16.4.15
12.3.15
CFP: Women and Ageing: New Cultural and Critical Perspectives
University of Limerick, Ireland · 20-22 May 2015
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University of Limerick, Ireland
20-22 May 2014
A conference engaging with the symbolic aspects of women and ageing in culture and society, and the power these constructions exert over old age.
Conveners: Dr Cathy McGlynn, Dr Maggie O’Neill, Dr Michaela Schrage-Früh (University of Limerick)
Plenary Speakers: Prof Germaine Greer; Prof Margaret Harper
Events: Poetry reading by Medbh McGuckian; Roundtable on Women and Ageing
In a time when even Bridget Jones finds herself in her early fifties, it may at first glance seem unwarranted to speak of the invisibility of ageing women in literary and cultural contexts. In fact, in a review of Mad about the Boy in The Times, Sarah Lyall writes that, “Bridget’s amorous adventures … make the prospect of middle age not so bad at all”. Constructions like this open up questions about representations of women and ageing. What types of images of the “ageing woman” are created in cultural texts? Do women in later life, in order to become visible, need to find ways to “pass” as younger so that “age shall not wither them” as Kira Cochraine puts it in an article in The Guardian? Are these legitimate strategies or should women embrace the menopause as a new phase of life and liberation as advised by Germaine Greer? What impact do dominant representations of ageing women have on the sociocultural realities of women in their later years? And in what ways do they compare to earlier representations?
The rise of the new interdisciplinary field of ageing studies / cultural gerontology testifies to the need to reassess cultural representations of ageing and to view ageing not only as part of the life course but as a social and cultural construct. It is all the more surprising that ageing is a topic still marginalised in feminist theory, despite Simone de Beauvoir’s testimony to her dismay at ‘society’s secret shame’ in The Coming of Age in 1970. There are some notable exceptions, such as Germaine Greer’s work on the postmenopausal woman, Susan Bordo’s work on the body, or Lynne Segal’s recent reflection and analysis of the process of growing older. This conference will engage with the symbolic aspects of women and ageing in culture and society, and the power these constructions exert over public and private conceptions of old age.
The aim of this conference is to provide an opportunity to discuss intersections of the cultural, social and medical dimensions of women and ageing. It will engage with discourses on ageing in their various cultural manifestations through the ages but also across different cultures, genres and media. We invite papers from diverse disciplines such as literary and cultural studies, film and media studies, philosophy, anthropology, linguistics and the medical humanities.
Possible topics can include but are not limited to:
- Ageing, autobiography and lived experience
- Technologies, medicine and ageing
- Ageing and popular culture
- Ageing and neoliberalism
- Visual images of ageing
- Age and performance
- The ageing body as text
- Ageing and memory
- Stigma
- Myths about ageing, women in myth
- Age and creativity
- Queer ageing
- Love, loss and mourning
- Health, menopause, the post-maternal body
- Male representations of women and ageing
- Older and younger mothers
- The ageing spinster
- The cult of youth and perceptions of beauty
- Ageing, recession and dependency
- Ageing and women minorities
- Age, race, and colour
Queries may be directed to the conference organisers at ageing.women@gmail.com. Please submit proposals for papers or panels by 15 March 2015. Proposals should be 250 words and should include a 50-word biography.
Website: womenandageing.wordpress.com
11.3.15
Overbeck on Editing Samuel Beckett's Letters
Stefano Rosignoli asks Lois M. Overbeck about the ongoing four-volume edition
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| Samuel Beckett. Photograph: John Minihan |
At the end of a summer rich in events on Samuel Beckett, scattered largely between Dublin, Belfast and Enniskillen, academic research was encouraged in October with the publication by Cambridge University Press of the third volume of the writer’s correspondence. As in the previous volumes, Beckett’s statements about his own work, as well as the many intertextual references expanded on in the dense notes appended by the editors, demonstrate the scholarly value of the publication, which will become a primary resource especially for young researchers with no opportunity to explore public archives and private collections on both sides of the Atlantic. It is Beckett’s mocking depiction of intellectual life, however, rather than the crowded web of literary and artistic influences, that strikes the general reader and ensures that the letters are an enjoyable, rather than purely informative reading experience: “On m’a demandé un livret d’opéra bouffe! J’ai écrit une ligne – ‘J’ai pas envie de chanter ce soir’ – puis j’ai renoncé.” (“I have been asked for a libretto for a comic opera! I wrote one line: ‘I don’t feel like singing tonight’. Then I gave up.” SB to Jacoba Van Velde, 12.04.1958; in LSB III, 130-131). This trenchant tongue doesn’t appear to spare Beckett himself. In the same letter he declares, exhausted: “Il y a deux moments qui valent la peine, dans le travail, celui de la mise en route et celui de la mise en corbeille” (“There are two worthwhile moments in my work: the opening up and the basketing”; ibid.). This is just one of the many accounts of Beckett’s distress when facing the creation of new work, something that continues to spring at the author from the white page itself even during the years of his belated success.
I met Lois M. Overbeck, research associate at Emory University and general editor of The Letters of Samuel Beckett, to discuss the series, which is now approaching its conclusion. The interview took place just a few days after a public lecture given in Reading by Dan Gunn, professor at the American University of Paris and editor of the Cambridge collection, and before a reception at the Irish Embassy in London, which hosted a reading of the letters given by Barry McGovern.
Samuel Beckett was particularly reluctant to acknowledge that archival material could shed light upon his published works. In his later years, he authorised the publication only of those letters “having bearing upon my work” (LSB III, xviii), which became the principle guiding the selection and annotation of his vast correspondence. How would you summarise the editors’ interpretation of Beckett’s guidelines?
