CFP 2018 - THRESHOLDS IN LITERATURE AND THE ARTS

The Threshold of Meaning (Notes on Literary Phenomenological Archeology)

The woman in the painting on the cover of this book stands with her back to us. She is far from open to the viewer. What is half-open in the painting is the door in front of her, and indeed also the door to her right, and another door and a sliver of sun-lit window glimmering from the interior into which the central door allows us a peek. The woman's head, in keeping with the tentativeness of the doors, is half-turned towards the main door

‘The Threshold is the Fountainhead: Threshold-Motifs in Peter Handke’s Writing’, Jadavpur Journal of Comparative Literature, No. 53, pp 125-140, 2016

The German verb "schwellen" contains the imagery of swelling up and flooding that underlines the signification of threshold as a zone of flux. However the English equivalent ‘threshold’ lacks this visual imagery. Threshold and its derivatives like the threshold place (Schwellenort), threshold-Angst (Schwellenangst) and threshold-consciousness (Schwellen-Bewußtsein) are Peter Handke’s key words that recur in many of his works, especially in the late works in various ways. This article focuses on threshold and border motifs in Handke’s oeuvre beginning with his novel "The Chinaman of Pain".

Vol 11, no 1, 2012

This is the fourth, and final, article in a series on threshold concepts featured in the scholarly newsletter of the Gwenna Moss Centre for Teaching Effectiveness at the University of Saskatchewan, Bridges.

Bendithion, 2011

In his 'Introduction: The Concept of Liminality', in Margins and Thresholds: An Enquiry into the Concept of Liminality in Text Studies, Dr. Aguirre states that "if we accept that the 'margin' is no more than an unacknowledged threshold, we shall conclude that the threshold is in itself a 'territory' or provides entry to one."[1] That "the threshold is in itself a 'territory'" is a philosophical and empirical tenet that I had long held, long experienced but had not seen mentioned in literary rubric beyond Empson's brief gloss in Chapter Three of Seven Types of Ambiguityin which he refers to ambiguity occupying "whole states of mind" and "several universes of discourse" and discusses the nature of allegory. This seemed promising when I first read it, decades ago, but the discussion quickly moves on to an examination of 18th century puns and like Mr Woodhouse with his "Kitty, a fair but frozen maid",[2] Empson seems stuck in that particular universe of discourse without extension. He does not enter the numinous realms of the liminal.[3]

Migratin Art Historians on the Sacred Ways, 2018

The notion of liminality -encompassing marginal space and threshold-crossing -comes from anthropological studies and has been linked to rites of passage since the pioneering work of Arnold van Gennep:

This thesis is concerned with transitional territory, referred to throughout as ‘Inbetween’, which is a zone wherein symbols and images are created and ideas are germinated. Van Gennep’s anthropological model is taken as a starting point from which to extrapolate notions of liminal space. This is followed by mythopoeic background material (in the form of references to the inbetween zones of the Hebrew Kabbalah and the Shi’ite Na Koja Abad) that helps to situate this concept within a historical context. From here I demonstrate, through examples from both arcane and contemporary literature, the inherently creative aspects of this liminal space, and also its inverse — as a site of imaginative failure and moral paralysis when its erotic force is diminished. The writers here discussed in detail are Iris Murdoch, Tony Kushner, Phillip Pullman and Amos Oz. While linking mythological antecedents of Inbetween with more recent works of fiction, Mind the Gap also reflects upon personal endeavours to articulate this concept through the two stories that accompany this work. I demonstrate the paradox that it is Inbetween’s ambivalence that makes this imagined space the hub of both personal and cultural change: between oppositional poles is the ground of creativity, of individuation, of reconciliation.

Novel: A Forum on Fiction 46:1, 2013