Sensing the Borderland in the Work of Female Writers from Northern Mexico and South Asia

The objective of this paper is to analyze the role of multisensorial representation in producing the reader’s borderland experience. It focuses on literary work by female authors from Northern Mexico and South Asia. Particularly on specific texts by Juana Adcock, Orfa Alarcón, Patricia Laurent, Ila Arab Mehta, Krishna Sobti and Kundanika Kapadia. The selections embody the border in mental health, race, society and religion as well as from an environmental perspective. Identifying how multisensorial representation contributes in bringing to life the border from these diverse points of view is the goal of this paper. The authors come from states on the northern frontier of their countries, states with desert zones in their territory, where temperature rises above 40 degrees celsius seasonally. Antipodally located as their regions are, the aim is to find common ground in their work, to construct and explore this intentional frontier. The analysis presented here is connected to a practice-based research art project entitled Zan. Project Zan has organized intercultural reading seminars where participants collaborate sharing their perspectives on gender, borderlands, discrimination, sexuality, and violence. The institutions that have shared their academic community with Zan include University of Rajasthan, University of Kashmir, UANL and UACJ.

Keywords: Senses, borderland, female writing, Mexico, South Asia
 

Caroline Pollentier ∆ (English, Sorbonne Nouvelle University, France)

Re-Minding Skin: Modernist Cognition, Thermoception, and Haptic Vulnerability

This paper seeks to revalue the sense of touch in narrative studies by considering the nexus between skin and mind in modernist fiction. In classical narratology, “transparent minds” (Cohn 1978) have mostly been read through the abstract, disembodied prisms of sight and voice. In postclassical narratology, fictional minds were subsequently framed “beyond the skin” (Palmer 2004). In “Re- Minding Modernism” (2011), cognitive narratologist David Herman used the theory of extended cognition to demonstrate that there is no such thing as an inward turn in modernist fiction. My point is to question this negation of interiority and the forgetting of touch in narratology by highlighting epidermal figures of mind in modernist fiction. Drawing on Didier Anzieu’s model of the Skin-Ego, cognitive narratology, as well as more recent ecocritical studies on thermoception (Clare 2019, Hsu 2023), I will argue that the perception of cold and warmth is instrumental to the modernist representation of consciousness. Through close readings of Mulk Raj Anand’s novel Untouchable (1935) and Jean Rhys’s interwar fiction, I propose to show how thermal aesthetics intertwine poetics of mind with politics of social justice through an attention to vulnerable bodies.
Keywords: temperature, touch, modernism, fiction, vulnerability

Danlu Chen ∆ (Comparative Literatures and Cultures University of Bristol, UK)

Sensing Urban Acoustic Ambience and Uncanny Sensations in Émile Zola’s ‘La Mort d’Olivier Bécaille’ (1884)

Sound has the capacity to defy spatial boundaries and create an immersive ambience, reflecting the ways in which people inhabit and interact with the environment. In his short sensation fiction ‘La Mort d’Olivier Bécaille’ (1884), Émile Zola mobilises Naturalist depictions of sound, in order to portray uncanny sensations and anxiety in the urban space during the process of modernisation in late nineteen-century France. The male protagonist Olivier Bécaille experiences catalepsy and sensory impairment after he takes the train to Paris from the provinces. He can only perceive what happens around him by listening to his surroundings. The depiction of complex urban sounds in Bécaille’s uncanny narrative presents his identity as a migrant and urban outsider from the French countryside. The cries of lower-class merchants on the street, the overwhelming noise in the metropolis, and the din of the train in his dream signify disparity and coexistence as effects of modernisation. Through sensory studies of Bécaille’s auditory experiences and urban soundscape, this paper explores the interaction between the city dweller and the changing external environment, and the tension between the traditional and the modern, between the natural and the mechanical. Keywords: sensory perception, urban acoustic ambience, uncanny sensations, Émile Zola, ‘La Mort d’Olivier Bécaille’