Laura de la Parra Fernández
I'm Assistant Professor in the Department of English at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, where I obtained my PhD in English (International Mention, Extraordinary Doctoral Award, "Félix Martín" Best Thesis in American Studies Award). My doctoral research was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education (FPU–MECD). I’ve been a Visiting Researcher at Birkbeck College, University of London and at Harvard University, funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education and at Project Narrative, Ohio State University, funded by a Ruth Lee Kennedy Postdoctoral Fulbright Scholarship. I am currently a member of the research projects "Gender and Pathography from a Transnational Perspective" (PI: Isabel Durán, Complutense University) and “Cultural History of Gestures” (PI: Javier Moscoso, National Research Council), both funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science. My research interests include modern and contemporary British and American literature, with an emphasis on gender studies, the medical humanities, the history of emotions, experimental writing and life writing.
Supervisors: Isabel Durán Giménez-Rico and Carmen Méndez García
Supervisors: Isabel Durán Giménez-Rico and Carmen Méndez García
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Emma Cline’s first novel, The Girls (2016), was a summer best-seller, receiving praise from both critics and the general public. The Girls was inspired by 1960s Charles Manson’s girl squad killings. These are told from the point of view of grown-up Evie, who did not actually take part in the murders, but reminisces her time at the cult with nostalgia. Drawing on Berlant’s theory, I will analyse how Cline’s novel stages the “female complaint” in the portrayal of the crises of institutions such as the family, heterosexuality and gender without fully resolving it, but pointing to a potential political and emotional alternative: the displacement of Evie’s desire into homoerotic love for the queen of the clan, Suzanne.
Conference Presentations
As Leigh Gilmore points out, “the autobiographical subject is a representation and its representation is its construction” (25). Therefore, the genre itself constructs the idea of the self. Similarly, in Giving an Account of Oneself (2005), Judith Butler claims that autobiography, as a “work on the self . . . takes place within the context of a set of norms that precede and exceed the subject” (17). Thus, according to Butler, this “truth of a person . . . might well become more clear in moments of interruption, stoppage, [and] open-endedness”(64). Thus, my aim in this chapter is to look at Carrington’s “stoppages” or breaks in giving her account of her asylum experience through the introduction of visual elements such as the map of “Down Below”. As Kathleen M. Kirby indicates, “[c]artography institutes a particular kind of boundary between the subject and space, but is also itself a site of interface, mediating the relationship between space and the subject and constructing each in its own particularly ossified way” (47). The map can then be read as a surrealist strategy to break with life writing conventions as well as with authoritarianist narratives of knowledge and the self.
Thus, I intend to explore how Down Below, as life writing, illuminates some kind of truth or knowledge that deviates from the autobiographical tradition of the unitarian self. Carrington’s found truth sheds light on other possibilities of existing—or creating—the self, while she challenges both the normative knowledges of Francoist psychiatry and traditional life writing. I will analyse how she reappropriates the surrealist tradition to represent, subvert and challenge her experience of madness by finding a new way to convey this experience as a break in the normative idea of self which allows for a breakthrough in new forms of representation.
Emma Cline’s first novel, The Girls (2016), was a summer best-seller, receiving praise from both critics and the general public. The Girls was inspired by 1960s Charles Manson’s girl squad killings. These are told from the point of view of grown-up Evie, who did not actually take part in the murders, but reminisces her time at the cult with nostalgia. Drawing on Berlant’s theory, I will analyse how Cline’s novel stages the “female complaint” in the portrayal of the crises of institutions such as the family, heterosexuality and gender without fully resolving it, but pointing to a potential political and emotional alternative: the displacement of Evie’s desire into homoerotic love for the queen of the clan, Suzanne.
As Leigh Gilmore points out, “the autobiographical subject is a representation and its representation is its construction” (25). Therefore, the genre itself constructs the idea of the self. Similarly, in Giving an Account of Oneself (2005), Judith Butler claims that autobiography, as a “work on the self . . . takes place within the context of a set of norms that precede and exceed the subject” (17). Thus, according to Butler, this “truth of a person . . . might well become more clear in moments of interruption, stoppage, [and] open-endedness”(64). Thus, my aim in this chapter is to look at Carrington’s “stoppages” or breaks in giving her account of her asylum experience through the introduction of visual elements such as the map of “Down Below”. As Kathleen M. Kirby indicates, “[c]artography institutes a particular kind of boundary between the subject and space, but is also itself a site of interface, mediating the relationship between space and the subject and constructing each in its own particularly ossified way” (47). The map can then be read as a surrealist strategy to break with life writing conventions as well as with authoritarianist narratives of knowledge and the self.
Thus, I intend to explore how Down Below, as life writing, illuminates some kind of truth or knowledge that deviates from the autobiographical tradition of the unitarian self. Carrington’s found truth sheds light on other possibilities of existing—or creating—the self, while she challenges both the normative knowledges of Francoist psychiatry and traditional life writing. I will analyse how she reappropriates the surrealist tradition to represent, subvert and challenge her experience of madness by finding a new way to convey this experience as a break in the normative idea of self which allows for a breakthrough in new forms of representation.
the perspective of queer temporalities. In so doing, I will argue that the text
maps the crossroad between the emerging, sexually liberated woman of the 1960s and the bourgeoise housewife of postwar Britain, locating both within the patriarchal realm yet shedding light on the possibility of dismantling hegemonic power relations through the establishment of new forms of kinship. By refusing a linear plot—in particular, the genre of the whodunnit—the novel subverts readers’ expectations of closure and resolution, reconsidering issues of narrative authority. At the same time, compulsory heterosexuality precludes any actual liberation for either the middle-class housewife or the seemingly sexually liberated young woman, as it is enforced through violence.
Siguiendo a otros autores que ya han demostrado excelentes resultados en el uso de la escritura creativa en la enseñanza de L2 (Arshavskaya, 2015; Zhao, 2014) y en la clase de literatura (Schiller, 1954; Bowen 1993; Knoeller, 2003), proponemos ejemplos prácticos de la aplicación de la escritura creativa a la enseñanza de literatura en L2 para mejorar las destrezas de comprensión lectora, reflexión crítica y redacción en L2 de los estudiantes de grados universitarios de lenguas y humanidades. Se proporcionan dos ejemplos de posibles respuestas imaginativas a textos clásicos de un currículo de una asignatura introductoria a la literatura inglesa: el soneto shakesperiano y la escritura diarística.