Lunchtime work-in-progress seminar
Wednesday 9th March, 2016
1-2, 3.16, Arts Two
Our next lunchtime work-in-progress seminar takes place on Wednesday 9 March. Our two project managers will each give a short talk:
Helen Stark (QMUL) A “Charnel-Vault”: Corpses in Walter Scott’s Paul’s Letters to His Kinsfolk
Describing the ploughing of the battle field at Waterloo, the titular protagonist of Walter Scott’s part-fictionalised travelogue Paul’s Letters to His Kinsfolk (1816) comments that ‘I should have been better pleased, if, […] the field where, in imagination, the ploughshare was coming in frequent contact with the corpses of the gallant dead, had been suffered to remain fallow.’ Dead bodies are invoked again in Paul’s description of the Museum de Monumens Français in Paris as a ‘charnel-vault’ where each pillaged painting ‘has its own separate history of murder, rapine, and sacrilege’. Despite this suggestive engagement with Waterloo, Paul’s Letters has been the subject of little sustained critical analysis. This paper will argue that Scott’s travelogue articulates Europe-wide anxieties about how to memorialise Waterloo and the role of the dead in that memorialisation. In doing so, I draw on Philip Shaw’s argument that the ‘problem with peace’ is ‘its tendency to undermine stable concepts of identity’ (Shaw, 2002). In tracing the displacements, misreadings and rereadings of the dead structuring competing narratives of Waterloo, Scott exposes the fractures and tensions in European identities revealed, rather than resolved, by this battle.
Sarah Chaney (QMUL) Trigger Happy: Self-harm and emotional contagion in the 21st century
Today, the world wide web is littered with warnings for content from self-harm and suicide to sexual abuse and racism. Yet just ten years ago the phrase ‘trigger warning’ was barely used at all. This short talk raises some questions around this notion as it pertains to self-harm in particular. On the one hand, modern concepts of self-injury depict these behaviours as private, personal acts associated with individual inner turmoil; on the other, the ‘trigger’ is embedded in a neurobiological model of conditioning, based on reflex responses to trauma. Where did the concept of the ‘trigger’ and its associated warning come from? And why and how did it become associated with an approach to self-harm based on peer contagion?
Lunch is provided and will be available from 12.45. Please rsvp to emotions@qmul.ac.uk for catering purposes. All welcome!
The seminar will take place in Room 3.16 of the Arts Two building, which is Number 35 (and coloured purple) on this campus map.