Earlier this year, one of my papers was published in the inaugral issue of the Goldsmiths ECL departmental e-journal, which is very exciting. Although I have largely moved away from James Bond, this article I think quite nicely encapsulates some of my early work. It’s called ‘The Fate of the World Rests in Your Hands, 007: Where Crisis and the Symbolic Order Come In (in the Spy Genre)’.

By the end of Casino Royale (1953), James Bond is confronted with a crisis of identity. Increasingly his perception of the symbolic order, society’s unwritten constitution represented by the government he serves, is failing. It is no longer something he can subscribe to, yet he is unable to articulate or properly make sense of why, nor can he imagine another order to which a sense of reality can be attributed. Bond’s experience as the anxious subject struggling against the higher power of authority is compounded by his position as an agent for the British Secret Service. Throughout Ian Fleming’s fourteen-book series, the dominating plotline is not that of an all-conquering superspy set to save Western civilisation, but that of a subject seeking reconciliation with a lost identity, a repressed self attempting to redefine his body and his subjective identity in terms of his role as assassin. In this paper, I turn to Lacan’s conception of the symbolic order, to examine the crisis of identity that erupts in James Bond at the imago [1] of Bond-as-machine. Faith in the symbolic order is traditionally what holds the spy-hero together; though intangible, it is what spurs the spy to action and what allows his actions to be justified. Yet, in the James Bond series, this order is a source of conflict and appears to be the very thing that causes Bond’s breakdown. Induced by Rene Mathis, this imago is a violent disruption to Bond’s experience of himself as a living, thinking subject, causing Bond to disconnect from the symbolic order he serves. Yet the spy genre is full of anxious subjects struggling to protect a symbolic order and convince themselves that the symbolic order is worth protecting. Fleming’s portrayal of James Bond is just one in a long history of anxious subjects in the spy genre. Here I first offer an examination of the symbolic order and look at two examples of how the relationship between it and the spy-hero and symbolic order developed.

There are a lot of other articles in the issue that are well worth reading, so definitely check it out. I have an article to be released in the second issue, entitled , hopefully in the next month or so, entitled ‘Cause for Alarm: How in becoming spy holes develop in the hero’s Symbolic order’.

Other exciting news is that I will be off to Mexico to speak at the HUC conference in November. Now to buy my tickets…

‘When I’m good I’m very good, but when I’m bad I’m better.’
– Mae West

Derived from ‘bawd’, a word of uncertain etymology associated with practices of female prostitution, ‘bawdy’ describes something that is boisterously or humorously indecent. Considering that one of the earliest known works of literature, The Epic of Gilgamesh, with its many descriptions of the randy exploits of a Sumerian prince, can be considered bawdy, one might suggest that bawdiness is an intrinsic quality of literary discourse. From Rabelais’s laughing pregnant hags, to Rochester’s copious odes to genitalia, and Joyce’s ‘obscenities’ in Ulysses, the bawdy has titillated centuries of readers. Shakespeare’s statement, ‘it is a bawdy planet’, further suggests that bawdiness is in fact a condition of earthly existence, rather than a specifically literary phenomenon. One might wonder, however, if our hypersexual society, with its tendency to overexpose the body, is limiting our ability to engage in a form of expression that seems to be at least partially enabled by sexual restrictions. Or has this contemporary tendency to ‘bare all’ created a unique environment in which bawdy forms like the burlesque can be all the more attractive, because we yearn for the mystery, the comedy, the provocation, and the tease—because for once, we want NOT to see it all, or at least NOT to see it all at once?

We invite participants from across disciplinary borders to present on any aspect of what is undoubtedly an exciting and daring field of inquiry. Be forewarned, however, that the ‘bawdy is a Pandora’s box,’ as critic Joan Hutton Landis writes, ‘once opened, it is hard, if not impossible, to close the lid.’

