SLL 1. Margins and Thresholds:
An
Enquiry into the Concept of Liminality in Text Studies
by
Manuel Aguirre, Roberta Quance, and Philip Sutton
SLL
Vol 1: ISBN 84-607-0901-9
This
volume elaborates a working theory of liminality for
the study of texts. After a careful distinction between marginality
and liminality, three different problem areas are selected
for the testing of the theory. The authors show that popular
fiction constitutes a threshold field between literature and
folklore; how the symbolic role attributed to the figure of
woman in myth time and again places her on the threshold between
culture and nature; and how the structure of a rock concert
performance is shaped on three planes by a recurring set of
generic liminal attributes which endow it with an archetypal
quality. The authors argue that the study of thresholds, whether
at formal, positional, or structural levels, whether thematic,
symbolic, or narrative, whether in written, oral, iconographic
or performative text, is a most useful analytical strategy
and strongly encourages a redrawing of cultural maps so as
to make central room for the concept of the limen.
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SLL 2. A Place That Is Not A Place:
Essays on Liminality and
Text
Edited
by Isabel Soto
SLL
Vol 2: ISBN 84-931843-0-6
The
essays collected here, authored by a group of scholars both
from within and outside Spain, are the result of a seminar
held at Madrid’s Autónoma University in March
1999, and represent a further exploration of thresholds and
issues of canonicity in relation to text. Liminality is considered
here in terms, inter alia, of genre, structure, theme, cultural
conventions, ideology, and history Sutton borrows concepts
and theory from cultural anthropology and semiotics to theorize
the relationship of liminality to text, especially performance
text, and its reception. Both Lopez and Pujals explore language
as a mediating threshold in the work of contemporary poets
who are seen, in turn, to engage concerns congruent with those
of current critical discourse. Aguirre argues that Gothic
fiction is a liminal genre, not only thematically, structurally,
etc. but also because it is poised (liminally) at a threshold
moment in the history of Britain. Giles and Soto problematize
‘the centre’ by subjecting the writings of certain
canonical authors -Irving, Hughes, Lorca- to the refracting
lens of the limen, while Thomas questions the geographical
and political ‘marginality’ of Wales vis-a-vis England
and the West, and Farrell shows how the book may be used to
frame an individual or cultural existence on the margins and
thereby to impart sense to senseless fragments of experience.
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SLL
3. Betwixt-and-Between:
Essays in Liminal Geography
Edited
by Philip Sutton
ISBN:
84-931843-1-4
Based
on invited contributions to the 2nd International
Seminar on Liminality and Text, held at the Universidad Autónoma
de Madrid in April 2001, this volume contains further investigations
of issues raised earlier in the Studies in Liminality
and Literature series. Here, however, the emphasis
shifts from thresholds themselves onto the spaces they adjoin.
In a culturally and historically varied selection of texts,
all seven authors identify liminal sites whose properties
are then determined on the basis of an analysis of the geographies
they simultaneously link and separate. Aguirre, for instance,
shows how the customary laws of reality are suspended in the
narrative structures of fairy tales, making them analogous
to rites of passage. Gallego and Soto both interpret racial
hybridity as a liminal condition in a variety of African American
literary texts. Healy and Messent scrutinise the ever-shifting
threshold which separates civilisation from barbarity, the
former in the context of the problematisation to which it
was subjected in early modern England, and the latter in its
reflection in a contemporary icon, Thomas Harris’s Hannibal
Lecter. Quance’s study of the Don Juan myth invokes the
passage from life to death, whilst Pujals’s review of
English neoclassicism focuses especially on the relation between
art and politics. Across this diversity of texts and critical
approaches, the liminal emerges as a space defined by powerful
neighbours, yet always paradoxically infused with emancipatory
dreams.
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NEW
RELEASE :
SLL 4. Mapping The Threshold:
Essays in Liminal Analysis
Edited by Nancy Bredendick
The
charge to the invited speakers at the Third Seminar
on Liminality and Text, held at the Universidad Autónoma
de Madrid in the spring of 2003, was to discover and
delineate the properties of the limen. Their response,
as can be seen in the essays collected here, configures
the limen in all kinds of shapes and dimensions: doorsill,
borderline, border strip, shoreline, space, gap, and
phase. Whatever the configuration, however, in all the
essays, the dynamic quality of the limen stands out.
It is a space or a phase characterized by “dazzling
energy, dizzying transformation;” “fructile
chaos, a striving after new forms”; it is “unstable,
unfinished, ever changing”; it is “fluid,
multivocal, empowering”; and it is “ambivalent,
polluting, and dangerous to norm governed structures”.
Focusing on the dynamic properties of the limen, Manuel
Aguirre takes us beyond the qualities of duality and
double-ness so often associated with liminal identity
to show that what is at the limen in works like Nabakov’s
Pale Fire, and in post modern culture at large,
is more than just binary; it is inflected. With the
future of liminal analysis in mind, R. J. Ellis shifts
his attention away from Victor Turner’s “rites
of passage” pattern and concentrates instead on
Turner’s “processual pattern”, which,
as applied to The Scarlet Letter, gives us
access to the processes of artistic production itself.
Sue Broadhurst’s essay is about learning to appreciate
an emerging genre called ‘liminal performance’,
which includes certain kinds of experimental practices
in film, theater, music and dance that blur and collapse
the barriers between the arts and manipulate the latest
media technology. Jesús Benito and Esteban Pujals
examine poems by Li-Young Lee and John Ashbery to show
how word play is used as a rhetorical tool to effect
a response in the reader crucial to an understanding
of the liminal dimension of the work. In a similar vein,
Nancy Bredendick examines Hemingway’s use of ‘decadence’
in Death in the Afternoon as part of a dynamic
that functions liminally to inform and to persuade.
In the final essay, Cyril Edwards uses German vernacular
and learned texts to show how the elfin lexis and the
concept it expresses cross and re-cross the boundary
between good and evil over the centuries.
In essay after essay, speakers describe the limen as
a fertile place for creativity and change, if not the
very seat of such activity -- all of which bolsters
the notion that what is significant about the limen
is not just its position or shape but also its disruptive
force and generating power.
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www.porticolibrerias.es
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