That’s a big question. It occupied us greatly, because it is different for each volume. In the first one, we had a very difficult time drawing a line between life and work. Especially in this volume, all of Beckett’s writing in his letters is also his work. And because he was generating unfinished work, his letters – especially those to Thomas MacGreevy – are directions toward finished writing, or comments on the writing he was struggling to do. But, as time goes on, the difficulty doesn’t come from the distinction between life and work, but from the large number of letters about the work. So the questions are: how are we going to choose the ones that are most useful to readers but also the most representative of the body of the letters that we cannot include? There are hundreds of invitations for a coffee at the PLM [the Petit Café PLM at the Hôtel Saint-Jacques on Boulevard Saint-Jacques, Paris]. Which of these do we use? You know, they are virtually the same letter, or card. But this is not a decision related to work and life. We realised that all we could publish was a sample. We wanted this to be as good, representative, and literary as possible. But that doesn’t close the door to all the other letters. We do say where all the letters are, so that people will know where they can go for more. I think we have judged it right.
The Cambridge University Press edition has published so far “60 percent of the total corpus for the years 1929-1940, […] 40 percent for 1941-1956”, and “a little over 20 percent” for 1957-1965” (LSB III, xvii). What has been considered irrelevant to Beckett’s work and consequently left out?
In the third volume, it’s pretty clear what the major correspondences are. Of course we don’t impose a narrative, but rather try to discover the narrative that Beckett’s own creative cycles establish. Our job is to think of: where was he at this point? Who were the key people? What letters will tell the stories of his work? Several important narrative patterns are given by the alternation of language, for example. It’s pretty clear, in volume three, that his plays were begun in English, but that he translated them fairly quickly afterwards. If you look at the chronology, you realise that he was working in some way with his plays in every language, every year. And this is also because he not only wrote a play, but he directed it or helped to direct it. Part of that was due to his worldwide exposure, and his worldwide audience. He might have been writing primarily in English, but Comment c’est, for example, was clearly a struggle in French, and French was the language of greatest discipline for him. So the bifurcation may be dramatic versus fictional, meaning that he found one language more suitable for the kind of very precise control that he desired in his prose. The stage instead gave him a sense of freedom – though he managed this freedom tightly, in terms of the rigours of the theatre. He loved the three-dimensional aspect of the stage; the absorption he had for the visual is critical to see in the drama. You will see in volume four, particularly as he interacted with other playwrights (and especially Pinter), how central the visual and the stage performance was to him. What he found in the work for the stage was a kind of three-dimensional sculpture, made up of light, sound and movement.
Several letters reveal Beckett’s recurrent concern with his own body, most of all when health issues are involved. What kind of self-portrait emerges from the author’s correspondence in the period covered by the third volume, and how does it differ from earlier or later stages of his life?
In 1957, Beckett was fifty-one years old, so he started creaking at the joints as we all do… but I think he was much more accepting of that. He complained, of course! He did have serious issues, such as the anticipation of cataract surgery, then more of an ordeal than it is today. His brother died of lung cancer, so whenever he got a bronchial infection… it worried him. He had an area in his jaw that was very badly infected, and of course that was on his mind. And people die, all through this volume. He mourned, but there is a matter-of-factness about death in the letters. I think he was growing more mature about these elements in life. It really depends to whom Beckett was writing. He wrote very personally about his health to his family in Ireland, where there were people who wanted to know about his health. He always wrote to the person. As readers we are outside of this correspondence, and we only know what we read, and perhaps what the footnotes suggest is also happening. It depends on the recipient, how much Beckett needed or wanted to express about something, including his health.
The involvement of Samuel Beckett, of several authors at Les Éditions de Minuit and of the publisher himself, Jérôme Lindon, with contemporary history resurfaces in more than one passage. How would you describe Beckett’s response to the Algerian struggle for independence and to the following turmoil in France?
Well, he was there. He was in the middle of it. In the letters, he wrote that he was listening, anxiously, to the radio, that there were explosions and rioting in the streets, etc. He was physically there at the time this was all occurring. Suzanne, of course, was also very involved, in terms of her strong sense of what was right or wrong in any of these political struggles. Beckett didn’t feel, for instance, that he could sign a petition on behalf of Jérôme Lindon, who was accused for his publications and for his political positions. But this was because he was not a French citizen, and not because he lacked passion about injustice. Indeed, he circulated a petition among his English friends and literary affiliates, and encouraged them to address the situation, to create an international response to the political problem. So, he was not a-political, but you’re not seeing it written about in letters as much as that he was living through it. It was part of the fabric of what was happening. We have these wonderful rose-coloured glasses of time, but he didn’t have them. I mean, he was aware of what was happening, but one doesn’t take a longer view of history in the middle of it. We cannot sense the ultimate shape of history until after it has been experienced. Sometimes our expectations as readers are not realistic or fair.
Many passages in Beckett’s letters refer to convivial gatherings with friends and colleagues, including Avigdor Arikha and Patrick Magee, and to a few trips abroad, such as the 1958 trip to Yugoslavia, also motivated by the need to spend his royalties locally. To what extent did Beckett’s quality of life improve during these years and how did this affect his writing?
He was always generous, and liked to be able to take people to dinner. Hospitality was part of his rapport with people, and he enjoyed doing that. So I don’t think that the trip to Yugoslavia is particularly a benchmark about lifestyle. He and Suzanne regularly took holidays, and they gravitated toward warm, dry climates, because Beckett needed, physically, to get out of Paris. All along, Suzanne tried to make sure that he got into a place where he could relax, without his energies being completely absorbed by people wanting to see him. You can see that very clearly in volume two as well, but in the period covered by volume three, it is more possible to afford regular travel. Beckett used the Nobel Prize funds to help others rather than enrich his lifestyle, as you will see in volume four. When he moved to the apartment over Rue Saint-Jacques in 1960, he was just around the corner from where the Arikhas lived, so he could walk over and have a drink, or listen to music with them… their apartment was a kind of second living room, in a way. With other people, of course, it was different. He liked and enjoyed the company of all his publishers: John Calder was a very congenial person, Barney Rosset was much the same but out of a different milieu completely. Both of them came to their full bearing in the Sixties, and they naturally gravitated to the radical fringe. Challenging censorship was at the core of their publishing values and ventures. He was very close to his Irish friends as well: Pat Magee was a wonderful person, full of stories… and very strong. Jack MacGowran, on the other hand, was talented and delightful but more fragile.
