* Relación De Las Propuestas Aceptadas Con Sus Abstracts Correspondientes

SHORT STORY

Panel coordinator: Santiago Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan (Universidad de Valladolid). Departamento de Filología Inglesa, Plaza del Campus s/n, 47011 Valladolid.

Sesión 1:

- Agustín Torres Reyes (U. de Valencia): Jacqueline Woodson’s story The Other Side: Racial conflict and the acquisition of knowledge in children’s literature

Abstract: The Other Side (2001) is a children’s story with multicultural characters and themes that can be regarded as an aesthetic exploration of the human experience in the process of the acquisition of knowledge. That is what makes it universal. Jacqueline Woodson’s work includes many of the issues that are present in the real world but seldom appear in children’s literature, such as racial division or interracial relationships. Using the metaphor of a fence, this African American author reveals issues of loneliness and friendship, inclusion and exclusion, and the overcoming of prejudice and segregation through the wisdom of Clover and Annie, an African American and a white girl, who become friends. The story is told from the point of view of Clover who is both the protagonist and the first person narrator. The reader, thus, gets to see and understand the world through her eyes. The conflict is twofold: On the one hand, we find Clover’s own internal conflict about overcoming her fears and talking to the white girl. On the other, there is the conflict of person-against-society: Can Clover defy social and racial historical conventions? Can she climb over the fence that separates her town and overlook the barriers between black and white people? Can you be friends with a person of a different race? One of the author’s achievements is her ability to trigger questions in the young reader’s mind regardless of his or her cultural background or skin color. Another achievement is her subtle way of pointing out the past of injustice and discrimination that many African Americans suffered. In fact, she does this without even mentioning it.

- Rodrigo Fontes Torres (U. de La Coruña): “'A fiery pulse of sin, a splendid shame': Aesthetic Aspects and Troublesome Relationships in Wilde\s Tales”

Oscar Wilde is widely known because of a novel, The Portrait of Dorian Gray, and several plays. The fact is that he explored almost every possible genre; but among them, his poetry and short stories tended to be considered of lesser importance. Within the next few minutes we are going to cast our attention on the latter, given that, because of the censorship and the critics, his short stories were the literary form which best allowed Wilde to deal freely with some of the thorniest aspects of his aesthetic and moral beliefs. After some considerations concerning Wilde’s views about children as receptors of his fairy tales, we are going to analyse the way Wilde used the fairy tale to treat such issues as love beyond race, gender, substance, and even life or death; and to transmit a sympathetic view towards forbidden attachments, especially, homosexual relationships, which otherwise could not have been even treated in the repressive society of his time. Although the short stories are our main interest, we will also discuss these issues in other writings, especially in The Portrait of Dorian Gray and Salomé, the play that was banned in the United Kingdom and the one which have most in common with his fairy tales, because of his symbolism and given that it shows better than any other the French influence upon Wilde.

Sesión 2:

José Ramón Ibáñez Ibáñez (U. de Almería), Emilio Cañadas Rodríguez (U. Camilo José Cela), Aitor Ibarrola Armendariz (U. de Deusto): “Más allá de los márgenes de Poe: la poética del relato corto norteamericano en el siglo XX”.

Conocida es la importancia de Edgar A. Poe en el desarrollo del cuento norteamericano en la primera mitad del siglo XIX gracias a sus escritos sobre la génesis o la teorización del género. Sesenta años más tarde, Brander Matthews propondrá una sistematización que fomentará la publicación de manuales de cómo debíaa escribirse un cuento en aras de su éxito comercial. Ello provocó la banalización del género durante las primeras décadas del siglo XX. Esta mesa redonda se centra en la evolución posterior del género durante el resto del siglo XX, lo cual sin duda sentará las bases de la regeneración del mismo. Para ello, se pretende examinar la articulación que sobre la poética del relato corto norteamericano realizan escritores modernistas (Cather y Wharton), sureños (Porter, Welty y O’Connor) y realistas (Malamud, Oates, Carver) y que tanto les aleja de la concepción poeniana pero que, sin embargo, sentará las bases para una revitalización del género.

Sesión 3:

Carmen Melchor Iñiguez (U. Camilo José Cela), Isabel Morales (U. Camilo José Cela), Mª Dolores Moreno García (U. Camilo José Cela); Mª Jesús Perea Villena (U. Camilo José Cela): “Sexuality, transgression and gender identities in contemporary short stories”.

Literary images in the form of situations, dialogues and even erotic encounters, often come to our minds from fragments of favourite books. Works that, when read and re-read, make us feel as though we, ourselves, could have written them. In these stories we sometimes find that we derive a certain degree of pleasure from wondering about the real gender orientation of some of the characters, especially if these are troubled or appear to be under any kind of pressure. Is gender ambiguity a new fashion that impregnates literature as much as other activities in our lives? Is it still important to have a certain sexual orientation? What is the difference between gender identity and sex identity? Gender identity has become a social assemble, and our appreciation of literary reality has now changed. Works by three writers: Sandra Cisneros, Joanna Russ and Antonia S. Byatt have demonstrated this new reality, described and depicted for us to witness the ongoing process of literary creation and the voicing of a transgreeding, free accent.