Tuesday 17th October, 2017

5.15-6.30pm All Souls' College, Hovenden Room

Waqas Mirza (Lincoln College) - The Self-Translation of Mental Verbs in Samuel Beckett's Trilogy

This paper compares the translation of verbs describing mental processes in the trilogy, which include all types of cognitive actions and emotional states; it analyses its repercussions on the representation of the mind. Differences in Beckett’s verb translations are indeed extremely common and vary in type. While translating the trilogy, the author often widens or narrows the meaning of mental verbs. He also regularly substitutes a mental verb for another. These semantic differences have an effect on the representation of the protagonists’ minds. 

Philippe Panizzon (St. Anne's College) - ‘Ces rencontres qui voient à peine le jour’ (Rachid O.);  Identity, Mobility and Homosexual Encounters in Abdellah Taïa’s and Rachid O.’s Work

In his study Queer Nations (2000) Jarrod Hayes examines how North African literature from the 1950s to the 1990s deals with transgressive sexualities. Also, Joseph Massad shows in Desiring Arabs (2007) that from the 1990s western gay and lesbian identities have spread throughout the Arab world. In this paper I look at how two contemporary, outspokenly homosexual Moroccan writers, Abdellah Taïa and Rachid O., both question established models and suggest an uncoupling of homosexuality and identity in their work. How do these authors deal with the concept of a western gay identity, coming from a cultural background where such an identity is non-existent? While the critics who have studied these questions have been concerned to pigeonhole the narrators’ identity as queer or gay (Badin; Smith), I would like to demonstrate, first, how being a gay Muslim challenges the fixity of these two supposedly exclusive categories. Secondly, I will argue that the narrators’ selfhood is built through the fleeting affiliations they engage in, which resonates with  the practice of the sexual cruiser or loiterly subjectivity (Ross Chambers). Their selfhood, made of a plurality of different selves, in constant interrelation with others, dramatizes Jean-Luc Nancy’s thoughts in Être Singulier Pluriel in that the narrators’ singular being is constructed through the plurality of passing (sexual and non-sexual) encounters. Whilst this paper will challenge the ontological security of Muslim and western gay identity, it will shed new light on selfhood in Rachid O.’s and Taïa’s work and on the migrant homosexual self more generally.