argues that Gothic fiction is a liminal genre, thematically, structurally, and also culturally. Giles and Soto problematize ‘the centre’ by subjecting the writings of Irving, Hughes, and Lorca to the refracting lens of the limen, while Thomas questions the geographical and political ‘marginality’ of Wales vis-a-vis England and the West, and Farrell shows how the book may be used to frame an individual or cultural existence on the margins.
SLL 3. Betwixt-and-Between: Essays in Liminal Geography In a culturally and historically varied selection of texts, the seven contributors to this volume identify liminal sites whose properties are then determined on the basis of an analysis of the geographies they simultaneously link and separate. Aguirre shows how the laws of reality are suspended in the narrative structures of fairy tales, making them analogous to rites of passage. Gallego and Soto interpret racial hybridity as a liminal condition in a variety of African American literary texts. Healy and Messent scrutinize the threshold that separates civilization from barbarity in the context of early modern England, and in its reflection in Thomas Harris’s Hannibal Lecter. Quance’s study of the Don Juan myth invokes the passage from life to death, whilst Pujal’s review of English Neoclassicism focuses on the relation between art and politics. Across this diversity of texts and critical approaches, the liminal emerges as a space defined by powerful neighbours, yet always paradoxically infused with emancipatory dreams.
SLL 4. Mapping The Threshold: Essays in Liminal Analysis The charge to the invited speakers at the Third Seminar on Liminality and Text, held at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in the spring of 2003, was to discover and delineate the properties of the limen. Their response, as can be seen in the essays collected here, configures the limen in all kinds of shapes and dimensions: doorsill, borderline, border strip, shoreline, space, gap, and phase. Whatever the configuration, however, in all the essays, the dynamic quality of the limen stands out. It is a space or a phase characterized by “dazzling energy, dizzying transformation;” “fructile chaos, a striving after new forms”; it is “unstable, unfinished, ever changing”; it is “fluid, multivocal, empowering”; and it is “ambivalent, polluting, and dangerous to norm governed structures”. In essay after essay, speakers describe the limen as a fertile place for creativity and change, if not the very seat of such activity – all of which bolsters the notion that what is significant about the limen is not just its position or shape but also its disruptive force and generating power.
SLL 5. The Dynamics of the Threshold: Essays in Liminal Negotiations This volume collects the results of the 4th ISLT held at Madrid’s Autónoma University in March 2005, and offers a challenging exploration, in film, music, literature, anthropology, sculpture and two-dimensional monuments, of the unpredictable behaviour of the threshold as a site dominated by the logic of ambiguity. Appropriately, the book abounds in questions concerning liminal dynamics. What, for instance, happens when the logic of postponement makes the limen expand? Aguirre explores in Gothic narrative technique the continuous procrastination of an event which stretches liminal space until it swallows everything like a black hole – rather like the lake in South Carolina that Ineke Bockting expands on as an able metaphor for the haunted culture of the American South. On a threshold which is an (almost) all-encompassing situation, how is power ascribed to objects, and how are borders (or their absence) configured by this process? Ana Manzanas studies in works by J.M. Coetzee and Thomas King the quiet productivity of physical gates and borders, and the way borderlessness itself may constitute new gates separating self from other, the privileged from the underprivileged. But what happens when a people such as Native Americans find themselves actually trying to live in a liminal condition? David Murray points out that it is one thing to write about the workings and location of the liminal space, and another to live it, and argues that those who actually inhabit that threshold are the powerless or the disempowered. So the questions return. What can and cannot be done by or in the threshold? Can it, as Hein Viljoen’s essay on Breytenbach’s poetry suggests, enable survival, unleash creativity, transform reality? Can it itself be transformed? Then again, while Alan Rice asks whether the intercultural and diasporic experience of a little black slave can force us to redefine imperial notions of race, nation and identity, Isabel Soto shows how Frederick Douglass’s Narrative and Gayle Jones’s “Asylum” make manifest the intersection of three strands: intertextuality, mise-en-abyme, and “double consciousness”, to dramatize the incursion into the forbidden territory of the white text. And what if we carry the threshold into the other side of the cinema or TV screen? Taking his cue from Carroll’s looking-glass fantasy, Philip Sutton shows that the crossing of the ‘real’ character over to the fictional text is laden with conflict and tension. Yet how do we assess the relationship between the two ‘spaces’ or energies on either side of the threshold? Robert Samuels explores that limen where literary discourse looks to the musical world while music reaches out to narrative in search of new modes of signification. Miriam Mandel sums up some of the results of the Round Table that followed the conference, and addresses yet another threshold, the future of our investigations.
SLL6. The Thresholds of the Tale: Liminality and the Structure of Fairytales It has often been claimed that the genre of the fairytale enacts the hero’s exemplary journey of initiation and transformation; and in a certain light this is obviously true. Taking recourse to such fields as anthropology, mythography, comparative religion, folkloristics, performance theory and literary criticism, and leaning on ritual studies, Propp’s morphology, and liminalist analysis, this book offers a contribution to the structure of that journey and, more generally, to the ‘grammar’ of the fairytale. It concentrates on formal analysis of textual techniques, outlines a set of compositional principles common to ritual and fairytale, and postulates a performance-text continuum within which to view the fairytale as text and as a genre of fiction without neglecting its performative nature. This analysis, however, leads to a questioning of the traditional ‘heroic biography’ pattern, and to the proposal of an alternative framework –the Sovereignty model- which brings out the decisive (though mostly obscured) role played by the female figure in the genre.
SLL 7. Embodied Boundaries: Images of Liminality in a Selection of Women-Authored Courtship Narratives A comparative, interdisciplinary approach, incorporating both anthropological theories of the limen and feminist literary criticism, brings to light vital aspects of four very different works. This book analyses liminality as a meaningful strategy for social comment and protest in works by Murasaki Shikibu, Marie de France, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Edith Wharton. Negotiating the demands and perils of courtship, their heroines create a form of refuge on the threshold as a way of protesting a female’s bounded body and limited options. Through an innovative juxtaposition of East and West, ancient and modern, and multiple linguistic communities, meaningful commonalities in women’s writing are revealed. Embodied Boundaries demonstrates how these authors, despite obvious differences in socio-cultural context, employ strikingly similar images that act to destabilize the prevalent centre/margin paradigm and thereby challenge gendered hierarchical practices based on a damaging imbalance of power.
SLL 8. Liminal Poetics, Or the Aesthetics of Dissent The essays collected here are the result of the 5th International Seminar on Liminality and Text, held at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid in March 2007. The main purpose of the seminar was to instigate a scholarly debate in relation to the principles which govern the production of meaning on and by the limen, about the role the limen plays in different levels and fields, with the ultimate intention of delineating a poetics of the threshold. Each contributor approached the issue from his/her own field of interest, but all of them coincided in identifying a function of what could be broadly defined as “dissent”; the mutable and unpredictable reality of the threshold, its “structure-dissolving” quality, is the perfect tool to dismantle the neat and often purposeful architecture of the current artistic practice. It is precisely the liminal nature of the poetics illustrated in this volume that determines their potential for transgression, their capacity to question the prevailing discourses and reassess them in a new aesthetic programme.
SLL 9. At the Interface |