Bio Note: Prof. Patrick McGuinness – Keynote Speaker
Prof. Patrick McGuinness is an academic, critic, novelist, and poet. He is a Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Oxford (St Anne’s College), a Sir Win and Lady Bischoff Fellow in French, and a Tutor in Modern Languages. He lectures on comparative literature, modern theatre, French language and modern literature, and modern British and American poetry. His main research interests include 19th and 20th century French literature, especially Poetry and Theatre; French and Belgian Symbolism; Belgian Literature in French and Comparative Literature; Anglo-American Modernism and modern poetry in English. His latest publications include the essay collection Ghost Stations: Essays and Branchlines (CB Editions, 2025), the poetry collection Blood Feather (Jonathan Cape, 2023), the novel Throw Me to the Wolves (Jonathan Cape, 2019), and the monograph Poetry and Radical Politics in fin de siecle France: From Anarchism to Action francaise (OUP, 2015).
Panel 1: Nonhuman Voices
From Cloud to Soil: Arboreal Voice and Radical Listening in Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees
Gianna Brahović, University of Split
Abstract
The Mediterranean has long functioned as a palimpsest of many diverse, battling voices. Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees speaks of one such conflict in 1974 Cyprus through a surprising character: a fig tree. The tree’s internal monologue serves as a biological archive of the conflict, and its consequences on humans and nature alike.
As we navigate the Anthropocene, human influence has rendered the voice of nature increasingly silent. This ecological silencing is further amplified by a hyper-vocal digital landscape dominated by Artificial Intelligence. Unlike these unmoored digital voices, the rooted memory of the fig tree offers a tether to the past.
This paper argues that by granting readers access to the tree’s private monologue, Shafak demands a practice of radical listening. To engage with the arboreal perspective, the reader must intentionally quiet the algorithmic speed of the modern era and adopt a slower, ecological temporality. Ultimately, the novel suggests that reclaiming a coherent identity requires a shift from the cloud back to the soil. It is only by stepping closer to nature that one can access the historical roots essential to understanding one’s identity. By listening to the non-human witness, we do not merely observe nature; we ground ourselves in our shared history, reclaiming our own capacity for thought and memory from the overwhelming voices of the artificial age.
Bio Note
Gianna Brahović is a PhD student working under the supervision of Associate Professor Brian Willems at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Split. She holds a double major MA in Croatian Language and Literature and English Studies. Her doctoral research focuses on the notion of the Anthropocene and its portrayal in 21st century Croatian and English novels. She has presented her work at several international conferences, including the 4th International Interdisciplinary Conference Postmemory and the Contemporary World, and Spaces for Change in Literature, Hi/Story and the Cultural Imagination: Korea, the Mediterranean, and Other Europes.
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Searching for the voice of house: Decentering the Human through Spoken and Unspoken Practices with our Architectural Kin
Chrissy Ralph, Norwich University of the Arts
Abstract
This paper presents an investigation of creative collaboration with the house I live in, delivering philosophical exploration of languages embedded in corporeal and architectural structures.
The research focuses on more-than-human communication relayed through performance art practice. Performance art often centres the body; this research aims to decenter human perspectives and, through working with a domestic setting, challenge barriers to meaningful engagement with art. This post qualitative inquiry works from the mess and stays with the trouble. Using feminist posthumanist and new materialist frameworks, my research addresses searching for the voice of house, offering insight into our spoken and unspoken exchanges.
This research is conducted through performance art practices and experimental, messy writing approaches. Amplifying what sits outside of spoken language, house and I conduct sound experiments. Playing sounds made by house back through my body, through house’s own structure, and through the bodies of an audience, we use deep listening practices to find diverse ways of listening and understanding each other. Our interactions are durational and liable to fail. We enter this work ready to spend extended time listening, prepared to recoup anything from barely perceptible Lynchian room tone to banging sounds of house’s internal pipework systems.
This work engages with architectural kin, seeking generation of methods for creatives who find themselves confined to the home for reasons including gender, financial, and time- based restrictions. De-centring human perspective, this paper works through how we access and perform languages of the more-than-human, reassessing our positions in the listening chain.
Bio Note
Chrissy Ralph (she/her), b.1980, UK. Performance artist and researcher, working in live and recorded performance, sculpture, and material enquiry. A working-class mother of four, Chrissy works with themes of tension, boundary, social justice, and marginalised voices. Chrissy achieved a first-class Fine Art BA in 2014, Fine Art master’s degree in 2023, and is in her second year of a practice PhD at Norwich University of the Arts. Focus artist of regional BBC Radio programme, Creative Spotlight (2023) and recipient of the Henry Moore Foundation Artists Award 2025, Chrissy has exhibited work in group shows in Canada, Greece, Italy, Iceland, Germany, Brazil, and Iran, and across the UK.
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When Objects Speak: Stage, Voice and Resistance in Susan Glaspell’s Trifles
Helena Paoli, University of Bari
Abstract
This paper explores the notion of “voice” through the material agency of stage objects in Trifles (1916) by Susan Glaspell. Once dismissed as mere decorative elements, props have recently been re-evaluated by theatre scholarship as agents within performance, aligning with broader interdisciplinary trends and the emergence of new materialisms. Specifically, this analysis reconsiders stage properties as active participants in processes of recognition and resistance, functioning as non-human mediators for silenced individuals.
Inspired by the real-life case of Margaret Hossack, which Glaspell covered as a journalist, the play stages the investigation of Minnie Wright, accused of murdering her husband in their rural farmhouse. Significantly, Minnie never appears on stage and is denied a voice within the patriarchal and legal framework that judges her.
While the male authorities dismiss kitchen objects as insignificant “trifles”, the female characters carry out their own investigation on stage by piecing together domestic details. A loaf of bread, fruit jars, a broken birdcage, an unfinished quilt – these objects become alternative sites of testimony, voicing a narrative of emotional neglect and systemic oppression.
As a consequence, Trifles reconfigures the relationship between voice and presence: although Minnie remains physically absent and legally silenced, her experience resonates materially with the audience, performing a subtle yet powerful form of resistance. Glaspell ultimately reveals how theatre can redistribute agency, destabilize gendered hierarchies of speech and imagine alternative forms of justice.
Bio Note
Helena Paoli is a PhD student at University of Bari, where she is exploring family conflicts within 20th-century American theatre (Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, James Purdy). Her research interests also include the American short story, the dramaturgical use of objects on stage and the intersection of theatre and literature. She contributed a chapter on Tennessee Williams’s short stories to the volume Racconti Americani (Agorà&Co., 2025). She previously published her flash stories in the American magazine Mud Season Review (2023) and three fantasy novels (Bibliotheka Edizioni, 2015, 2017; Fanucci Editore, 2019).
Panel 2: Digital Voices
The Queer Gap: AI Transcription and Drag Voices
Lea Pešec, University of Graz
Abstract
Automated speech recognition (ASR) is increasingly used in qualitative research, yet its persistent failures when transcribing queer and drag performers’ speech raise urgent questions about gender justice, legibility, and the politics of listening. As transcription scholars have long argued, transcription is not a neutral conversion of speech into text but an interpretive and power-laden practice (Davidson, 2009; Jenks, 2013; McMullin, 2023). This paper examines what ASR errors reveal about how non-normative voices become (un)intelligible within automated systems and how these breakdowns can be mobilized analytically through the concept of the queer gap.
Drawing on 22 hours of recorded interviews from eleven semi-structured photo-interviews with drag performers in Austria and the US, I show that ASR routinely misrecognizes identity terms, drag kinship language, cultural references, and vernacular expressions. These failures are not random glitches but patterned distortions that reshape or erase queer meaning, producing substitutions, omissions, and misnamings. Such breakdowns resonate with broader critiques of algorithmic misrecognition and the harms of normative gender legibility in AI systems (Hamidi et al., 2018; Rincón et al., 2021). Rather than treating transcription errors as incidental noise, I theorize them as evidence of normative machinic listening. Methodologically, I advance a reflexive transcription approach combining selective human transcription, systematic audio-text alignment, and transparent coding of machine substitutions and semantic shifts.
Bio Note
Lea Pešec is an Austrian Academy of Sciences fellow and doctoral candidate at the Department of American Studies, University of Graz, researching drag performers’ online and offline identities. She holds degrees in Sociology and English and American Studies from the Universities of Zadar, Bamberg, and Graz, and is affiliated with the Aging in Data project, board member of the Austria’s Young Americanists, as well as a member of the Media and Social Movements research cluster. In terms of research, Lea has an interest in gender and queer studies, visual studies, identity, and digitalization.
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Who Speaks When the Machine Writes? Voice After the Human
Maya Micallef Engerer, University of Malta
Abstract
Literary criticism has long treated voice as the expressive trace of a human subject. From Romantic theories of authorship to modern narratological accounts of narrative voice, the concept presupposes a speaking presence whose interiority becomes legible through language. Recent developments in generative artificial intelligence complicate this assumption by enabling the large-scale production of texts that convincingly replicate recognisable literary styles. When algorithms generate passages that resemble the voice of canonical writers such as William Shakespeare, the question arises: if voice can be computationally reproduced, what remains of the concept of authorial voice?