Possible topics could be inspired by, but should not be limited to, the following thematic concerns:

- gender and the body: Body/Bawdy
-  the connection with the dirty and abject
- bawdy genres and mediums (the dirty joke, folksongs, limericks, erotic cartoons, graffiti, the burlesque, etc)
- performing bawdiness: bawdy as commodity
- the bawdy in the Eastern and Western canon
- the intersections of bawdy and grotesque, camp, and kitsch
- changing standards of censorship
- bawdy and satire
- eating, drinking, screwing: the bawdy and other appetites
- the interaction between the erotic, the pornographic, and the bawdy
- famous bawds (real and fictional)

Submission deadline: 31 March, a 400-500 word abstract and a 200-word autobiography

Questions and submissions should be sent to: egsa-colloquium-committee-2010@googlegroups.com

In their exploration of the intersections between literature and psychoanalysis entitled Testimony, Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub turn to the classroom experience, asking, “[i]n a post-traumatic century, a century that has survived unthinkable historical catastrophes, is there anything that we have learned or that we should learn about education, that we did not know before?” Indeed, both trauma and pedagogy confront their subjects – doctors, teachers, patients, victims – with the difficulties of communication: not just of putting history into words, but of making past events present enough to do them justice without ignoring the contingencies of memory and hindsight. Meanwhile, performance, in all its outward spectacle, seems at first to contradict the difficulties of traumatic and pedagogical processes; tragedy in particular ostensibly promises a cathartic experience, centering around those very aspects of recognition and expression that often elude the traumatized victim in the context of psychoanalysis. And yet participants in both educational and therapeutic settings often find themselves troubling the boundaries between fact and narrative, memory and story, authenticity and theatricality – distinctions whose surprising fineness can cast ethical questions harshly into the spotlight.

The Literature and Psychoanalysis Reading Group invites proposals for papers that explore the convergences and divergences of trauma theory, literature, psychoanalysis, pedagogy, and/or performance. We welcome submissions from a range of disciplines within the humanities and Social Sciences.

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

- the relationship between teaching and psychoanalysis (“impossible professions”)
- trauma theory
- ethics and psychoanalysis
- transference (Freudian and post-Freudian theories)
- literary representations of education and psychoanalysis
- gender theory and psychoanalysis
- speech acts and violence
- borders and thresholds
- identification and desire
- masculinity, sovereignty, and the symbolic order
- theatre and psychoanalysis

Submission deadline: 26 March, 300-word abstract for a 8-1o page or 20-minute paper. Submissions must include full name, contact information and institutional and departmental affiliation.

Questions and submissions should be emailed to: 2010splrg@gmail.com.

“Man’s most valuable faculty is his imagination. Human life seems so little designed for happiness that we need the help of a few creations, a few images, a lucky choice of memories to muster some sparse pleasure on this earth and struggle against the pain of all our destinies – not by philosophical force, but by the more efficient force of distraction.” – Germaine Necker de Staël

Works of fiction, whether popular or “literary,” have often been described as informing – and being informed by – a spirit of escapism. Readers may take up a text seeking to be edified, but they may also hope for the “distraction” described above by Madame de Staël. Is this a necessary feature of fiction? Or is it rather a feature of the reader’s approach to fiction? How does it apply to works of non-fiction? To drama? To poetry? Can theories of escape and escapism be applied to non-literary fields? What alternatives to escape are there?

We seek papers addressing these and other questions, and we welcome submissions from students in all disciplines. Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

- Escape
- Hiding
- Pursuit
- Divine intervention
- Happiness
- “The one that got away”
- Travel
- Safety
- Out and coming out
- Rescue
- Danger
- “esc”
- Transcendence
- Exploration
- Evasion
- Romance
- Survival and revival
- Fantasy
- Liberation
- Zombies

The conference is graduate oriented, however the organisers are also calling for interested undergraduates to form a panel.

Submission deadline: 1 April 2010, 300-word proposal accompanied by a 100-word biographical sketch.