The large number of letters to contemporary writers testifies to Beckett’s growing international fame. This is also proven by the enthusiasm aroused in the younger generation, represented in volume three primarily by Harold Pinter and Aidan Higgins. Among his followers, the closest might have been Robert Pinget: how would you describe their friendship, leading to the adaptation of La Manivelle into English (The Old Tune)?
Pinget had difficulty with his publisher and so he moved to Les Éditions de Minuit. Beckett encouraged him, having him commissioned with the translation of Embers for the Italia prize, for example, and suggesting he write for the BBC. Beckett knew how important it was to be known to an English-speaking audience. Barbara Bray was instrumental in getting Pinget’s connection with the BBC worked through: she was very gifted both as a translator and as an adapter. She worked closely with Beckett on the translation of Pinget’s La Manivelle; although he did not always accept a suggestion, it freed him to know that he had a partnership going. Beckett and Aidan Higgins met through John Beckett. When Higgins asked Samuel Beckett for advice, Beckett suggested, rather, that he consult Arland Ussher “for wisdom”. There are wonderful letters at Trinity College Dublin, between Higgins and Ussher, both of them interested in Beckett’s work. Higgins for a time was in London, and so was John Beckett; they saw the plays and wrote to each other about them. Their corollary correspondence is very interesting, and very helpful. Sam’s friends were also friends with other friends, so if you did the sociological mapping, you would find a lot of interlocking circles, and that’s crucial to understand. As Martha Fehsenfeld and I began our research, we found a different kind of community in Dublin than in Paris and London. In Ireland, particularly, the circles were very tight. Beckett was willing to help Higgins, and arranged for the French translation of Langrishe, Go Down. Is it a coincidence that Harold Pinter decided to write the screenplay for Langrishe? Beckett suggested that Higgins work with Calder to publish his work in English [Felo de Se, issued by Grove Press in the US as Killachter Meadow; LSB II, 705]. Beckett was a mentor. I think the word “influence” is always a difficult word for writers: they don’t like to admit being influenced, but how can you help but be? [Read More]
Also at A Piece of Monologue:
Modernism's Chronic Conditions: Temporality, Medicine, and Disorders of the Self
Free Public Event · University of Exeter, 17 April 2015
Xfi Building, University of Exeter
Friday 17 April 2015
Registration is Free
Speakers
- Dr Marion Coutts, author of The Iceberg (Goldsmiths)
- Prof Lois Oppenheim (Montclair State University)
- Dr Lisa Baraitser (Birkbeck)
- Prof Jeremy Holmes (University of Exeter)
- Jonathan Heron (University of Warwick)
- Dr Kirsty Martin (University of Exeter)
- Prof Zoe Playdon (University of London)
Respondents
- Prof Alan Bleakley (University of Falmouth)
- Prof Chris Code (University of Exeter)
- Prof Paul Dieppe (Exeter Medical School)
- Dr Joanne Winning (Birkbeck)
About the Event
This workshop brings together scholars, creative practitioners, medical educators, and clinicians concerned with disorders of the embodied mind, to consider how artistic modernism might offer specific resources for understanding what it means to live with conditions which resist narrative shapes of closure and completion.This workshop is the first event organized by the AHRC funded network ‘Modernism, Medicine and the Embodied Mind: Investigating Disorders of the Self’. [Read More]
Dan Gunn on Finding Time for Literature
Writers and translator Lydia Davis talks to Dann Gunn about Beckett and The Emperor of Ice-Cream
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| Photograph: Dan Gunn |
A very orderly Greek friend visited me recently, and on stepping into my office and seeing the state of my desk, cried out “Dan! What is that?” He was genuinely shocked, perturbed even, at the sight of the books, papers, unopened envelopes, and assorted debris that flows from several piles over my desk, threatening at any moment to spill off the edges (as it regularly does) and onto the floor. My response was not, I hope, unduly defensive: “It’s a sign that I’m being productive.” Indeed, my desk is clear and tidy only ever for a brief moment after some task has just been completed (or at moments when I remember some unopened bill that needs to be paid). I do like to observe something organized emerging from the apparent chaos; and when that chaos threatens to become a liability, I turn to photos of the studios of artists I admire, of Francis Bacon or Alberto Giacometti, and protest: Now their mess really was a mess.
When I was seventeen, I chose to leave Edinburgh, where I was raised, for the University of Sussex, not least because I had read a book by Gabriel Josipovici entitled The World and the Book; it said on the cover that he was teaching there. What I admired (and still admire) about this wonderful critical work was that it dealt openly and freely with different periods and authors, from different cultures and languages, from Dante to Proust to Saul Bellow. Also mentioned on the cover was that Gabriel Josipovici wrote fiction as well as criticism. In some quiet place within me I seized hold of this as a model: a critic who also writes fiction; a novelist who also writes criticism. I had eight fantastic years at Sussex, taught in an ideal setting by the best teachers imaginable. As it happens, on my very first day I was introduced to my “personal tutor” (what in America would be called my “academic advisor”): Gabriel Josipovici. We quickly got to know each other and have remained friends ever since. The Sussex of those days confirmed for me that one did not have to be (only) a specialist, that one could draw inspiration from many sources, refusing to be boxed in to a single discipline or period or language. I still find that the criticism emerging from this openness suits me best. I have recently been rereading with delight Tony Nuttall’s Shakespeare the Thinker—a book by a former Sussex professor that emerges out of precisely what I’d call the “Sussex spirit.”
By multiplying my directions and intellectual investments—this is as true for me of sporting activity (of which I have done a lot)—I tend not to disperse but rather to gain energy. I avoid what I most dread, being bored. I spent a lot of time as a child being bored in classes in which I had absolutely no interest or flair; I vowed to attempt to lead a life in which I would never be bored again. I can honestly say that I’ve virtually achieved that, but only because I’m constantly varying the sort of word-activity I’m doing. Another relevant analogy might be language-learning. There are ways in which learning a new language can interfere with the language(s) one already knows, but in general I’ve found—and I’m surely not the only one—that learning a new language, even if it requires time and energy, pays back doubly, opening a space in the head/brain/sprit that feels and feeds very much like freedom. I am currently learning Bulgarian, and doing this somehow makes the other languages I know vibrate and hum in echo, as if the words of the new language were watering the words grown dry in the languages less practised.