This paper approaches AI-generated textuality not as a technological anomaly but as a theoretical provocation that exposes tensions already embedded within literary understandings of voice. Drawing on posthumanist accounts of subjectivity developed by Rosi Braidotti and N. Katherine Hayles, the paper argues that literary voice should not be understood as the property of a singular human speaker. Instead, voice emerges from relational networks involving language, cultural memory, technological mediation, and interpretive communities. Seen from this perspective, the apparent ability of AI systems to reproduce authorial voice does not simply threaten human creativity. Rather, it reveals that what literary criticism calls “voice” has always depended upon processes of circulation, repetition, and collective recognition that exceed individual authorship. By examining how synthetic textual production destabilises assumptions about authenticity, originality, and intellectual labour, the paper proposes a shift from thinking of voice as expression to understanding it as configuration. Such a reconceptualisation allows literary studies to address synthetic authorship without relying on increasingly unstable distinctions between human and machine expression.
Bio Note
Maya Micallef Engerer is an M.A. student in English (Literary Studies) at the University of Malta. She holds a B.A. in English with Philosophy. Her research interests include literary theory, posthumanism, authorship, and the relationship between voice, subjectivity, and technological mediation in contemporary textual production.
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Whose Voice Prevails? Editorial Gatekeeping and the Romantasy Wave
Rebecca Ganado, University of Malta
Abstract
In the booming romantasy subgenre — where fantasy merges with romance driven by TikTok-fuelled demand — editors and agents increasingly curate manuscripts toward commercial viability, prioritising steamy relationship arcs, emotional dynamics, and romance-heavy plots over intricate worldbuilding or lore. This paper examines editors as curatorial voices that shape, filter, and sometimes silence authors’ original intentions, raising urgent questions: What becomes of the author’s voice once refracted through these editorial lenses? Whose voice ultimately resonates in the published text: the writer’s, the editor’s, or a hybrid born of compromise? At what point does guidance become suppression?
Drawing on recent bestsellers, this paper explores how market pressures steer fantasy toward romantasy tropes, blending subgenres for broader appeal and sidelining artistic innovation. For instance, significant revisions appear in plot and character development when comparing Sarah J. Maas’s originally self-published Queen of Glass to the traditionally published Throne of Glass, as Blooomsbury editors shifted emphasis from intricate worldbuilding and character-driven intrigue toward heightened romantic and sensual elements, reflecting broader industry demands for market friendly hybrid genres.
Building on genetic criticism of drafting processes — which reveals stark divergences between unpublished manuscripts and final versions — this analysis distinguishes the external editor-author dialogue from the internal one between a writer’s past impulses and future self-refinements. Rather than resolve these tensions, this paper identifies emergent questions: How does romantasy’s editorial filtering resist or reinforce representational voices in contemporary fantasy? In an era of algorithmic pages, can authorial resistance endure? By probing these intersections, it invites reflection on voice as a contested site of power in literary production.
Bio Note
Rebecca Ganado graduated from the University of Malta with a B.A. (Hons) in English with Communication Studies and is currently pursuing Master’s degree in Literary Studies at the same institution. She is a member of the Seen and Heard Project team, where she enjoys working on giving children’s voices a platform. She is also passionate about contemporary fantasy and wants to build a career in publishing, as well as shift its perception in academic circles, demonstrating that the genre can serve serious scholarly purposes beyond escapism or sensationalism.
Panel 3: Mad Voices
Sighing Off-key. The Blue Notes of Melancholic Deviants (Not Joining the Chorus)
Caroline Salfinger, University of Arts Linz
Abstract
Melancholics are seen as withdrawing figures, and withdrawal used to be labelled as “apolitical” for a long time. In recent years this judgement has been increasingly revised, even reversed. So, it is worth to prick up our ears and listen more closely to the melancholic lamentations, investigating the diverse ways they contain and convey the subversive potential of withdrawal to question and challenge power structures.
In order to analyse these voices, their timbre of resistance and nuances of dissent as well as their auditory impact, a special resonance chamber is created: first, literary works whose protagonists can be considered as melancholic deviants are consulted. Then the voices that can be heard in and around these works are detected and anchored in a space created by the interconnection of different fields like sociology, philosophy, history, literature and gender studies for further discussion.
In the course of this analysis how the tone of voice forms the message becomes audible. Sighing, whining, groaning, moaning: all these melancholic vocalizations are uttering dissatisfaction and the longing for something lost… while indicating that it is not possible to speak up. Distorted sounds and words, torn and wretched, make suppression noticeable. The practice of these “blue notes” as a special form of complaining thus reveals itself to be a tactic for circumventing imposed silencing; a tactic that is now of particular interest, as it is more necessary than ever to resist the pressure to keep quiet or join the chorus of normativity.
Bio Note
Caroline Salfinger (*1991 in AT) studied Fine Arts as well as Applied Cultural and Art Studies at the University of Arts Linz, where she now works as a University Assistant and is part of the PhD Research Collective. In her ongoing PhD project ‘Spaces of Solitude and Spells of Withdrawal. On Laboratories and Subversive Tactics’, she is taking selected literary figures as a starting point to investigate various spaces of individual retreat, their possible functions and characteristics.
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‘I come to speak. At last.’: Reconceptualising Madness Through First-Person Narratives
Danielle van der Merwe, Heidelberg University
Abstract
The ongoing trend of “writing back”, i.e. re-examining narrative events through the point of view of marginalised or vilified characters, has gained considerable traction when it comes to reimagining stories featuring madwomen. Whereas, in older literary texts, fragmented speech (or even a loss of speech altogether) is characteristic of mad characters (Neely 2004), twenty-first- century retellings aim to ‘restor[e] a voice, a history and an identity to those hitherto exploited, marginalised and silenced by dominant interest and ideologies’ (Widdowson 2007, 506).
By giving the madwoman the needed voice with which to clarify the intention behind her behaviour, revisionary works such as Ronald Frame’s Havisham (2004) and Lisa Klein’s Ophelia (2006) are able to provide a middle ground for the heated debate among feminist literary critics on whether or not madness can be seen as a form of silent protest.
By drawing parallels between the two works, I aim to show how these novels challenge past conceptions about madwomen and reinterpret female madness: How does the narrating madwoman use her newfound voice to construct her mad persona, both literally, through her narration, and metaphorically, through her dress? Furthermore, what role do social circumstances, i.e. female subjugation and mental health biases, play in how her madness is conceptualised?
Bio Note
Danielle van der Merwe is a PhD student, currently enrolled in Heidelberg University, Germany, and majoring in English literature. Her research focus is on literary adaptations involving madwomen – particularly narratives told through the madwoman’s perspective. The research is a continuation of her M.A. thesis titled ‘Representations of Female Madness: From Shakespeare to Dickens.’ For the last couple of years Danielle has played an active role in the department working as a literature tutor, teaching seminars and giving lectures.
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Insane or Insightful? The Lunatic Voice as Narrative Innovation and Ethical Critique in Selected Works of Joyce, Eliot, and Woolf
Jessica Meli, University of Malta
Abstract
This paper explores the concept of the “lunatic voice” in literary modernism, arguing that representations of apparent madness function not as pathological markers but as sites of narrative innovation and ethical critique. Drawing on my M.A. dissertation, I examine how modernist writers resort to characters whose perceptions, speech or consciousness cast them as outsiders to rationalist thought despite not having a clinical diagnosis, the study contends that their voices, articulate what “sane” perspectives do not or cannot express. Through close readings of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, I demonstrate how these texts do not merely depict madness but formally perform it through experimentation with fragmentation, stream of consciousness, polyphony, mythic references, and interior monologue, these texts reflect the dislocations of modernity and exposing accepted moral norms, cultural values, or notions of what is generally considered good, normal, or rational.
Rather than treating madness as a clinical condition, this study approaches it as a discursive construct informed by Michel Foucault’s conception of madness as a form of social exclusion, alongside theories of narrative ethics. The lunatic voice emerges as a mode of perception that exposes the limitations of normative reason and articulates ethical truths inaccessible to conventional perspectives. In Joyce, the rebellious consciousness of Stephen Dedalus destabilises institutional authority; in Eliot, fragmented voices enact cultural disintegration; in Woolf, then, lyrical monologues dissolve individual identity into collective consciousness. By foregrounding marginal and fragmented voices, this paper contributes to discussions of literary voice and ethical listening, proposing that modernist experimentation transforms madness into a critical strategy that both reflects and critiques the fractured realities of modernity.
Bio Note
Jessica Meli is an educator of English. She holds a BA (Honours) and a Master’s in Teaching and Learning in English and Second and Foreign Language Teaching, and is currently reading for an M.A. in Literary Studies at the University of Malta. Her research interests centre on literary modernism and its experimentation with form, consciousness, and authority. Alongside her academic research, she teaches at secondary and post-secondary levels and contributes to educational resource development as co-author of Get Ready for SEC English Literature and Unlocking English for Learners of Science. Her work reflects an ongoing commitment to bridging advanced literary scholarship and pedagogical practice.
Panel 4: Marginal Voices
Posterior Pain: Revisiting Problems with the ‘Post-‘ Prefix
Jackson Mauzé, University of Malta
Abstract
As potently as the ‘post-’ prefix evokes an inescapable quality of art and life in the 20th and 21st centuries (poststructuralism, post-humanism, post-truth), has it not become a pedagogical pain in the posterior? Taking one of its progenies as an example, postmodernism has been declared dead by scholars such as Linda Hutcheon, Levi Bryant, and Graham Harman. Yet its elemental fragmentation, reflexivity, and aversion to grand narratives remain cogent within art and discourse. Which is it, then? Is the ‘post-’ fully alive? Or undead?
