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Mr Xavier Aldana Reyes
Xavier Aldana Reyes worked in English and Creative Writing until September 2011.
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Part 1 Tutor English Literature
Department: English and Creative Writing
Degree: BA (Hons) Barcelona; MA University of London
Current Teaching
Xavier is the Academic Coordinator of the International Summer Programme ('British Culture and Society 1800-2000'), where he lectures. He has taught on the ENGL100 ('Introduction to English Literature') and the SPAN200/290 ('Advanced Spanish: Oral Skills') courses at Lancaster and is also an Associate Lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University Cheshire, where he teaches on the Year 2 course 'Gothic and Gender'.
Research Interests
Xavier is particularly interested in notions of pain and the body, the epistemology of torture and the affective qualities of the Gothic and Horror modes/genres. He is also very interested in Postmodern theory, Gender Studies, Queer Theory and Modernism.
Xavier's PhD centres on notions of pain and suffering at aesthetic and affective levels and offers a wide exploration of the rise of bodily transgression in Contemporary Horror and Gothic. His work pursues an alternative analysis of these genres/modesin the past two decades through a sustained focus on the body as a locus of ontological liminality that establishes and problematises the viewer's somatic responses to transmutable pain (Shaviro 1993, Sobchack 2004). Through a detailed study of particular, but greatly overlooked, vicarious cultural representations since 1970 (Ballard, Barker, the video nasties, avant-pulp, splatterspunk)and how these labour to produce a/effect, his project seeks to contribute to what Emma McEvoy has identified as a pressing need for Gothic Studies 'to rewrite the terminology of accepted literary histories' (2007: 8) through a reinstatement of the visual and the importance of fiction as a 'lived in' experience. Xavier is also hoping to advance current theories on the 'limits of horror' (Botting 2008) and on its inherent obsession with the 'borders of the material' (Bloom 1998: 296). His PhD will include extensive discussions on writers like Chuck Palahniuk, Bret Easton Ellis, Clive Barker, Poppy Z. Brite, JG Ballard or Dennis Cooper but will also centre on the analysis of recent Horror cinema like the Saw and Hostel film franchises.
Xavier is also concerned with the (im)possibility of defining and demarcating the interstices between culture, art (literature and film in particular) and entertainment.
Publications
Chapters in books and journal articles
'Skin Deep: Surgical Horror and the Impossibility of Becoming Woman in Almodóvar's The Skin I Live in', currently under consideration by the peer-reviewed journal The Bulletin of Hispanic Studies (University of Liverpool), http://www.liverpool-unipress.co.uk/html/publication.asp?idProduct=3596
'"Carnihilism" and Horror', EnterText: An Interdisciplinary Humanities E-Journal (London: University of Brunel, 2012, forthcoming), http://arts.brunel.ac.uk/gate/entertext/home.htm
'Situating Postmodern Gothic Landscapes (2001-2011): Suburban Spaces, Machinic Systems and the Redundancy of the Body', in Where Horror Dwells: Locating Horror Across Media Landscapes, ed. by Patricia Oman and Drew Beard (currently under consideration by Routledge)
'Contemporary Horror and the Mediation of Violence', in Violence and Its Representational Limits, ed. by Graham Matthews et al. (currently under consideration by Palgrave Macmillan)
'"Who Ordered the Hamburger with AIDS?": Haematophilic Semiotics in Tru(e) Blood', in Open Graves, Open Minds: Vampires and the Undead in Modern Culture, ed. by Sam George and Bill Hughes(Gothic Studies journal issue: Manchester University Press, 2012, forthcoming)
'A "Flesh" New Start: The Transgressive Case of "Torture Porn"', in Transgression and Its Limits, ed. by Matt Foley, Neil McRobert and Aspasia Stephanou (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011, forthcoming)
'Limites Corporales: "Degeneracion" en Jeanette Winterson y Written on the Body' ('Bodily Boundaries: "Genderlessness" in Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body), in Cuerpos Que Cuentan: Estudios Literarios (Bodies that Count: Literary Studies) (Barcelona, UOC/Open University of Catalonia, 2011, fothcoming)
'Obsessed with Pain: Body Politics in Contemporary Gothic', in Twenty-First-Century Gothic, ed. by Brigid Cherry, Peter Howell and Caroline Ruddell (Newcastle Upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), http://www.amazon.co.uk/Twenty-first-century-Gothic-Brigid-Cherry/dp/1443823899/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1291119111&sr=1-3
'"The Body is a Bloody Battlefield": Gender (De)Constructions in Angela Carter's The Passion of New Eve and Jackie Kay's Trumpet', Bodies of Work: Women in the Arts, June 2010 (on-line component), http://www.bodiesofwork.info/Body%20is%20a%20Blood%20Battlefield.html.
