Revenants and Wagner

With this Jane Eyre-frenzy in which we are so immersed it's easy to forget that there are other things going on in Brontëland. The Radical Brontës festival, for instance. But also in the scholar world there are things to report and we don't want to forget them.

A couple of recent or on-going conferences with Brontë-related topics:

The ESSE8 Conference (European Society for the Study of English) was held in London from 29 August until 2 September. In one of the panels we found the following:

S35. Revenants and Hauntings in Neo-Victorian Fictions.

The Haunting Presence of Charlotte Bronte and Jane Eyre in Charlotte: The Final Journey of Jane Eyre by D.M.Thomas
Sarolta Marinovich-Resch (University of Szeged)

D.M. Thomas’s Charlotte: The Final Journey of Jane Eyre (2000) is a good example of the paradoxical functioning of the postmodernist ’neo’-Victorian fiction. The haunting compulsion to return to the Victorian era and the ironical debunking of the past seem antithetical, yet display a nostalgic tendency. The confrontation between the present and the past is enhanced as Thomas’s novel unfolds in parallel a Victorian and a contemporary story. The Victorian section, written in the form of pastiche, takes up the story of Jane Eyre where Charlotte Bronte left it, and subverts the canonical version transforming pastiche into parody. The contemporary plot recounts the adventures of a British Bronte scholar, Miranda Stevenson, and represents her experience of the uncertainty about the perception of reality and the possibilities of meaning. Studying narrative fragmentation, textual heterogeneity and generic plurality in Thomas’s novel my paper aims to show the oxymoronic quality of its ’nostalgic postmodernism’.

And today begins the Association of Literature on Screen Studies Inaugural Conference in the De Monfort University, Leicester, UK (11-12 September).

In the programme you can find the following talk:

Panel 1: Music, Dance and Literature on Screen

Wagnerizing Wuthering Heights: Buñuel’s Tristan Storm in Abismos de Pasión
Saviour Catania, University of Malta

Abismos de Pasión was Luis Buñuel's free adaptation of Wuthering Heights transposed to Mexico. Buñuel, in a real coup of genius, used extensively Wagner's Tristan und Isolde in the soundtrack of the movie.

Categories: Scholar, Talks, Jane_Eyre, Sequels, Wuthering_Heights, Movies-DVD-TV