Our four panelists - two American Assistant Professors, a British Post-Doctoral Fellow, and a Canadian Ph.D. Candidate - will, in twelve minutes each, immerse audiences in radically diverse intertextual discourse via a discursive methodology that decentralizes Ishiguro studies. Our panel will, therefore, impart how a wide cross section informs Ishiguro’s language of literary and cultural influences. We illustrate the less explored yet shared terrain of literary production and artistic expression that prompts readers, like Ishiguro’s own plots, to reevaluate the ways that Ishiguro pinpoints the nuance of everyday life as essential to the enigmatic and paradoxical forces of individual and collective identity.
For our first paper, “Haunting the Halls,” Joshua Myers traverses the grounds of Washington Irving’s depicted Bracebridge Hall and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Darlington Hall in search of the environmental anxieties lurking amid both Irving’s and Ishiguro’s narration of dying English customs at countryside estates. While each author approaches English domesticity differently - Irving’s Bracebridge Hall is sentimental and Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day critical - both conceptualize the country manor as malleable only to the extent that it is grounded. Blending spatial theories like David Alworth’s Site Reading with an ecocritical approach, Myers inverts traditional views of aristocratic English rigidity as reflective of anxieties about domestic or class-based change. Instead, he suggests that the houses and their grounds are a site of purgatorial fears regarding how persistent sameness is inadequate for adjusting to the environmental changes that both Irving and Ishiguro present.
Next, Anjalee Nadarajan presents “The Restructuring of Relationships" to move listeners forward from the consideration of Ishiguro with the past by advancing a discussion of how Ishiguro forecasts the future. Nadarajan considers Ishiguro’s experimentations with the speculative genre as originating from the surreal, Kafkaesque style of his 1995 novel The Unconsoled, which she likens to Kim Stanley Robinson's 2020 novel The Ministry for the Future. Nadarajan explores how experimental writing styles lend themselves to both Robinson’s and Ishiguro’s abilities to communicate empathy and understanding in a rapidly changing world, despite different versions of the future: one steeped in lost and one cautiously optimistic. Engaging with theories of relativism, space-time, and other post-modern critical motifs, Nadarajan suggests that these different futuristic visions ultimately promote the compassion necessary for a functioning society to flourish.
For our third paper, “On the Edge of the English Novel,” Ben Fried anchors the panel’s previous intertextual discourses by attending to an interpretation of how Ishiguro’s literary development proliferated. Peering into studies of print culture in the United Kingdom, Fried examines the early stages of Ishiguro’s writing career and especially his initial publications in the Cambridge literary magazine, Granta. Reviewing Ishiguro’s personal involvement with that magazine’s editorial and publication records, along with historical studies that uncover the rise of postcolonial discourse, Fried places his detailed study of how the publishing industry influenced Ishiguro’s writing into a broader account of London as a pivotal literary capital in the late twentieth century.
Rounding out the panel is our final paper, “The Brief Intimacy of Song", in which Ryan James McGuckin echoes the panel's discussion of cultural anxiety, empathic discord, and editorial influence, by making visible music’s unique ability to sonically gather the uncanny. A consideration of the cassette tape in Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go with the gramophone recording in Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts indicates how hearing music facilitates what Stephen Benson observes in The Cambridge Companion to Kazuo Ishiguro as "creative misreading.” Music acts as a site of affective and imaginative unknowing to expose the extremes of romantic and familial belonging, an emotional paradox that seems just within reach despite biological and social impossibilities. With this assertion, McGuckin inspects how music conjures visions of apparently secured belonging and caring that, at best, remain uncertain amid Ishiguro’s and Woolf’s worlds of political and technological upheaval.
Overall, these panel presentations will produce lively engagement during the question-and-answer period.