Questions and submissions should be emailed to: uottawa.conference@gmail.com

To get myself on the road back to diligent writerly studenting, yesterday I set to work editing some of my work into a paper to submit to a graduate journal. This piece is related to my current thesis work, but is based on an old draft of a former direction. It’s a good place for me to experiment with how to express my approach to theory, but it’s also a good way of examining and reaffirming my approach to the primary texts, in this case the James Bond, 007 series.

I’ve largely decided to veer away from Bond for my thesis. He seems like the obvious choice when studying spy fiction, and he is invaluable in many ways, but for my purposes he is a far better springboard into the secret agents that follow. Unfortunately, the rest of the world is batty about the fellow and keep sending out calls for papers to discuss him rather than his legacy. Even so, I’m peeved that I’ve come across the CfP for Bond Girls: Sex and the Secret Agent so late, irked that I missed Improbable Plots: Making Sense of Contemporary Popular Fiction and decidedly miffed with myself for completely overlooking James Bond and Co: Spies, Espionage and Thrillers in a Cultural Context.

These are the first conferences I’ve come across specifically covering my area and I’ve missed the chance to go to any. The last one by a mere 5 days for registration submission at that.

Lesson learned. From now on, bugger email; the first place I’m going to each morning is UPenn.

In conversation with Julia Kristeva

Professor Jacqueline Rose FBA and Professor Marian Hobson CBE, FBA
talk to Professor Julia Kristeva FBA about her life and work

6.30pm-8.00pm, followed by a drinks reception
Monday, 24 May 2010

British Academy, Carlton House Terrace, London SW1

This is very exciting.

What’s been keeping my attention? Ellie Ragland-Sullivan, that’s what. Or rather who. She is the author of Jacques Lacan and the Philosophy of Psychoanalysis, a book I have seen referenced in bibliographies all over the place but only recently sought out. What a brilliant resource. Ragland-Sullivan has simultaneously revved up my love of Lacan and confirmed everything I hoped/thought/was convinced is true about how and why I want to apply psychoanalysis to spy fiction. Not that she touches on spy fiction, or any fiction really, in this text. It’s just a clean, clear guide to the inner workings of the development of Lacan’s thought and a brilliant discussion on Anglo-American psychoanalytic approaches in general.

Highly recommended.

There is very little about Ellie Ragland-Sullivan on the Internet, though it seems she is still teaching somewhere. The closest I managed to get is an article in The Symptom, on Lacan.com, which covers Lacan’s interpretation of Freudian dream analysis, the ego and structures of desire.

Also highly recommended.

*You can, should you want, get one of those horrible facsimile paperbacks but they are generally unreadable and a waste of the paper they were printed on.

A Secret Service follows the trials and tribulations of Anton Prehznez, a wealthy Russian Jew, who is doing his military service when he learns his father has been sent to Siberia and his mother and sister are destitute. He is forced to finish his service and two years later races to find his family. He traces them to a small village. He arrives shortly after his mother has died of starvation, but just in time to witness his sister being flogged for insubordinance to an officer of the law (re: he tried to rape her and she stabbed him) and speaking ill of the Tzarist regime. Anton flings himself between the executioner’s final blow and his sister, and is sent to prison.

He is sentenced to hard labour in Siberia but manages to escape by running off in the night and jumping down a well. The guards concede that if he is dead he is better off than alive to see out his sentence, and leave. Anton manages to disguise himself well enough to reach the Pacific coast and is stowed on a steamer to Canada. From Canada, he goes to England, and in London he meets up with the Nihilists, a group of Russian revolutionaries who, though peaceful, seek the freedom* of their people by any means necessary.

*Both economic and freedom of movement; the latter is reflected in Anton’s escape across the world from Siberia, the terrible climate of which and vast expanse makes it essentially a prison without walls.