Of course, there are only so many hours in the day, and several of the activities in which I’m involved, such as editing the Cahiers Series or the Letters of Samuel Beckett, are seriously time-consuming. But more important than the time spent is concentration available; and I can only really concentrate when I am excited by what I am doing. Perhaps I am lucky too, in that before I was reading Gabriel Josipovici, my childhood provided earlier models: my mother was always a voracious reader, and though she worked full time (my father having died when I was six years old) and had to raise me and my two older brothers, she would go to the municipal library every week and take out four or five novels; novels which I would then watch her consume. (She is now eighty-six years old, but retains that capacity for concentration that allows her to read a novel in a day.) And though in some ways I loathed my schooling, which was unnecessarily severe, punitive, and even sadistic (I was of the last generation to suffer the full rigours of the British “public school” system, in which being beaten was an everyday reality), it’s blindingly obvious to me, especially since I myself am a teacher, that I learned how to learn at a very young age. The school I attended was intensely academic, and it regularly strikes me how my students are struggling to learn patterns (such as grammar or essay structure) in their early twenties that were being driven into me when I was barely ten years old.
I still haven’t really answered your question, however, about how I allot the time to my various projects. I’m not sure I can do so adequately since this is rather instinctual. Teaching has to come first, since I find it humiliating to teach a class for which I don’t feel thoroughly prepared or to hand back a student’s essay that I have not marked up as completely as I judge to be helpful. (And could it perhaps be that I feel the need, in some barely reachable part of myself, to prove to the ghosts of my own schoolmasters that it is possible to teach in a demanding and informative way without becoming punitive or worse?) After teaching, the other activities somehow find their space and time—though not always simply I must admit. One example: two years ago I was asked by the TLS to review the first two volumes of Marguerite Duras’s Oeuvres complètes which had just come out in the Pléiade edition. I confidently took this on, only to lug these two volumes around with me wherever I went for the following two years, failing completely to get on with the reading, not to speak of the review. I was lucky enough to have an indulgent editor who ceded to my request made earlier this year, to add the final two volumes of the complete works, making up nearly eight thousand pages in total. For some reason this extra load made the task easier for me, and I managed to write my review while we are still in the centenary year of Duras’s birth. I often invoke the wisdom in a remark once made by Muriel Spark, one of my very favourite twentieth-century writers, when in a BBC interview she was asked if she ever had trouble with writer’s block. She said she never did, that she was always delighted to be writing. Her interviewer (John Tusa, I believe) persisted rather incredulously, asking if she really never found herself in trouble when writing her novels. Spark hesitated a moment before admitting that she did occasionally find that her plots became too complex and that as a result she could not find a way forward. “And what do you do then?” asked the interviewer. “Make them more complex.”
At the risk of going on far too long, I have to admit that there is a hierarchy in the writing and editing projects I undertake: not a hierarchy of importance but of difficulty. Here the sporting analogy may be apposite again. For someone who does not train, a run round the block is a challenge, where for one who trains, it is as easy as a stroll. For me, writing fiction is the hardest thing: nobody can indicate how long a story or novel should be, nobody can tell me in what accent or with what tone the characters should speak, nobody can tell me when I’ve written (or edited) enough, and in any case nobody is demanding the novel of me in the first place. Writing fiction is the toughest sort of training. But alongside that, keeping up with Samuel Beckett offers an arduous workout too, for he is surely one of the most intelligent and learned writers, and even to begin to do him justice requires very serious intellectual training, retraining, expansion, investment. If one spends one’s morning trying to write fiction, and one’s afternoon trying to say something about a writer as difficult and important as Beckett, then if one has a few minutes left over in the evening to attend to words in other contexts, one may indeed feel a little like a trained sprinter taking a jog round the block. [Read More]
Also at A Piece of Monologue:
Infinite Fictions: Essays on Literature and Theory
A collection of essays by upcoming literary critic, David Winters
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| David Winters |
For a taster of David Winters' writing style, take a look at his website, http://davidwinters.uk/
CFP: Scale: Malta, 2015
European Society for Literature, Science and the Arts · Malta · 15-18 June 2015
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| A still from Terrence Malick's Tree of Life (2011) |
This year’s conference is dedicated to the theme of Scale. In one way or another, scale is an issue deeply embedded in every discipline and every aspect of scholarly and scientific research. As the Call for Papers puts it, in the grand scheme of things Scale is the scheme of things itself. We do very much hope, therefore, that you will be as excited by the prospect of an interdisciplinary conference on Scale as we are. We are very pleased that the location of the conference will be Malta, an island in the middle of the Mediterranean with a rich history and culture, where effects of scale have exerted intriguing and complex energies for centuries, and which provides a particularly fitting and appealing venue for this year’s event.
The Call for Papers sets out a number of scale-related topics that cut across disciplines, with six threads identified that should themselves help to provide further prompts for thought. You will see that there is a distinguished group of keynote speakers – Bruce Clarke (Texas Tech), Marcus du Sautoy (Oxford) Gaetana Marrone-Puglia (Princeton), Tom McCarthy, Franco Moretti (Stanford) and Cary Wolfe (Rice) – which can only help to enrich intellectual and academic exchange when we meet in Malta in June. ‘Scale’ therefore promises to be an event that provides rich and rewarding interdisciplinary debate.
We very much look forward to receiving abstracts exploring scale and its various aspects and effects within and across disciplines. The conference will be particularly attractive to academics and researchers working in SLSA’s main areas of focus – literary studies, the sciences, the arts and the spaces (and scales …) in between, but we also hope to hear from delegates from other fields, who are most welcome to attend and participate.
This SLSAeu conference is organised in collaboration with the Humanities, Medicine and Sciences Programme at the University of Malta, and with the further support of the University’s Faculty of Arts, Faculty of Science and the Department of English, whose help is here warmly acknowledged.