Perhaps the ‘post-’ prefix deserves not eradication but precise re-presentation. In his famous explication of postmodernism, Jean-Francois Lyotard clarified the prefix to intellectually substantiate a conclusion of its antecedent, not temporally but transcendentally. Yet when Susan Bordo spoke of the contradiction posed by the prefix in its attachment to modernism, the semantic concern was not, after a manner, purely semantic. In an era defined by an increasing anti-intellectualism and ecological precarity, the academic voice, as seen with the eco-critical movement, cannot shelter in literature and lash out, as Sontag suggests, with forked interpretation. The academic voice must speak. In this case, it must be conscious of its jargon and the alienation it incurs. The history of this discourse and its relevance to the academic treatment of contemporary literature will be discussed through reference to Kurt Vonnegut, Salman Rushdie, Samantha Harvey, J.M. Coetzee, and the Artist Formerly Known As Prince.
Bio Note
Jackson Mauzé is a Literary Studies M.A. candidate at the University of Malta with a Master’s in the Liberal Arts from St. John’s College (2024) and a Bachelor’s in Anthropology from Davidson College (2016). An educator at heart, Jackson’s research examines the cultural and pedagogical architecture of moral frameworks in literature and media.
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Voicing the Margin: Polyphony, Epistemic Injustice, and the Ethics of Listening in Laila Lalami’s The Other Americans
Sarra Salhi, University of Carthage
Abstract
Scholarship on literary voice tends to focus on its thematic dimension by approaching it as a marker of identity, agency, and marginality. Yet, this content-based method of analysing the politics of voice overlooks the aesthetic mechanisms thereof. Form, no less significant than content, determines whose speech is heard, and whose testimony is dismissed. In readings of Laila Lalami’s novel The Other Americans (2019), voice is automatically studied in relation to questions of immigration, belonging, and otherness, whilst the role of the novel’s structure in regulating credibility and demanding a heedful mode of reading remains underexamined.
Drawing on Miranda Fricker’s concepts of epistemic injustice, and Lynn Hunt’s notion of imagined empathy, this paper argues that the polyphonic structure of the novel relocates the politics of voice from theme to form, playing a significant double-role that impacts both characters and readers. Immigrants, undocumented workers, racist neighbours, and even the man responsible for a Moroccan immigrant’s death are granted a space to speak. In doing so, the novel reveals an unequal distribution of credibility within its social world. Hence, Lalami invites readers to adhere to their initial role: to listen and empathize with this multitude of voices. Polyphony transcends its aesthetic purpose, serving as a strategy to rebalance power, and redistribute narrative authority by making the unheard audible, and cultivating ethical listening within the readership.
Bio Note
Sarra Salhi holds a Bachelor’s degree in Anglo-American Literature, Civilisation, and Language, and is currently a research Master’s student specializing in Cross-Cultural Studies at the Higher Institute of Languages of Tunis (ISLT), University of Carthage, Tunisia. Her scholarly interests are interdisciplinary, focusing on filmic, literary, and cultural studies to investigate how different representational modes speak to one another. Her current work delineates how aesthetic form of a novel generates its content, and informs meaning. Notably, Salhi’s work explores questions of voice, marginality, and ethical listening in relation to polyphonic storytelling in contemporary diasporic Anglophone fiction, especially in the works of North African writers.
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Liminal Voices: Between Identity and Movement across Mediterranean Shores
Jeehan Ashercook, University of Glasgow
Abstract
‘At its broadest, liminality refers to any “betwixt and between” situation or object, any in-between place or moment, a state of suspense’ (Thomassen 2014: 7)
The Mediterranean Sea extends a liminal space touching on the fringes of three continents. Migration between its shores underscores its ‘betwixt and between’ geolocation, and more importantly brings to our attention a host of liminal identities and voices.
My reference to the “liminal” draws on van Gennep (1901) and Turner’s (1969) theorisation of the term, referring to phases of transformation, often within rites of passage. Yet, rites of passage or migration both involve movement, which drives liminality. With particular attention to irregular migration, this paper considers precarious positionalities, journeys of uncertainty, and emergent liminal voices. In doing so, it engages with the Mediterranean as a geopolitical seascape that unfolds a matrixial space. Borrowing from Lichtenberg-Ettinger’s (1995) theory of the matrix as a space of negotiation between “I” and “non-I” will allow for observations concerning identity dynamics. Here, I theorise that the matrix engenders liminal identities and thereby liminal voices that must also navigate their subjectivity, relations between selfhood and otherness.
Engaging liminal voices through this theoretical lens will further guide my reading of the qasida, an ancient Arabic poetic form that traditionally explored the rigours of nomadic desert journeys, and its manipulation of voice wavering between personal, impersonal, collective, and individual synergies. This will ultimately inform a timeless mode of thinking through resistant liminal voices across history and between the Mediterranean’s shores.
Bio Note
Jeehan Ashercook is a doctoral researcher in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow where she specialises in poetry. Her research focuses on nomadic poetics while creatively and critically exploring the qasida, an ancient Arabic poetic form that traditionally concerned nomadic desert journeys. Her work engages the qasida’s contemporary capacity to shed further light on dynamics of migration and identity.
Panel 5: Faithful Voices
Translating the In-Between: Representation and Resistance in Jacob Riyeff’s The Bosom of the Father
Warren James Borg Ebejer, M.C.A.S.T.
Abstract
This paper explores the multifaceted “voice” of Henri Le Saux (Swāmi Abhishiktānānda) as presented in Jacob Riyeff’s English translation of his poetry, The Bosom of the Father: The Collected Poems of a Benedictine Mystic (2018). Framed within the symposium’s theme of representation, recognition, and resistance, the study examines how Riyeff represents a unique spiritual hybridity that merges French Benedictine monasticism with Indian Advaita (non-dual) philosophy.
Le Saux’s poetry serves as a site of resistance against rigid, dogmatic categories, utilising verse to articulate experiences that transcend traditional religious boundaries. The analysis investigates the representation of this “in-between” voice, questioning how English, a language often historically associated with colonial structures, is employed to convey a spiritual alterity that perhaps defies Western categorisation. Furthermore, the paper addresses the concept of recognition by examining whether Riyeff’s translation allows the reader to recognise the radical “otherness” of Le Saux’s mystical breakthroughs, or whether his translation domesticates these insights for a modern audience. By applying concepts from translation studies such as foreignisation and domestication, this study argues that Riyeff’s work is not a mere linguistic transfer but a vital performance of a voice that demands the recognition of a profound, shared silence across disparate ontological worlds.
Bio Note
Warren James Borg Ebejer, TOCS (b.1994), is a Lecturer at the Malta College of Arts, Science and Technology (M.C.A.S.T.). In 2012, he completed his Teaching of English as a Foreign Language (T.E.F.L.) induction course and read for a B.A. Honours (Melit.) in English in 2015. In the same year, he received his Diploma of Fellow in pianoforte playing from the Victoria College of Music and Drama, London. In 2016, he completed his P.G.C.E. (Melit.) in English, after which he read for an M.A. (Melit.) in English (Modern and Contemporary Literature and Criticism). He furthered his studies by reading for an M.A. (Melit.) in Spirituality (Carmelite Stream), receiving the Special Award at the Dean’s Awards Ceremony in 2022. As an emerging published author, his research takes an interdisciplinary approach, exploring the intersections of faith, spirituality, and literary analysis. Mr Borg Ebejer is currently reading for a PhD in Theology on the Benedictine mystic Henri Le Saux (Swāmi Abhishiktānānda) at the Faculty of Theology, University of Malta.
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A Chameleon in the Garden – Echoes of Donne in Marvell’s ‘The Garden’
Noah Galea, University of Malta
Abstract
An authority on Andrew Marvell, Nigel Smith, rightly describes the poet as a ‘chameleon’. This is because, just as Donne’s poetry may be laden with paradox, Marvell’s is filled with what scholars like James Loxley and Patrick J. McGrath would refer to as ‘echoes’ of, or ‘allusions’ to, the works of other writers. While Marvell may have been ‘private, solitary’, owing to a habit of self-reflection, the subject he was inclined to reflect upon was often other people. The notion of voice in Marvell’s work thus involves the emergence of other writers’ voices through his own poetry’s lines. Scholarship on Marvell hence commonly takes the approach of analysing the poet’s work by raising ‘intertextual questions through comparative means’.
Apart from classics like Ovid’s Metamorphoses, scholars often draw these comparisons between Marvell and his contemporaries. One such contemporary is John Donne. Donne, in his poetry, expressed a great desire to reunite with his late wife and viewed God as the sole means by which one may achieve immortality – by His alchemy, He rarefies ‘a corruptible body into immortal material’. Furthermore, Donne idealised a private space where their love may flourish and persist indefinitely. If God is the provider of immortality, then this space may be Heaven, or Eden. These biblical roots are also present in ‘The Garden’, with Laura Seymour noting ‘the garden as an Edenic space’. With this in mind, this paper aims to interpret Marvell’s ‘The Garden’ through a Donnean perspective on God, the world, and love.
Bio Note
Noah Galea is a postgraduate student in the Department of English at the University of Malta. He has a deep interest in creative writing and has been actively engaged in content writing for THINK Magazine while also teaching English to speakers of other languages. He has published creative work with ANTAE. He is currently undergoing thesis work in relation to John Donne and the topic of love, and hopes to continue nurturing his knowledge in the field of literature.
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Attending more-than-human kin: Ancestors, saviours, and the struggle for freedom in Report to Greco
Phillip Kapeleris, Maynooth University
Abstract
‘The decisive steps in my ascent were four, and each bears a sacred name: Christ, Buddha, Lenin, Odysseus’, Nikos Kazantzakis tells us in the Introduction to Report to Greco. From the first chapter, aptly titled ‘Ancestors’, we enter a world in which the author’s communion with more-than-human kin is both a central narrative device, and part of the didactic nature of the text.