Although he does adhere to the somewhat floral language of his day, Le Queux is quick to establish that this story is based in reality; much of the initial prose focusses on reporting the suffering of the Russian people, the oppression of the Russian government and the clandestinity and brutality of the Secret Police, all very real at this time, displaying Le Queux’s journalist background.

Anton arrives in London declaring:

The majority of Londoners are unaware that the headquarters of the most powerful secret organisation in the world exists in their midst. (56)

Later spy novelists will take this notion and transform it into the secrecy surrounding the British Secret Service, though here Le Queux is in fact referring to the Executive Council of the Russian Revolutionists, which

holds daily council and matures the plots which from time to time startle Europe. (56)

(I love this idea of a startled Europe; I have an image of the cocked eyebrow of Europe as a plot matures suddenly under Europe’s nose. Such impropriety, Europe would think, but never say aloud.)

There are countless events and situations that arise that will become familiar within the genre. Anton’s personal evolution from a casual participant to an ardent member of the inner circle; the chases through disguises and across landscapes; the constant presence of the opposition; the danger even the slightest exposure would bring. Anton shadows his opponent even as he is shadowed.

Yet the act of spying here is regarded with severity. Spying against the people is frequently described as ‘detestible’, ‘vile’ and ‘disgusting’. It is a violation of the rights of the people, and for Anton spying, the fear of being spied upon, is precisely what needs to be stamped out for Russian citizens to be free. What he is really opposed to is the idea that the spies of the Russian Secret Police have been bought by the state to turn against their neighbours. Russia was staggering under the weight of widespread poverty and economic decay; survival required resorting to activities that, in normal times, would be unthinkable:

At such a level of morality, the prospect of a ‘paying job’ is sufficient to inspire the agents of the Russian ‘state police’ with a spirit of boundless enterprise. (79)

It’s important to note the distinction between these spies that are spied to work against the people, and Anton’s organisation that works against the state.

Unfortunately, while A Secret Service has elements of what will shape the genre, it is itself rather unsuccessful. It seems to me that halfway through Le Queux began to forget his characters’ backgrounds and motivations from one chapter to the next. Anton begins the story as a Russian Jew, but only the reader seems to remember that fact. His comrades, or at least their names, get muddled by Le Queux; their activities as a result seem largely forced and unnecessary. Anton, though he supposedly marries at the 2/3 mark, goes on to have a succession of love affairs, while his sister’s fiancé turns up three chapters after declaring his love for her with another woman. By the end of the novel, Le Queux attempts to regain his footing and brings the story back to Anton’s roots, but it’s far too late.

A Secret Service was hilarious, unfathomable and unlikely, but rarely at the right intervals.

Memorable quotes:

Wrong a man, deny him all redress, exile him if he complains, gag him if he cries out, strike him in the face if he struggles, and at last he will stab and throw bombs [...] Our Government manufacturers murderers. (143)

Words are an index to one’s convictions. (180-1)

We hope this is a broad and stimulating theme, and encourages diverse and distinctive interpretations.

Possible papers might include work on:

• Medicine and textuality
• Representations of the body, or bodies
• Representations of gender or sexuality
• Writing, reading and bodily functions
• Disfigurement, mutilation or sadomasochism
• Horror and monstrous bodies
• The textual subject
• The text as subject
• Typography and the materiality of text
• History and textuality
• The textuality of politics
• Politics and representation
• Intersections between pictorial and textual representation
• The graphic novel
• Metafiction and experimentation
• Ageing/Childhood

Please note that this list is by no means exhaustive, proscriptive or prohibitive.

We are chiefly seeking quality academic articles, but are also very interested in including interviews, book and event reviews, creative writing, original photography and artwork. Whilst it would be ideal for interviews and reviews to relate to the theme of the issue, this is not a requirement.

As of yet we do not publish paper copies of the journal. All work will be published online.

Submission deadline: 1 April, 2010, 4,000–7,000 words

For details of submission and reviewing policy, or of correct submission format go to their website.