Last Saturday, two of our club members participated in a student conference hosted by The United Students Society, a fellow student organization at the Department of American Literature, University of Łódź.
The topic of the conference was Transformations / Metamorphoses: The Notion of Change in Contemporary North American Literature and Culture.
Here are two abstracts of the papers presented by UAM representatives:
The Shifing identity of Nathan Zuckerman
Zuzanna Ludwa, UAM
zuzannaludwa@gmail.com
Nathan Zuckerman, the protagonist of Philip
Roth’s numerous novels, has been believed to be the author’s alter ego,
positioning Roth’s fiction as a poorly disguised autobiography. In spite of
this, Zuckerman novels cannot be classified as a traditional example of retour
de personnage, as the protagonist is inconsistent and the supertext of the
novels does not constitute a cohesive literary universe. On the contrary,
Philip Roth has Nathan Zuckerman cross ontological boundaries and transgress
different diegetic levels, deliberately undermining the symbolic border between
fiction and autobiography. Roth’s attempts to problematize the relationship
between himself and Zuckerman are most visible in The Counterlife (1986), The
Facts: A Novelists Autobiography (1988), and Deception: A novel (1990). These texts destabilize the identity of
Zuckerman and question his status as Roth’s literary alter ego. In The Counterlife, Zuckerman realizes
alternative and contradictory life scenarios, posing metafictional questions
concerning the nature of literary representation and its relation to reality. Deception, narrated by a character
called “Philip Roth”, transgresses the boundary between different ontological
levels, as Nathan Zuckerman and “Philip Roth” share a fictional lover. Finally,
The Facts, a novel disguised as an
autobiography, depicts the troubled relationship between the author, Philip
Roth, and his literary creation, Nathan Zuckerman. Once again, the same
ontological world hosts both Roth and Zuckerman, implying their
interdependence. Their roles in The Facts
are reversed and Roth’s authorial power is questioned, as it is him who seeks
advice of his own literary creation, Zuckerman.
The presentation will
concern the process of deconstructing the stable identity of Nathan Zuckerman
and his transformation from a traditional protagonist to an unstable,
transworld character. The three novels will be considered as the opposite of Bildungsroman, since the transformations
of Nathan Zuckerman serve to undermine his credibility as a character. The
process of forming Nathan’s identity is reversed, as the novels deconstruct the
protagonist of Zuckerman Unbound and
shatter the illusion of realism, depicting Zuckerman as an unstable,
postmodernist protagonist. Here, transformation does not serve to compose a
more elaborate realist character, but rather to de-compose an already existing
literary entity.
From text to image: the metamorphosis of Paul Auster's City of Glass
Małgorzata Olsza, UAM
malgorzata.olsza@gmail.com
Published in 1985, Paul Auster's City of Glass, the first book in The New York Trilogy,
is a one of a kind meta-fictional detective story. It embraces a complex play with the nature, function and meaning of language, demonstrating the
ambiguity of
signification as regards linguistic representation. In his prose, Auster deconstructs literary conventions and their status as a signifying structure, indirectly indicating
the fall
of language. Although Auster's novel, with its exploration of language, proves to be rather non-visual and playful as far as the style is concerned, Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli succeeded in adapting it into a graphic novel. The metamorphosis into a completely new genre based on unique principles of visual narration poses questions about the differences between verbal and visual representation.
The aim of this paper is to investigate the nature of changes that have occurred as a result of the genre transformation in question. I will analyze the textual and visual layer of City of Glass: The Graphic Novel
and demonstrate how through this act of metamorphosis Karasik and Mazzucchelli re-interpreted Auster's original text into the visual
code of comics.