Looking forward to scale-related conversations in June, in Malta. [Read More]
10.3.15
What Homer Can Tell Us About Modern War
Charlotte Higgins on the continuing relevance of a 3,000-year-old poem.
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Many wishing to make sense of wars in their own time have reached for The Iliad. Alexander the Great, perhaps the most flamboyantly successful soldier in history, slept beside a copy annotated by his tutor, Aristotle. "He esteemed it a perfect portable treasure of all military virtue and knowledge," according to Plutarch's biography. Simone Weil's essay, "L'Iliade ou le poème de la force", published in 1940, holds that "the true hero, the true subject at the centre of The Iliad is force", which she defines as "that X that turns anybody who is subjected to it into a thing".
Her contemporary Rachel Bespaloff, a Geneva-raised philosopher who wound up in the United States, also turned to Homer's poem as a "method of facing" the second world war. For her, it tells a profound, human story – "Suffering and loss have stripped Hector bare," her essay "On The Iliad" begins.
We are still turning to The Iliad, amid our own wars: the Australian writer David Malouf's recent novel, Ransom (Chatto & Windus), is about the encounter between Priam and Achilles in The Iliad's final book, while Caroline Alexander's new study of the poem, The War that Killed Achilles (Faber), sees it as a meditation on the catastrophic effects of conflict. While she does not indulge in crass equivalences, it is hard not to be alerted by her reading to the devastation caused by the conflicts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
[...]
The Trojan war – a more or less mythical event – was a 10-year siege of the city of Troy by a coalition of Greeks, its purpose to restore Helen to her Spartan husband, Menelaus. The Iliad charts not the famous causes of the conflict (the Trojan prince Paris's abduction of Helen) nor its spectacularly bloody end (the Greeks' ruse of the wooden horse and the brutal sacking of the city). Instead, the subject of the poem is menis, fury – specifically, the wrath of the Greeks' best warrior, Achilles.
That wrath is provoked by his commander-in-chief Agamemnon's misguided decision to seize Briseis, Achilles's captive woman, as compensation for his own bit of living loot, Chriseis, whom he has been obliged to restore to her Trojan father. Achilles, his pride and honour outraged, withdraws from the fighting and persuades his mother, the goddess Thetis, to ask Zeus to turn the tide of war against the Greeks, knowing that they will suffer appalling losses. He stubbornly resists all appeals to return to battle, but eventually agrees to send his beloved comrade, Patroclus, into the fray.
When Patroclus is killed by the Trojans' best fighter, Hector, Achilles whirls into a frenzy of redoubled, redirected rage. He joins the fighting, and begins a lengthy and pitiless slaughtering spree. Finally, he kills Hector in single combat and attaches the corpse to his chariot, dragging it triumphantly around the walls of the city. (In 2004, the bodies of American contractors were attached to the backs of cars and dragged through the streets of Fallujah.) At the end of the poem Hector's frail and eldery father, Priam, enters the Greeks' camp and persuades Achilles to restore to him his son's body.
[...]
[...] The Iliad still has much to say about war, even as it is fought today. It tells us that war is both the bringer of renown to its young fighters and the destroyer of their lives. It tells us about post-conflict destruction and chaos; about war as the great reverser of fortunes. It tells us about the age-old dilemmas of fighters compelled to serve under incompetent superiors. It tells us about war as an attempt to protect and preserve a treasured way of life. It tells us, too, about the profound gulf between civilian existence and life on the front line; about atrocities and indiscriminate slaughter; about war's peculiar mercilessness to women and children; about friendships and sympathies across the battle lines. It tells us of the love between soldiers who fight together. Most of all, it tells us about the frightful losses of war: of a soldier losing his closest companion, of a father losing his son. [Read More]
27.2.15
Beckett’s Bodies: Affect, Disability, Performance
SAMLA 85: Durham, NC Nov 13-15, 2015
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| Samuel Beckett rehearsing with the San Quentin Drama Workshop |
Conference of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association (SAMLA)
Chair/contact: Michelle Rada, Brown University
Beckett’s Bodies: Affect, Disability, Performance
This panel seeks to explore the ways in which bodies are figured and disfigured in Beckett’s work. On their own constituting an expansive “body of work,” Beckett’s prose texts, poems, plays, radio, television, and film works posit human, non-human, and inhuman bodies in different and often surprising forms. What kinds of bodies are incorporated, disembodied, or stripped bare in Beckett’s work? How can we trace the life, vulnerability, and survival of the body in single texts and across works? Are Beckettian physical and textual bodies susceptible to or immune from affect? Which bodies, metaphorical or otherwise, are excluded from consideration and care in a quite prolific archive of Beckett criticism? How does the body function and dysfunction across genre and media, prose and performance? The purpose of this panel is to provide a multidisciplinary platform for thinking about the body in Beckett’s work through emerging reading practices, which could engender new connections and ideas for such an extensively critiqued range of texts. In keeping with SAMLA’s theme for the 2015 conference, “In Concert: Literature and the Other Arts,” emphasis placed on thinking across genre, media, and theoretical approaches is encouraged, and will be a significant part of our conversation at this panel.
Possible approaches and topics may include, but are not limited to:
Queer bodies in Beckett’s work
Beckett and disability studies
Bodily capacity and its limits in performance
Affect and its embodied forms
Gendered bodies and feminist approaches to Beckett
Abject and aging bodies, dead bodies, and animal bodies
Material bodies and the life of the object
Beckett’s body of work and its sustained life in/through/as Beckett criticism
The precarious body, vulnerability, and the pains of survival
Ill-sensing: perception and the phenomenological body in Beckett
Food studies, consuming bodies, oral fixations, sucking stones
Sex and reproduction in Beckett
Adaptations of Beckett and the political, gendered, and racialized body
Dance, stage directions, choreography, and demands on the performing body
Please send a 250-300 word abstract, a brief bio, and any questions to: michelle_rada@brown.edu by 1 June 2015.
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30.11.14
Free Event: Nicola Humble on The Literature of Food
Assuming Gender Annual Lecture · Cardiff University, 10 December 2014
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| Design: Rhys Tranter |
Free Public Event at Cardiff University. All welcome to attend.
