FUMAGALLI, MARIA CRISTINA (2)
Professor @ University of Essex
Bio
Professor in Literature at the University of Essex and author of On the Edge: Writing the Border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic (2015), Caribbean Perspectives on Modernity: Returning Medusa's Gaze (2009), The Flight of the Vernacular: Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott and the Impress of Dante (2001) and of numerous articles and book chapters. Her new book, Derek Walcott Painters: A Life with Pictures is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press.
Geographical location : London
Research Area and Interest : Caribbean literatures and the visual arts, border studies (particularly the border between Haiti and the Dominican Republic), literature and the environment, migration/human rights and literature,
Social Media
Panel
Black Power in Literature
Presentation
Narrative suturing and un-sutured wounds: Derek Walcott’s ‘American Muse’ and Walker Evans’s ‘Annie Mae Gudger’
Narrative suturing and un-sutured wounds: Derek Walcott’s ‘American Muse’ and Walker Evans’s ‘Annie Mae Gudger’ In this paper I will look at ‘American Muse,’ a poem in Derek Walcott’s collection The Fortunate Traveller (1981) which offers an ekphrastic reading of Walker Evans’s famous photographic portrait of Annie Mae Gudger included in James Agee’s and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941). I will discuss how Walcott explores aestheticisation, icon-making and world-making (or, in this case, nation-making) processes, and their concomitant inclusionary and exclusionary discourses in order to reveal the existence of an open –or “un-sutured”— personal and collective wound festering away at the heart of US society.