This paper seeks to understand why Kazantzakis has employed these more-than-human kin in the novel – ancestors, internal voices, “gods”, saviours – and the nature of their relationship to the pursuit of freedom. It reads the novel as a search, or ‘ascent’, towards both personal and collective liberation. The author’s spiritual transcendence is foregrounded against the context of a fractured Greece, with both man and nation in the process of a grand ‘becoming’.
Written in the final years of his life as ‘not an autobiography’, I’ll attend to Kazantzakis’s polyphony of more-than-human voices. By situating both the personal and national as part of a wider movement for liberation, Kazantzakis’s universalism remains as relevant today as it did over half a century ago.
Bio Note
Phillip Kapeleris graduated with a Bachelor of Commerce (Information Systems; Human Resources and Industrial Relations) from the University of Sydney. Currently, he is completing his M.A. in English Literature at Maynooth University (Ollscoil Mhá Nuad). A former NGO leader and international consultant, his writing has appeared in print and online.
Panel 6: Communal Voices
Exploring Teachers’ Understandings of Disability through Oppressive and Anti- Oppressive Pedagogies: Α qualitative study in the Cypriot context
Chrystalla Christodoulou, University of Cyprus
Abstract
This paper explores teachers’ understandings of disability in relation to oppressive or anti-oppressive pedagogical approaches. Drawing on theoretical perspectives from Disability Studies and Disability Studies in Education, the study examines how educators conceptualise disability and how these understandings influence their attitudes toward social inclusion for individuals with disabilities.
To investigate this issue, a small sample of three teachers participated in semi-structured interviews guided by using vignettes (created by the researcher). The vignettes (social media posts, television clips, children’s books) were chosen to encourage reflection on situations related to disability, educational practices, and inclusion. The data were analysed through thematic analysis, which involved an initial coding process followed by the development of broader thematic categories. The analysis resulted in three main themes: teachers’ perceptions of disability, the perceived responsibility of the state, and teaching practices related to oppressive and anti-oppressive pedagogies.
The findings highlight several tensions between theoretical principles of anti- oppressive pedagogy and the ways in which disability is understood and addressed within educational practice. The analysis reveals both the potential and the challenges educators encounter when attempting to adopt more inclusive approaches in their teaching.
The paper concludes by discussing key challenges related to the implementation of anti-oppressive pedagogies and the broader goal of social inclusion for people with disabilities. The study also contributes to broader discussions on representation and recognition of disability in education, while highlighting the role of anti-oppressive pedagogies as forms of resistance to dominant deficit perspectives. Finally, it offers reflections and suggestions for strengthening educators’ critical engagement with disability and inclusive educational practices.
Bio Note
Chrystalla is currently completing her MA in Special and Inclusive Education at the University of Cyprus. She previously completed her Bachelor’s degree in Primary Education at the same institution. Her research focuses on disability studies, inclusive education, and anti-oppressive pedagogies. She plans to begin her doctoral studies in September 2026, continuing her research on disability and social justice in education.
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‘On vous met le feu’: Collective Voice Setting the Stadium on Fire in Marseille
Phil Bonjour, University of Limerick
Abstract
This paper takes the chant ‘On vous met le feu’ (‘We set you on fire’), from supporters of Marseille football club (Olympique de Marseille), as an entry point into the study of collective voice as intensification. Based on sonic ethnography conducted in the Vélodrome Stadium, I argue that football chanting operates as a fluctuating configuration of structural excess and fragile chorality through which a collective subject is not expressed but ignited.
Clameur names moments of deregulated vocal force, when voice exceeds linguistic containment and becomes bodily pressure. Chorality organises this excess into patterned coordination, tending toward monodic fusion. In Marseille, however, unity is never pure: antiphonal exchanges between groups and “virages” (curva) sustain rivalry within cohesion, producing a collective voice that is both unified and internally differentiated.
The metaphor of fire captures this dynamic. Vocal incandescence asserts territorial presence and mutual recognition, transforming the stadium into an affective field of intensified belonging. Yet such saturation also generates “phonophobia,” where the density of collective sound tests the limits of identification with the crowd.
By analysing football chanting as voice set ablaze, this paper argues that collective voice is neither stable nor singular but a volatile process through which communities stage, negotiate, and contest their own cohesion.
Bio Note
Phil Bonjour is a PhD candidate at the Centre for the Study of Popular Music and Popular Culture, University of Limerick (Ireland), where he investigates football chants in French stadia. Trained in sociology (EHESS, Paris) and musicology (Conservatoire de Paris), Phil’s research interests include collective vocalization and the music history of European spa towns. He won several prizes at international conferences and he has been awarded scholarships by the Irish Research Council and the University of Limerick.
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The Voices of Martinus Scriblerus
Melissa Mawdsley, University of Malta
Abstract
During the Enlightenment, London’s literary coteries and salons fostered collaborative exchange. Among them was the Scriblerus Club, whose members included Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, John Gay, Thomas Parnell, Dr John Arbuthnot, and Robert Harley. While each of these writers achieved individual success, they also collectively fashioned the fictional persona of ‘Martinus Scriblerus’ in the collaboratively, yet unequally, co-written text titled The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus, producing a shared voice that emerged from multiple writers and developed into a distinct authorial identity.
This paper examines the “Scriblerian” voice from two perspectives. First, it considers how the members’ individual satirical styles converge, through a shared commitment to the parody of scholarly pedantry, to create a unified voice and style. This anticipates the contemporary idea of ‘distributed collaborative writing,’ which, like Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, illustrates how authorship is not the product of a singular consciousness, but the emergent effect of an interacting network of human and non-human agents.
It then traces how the Scriblerian voice is revived by individual members. In 1729, Pope incorporated Scriblerus into the framing of the Dunciad Variorum, demonstrating how the shared persona is re-performed within individual authorship. Drawing on Judith Butler’s theory of performativity, this paper argues that the Scriblerian identity is not anchored to its origins, but sustained through citational performance.
This paper therefore argues that the Scriblerian voice emerges from a distributed mode of collaborative writing that fuses multiple voices into a single persona, which endures as a reiterative performance. I conclude by suggesting that analysing the Scriblerian composite voice might give insights into contemporary discussions on literary authority and authorship in today’s AI and technology-driven culture, in which the question of “who (or what) is speaking?” is dominant.
Bio Note
Melissa Mawdsley is currently reading for an M.Phil. in English at the University of Malta. She holds a B.A. Hons. and an M.A. degree in English from the University of Malta. Her research interests include collaborative writing, electronic literature, AI-literature, digital humanities, poststructuralism, and posthumanism.
Panel 7: Revisionary Voices
Voices in Silence: Anthony Burgess’s The Clockwork Condition Manuscript
Alessia Gentile, University of Florence
Abstract
This paper examines Anthony Burgess’ unfinished and unpublished manuscript The Clockwork Condition (1972-1973) as a case study for understanding how literary voice can emerge precisely through its silencing.
The manuscript remained inaccessible for decades due to a combination of authorial, editorial, and market decisions that redirected Burgess’s project and prevented its publication. This enforced marginalization, however, paradoxically foregrounds its critical significance: the traces of the creative process – cancellations, variants, incomplete passages – reveal a voice that is richly expressive and intellectually engaged. By attending to this previously unheard voice, this paper demonstrates that unpublished and/or unfinished texts are not mere drafts or incomplete experiments, but vital manifestations of an author’s thought.
The circumstances of The Clockwork Condition’s invisibility illuminate how structural and practical factors shape what is heard and what is silenced, underscoring the importance of archival recovery. The manuscript contributes more than an “unpublished text” to Burgess’s corpus: it restores interpretive possibilities which had long been unavailable and offers new insights into A Clockwork Orange (1962 UK; 1963 US), the novel that brought Burgess lasting fame. The Clockwork Condition exemplifies how the interplay between suppression and expression can enhance our understanding of literary voice. The case shows that silencing does not diminish a text’s significance; rather, it can amplify its interpretive potential, revealing the complex dynamics of creativity, authority, and cultural forces in the construction of literary legacy.
Bio Note
Alessia Gentile is a PhD student in English Literature at the University of Florence (Italy), where she also completed a specialization in Print and Digital Publishing in 2023. Her doctoral research focuses on Anthony Burgess’s literary writing process through the lens of genetic criticism. Her work combines close textual analysis with archival research to explore questions related to the cognitive processes involved in the act of writing (and rewriting). In 2024-25, she held a research fellowship in English language at the University of Ferrara (Italy), and for three years (2021-2024) she taught Digital Culture at the University of Florence. She is Section Editor of LEA – Lingue e Letterature d’Oriente e d’Occidente, and member of the editorial boards of Studi irlandesi, A Journal of Irish Studies and Journal of Early Modern Studies. Her research interests include English literature, modern manuscript studies, digital humanities, and the history of the book and publishing.
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Recursive Voices: Tracing the Roots of American Psycho
Sherwin Shibu, Maynooth University
Abstract
The question of whose voice rings loudest in creation is one that has often gone unexplored. The prevalent idea seems to emphasise, or take for granted, the complete autonomy of the artist over the art he produces. It seems worth asking how true this idea really is. When one piece of art begins to mirror another with eerie similarity, and when a chronology of such art expresses the same narrative logic, carried over by a returning archetypal structure… when such a link cannot be denied, how difficult does it become to presume the artist’s autonomy and volition over what they create?