Assuming Gender Annual Lecture 2014.
10 December, 5.15pm.
Professor Nicola Humble (University of Roehampton)
'The Literature of Food'
The lecture will be preceded by a wine reception from 4.00pm.
After the lecture, we will be holding a meal at Mezza Luna on City Road. If you would like to attend the meal, please email Catherine Han at hanc@cardiff.ac.uk by the 8 December.
16.11.14
Hotel: A New Journal for Literature and the Arts
Call for submissions
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A Hotel is defined by its inhabitants: Commenting on the role of the novelist at mid-Century, Alain Robbe-Grillet would declare that the genuine writer “has nothing to say” but rather “only a way of speaking.” Whilst his conceit is here broadly prevalent as an exploratory view of the formalist interests that help us, as readers, discern a view of the Modern work of fiction and its largely self-reflexive interests, its implicit declaration is the apparent “otherness” of the work of art in the contemporary age. This is, of course, a point of contention that secures innovation, experiment, and the avant-garde a subsidiary status that allocates its significance as something only tangible amongst a group of readers privy to a sense of the novel’s history and as such, subsequently, conversations regarding the futurology of the novel’s form are then questions only accorded in the annals of academic culture. HOTEL would take this interest as central to its observations. Robbe-Grillet’s “genuine” writer here equivocates with a “genuine” reader, and this is the key notion that HOTEL would seek to explore. HOTEL seeks to accommodate fiction, poetry and contemporary thought on form, medium and authorial intentionality.
Contact: hoteleditorial@gmail.com
27.10.14
Asymptote: October 2014 Issue
Staging Beckett and Contemporary Theatre and Performance Cultures
Minghella Building, University of Reading 10-11 April 2015
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| Samuel Beckett. Photograph: Reg Lancaster/Getty Images |
Minghella Building, University of Reading 10-11 April 2015
Conference Call for Papers
The Staging Beckett team is pleased to announce the project’s third and final conference, Staging Beckett and Contemporary Theatre and Performance Cultures. Building on the conversation begun at the first two events which addressed national and international performance histories and productions at the cultural ‘margins’ respectively, this conference aims to address how we can locate productions of Beckett’s theatre or the staging of any Beckett text within the wider landscape of contemporary theatre and performance in different cultural contexts. What are the legacies of productions of Beckett’s theatre or stage adaptations of other texts for contemporary theatre and performance practitioners? How can we best document and record those legacies? We are keen to hear from academics and practitioners (whether UK, Irish or international) interested in the legacies of particular performances, the documentation and analysis of Beckett in performance, and in the dialogues between Beckett’s theatre and wider theatre and performance practices and cultures. Issues to consider might be, but are not limited to, the following:
- Recent productions of Beckett’s drama
- The ‘Festivalisation’ of Beckett
- ‘West End’ Beckett
- Beckett and Contemporary Live Art / Experimental / Intermedial performance
- Beckett and Censorship
- International touring productions to the UK and Ireland (e.g. Robert Wilson and Peter Brook) or from the UK and Ireland (e.g. the Dublin Gate Theatre’s Beckett Festival)
- Beckett and contemporary stage design / dramaturgy
- Beckett, performance and the digital
- The adaptation / appropriation of Beckett’s non-theatre texts for performance
- Beckett and music in performance
- Beckett’s legacies for performance
Please send proposals of c. 300 words to p.mctighe@reading.ac.uk by December 1, 2014.
More information on Staging Beckett project events and activities can be found at http://blogs.reading.ac.uk/staging-beckett/
Staging Beckett team: Matthew McFrederick (Reading), Anna McMullan (Reading), Trish McTighe (Reading), David Pattie (Chester), Graham Saunders (Reading), David Tucker (Chester).
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21.9.14
Adorno, Benjamin and Pop Culture
From Alex Ross (New Yorker)
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| Illustration: Patrick Bremer |
In Jonathan Franzen’s 2001 novel, “The Corrections,” a disgraced academic named Chip Lambert, who has abandoned Marxist theory in favor of screenwriting, goes to the Strand Bookstore, in downtown Manhattan, to sell off his library of dialectical tomes. The works of Theodor W. Adorno, Jürgen Habermas, Fredric Jameson, and various others cost Chip nearly four thousand dollars to acquire; their resale value is sixty-five. “He turned away from their reproachful spines, remembering how each of them had called out in a bookstore with a promise of a radical critique of late-capitalist society,” Franzen writes. After several more book-selling expeditions, Chip enters a high-end grocery store and walks out with an overpriced filet of wild Norwegian salmon.
Anyone who underwent a liberal-arts education in recent decades probably encountered the thorny theorists associated with the Institute for Social Research, better known as the Frankfurt School. Their minatory titles, filled with dark talk of “Negative Dialectics” and “One-Dimensional Man,” were once proudly displayed on college-dorm shelves, as markers of seriousness; now they are probably consigned to taped-up boxes in garages, if they have not been discarded altogether. Once in a while, the present-day Web designer or business editor may open the books and see in the margins the excited queries of a younger self, next to pronouncements on the order of “There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” (Walter Benjamin) or “The whole is the false” (Adorno).
In the nineteen-nineties, the period in which “The Corrections” is set, such dire sentiments were unfashionable. With the fall of the Soviet Union, free-market capitalism had triumphed, and no one seemed badly hurt. In light of recent events, however, it may be time to unpack those texts again. Economic and environmental crisis, terrorism and counterterrorism, deepening inequality, unchecked tech and media monopolies, a withering away of intellectual institutions, an ostensibly liberating Internet culture in which we are constantly checking to see if we are being watched: none of this would have surprised the prophets of Frankfurt, who, upon reaching America, failed to experience the sensation of entering Paradise. Watching newsreels of the Second World War, Adorno wrote, “Men are reduced to walk-on parts in a monster documentary film which has no spectators, since the least of them has his bit to do on the screen.” He would not revise his remarks now.
