Event date: Tuesday 11 May 2010, 5.30 p.m. – 6.30 p.m. >>> CANCELLED <<<
Location: Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Blandijnberg 2, Faculty Room

“The Value of Language” given by Dr. Jane Kilby (University of Salford)

“Part literary criticism, part memoir, Mary Hamer’s Incest: A New Perspective constitutes a response to her discovery that Sappho Durrell, the daughter of the author Lawrence Durrell, had committed suicide having struggled for years with the reality of her father’s abuse. Indeed, the discovery is particularly pertinent, since it forces Hamer to realize that The Alexandria Quartet – which was the book that had made Sappho Durrell’s father famous in the 1960s and which Hamer had enjoyed reading as a romantic fiction about brother-sister incest – is a lie. The aim of this paper is to suggest, however, that if ‘the romance of the notion’ subsequently shattered as Hamer claims, then her book pieces it back together again. This is not to say that Hamer dismisses incest as a violent reality or that she deliberately undermines Sappho Durrell’s own testimony, which was published in a special issue of Granta. But rather the problem lies in Hamer’s desire to find meaning in both incest and suicide. Critically, then, Hamer is determined to read the actions of both father and daughter as symbolic. For Hamer, as it is for so many, violence figures as a language, as something which speaks to us – and speaks to us, not uncommonly, of a prior violence or pain. Taking issue with this conceptualization, I argue that if we are to understand the value of language for trauma victims such as Sappho Durrell, then we must not confuse violence and language. They are, as I will demonstrate, entirely different realities. It is an argument, moreover, that is drawn from the work of Cathy Caruth, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub. Indeed, it is for this reason, I will argue, that Caruth, Felman and Laub are best read as critical theorists and not poststructuralists, despite the influence of de Man on both Felman and Caruth. Ultimately, then, and despite the ways in which they have been associated with an ethical poststructuralism, I will claim that Caruth, Felman and Laub are concerned with political critique and a modernist conception of language, which values language for being clean of violence and the liberal sociality it implies.”

Jane Kilby is a senior lecturer in the School of English, Sociology, Politics and Contemporary History at the University of Salford. She specializes in the interdisciplinary question of violence, trauma and testimony, and is author of Violence and the Cultural Politics of Trauma. She is currently working on a monograph entitled The Banality of Incest.