My paper examines this phenomenon within Bret Easton Ellis’s magnum opus, American Psycho, arguing that this book emerges not as a solitary burst of postmodern angst and creativity, but as tied inextricably to a body of art that spans from the late Victorian era to early and transitional Modernist eras, with roots in Hellenic era art. What returns in American Psycho is the narrative logic and archetypal structure that deals with key themes such as the aesthetic bargain, the dual self, and the price of creation. It is argued that these tensions make themselves prevalent once again due to the returning circumstances in the Zeitgeist, where art helps mediate and reflect the conditions of one era.
Using the work of key thinkers such as Harold Bloom, Walter Benjamin and Linda Hutcheon, the phenomenon of how art is produced, reproduced, and received, and the subsequent implication this has on the idea of artistic autonomy will be explored.
Bio Note
This paper draws upon my supervised PhD project, which I am to commence in the University of Galway with Dr Irina Ruppo in 2026/7.
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Authenticity Beyond Equivalence: Translating Han Kang into English, German, and French
Lucille Schäfer, University of Bonn
Abstract
Following Han Kang’s reception of the Nobel Prize in Literature, renewed global attention to her work has revived concerns in Korea about the quality (or lack thereof) to be found in the translations of her novels. Such debates often focus on additions, omissions, and textual changes on a literal level. However, they generally overlook a broader question: how a writer’s voice – and the overall meaning of a text – is rendered across languages.
To remedy this, I examine how Han Kang’s authorial voice is translated and transformed in English, German, and French. Using a descriptive and comparative approach, I examine two of Han Kang’s books in translation: Deborah Smith’s English rendering of The White Book (2016) and e. yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris’s English translation of We Do Not Part (2021), as well as their respective German and French counterparts. The analysis considers lexical choice, syntactic structure, and narrative rhythm, asking how translators negotiate the tension between formal equivalence and equivalence in effect. It also foregrounds the role of individual translator decisions alongside broader tendencies within particular target languages.
Rather than treating authenticity as strict linguistic equivalence, the paper conceptualizes translated voice as a hybrid form shaped by both author and translator. While complete equivalence may be unattainable, translation can amplify, transform, and enrich a writer’s voice. By highlighting the creative and often ingenious strategies translators employ, this study argues that translation does not merely distort literary voice but enables it to resonate across linguistic and cultural boundaries.
Bio Note
Lucille Schäfer is a PhD student in Korean Studies at the University of Bonn (Germany) and recipient of a doctoral scholarship from the German National Merit Foundation. In her dissertation project she examines how notions of national literature and world literature are represented and negotiated in contemporary Korean literary writing, translation, and discourse. She has received a MA in Transcultural Studies from the University of Heidelberg as well as a BA in Comparative Literature and French from a joint degree program at the universities of Mainz and Dijon. Additionally, she was a fellow of the Korean Language Training program offered by the Korea Foundation.
Panel 8: Women’s Voices
Salt and Silence: Fiction and the Voices of Southern-European Mediterranean Women
Tessielle Saliba, University of Malta
Abstract
This paper examines representations of Southern-European women in Elena Ferrante’s The Lost Daughter and Elif Shafak’s The Island of Missing Trees to explore how gender oppression operates through intersecting systems of patriarchy, religion, and family honour across Southern Europe and the Mediterranean. It considers how women’s voices are regulated, fragmented, or silenced within these cultural frameworks, and how contemporary fiction becomes a space for articulation and recognition. It argues that religious moral traditions, alongside patriarchal structures, produce a distinctive configuration of female subordination that shapes not only women’s lived realities but also the terms under which they are permitted to have a voice: that is, to speak and be heard.
While Southern Europe and the Mediterranean have often been constructed through dominant Northern European discourses as culturally “other,” less attention has been paid to how these narratives intersect with gendered silencing. Drawing on feminist theory, including Simone de Beauvoir and Sylvia Walby, alongside European feminist scholarship by Sandra Ponzanesi and Gianmaria Colpani, the study situates the region within a semi-peripheral framework where modernisation collides with enduring patriarchal norms. Through close textual analysis, it demonstrates how contemporary women writers reflect and critique these constraints, revealing patterns of moral surveillance, domestic control, and idealised sacrifice, while foregrounding narrative voice and fragmentation as strategies through which marginalised female experiences are reclaimed, positioning literature as a space and voice of resistance against dominant cultural discourses.
Bio Note
Tessielle Saliba graduated from the University of Malta with a B.A. (Hons.) in English in 2022 and a Master’s in Teaching and Learning in English in 2025. She is currently reading for an M.A. in English Literary Studies at the University of Malta. Alongside her studies, she works as a full-time English teacher in a state secondary school. Her research interests include feminist theory, intersectionality, queer theory, and Mediterranean studies, particularly in relation to questions of identity, gender, and cultural representation in literature.
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Fantasy is Female: Analysing the Representation and Value of the Feminine Voice in High Fantasy Literature
Ella Nordfeldt, University of Malta
Abstract
Female characters are princesses in towers and damsels in distress – or at least they used to be. Now they are becoming heroines. The heroine within high fantasy changes the fundamentals of what it means to be a hero and replaces the patriarchal view of a single victorious hero with a view of the heroine who is victorious through the support of her community.
The discussion of the female voice, and the value of that voice, will be furthered by looking at the fantasy works of Rebecca Yarros, namely her Empyrean Series. I will highlight the importance of the feminine voice brought to life in High Fantasy through the leading female protagonist. The works of Patricia Pender, Marina Warner, and Lori M. Campbell, all of whom work in analysing leading female characters in different media, have laid the foundation for the context of this paper, which will further their reach into High Fantasy literature.
This research will discuss the way in which these characters are represented, including gender constructs and disabilities; the value they hold as role models and as a means of expression of female empowerment; and the way in which they break the cage of the hero and replace it with the court of the heroine by reshaping Joseph Campbell’s patriarchal view of the hero in favour of a feminist view of what it means to be a heroine.
Bio Note
Ella Nordfeldt has recently graduated from the University of Malta with a B.A. in Classics and English and is currently reading for her M.A. in English (Literary Studies). Her areas of interest and research lay primarily in feminist theory, antiquity in literature, and contemporary fantasy literature. In her B.A, she worked closely with the Department of English Students Association (DESA) and held the titles of President and Vice-President. She is currently a full-time teacher of English Language and Literature at St. Michael Foundation and is interested in furthering her studies and career within teaching literature.
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Political Witness or Prescient Storyteller? Reflections on the Atwoodian Voice
Daniel Cini, University of Malta
Abstract
What do we understand by “authorial voice”? What is its function? Is it artistic or political? And how does a writer find or construct their “voice”? These are some of the questions this paper engages with in relation to Margaret Atwood, focusing on what critics have come to define as the “Atwoodian” character of her voice.
Through an exploration of selected writing pieces, I discuss Atwood’s meta-reflections on “authorial voice”, and how she creates the “illusion” of a voice through authorial ploys that retain the oral qualities of storytelling. The marked distinctions that Atwood draws between the oral and the literary traditions are expanded on here.
This paper then examines how Atwood actively invokes the voices of past storytellers, often subverting dominant narratives and reclaiming lost voices. I also reflect on how her distinctive tone, described by readers as ‘deadpan’ and ‘sardonic’, is central to constructing this Atwoodian framework. While her inventive writing, both literary and non-fiction, is marked by a consistent engagement with and examination of the power politics of gender, history, and social institutions, Atwood challenges the idea that the writer must be a ‘political agent’, arguing that this could lead to censorship or a writer becoming a mere mouthpiece.
Finally, I consider how Atwood’s “voice” serves as a form of historiographic reflection, bearing witness to political, social, and environmental issues, and question whether this has been the foundational premise why hers has endured.
Bio Note
Daniel Cini is a PhD candidate with the Department of English at the University of Malta. His research interests include the politics of storytelling, transmedia storyworlds, persona studies, and the interplay between literature, media, and celebrity culture. Daniel is a Senior Manager with the National Literacy Agency (Malta), where he develops and coordinates educational programmes, initiatives, and campaigns that promote reading and writing among children and young adults. Daniel is the author of two children’s picture-books.
Panel 9: Irish Voices
The Irish Voice Shrouded in Gothic Tales
Shannon Gila, Maynooth University
Abstract
The island of Ireland was subjected to British colonial rule for eight-hundred long, tumultuous years. This has left the Irish state marked by the legacy of colonialism, a bruise which is undeniably prevalent within the literature produced in this country. When considering some of the most famous voices of the Irish state, one may think of the vast popular collections of W.B. Yeats, James Joyce, and Seamus Heaney. These venerated writers frequently address the “Irish Question” explicitly within their work, often setting their writing within the alluring Irish landscape. However, does looking at a more subversive genre offer a deeper, more critical, insight into the reality of postcolonial Ireland?
The Gothic novel, which gained great popularity in the late-eighteenth century, became a fascination across the isle of Ireland, with numerous Protestant authors turning to it in order to express their frame of mind. This led to the production of a myriad of haunting stories, influenced by an underlying anxiety festering within the spirit of these writers. Therefore, does the Gothic genre offer a more authentic narrative for the Irish experience? And does it make room for the voice of the marginalised Irish experience?
This paper will showcase how the colonial legacy of Ireland influenced multiple authors to imbue their writing with the religious, political, and social fears that were rampant throughout Irish society. By utilising the Gothic form to express these anxieties, it provided writers with a weapon to combat the forces that were supressing their voice. Through examining popular Irish Gothic texts such as Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, I aim to trace the Irish voice through Gothic fiction and highlight how it provided a platform for the marginalised and silenced.