The philosophers, sociologists, and critics in the Frankfurt School orbit, who are often gathered under the broader label of Critical Theory, are, indeed, having a modest resurgence. They are cited in brainy magazines like n+1, The Jacobin, and the latest iteration of The Baffler. Evgeny Morozov, in his critiques of Internet boosterism, has quoted Adorno’s early mentor Siegfried Kracauer, who registered the information and entertainment overload of the nineteen-twenties. The novelist Benjamin Kunkel, in his recent essay collection “Utopia or Bust,” extolls the criticism of Jameson, who has taught Marxist literary theory at Duke University for decades. (Kunkel also mentions “The Corrections,” noting that Chip gets his salmon at a shop winkingly named the Nightmare of Consumption.) The critic Astra Taylor, in “The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age,” argues that Adorno and Max Horkheimer, in their 1944 book “Dialectic of Enlightenment,” gave early warnings about corporations “drowning out democracy in pursuit of profit.” And Walter Benjamin, whose dizzyingly varied career skirted the edges of the Frankfurt collective, receives the grand treatment in “Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life” (Harvard), by Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, who earlier edited Harvard’s four-volume edition of Benjamin’s writings.
The Frankfurt School, which arose in the early nineteen-twenties, never presented a united front; it was, after all, a gaggle of intellectuals. One zone in which they clashed was that of mass culture. Benjamin saw the popular arena as a potential site of resistance, from which left-leaning artists like Charlie Chaplin could transmit subversive signals. Adorno and Horkheimer, by contrast, viewed pop culture as an instrument of economic and political control, enforcing conformity behind a permissive screen. The “culture industry,” as they called it, offered the “freedom to choose what is always the same.” A similar split appeared in attitudes toward traditional forms of culture: classical music, painting, literature. Adorno tended to be protective of them, even as he exposed their ideological underpinnings. Benjamin, in his resonant sentence linking culture and barbarism, saw the treasures of bourgeois Europe as spoils in a victory procession, each work blemished by the suffering of nameless millions.
The debate reached its height in the wake of Benjamin’s 1936 essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” a masterpiece of contingent optimism that praises mass culture only insofar as mass culture advances radical politics. Many readers will sympathize with Benjamin, who managed to uphold a formidable critical tradition while opening himself to the modern world and writing in a sensuous voice. He furnishes a template for the pop-savvy intellectual, the preferred model in what remains of literary life. Yet Adorno, his dark-minded, infuriating brother, will not go away: his cross-examination of the “Work of Art” essay, his pinpointing of its moments of naïveté, strikes home. Between them, Adorno and Benjamin were pioneers in thinking critically about pop culture—in taking that culture seriously as an object of scrutiny, whether in tones of delight, dismay, or passionate ambivalence. [Read More]
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Mapping Space in Fiction
Aashish Kaul on Joseph Frank's 1945 study
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| Nora and James Joyce |
As Joseph Frank points out in his early study from 1945, Spatial Form in Modern Literature, Joyce, in Ulysses, works with the assumption that his readers are Dubliners, intimately acquainted with Dublin life and the personal history of his characters, thereby allowing him to refrain from giving any direct information about them; information that, contrary to his intentions, would have betrayed the presence of an omniscient author. What Joyce does, instead, is to present the elements of his narrative in fragments, as they are thrown out unexplained in the course of casual conversations, or as they lie embedded in the various strata of symbolic reference, allusions to Dublin life, history, and the external events of the twenty-four hours during which the novel takes place. The factual background, which otherwise is so conveniently summarized for the reader, must be reconstructed in this case from fragments, sometimes hundreds of pages apart, scattered through the book. As a result, Frank argues, the reader is forced to read Ulysses in the manner he reads modern poetry – continually fitting fragments together and keeping allusions in mind until, by reflexive reference, he can link them to their complements. Indeed Joyce himself, although his model was Aristotle, says as much of Ulysses in a letter to Ezra Pound of 9 April 1917: ‘I am doing it, as Aristotle would say – by different means in different parts.’ [Read More]
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18.9.14
Why Walking Helps Us Think
Nabokov, Joyce, Woolf and the science of walking
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| Photograph: Nick Walton |
In Vogue’s 1969 Christmas issue, Vladimir Nabokov offered some advice for teaching James Joyce’s “Ulysses”: “Instead of perpetuating the pretentious nonsense of Homeric, chromatic, and visceral chapter headings, instructors should prepare maps of Dublin with Bloom’s and Stephen’s intertwining itineraries clearly traced.” He drew a charming one himself. Several decades later, a Boston College English professor named Joseph Nugent and his colleagues put together an annotated Google map that shadows Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom step by step. The Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain, as well as students at the Georgia Institute of Technology, have similarly reconstructed the paths of the London amblers in “Mrs. Dalloway.”
Such maps clarify how much these novels depend on a curious link between mind and feet. Joyce and Woolf were writers who transformed the quicksilver of consciousness into paper and ink. To accomplish this, they sent characters on walks about town. As Mrs. Dalloway walks, she does not merely perceive the city around her. Rather, she dips in and out of her past, remolding London into a highly textured mental landscape, “making it up, building it round one, tumbling it, creating it every moment afresh.”
Since at least the time of peripatetic Greek philosophers, many other writers have discovered a deep, intuitive connection between walking, thinking, and writing. (In fact, Adam Gopnik wrote about walking in The New Yorker just two weeks ago.) “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live!” Henry David Thoreau penned in his journal. “Methinks that the moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.” Thomas DeQuincey has calculated that William Wordsworth—whose poetry is filled with tramps up mountains, through forests, and along public roads—walked as many as a hundred and eighty thousand miles in his lifetime, which comes to an average of six and a half miles a day starting from age five.
