PhD Work in Progress 2018

Dear NICA members,

Please join us for our annual ‘PhD Work in Progress’ meeting on Friday, June 15, 15:00-17:00, at the Oudemanhuispoort (room E1.08) in Amsterdam. Everyone’s welcome! Our PhD fellows Tingting Hui, Paris Cameron-Gardos, and David Gauthier will share samples of their current work in progress, with joint discussion (and drinks) to follow. How to justify a topic seemingly outside your discipline? How to deal with a rich but challenging case? And how to bring discordant elements together in the introduction? See below for brief descriptions of the topics at stake.

All best!
Eloe and Murat

Tingting Hui
Accented Tongues: On Literature and Language as Bodily Styles
Accent is a research topic predominantly rooted and nourished in linguistic studies, and I, as a literary scholar, often find myself put in a position to “justify” my fascination with accent. For me, accent serves as a focal point that allows me to rethink terms and concepts such as body and foreignness, and to analyse  literary, social, and cultural phenomena. In this presentation, I will give a brief introduction to my PhD project in terms of its scope, the layout of the chapters, and the methodology.

David Gauthier
Following a war machine: On the notion of execution in Louis Ferdinand Céline’s Casse-Pipe
I’d like to present and reflect on a section of my dissertation that focuses on Louis Ferdinand Celine’s novel Casse-Pipe. This section follows a chapter which introduces the notion of software execution (machine execution) and its relation to law and violence, and here I’m trying to expose/work the concept with Céline’s novel (military execution). There is a fair amount of literary theory (Barthes, Deleuze) which I’d like to discuss and a few options/choices I’m still wrestling with in the text and its context.

Paris Cameron-Gardos
The Introduction: Making “Out” a Reality
Writing, and now revising, the introduction to my thesis has presented a number of challenges. In particular, I have frequently asked the question: how is possible to address a topic that encompasses Queer Theory, Film Studies, and Cultural Analysis? Just as importantly, I wanted my writing to follow the lead of Mieke Bal through the personalization of the topics. To do so, I needed to include anecdotes that helped illustrated the struggle with concepts and theory. The process of working through, and with, these sometimes discordant elements has been essential to the creation of this part of the thesis. Just as importantly, the challenges of synthesis resulted in a significant expansion of the whole document during the writing process.