Reviews
Lucie Armitt, Twentieth-Century Gothic (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2010), in The Gothic Imagination (University of Stirling), June 2011, http://www.gothic.stir.ac.uk/blog/clive-bloom-gothic-histories-the-taste-for-terror/http://www.gothic.stir.ac.uk/blog/lucie-armitt-twentieth-century-gothic/
Clive Bloom, Gothic Histories:The Taste for Terror, 1764 to the Present (London and New York: Continuum, 2010), in The Gothic Imagination (University of Stirling),January 2011, http://www.gothic.stir.ac.uk/blog/clive-bloom-gothic-histories-the-taste-for-terror/
London Gothic: Place, Space and the Gothic Imagination, ed. by Lawrence Phillips and Anne Witchard (London and New York: Continuum, 2010), in The Gothic Imagination (University of Stirling), November 2010,http://www.gothic.stir.ac.uk/blog/london-gothic-place-space-and-the-gothic-imagination-lawrence-phillips-and-anne-witchard-eds/
Horror Zone: The Cultural Experience of Contemporary Horror Cinema, ed.by Ian Conrich, in The Irish Journal of Gothic and Horror Studies, on-line publication, July 2010, http://irishgothichorrorjournal.homestead.com/bookreview8.html#anchor_48
Conferences
Xavier is presenting the following papers:
'Hardcore to Queercore, or The Trouble with Gay Zombies', Bram Stoker Centenary Conference 2012: Bram Stoker and Gothic Transformations, University of Hull, 12-14 April, 2012
'Shakespeare's Tragedy of Blood Reassessed: Reading Titus Andronicus as Affective Surface', Shakespeare Inside-Out: Depth/Surface/Meaning, 5th Biennial British Association Conference, Lancaster University, 24-26 February 2012
'Goth in the Machine: Problematising Jeanette Winterson's Posthuman Fictions', Contemporary Women's Gothic, University of Brighton, 5 November 2011
Xavier has presented the following papers:
'Snuff' is Enough: Contemporary Horror, Corporeal Liminality and the 'Gothic' Experience, Gothic Limits/Gothic Ltd, 10th Biennial Conference of the International Gothic Association. University of Heidelberg (Germany), 2-5 August 2011
'Snuff' is Enough (Is Enough?): Corporeal Liminality in Contemporary Horror, Bodies in Movement: Intersecting Discourses in the Sciences and Arts. University of Edinburgh, 28-29 May 2011, forthcoming; Rethinking Contemporary Gothic: An Interdisciplinary Study Day. Lancaster University, 3 June
'"I Get a Lot of Money for You, and That Makes You My Bitch!', or Why Torture Porn Is Not Misogynistic', Centre for Gender and Women's Studies Open Seminar Series, Lancaster University, 21 February 2011
'A-Porn-Ellipse, or The Advent of "Carnihilistic" Horror', Apocalypse and Its Discontents, Westminster University, 11-12 December 2010. Funding received from the Science Fiction Foundation (SFF).
'Kill with Me?': Contemporary Horror and the Mediation of Violence', Critical Theory: Violence and Reconciliation, University of Exeter, September 2010
'A "Flesh" New Start: The Transgressive Case of "Torture Porn"', Transgression and Its Limits, University of Stirling, May 2010
'Diaries of the Haunted: Structures of Identity in Chuck Palahniuk's Postmodern Gothic', DELC Postgraduate Colloquium (guest speaker), Lancaster University, May 2010; Framing the Self: Anxieties of Identity in Literature & Culture, 1800 to the Present Day, University of Portsmouth, May 2010
'"Who Ordered the Hamburger with AIDS?": Blood Anxiety in True Blood', Open Graves, Open Minds: Vampires and the Undead in Modern Culture,University of Hertfordshire, April 2010
'Transgressive Digital Monsters: Bodily Awareness in the Video Games of Clive Barker', Monstrous Media/Spectral Subjects (International Gothic Association), Lancaster University, 2009
'Obessed with Pain: Body Politics in Contemporary Gothic', Gothic in the 21st Century, St Mary's University (London), 2009
Xavier has also chaired panels on: Alan Moore (IGA, Lancaster2009), 'Fractrued Bodies' and 'Re-Sounding Words' (Fractured Images/Broken Words, Lancaster2010), the pornographic gaze (Transgression, Stirling 2010) and apocalypse in American fiction (Apocalypse, Westiminster, 2010, forthcoming).
Pedagogy and Membership of Professional Bodies
Xavier has passed the CAP (Certificate in Academic Practice) and is an associate of the Higher Education Academy. He is also postgraduate representative for the International Gothic Association (2011-2013).
Xavier is currently attending the 'XXVI Curso Inicial de Formación de Profesores de Español como Lengua Extranjera' (Teaching Spanish as a Foreign Language) at the 'Instituto Cervantes' in Manchester.
Other Interests and Hobbies
In 2008, Xavier participated in the Voiceworks project. This entailed working with a composer and having one of his poems set to music. The song was performed in April at the Wigmore Hall (London). For more information, see: http://www.voiceworks.org.ukor http://www.voiceworks.org.uk/artists/0708/songs0708/constriction_1.html. He also had a short story, 'SteppingStones', published in Dissections (October 2008),a horror journal edited by, among others, Clive Bloom.
In 2010, Xavier read two short stories, 'Black Rocks, White Mountain' and 'An Exercise in Exorcism' as part of the Salon series. He was alsoinvited to contribute a poem, 'Dispossession', for the HIV Vigil day on 1 December 2010. He has also completed a first draft of a post-apocalyptic novel, tentatively titled The Harpy's Nest.
Academia.edu website: http://lancs.academia.edu/XavierAldanaReyes
Associated Keywords: Gothic culture, Gothic film, Gothic literature, Literature and gender, Modernism, Postmodernism, Post-structuralism, Queer theory, The child in horror fiction
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Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Lancaster University
Lancaster LA1 4YD
United Kingdom Tel: +44 (0) 1524 510851
Fax: +44 (0) 1524 510857
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