Lisa Folkmarson Käll gives associate professor lecture
This Thursday, the Centre's recently appointed associate professor Lisa Folkmarson Käll will give a lecture on Ovid's story of Echo and Narcissus in the Metamorphoses through some of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's writing on expression and speech.
The lecture is held on Thursday November 24 between 09.15-09.45 in lecture hall 7/0043 at English Park Campus. The title of the lecture is "A Voice of Her Own? - Re-visiting the story of Echo and Narcissus".
Abstract
In this paper I turn to Ovid's story of Echo and Narcissus in the Metamorphoses through some of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's writing on expression and speech. Echo's speech as portrayed by Ovid clearly illustrates the way in which Merleau-Ponty describes speech in Phenomenology of Perception as a 'paradoxical operation' through which we use words with already given sense and in that very process both stabilize and alter established meaning. Instead of reducing Echo to a moment of the identity and fate of Narcissus, I want to bring out Echo's own voice and the expression of her subjectivity through creative repetition. The short dialogue between Echo and Narcissus makes manifest that Echo's words cannot be reduced to a simple repetition of a clear and distinct original. Rather, her speech emerges in relation to an original that is only made present as an original of a repetition in that very repetition. Echo's voice is a break and disruption of the voice and the words she repeats and each repetition is also its own origin. Echo's own voice and subjectivity are only made present when we listen to it as something other than a simple repetition of the voice of Narcissus. The fragments she returns through her echo, loose their fragmented character through modifying and altering their already given meaning. I will argue that what Echo lacks is not primarily a voice of her own but rather an unbound origin which by itself remains mute and thereby runs the risk of not expressing anything at all. In my reading, Echo is repetition but it is precisely as repetition that she is also originating speech.
Double doctor
Lisa Folkmarson Käll has a double doctorate degree in philosophy and gender studies. She has worked at the Centre for Gender Research since 2007. Among other things, she is coordinator for the Centre's research group Body/Embodiment within the GenNa Excellence Programme.
Read more about Lisa Folkmarson Käll (Länk borttagen)
Read more about the Body/Embodiment research group (Länk borttagen)