conference reviews |
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'Haunting, War and Conflict' Two panels of the recent 'Haunting, Spaces, Discourse' conference at the University of Karlstad, Sweden were devoted to 'Haunting, War and Conflict. Whilst there was to be a total of eight speakers presenting papers, no-shows reduced this number to four (which did provide more time for the individual speakers to present their work). Augmenting the Haunting, War and Conflict panels, Gillian Rose's (Open University) opening keynote address focused upon newspaper coverage of the 7 July attacks on London, with a particular concern for way in which the events of that day have been recorded and commemorated photographically. By chance, all four speakers in the Haunting, War and Conflict panels took as their focus World War I, and by chance again, in of each the two sessions the papers touched upon overlapping themes. The first session was centred on questions of commemoration. Martin Hurcombe's (University of Bristol) paper 'Raising the dead: visual memories of the French infantryman in the interwar years' took as its focus two films: Abel Gance's J'Accusse! (1919) and Raymond Bernard's Les Croix des bois (1932). Paul Gough's (Bristol School of Art, Media and Design) presentation 'Insurrection: Resurrection: reviving the dead in the work of Stanley Spencer, Will Longstaff and Jeff Wall', scrutinised the way in which the dead of war have been represented in these three artists' work. The discussion that followed the papers incorporated debate about the statue in the main square of Karlstad, that commemorates the signing of the treaty ensuring the peaceful dissolution of Norway and Sweden in 1905. The connecting themes of the second session can be described as phantasy and writing. Eluned Summers-Bremner's (University of Auckland) paper 'Traumatised History: the haunting of the modernist novel by the gaze of the First World War', developed Lacan's notion of the gaze, applying this to First World War literature, in particular Ford Maddox Ford's work. Jenna Kubly's (Tufts University) presentation, 'Fantastical Hauntings in the War Plays of JM Barrie' explored a now little known aspect of Barrie's oeuvre, in which questions of phantasy and representation are foregrounded. Both panels were well received generating debate that will no doubt go on to inform future research. |