Bio Note
Shannon Gila (She/Her) is an Irish student currently pursuing a Masters in Literatures of Engagement at Maynooth University. She has achieved an Upper Class Honours in her Bachelor of Arts, studying English and History. Her research interests include: Feminist Theory, Ecocriticism, and Early Modern Europe. Her current research project is focused on examining eighteenth century Irish Gothic fiction through a postcolonial lens.
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Guthanna na Mbán: Reclaiming Female Voices in Irish State Law and Literature
Eileen Jenkins, Maynooth University
Abstract
This presentation will explore the reclamation of female agency in contemporary Irish literature through an analysis of immersive texts that deconstruct historical and systemic trauma of the recent Irish past. Ernest Renan famously characterized the Irish as ‘an essentially feminine race’ (Cairns & Richards, 47). Renan’s historical framing did not serve women; Irish women were marginalized by all administrations, from the colonialists to the subsequent patriarchal institutions of church and state. Women and girls’ voices were systemically silenced by discriminatory legislations, labelled ‘offenders’ by being pregnant and imprisoned in mother and baby institutions. These women’s voices were never heard or listened to; they were denied a voice. In 1987, the legal status of illegitimacy was abolished.
This analysis will extend across the border to Northern Ireland, examining how religion, political violence and layered inequalities during the troubles further oppressed female subjects. Using a theoretical framework focused on the female gaze and the physical manifestations of trauma-ranging from Anna Burns ‘anti-orgasms’ in Milkman to Kimberley Campenello’s experimental poetics in MOTHERBABYHOME-, with excerpts from Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, this presentation argues that contemporary literature serves as a crucial site for witnessing and accountability. The Irish language will be used in the presentation. These writers give voice to narratives previously never uttered or suppressed by officialdom, a voice that challenges collective memory of what it means to be Irish and female.
Bio Note
Eileen Jenkins holds a BA in English & Equality Studies from IADT Dublin. She is currently an MA student at Maynooth University studying Literatures of Engagement. Her research interests include colonial and post-colonial literature, Irish literature, feminist theory, and contemporary poetry. Her current research examines the poetics of displacement, identity, and appropriation in prose poetry. As a mature student, Eileen brings a unique perspective to her research informed by personal experience and academic pursuit. Having lived through significant social and political changes impacting women’s lives, she is keen to add her voice to the collective.
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Confessions, Memoirs and Women’s Experience during the Greek and Irish Civil Wars
Anatoli Sofra, Maynooth University
Abstract
In this paper, I would like to compare the accounts of women who participated in the Greek and Irish civil wars. Specifically, while researching for my MA’s dissertation topic, I identified the lack of documented women’s accounts that relate to their participation and experience of both the Irish and the Greek civil war. Women have been an integral part of IRA with the Cumann na mBan branch and of the Greek Democratic Army; however, their experiences have not been properly documented; indeed, their voices and actions have been overlooked for many years by historians.
Using a Marxist-feminist lens, I would like to tap into their experiences and explore the similarities as well as differences which stem from the two countries being objects of direct or indirect – as in the case of Greece – colonialism, of social inequality, and also of the authority and control of the Church, either the Catholic, Protestant or Orthodox. Ultimately, I will briefly look into the aftermath of these civil wars and whether women’s place in society was affected or instead regressed into more conservative pre-revolutionary roles, and what the implications of this regression might be.
Bio Note
Anatoli Sofra holds a BA in English and American Literature (The American College of Greece). She is an MA student in Literatures of Engagement at Maynooth, Ireland. She has published a poetry collection in Greek, Arnisikiria (which means Veto; Ars Nocturna, 2025), published numerous self-published zines, and participated in two collective poetry books. She is also a spoken word artist under the name ‘anatoli’.
Panel 10: Unheard Voices
Queer Isolation across Media: Failure and Discomfort
Antonio Grech, University of Malta
Abstract
The term “queer” alongside queer theory necessitates frustration as the fluid standard which brings about liberation in its reading. Queer readings do away with the ‘silent presumptions’ which have been constructed to satisfy normative qualities across various identity-fracturing discourses. Sedgwick questions whether the richest junctures must be those where ‘everything means the same thing’, and reveals the possibilities of expressing personal histories which have been riddled with exclusion and violence.
In this allowance for the self to exist and be explored outside of these presumptions, I ask what it means for a medium to speak. In response, I argue that in representing marginalised individuals, failure and discomfort speak. By reading queer isolation across various mediums, such as Iain Banks’ The Wasp Factory (1984), Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands / La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975), and Celeste (2018), I will examine how, through isolation, these mediums flourish, and queer fracture becomes a structuring of the self which is self-sufficient and accomplishing, even in the midst of failure.
Bio Note
Antonio Grech is a student at the University of Malta who has graduated with a Bachelors of Arts in English (Honours) with Psychology and is now reading for a Master’s degree in English Literary Studies. His areas of interest include creative writing, horror, and queer theory, as well as contemporary and postmodernism fiction (which was the focus of his Bachelor’s dissertation). He is currently an Editor for ANTAE, an internationally refereed creative writing journal which publishes all kinds of work written in English.
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Token Voices: The Gap Between Visibility and Authenticity in Queer Literary Characters
Jovana Mladenovic, University of Malta
Abstract
The publishing industry has made significant strides toward queer visibility in literature, proven by the rising number of queer protagonists and minor characters in contemporary literature. While encouraging, this must not be mistaken for true progress. To practice genuine equality, we must hold these characters to the same rigorous standards of attention, respect, and critical analysis routinely applied to heterosexual characters. Therefore, we must ask ourselves: Does representation matter if it is not done with authenticity? Do well-intentioned inclusive authors inadvertently perpetuate the very stereotypes they seek to dismantle?
This paper argues that visibility alone is not sufficient for progress. Many of these characters function as what this paper terms ‘token voices’, who function as narrative devices whose queerness is performatively highlighted yet not sufficiently explored. The paper focuses on the phenomenon of flattening the richness of queer experience into stereotypical tropes that reinforce, instead of dismantle, heterosexual norms. It will show how many queer characters in literature remain static and flat throughout the story, with their only function being comedic relief. By comparing these tokenised figures with examples of authentic narratives, this paper aims to show that queer literature should not merely settle for inclusion, but strive for authenticity and representing queer characters with character depth and autonomy who exist and speak beyond the confines of their sexuality.
Bio Note
Jovana Mladenovic is a postgraduate student of English literature at the University of Malta. She has a Bachelor’s degree in Germanic linguistics, culture and literature from Université Libre de Bruxelles, as well as a minor degree in information and communication. Her academic interests include queer theory, revisionist literature, mythology, fantasy, and feminist literature.
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Silenced Subjects: Recovering the Black Voice
Martha Tonna, University of Malta
Abstract
This paper argues that the Black voice in literary history cannot be defined through a binary of silence and expression, but by regimes of mediation that determine who may speak, under what conditions, how speech is framed, and whether it is recognised as being authoritative. Rather than looking at silence as an absence, I argue that Black subjectivity has been intentionally regulated within abolitionist frameworks, structurally ventriloquised within colonial discourse, and only later rearticulated through acts of postcolonial linguistic resistance. Therefore, voice appears as a contested desire produced within transatlantic circuits of power rather than as an innate manifestation of identity.
I place these dynamics into a diasporic model, based on Paul Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic (1993), wherein Black subjectivity arises through migration throughout the Atlantic region rather than inside a single national tradition. Using Frantz Fanon’s study of colonial language and subject creation and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s examination of subaltern speech, I argue that the Black literary voice is always relational, both enabled by and resistant to dominant institutions. Thus, through acts of narrative negotiation, the Black voice is simultaneously aestheticised, disciplined, and transformed, making it historically contingent. These theoretical frameworks will be applied to Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), which performs strategic self-authorship within the moral and editorial constraints of abolitionist discourse. Other novels such as Oroonoko (1688), where black eloquence is mediated and contained within colonial narration, and A Tempest (1969), in which Caliban transforms imposed language into explicit revolutionary defiance, will be touched upon but not closely analysed. By applying theory to texts, I will map a trajectory from ventriloquism to linguistic reclamation, revealing voice as a site of ongoing struggle within the Black world.
Bio Note
Martha Tonna holds a B.A. in English and Psychology and is currently pursuing an M.A. in Literary Studies at the University of Malta. Her research interests include postcolonial theory, African and diasporic literature, and the representation of marginalised voices in the Atlantic world. She is particularly interested in questions of narrative authority, mediation, and the literary construction of the Black voice under slavery and colonialism.
Panel 11: Sensorial Voices
The Visual Voice in Shaun Tan’s The Arrival
Monika Genkova, University of Malta
Abstract
This inquiry begins with what might be termed the “silent turn” in contemporary visual narrative: the capacity of wordless media to articulate complex experiences of displacement and marginalisation. Central to this turn is the tension between the hegemonic authority of written language and the “voiceless utterances” of the subordinate. If voice is traditionally defined through linguistic mastery and the ability to be “heard”, how can a wordless text assert agency and recognition?
What does it mean, then, to locate a voice within the ‘sepia-toned silence’ of Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (2006)? I argue that Tan’s use of a purely visual medium does not signify an absence of voice but rather functions as a strategic form of resistance against the exclusionary nature of dominant languages. In this sense, the graphic novel does not merely represent a migrant’s story; it adopts a “visual voice” that mirrors the immigrant’s lived experience of navigating indecipherable alphabets, for example.
I pursue this argument through an analysis of Tan’s panel structure and surrealist iconography, which demands an ethical act of “listening” through witnessing. These visual strategies, I propose, enact a mode of communication that transcends linguistic barriers, allowing for a collective resonance that remains unaligned with any single hegemonic frequency. Ultimately, The Arrival demonstrates that silence can be a powerful instrument of presence, providing a medium where the underrepresented voice becomes thinkable without the need for translation.
Bio Note
Monika Genkova is a first-year Master of Arts student in the course English (Literary Studies) at the University of Malta. Her bachelor’s degree in Theatre and Drama was obtained in 2014 at the University of South Wales.
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‘Guilt will confine you, torture you, and destroy you’: A Study into the Manifestations of Guilt in Characters of Horror Media
Katrina Fenech, University of Malta
Abstract
Guilt within the horror genre foregrounds a space where the breakdown of reality, as well as of a character’s psyche, can lead to an emergence of multiple voices within a singular character. Placing Konami’s Silent Hill 2 Remake and Poe’s short stories ‘The Black Cat’ and ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ alongside Freud’s theories of the uncanny and Kristeva’s theory of abjection, this paper analyses the effects of a character’s crimes on their psyche.
This study shall read how each character’s reaction to the guilt differs to the others’, even though they are elicited from similar crimes. In this manner emerge the differences between, as well as the strengths of, their voices. These are evaluated through how these characters react to the guilt, and whether they surrender to the guilt or resolve it. These motions are at work through auditory elements in ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’ and physical ones in Silent Hill 2 Remake and ‘The Black Cat’.
This paper takes a closer look at the voice of the character before the crime is committed, during the events of the narrative, and once they confront the guilt, creating a linear timeline of the transformations and allowing for an understanding of how the “original” voice is moulded into a “new” voice. The chosen texts would not only allow for a deeper analysis of these ideas but also approach them transmedially, therefore bringing in an element of universal of guilt into this study.
Bio Note
Katrina Fenech has recently graduated with a B.A. in English and Theatre Studies and is currently reading for an M.A. in Literary Studies. Her main areas of study lie within horror media studies, psychoanalytic theory, feminist theory, and gothic studies, with a specific interest in the intersection between the four abovementioned currents. During her undergraduate programme she spent a year working as a TEXT editor within the Department of English Student Association (DESA), and is hoping to gain more editing experience in the future.
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(Re)voicing Trauma: Narrative Agency and Cinematic Stabilization in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and its 1985 cinematic adaptation
Mahmoud Lamloumi, University of Carthage
Abstract
Through a comparative and intermedial framework, this paper examines the construction, mediation, and representation of the trauma-inflected voice in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple and its 1985 cinematic adaptation directed by Steven Spielberg.
This paper scrutinizes the mediation of trauma and its inscription within literary and filmic modalities by examining the affordances of each medium and its implications on conceptions of wounded testimonial discourse. This paper analyzes the narrative strategies in both the novel and the film to ultimately elucidate the ways in which trauma manifests, both according to, and beyond the conventions of, each medium. Beyond fidelity criticism, the study investigates, on the one hand, the ways in which the traumatized voice is inherently linked to Celie’s retrospective self-narration, fragmented temporality, and seemingly-nonsensical discourses.
On the other hand, this inherent instability is framed within a melodramatic and coherent narrative design that substitutes Celie’s authoritative confessional voice with an implied authorial presence constituted by editing, visual composition, and sound design. The epistolary voice in the letters is substituted by voiceovers that are integrated into an emotionally-charged visual mediation, guided by orchestral swells, close-ups, and montages that concretize the trauma for viewers. This way, the process of adapting Walker’s text and its fragmentary traumatized voice into a cinematic form recasts self-narration as an audiovisual spectacle mediated for the spectator to examine on verbal, visual, and auditory levels.
Ultimately, this paper argues that trauma is inscribed in the novel’s narrative structure via fragmentation and Celie’s narrative agency, whereas, in the film, it is stabilized through a cinematic lens that reasserts narratorial authority and enforces melodramatic order and structural coherence.
Bio Note
Mahmoud Lamloumi is a Tunisian MA student specializing in Cross Cultural Studies. He earned his Bachelor’s degree in English Language, Literature and Civilization from the Institut Supérieur des Langues de Tunis (ISLT), University of Carthage. His research interests center on intermedial texts and crossmodality, with a particular focus on cinematic form and adaptation studies.
Panel 12: Silent Voices
The Development of Voice from Voicelessness in Ghassan Kanafani’s Returning to Haifa
Darragh Clarke, Maynooth University
Abstract
Historically, when systems of power marginalise certain communities, they strip them of their agency, silencing them in effect. This then begs the question: how can we develop voices from a place of voicelessness? This is the challenge that Ghassan Kanafani takes on in his celebrated novella Returning to Haifa. Whilst scholarship on the text has tended to focus on its more overt commentary, the aesthetic make-up of the work has been comparatively understudied. By exploring the narrative and formal conventions of the text, alongside its numerous carefully constructed literary devices, this paper examines its use of aesthetics to illustrate a pathway from silenced oppression to voiceful agency.
Through close readings that focus on the text’s stylistic composition, two critical arguments about the dichotomy of voice and voicelessness can be presented. Firstly, through a Hauntological lens that incorporates aspects of affect theory, we can examine how shame and trauma produce a self-policing of silence within oppressed communities. Secondly, a Fanonian analysis is used to explore how narrow sectarian or nationalist perspectives can be overcome and replaced with a compassion-based adherence to the mutual recognition of shared humanity. Ultimately, I argue that, through Kanafani’s nuanced political aesthetic sensibilities, Returning to Haifa advances universally applicable humanist principles to the perpetually necessary process of decolonisation.
Bio Note
Darragh Clarke is a 2025 Irish Research Council Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship Awardee. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in History and English, and a MA in Literatures of Engagement, both from Maynooth University. His dissertation is entitled ‘Ethical Recognition in the Aesthetic Development of the Palestinian Novel’ and focuses on the stylistic evolution of Palestinian fiction from the post-Nakba period to the modern day. Darragh’s broader literary interests include Marxism, Irish Modernist writers and aesthetic experimentation in film and tv.
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The Absent “You”: Silence and Narrative Isolation in Colm Tóibín’s One Minus One
Domenico Ianuale, University of Naples ‘Parthenope’
Abstract
In Colm Tóibín’s short story One Minus One, the narrative voice operates at the paradoxical intersection of speech and erasure. This research argues that the protagonist’s silence functions not as a failure of communication, but as a deliberate literary strategy through which unspoken trauma and existential exile are registered. While the story adopts a deceptively conversational tone, it is fundamentally characterized by the absence of a conventional narratee. The protagonist addresses an implied “you” — an absent ex-lover — effectively turning his voice into a self-reflective void that reinforces his isolation.
This work further explores how such a narrative structure functions as a mechanism of isolation, where the act of speaking only further highlights the protagonist’s displacement within what Edward Soja (1996) defines as a geographical and emotional “Thirdspace”. Central to this reading is the queer liminality of the text, where sexual identity is never explicitly articulated but remains relegated to an ‘epistemology of secrecy’ (Sedgwick 2008). The analysis suggests that this silence is deeply political: an imposed framework that regulates expression and renders marginalized voices precarious.
By attending to these voiceless utterances, the research examines how Tóibín gives narrative weight to the deliberate erasure of personal history. Ultimately, One Minus One reveals that the spaces where voice is absent can be as powerful as speech itself, offering a profound reflection on the integrity of human subjectivity in the face of systemic and personal silencing.
Bio Note
Domenico Ianuale is a PhD candidate in Studi Linguistici, Terminologici e Interculturali at “Parthenope” University of Naples. He obtained his Master’s degree in English and Anglo-American Studies at Sapienza University of Rome, with a thesis entitled ‘Language on Trial, Bodies at Stake: Legal and Linguistic Representations of the Female Other in the Pendle Witch Trials’. His research interests include discourse analysis and pragmatics, as well as postcolonial, feminist, and queer literature.
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Can You Hear Me?
Dylan Gough, Maynooth University
Abstract
I would love to explore how voice is considered both weapon and blessing. In many instances we use our voice as a way to present ourselves, whether that is introducing ourselves or clarifying our presence. Whichever way we choose to use our voices, it shapes power and identity, both our own and collectively. When a voice goes unnoticed it is usually due to the audience choosing not to listen. This silence is treated as a convenient dismissal for the speaker; whether ignoring the speaker was a deliberate or accidental coincidence, it will always be seen as a response. The response of silence can in many cases reinforce the main hegemonic ideologies, but who decides which silences are tolerated? Is it us?
I plan to use poetry as a medium for exploring voice. Langston Hughes’s ‘I, too’ and Maya Angelou’s ‘Still I Rise’ are able to clearly show the author trying to reassert power and identity as they had been dismissed. The authors experienced a silencing of their own, whether that was being removed from the table or reclaiming their voice lost in history. ‘Until the Lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter’ (Chinua Achebe). I plan to explore and tease out at what point not listening becomes a choice, and whether questioning leads to a resolution.
Bio Note
My name is Dylan Gough and I’m a MA student from Maynooth University
Panel 13: Wounded Voices
Gifting, Stealing, Taking and Keeping: The Voice of Possession in Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep
Sarah Farrugia, University of Malta
Abstract
Post-Holocaust novels still feature as part of the contemporary literary landscape, despite the suffering etched into the collective memory of those who were directly or indirectly affected by it. Contemporary post-Holocaust novels explore the tension between the compulsion to represent the voice of collective and individual trauma and victimhood, and the urgency for this voice to recede into history due to the discomfort evoked through the act of remembering.
The focus of this essay is the former: victimhood is a burden and responsibility, and its representation brings with it personal, social and political implications. Drawing on Marianne Hirsch’s notion of post-memory as well as Anne Rothe’s discussion surrounding vicarious victimhood, the purpose of the essay is to explore the framing of post-Holocaust victimhood in the novel The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden.
In the novel, post-Holocaust victimhood is aligned with property ownership, centring around the main setting of the novel: a house in Overijssel, a rural Dutch province. Within post-war Europe, the setting presents the idea that claims to victimhood, rather than being assessed through the binaries of Jewish versus non-Jewish (as well as belonging to marginalised groups targeted by the Nazi regime), are negotiated through literal definitions of belonging and ownership of property. This is re-negotiated in the novel through a pre- versus post-war perspective. Therefore, the aim is to assess the implications of this reframing of the voice of victimhood and how it reshapes the genre in terms of redefining ownership and memory in contemporary post-Holocaust novels.
Bio Note
Sarah Farrugia is a mother, wife, teacher and current MA (English – Literary Studies) student at the University of Malta. Her area of interest centres on horror, the supernatural, trauma, victimhood and memory in contemporary novels and films, particularly as juxtaposed in the field of children and young adult fiction. She is currently an editor with ANTAE, an international journal of creative writing (www.um.edu.mt/antae).
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Voices from the Wound: Madness and Trauma in Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life
Claudio Favazza, University of Florence
Abstract
This paper examines the problem of voice and subjectivity in Martin Crimp’s Attempts on Her Life (1997), a play that destabilises dominant medical and cultural constructions of madness. Drawing on Shoshana Felman’s argument (Writing and Madness, 2003) that madness must find its own mode of expression beyond rational discourse, the paper argues that Crimp’s text stages the emergence of a “mad voice” that speaks through trauma and fragmentation.
The play centres on Annie, a protagonist who never appears on stage and whose identity is never embodied but assembled through a proliferating chorus of speakers who attempt to define, narrate, and appropriate her, yet never coalesce into a coherent narrative. Rather, their statements accumulate in a chaotic assemblage of discourses, advertising language, political rhetoric, economic terminology, and fragmented testimony that destabilise any fixed account of Annie’s identity.
I argue that this polyphonic disorder does not silence the protagonist but becomes the means through which her traumatic experience is communicated and understood. By immersing the audience in this unstable discursive environment, Attempts on Her Life turns the proliferation of discourses into a relational structure through which trauma becomes perceptible.
This resonates with Cathy Caruth’s idea (Unclaimed Experience, 1996) that trauma is a ‘speaking wound’: an experience that cannot be fully integrated into one’s narrative but becomes accessible through witnessing. The play thus transforms fragmentation into a performative mode of witnessing trauma, allowing madness to articulate its own voice not through coherent narration but through the disruptive clash of competing voices.
Bio Note
Claudio Favazza is a doctoral researcher in English Literature at the University of Florence, specializing in the intersection of literature and medicine within the Medical Humanities. His research explores the representation of psycho-social issues in theatre, with a particular focus on contemporary British drama, which he analyses through trauma theory and Avery Gordon’s haunting framework. He investigates how modern and contemporary theatrical texts engage with psychiatric, psychoanalytic, and socio-cultural discourses to destabilize normative understandings of subjectivity, madness, and identity. Claudio is a member of the research group Thea-Med (Theatre and Medicine), which is building a database of 18th– and 19th-century theatre texts that engage with medical discourses. He holds a BA and MA in European and Extra-European Languages and Literatures from the University of Milan.
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Voices of Silence: Trauma and Defiance in Tolkien’s The Hobbit, The Fall of Arthur and The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth
James Moffett, University of Malta
Abstract
Silence can evoke more efficiently than the physical manifestation of voice, and may reveal as much about a character’s inner state and surroundings as articulated speech. This paper examines instances of the use of voice (and lack of) in three distinct works by J.R R. Tolkien: The Hobbit, The Fall of Arthur, and The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth.
All three differ markedly in narrative form, tone, and intended audience. While The Hobbit is a prose narrative largely directed at younger readers, the latter two works represent Tolkien’s more scholarly engagement with early medieval literary traditions. The Fall of Arthur is an unfinished epic poem that experiments with adapting Old English alliterative metre into modern English, whereas The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth is a poetic play that reimagines the aftermath of the historical Battle of Maldon. Despite their formal and stylistic differences, these works share a concern with the expressive power of voice – both spoken and withheld.
This study, therefore, argues that Tolkien uses voice as a key narrative device through which characters articulate, resist, or internalise the psychological effects of warfare. Moments of speech, silence, and restrained expression reveal both trauma and defiance, shaping the moral and emotional landscape of each text. By comparing these works, the paper demonstrates how voice functions as a unifying narrative mechanism across Tolkien’s varied literary experiments, while reflecting the broader atmosphere of 1930s disillusionment – a period that informed Tolkien’s creative and scholarly output.
Bio Note
James Moffett is an MPhil/PhD candidate with the Department of English at the University of Malta, researching the topic on J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Fall of Arthur as a response to interwar disillusionment. He holds a Master’s degree in Digital Arts from the University of Malta, as well as a Master’s degree in Professional Writing from Falmouth University (UK). He has published a number of Sherlock Holmes books and a poetic retelling of the Battle of Hastings, together with a short poetry book on time and space. James also runs the Tolkien-themed YouTube channel Brewing Books.
Panel 14: Mediated Voices
Deferring Voice: An Argument for the Impersonal
Maria Chiara (MC) Grech, University of Malta
Abstract
In recent decades, writing in both academic and creative contexts has often been understood as a means of cultivating individual voice and asserting personal expression. Simultaneously, several contemporary novelists have emerged who deliberately use their work to subvert this notion, framing the novel form as a space to dissolve the self completely.
Rather than treating the novel as a vehicle for the articulation of an authentic self, these writers actively work against such expectations and instead aim to become beacons for other voices and histories. The works they produce subvert “realist” writing and retroactively reveal the sources of such realism as already and always heavily mediated, bled dry of any claim to true human experience. When the existence and acts of the personal are constantly deferred, unexpected sources of noise and synchronicities can emerge instead, oftentimes ones that reveal deep and complex human workings.
This paper will explore several instances in novel-writing in which personal voice has been deliberately relinquished — particularly those that emerge in times of political unrest or societal collapse — and asks what becomes possible once a speaking subject gives up on a final and singular emergence of self.
Bio Note
Maria Chiara (MC) Grech is a student at the University of Malta currently pursuing an MA in Literary Studies. Her in-progress thesis aims to navigate the motions of flow and relay within the novels of contemporary writer Tom McCarthy. MC’s other areas of interest include horror, post-humanism, and creative writing. In 2024, MC was published in ANTAE, a journal for creative writing.
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The Afterlife of a Life Story
Adam Bellares, Lancaster University
Abstract
‘What right do I have to write? To reveal familial secrets, trauma, and shame, to set out for the gaze of the reader […] the histories of the loved ones [in my life] or those gone. […] A writer, with the desire to tell, to construct a writerly persona, to represent, is always already enacting the master narrative, an internalization of colonial discourse […] To what extent can the writer allow other voices to enter into the text?’
My late wife, Rhonda, asked herself these questions twenty years ago as a Master’s-level student studying literature. After her death from ovarian cancer in 2023, I began, as she had requested, to read through her writings: a lifetime’s worth of journals, daily to-do lists, letters, poetry, essays, and a doctoral dissertation. Knowing my background as a creative writer and my interest in works of curation, she had hoped that I would make selections from this archive and ‘“publish” the best parts in some way’.
In this presentation, I share excerpts from my ‘dual memoir’ project, A Birth in Reverse, that is my attempt to honour this request, and I reflect on the ideas connected to listening — and in particular, listening to the dead — that motivated Rhonda’s scholarly work and now inform my own.
Bio Note
Adam Bellares is a postgraduate researcher in Creative Writing at Lancaster University. His academic background includes an MS in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University, MA in Writing from Johns Hopkins University, and MA in Literary Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London. He previously worked as an occupational therapist in the United States.
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The Post-internet Pose: Algorithmic Flattening of Contemporary Voices and Aesthetics
Ulaş Ersezen, University of Malta
Abstract
This paper examines the phenomenon of algorithmic flattening of voices caused by viral internet trends and memes. The argument suggests that social media, the digital means of production, and new media flatten the creative habits and aesthetic outlooks, resulting in a nigh monolithic voice.
While this argument can be explored in the context of fine arts and literature, this paper focuses exclusively on social media. The paper does not engage with the creative aspects of the social media content it is analysing, and it does not treat these media products as creative works, post-literary creations, or new media art. The paper is concerned primarily with the general cultural influence of social media and the notion of algorithmic flattening.
The general theoretical approach of the paper borrows heavily both from canon and contemporary cultural criticism, but the works that give direction, and a title, to the paper are Kyle Chayka’s Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, Stephen Marche’s ‘Winning the Game You Didn’t Even Want to Play: On Sally Rooney and the Literature of the Pose’, and Broey Deschanel’s ‘TikTok Feminism is Not Your Friend’. Through an employment of cultural criticism and media studies, the paper speculates on the current state of the flattening contemporary voices and the situations political implication.
Bio Note
Ulaş Ersezen acquired his B.A. in English Language and Literature from Yaşar University and his M.A. in English from the University of Malta. Currently, he works as an associate editor for ANTAE journal and continues his scholarly research independently. His research interests are contemporary literature, metamodernism, cyberculture, and post-internet art and literature.