What is it about walking, in particular, that makes it so amenable to thinking and writing? The answer begins with changes to our chemistry. When we go for a walk, the heart pumps faster, circulating more blood and oxygen not just to the muscles but to all the organs—including the brain. Many experiments have shown that after or during exercise, even very mild exertion, people perform better on tests of memory and attention. Walking on a regular basis also promotes new connections between brain cells, staves off the usual withering of brain tissue that comes with age, increases the volume of the hippocampus (a brain region crucial for memory), and elevates levels of molecules that both stimulate the growth of new neurons and transmit messages between them. [Read More]
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10.9.14
Metamorphoses: The Third International Flann O’Brien Conference
Charles University, Prague, 16-19 September 2015
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| Prague |
Charles University, Prague, 16-19 September 2015
Keynote Speakers
Joseph Brooker (Birkbeck, University of London)
Catherine Flynn (University of California, Berkeley)
Brian Ó Conchubhair (University of Notre Dame)
Guest Writer
Kevin Barry (City of Bohane; winner of the 2013 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award)
Written at a time of profound transformation in post-independence Ireland and war-torn Europe, and displaying an acute awareness of the epochal changes bearing on modern notions of literature and the self, Flann O’Brien’s oeuvre offers a sustained engagement with the representation of cultural, political, and personal metamorphosis. This is a body of writing in which the human always bears the potential to be radically remade in the forms of horses, bicycles, and trains; in which genre, language, and literary form are constantly reorganised and refashioned; in which a programme of pseudonymity presents the comic writer as a master of disguise and identity as a matter of constant flux.
At Metamorphoses: The III International Flann O’Brien Conference (Charles University, Prague, 16-19 September 2015), the organisers propose to build on the current sea change in O’Brien studies to foster a scholarly and critical debate dedicated to these themes of metamorphosis in the writer’s work. At stake will be the ways in which O’Brien’s English and Irish language novels, short stories, column-writing, non-fiction, teleplays, and theatrical work:
- Test the limits and possibilities of identity, hybridity, & concepts of post-humanity;
- Engage and transform cultural, political, & economic upheaval at home and abroad;
- Process radical paradigm shifts in the sciences, from Darwinian evolution theory to the “Mollycule Theory” of quantum physics;
- Explore (anti-)modernist reconstructions of myth, whether Irish or Ovidian;
- Attend to linguistic, generic, and formal mutations, as well as the resonances between metamorphosis, metaphor, and metafiction;
- Present shifting views of himself, his own writing, and the figure of the Author;
- Are transformed in the acts of reception, rewriting, translation, & adaptation;
- Are opened up for new readings by genetic analyses of the vast and critically under-analysed collections of his works in progress (correspondence, manuscripts, drafts) housed at Boston College, Southern Illinois University, & University of Texas at Austin;
- Are amenable to new comparative readings with Prague’s sons Franz Kafka and Karel Čapek, as well as other modernist writers and movements of transformation, from Jarry & Joyce, Borges & Beckett, to the Absurdists, Futurists, & Surrealists.
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5.9.14
Samuel Beckett Week 2014
University of Reading · 1-4 October 2014
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| A manuscript notebook of Samuel Beckett's first novel, Murphy |
We will be holding an exhibition and series of public events to celebrate the University's internationally renowned collection of manuscripts from the Nobel Prize-winning writer Samuel Beckett (1906-1989).
Wednesday 1 - Saturday 4 October
Public Exhibition: "Samuel Beckett in London - the Murphy Notebooks".
Museum of English Rural Life (free).
At this exhibition, which will focus on Beckett's time in London between 1934 and 1935, the University's recently acquired notebooks for Beckett's novel Murphy will be on display alongside a wide range of other material.
Thursday 2 October
Beckett Archive Workshop.
2-4pm, Museum of English Rural Life (free). Please book in advance.
Open to all, this free two-hour workshop will introduce the University's Beckett archive to participants. It is open to any interested members of the public, but places must be booked in advance.
Friday 3 October
Public Lecture and Drinks Reception: Professor Dan Gunn - "Samuel Beckett Through his Letters".
5.30pm, Minghella Building, Whiteknights Campus (free). Please book in advance.
Dan Gunn is Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the American University of Paris, and editor of the Letters of Samuel Beckett.
Saturday 4 October
The Beckett International Foundation Annual Research Seminar 2014.
10am, Museum of English Rural Life (£20 waged, £15 unwaged). Includes lunch and refreshments. Please book in advance.
This day-long advanced seminar will explore some of the latest research in Beckett Studies.
For further details and booking please contact:
Workshop and/or Lecture: Conor Carville - c.carville@reading.ac.uk
BIF Seminar: Mark Nixon - m.nixon@reading.ac.uk
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Margaret Atwood Joins the Future Library Project
Canadian author's new work will not be read for 100 years
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| Margaret Atwood |
Depending on perspective, it is an author's dream – or nightmare: Margaret Atwood will never know what readers think of the piece of fiction she is currently working on, because the unpublished, unread manuscript from the Man Booker prize-winning novelist will be locked away for the next 100 years.
Atwood has just been named as the first contributor to an astonishing new public artwork. The Future Library project, conceived by the award-winning young Scottish artist Katie Paterson, began, quietly, this summer, with the planting of a forest of 1,000 trees in Nordmarka, just outside Oslo. It will slowly unfold over the next century. Every year until 2114, one writer will be invited to contribute a new text to the collection, and in 2114, the trees will be cut down to provide the paper for the texts to be printed – and, finally, read.
"It is the kind of thing you either immediately say yes or no to. You don't think about it for very long," said Atwood, speaking from Copenhagen. "I think it goes right back to that phase of our childhood when we used to bury little things in the backyard, hoping that someone would dig them up, long in the future, and say, 'How interesting, this rusty old piece of tin, this little sack of marbles is. I wonder who put it there?'" [Read More]
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4.9.14
The Selected Poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini
A bilingual edition
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| The Selected Poetry of Pier Paolo Pasolini: A Bilingual Edition, ed. Stephen Sartarelli |
Most people outside Italy know Pier Paolo Pasolini for his films, many of which began as literary works—Arabian Nights, The Gospel According to Matthew, The Decameron, and The Canterbury Tales among them. What most people are not aware of is that he was primarily a poet, publishing nineteen books of poems during his lifetime, as well as a visual artist, novelist, playwright, and journalist. Half a dozen of these books have been excerpted and published in English over the years, but even if one were to read all of those, the wide range of poetic styles and subjects that occupied Pasolini during his lifetime would still elude the English-language reader.
For the first time, Anglophones will now be able to discover the many facets of this singular poet. Avoiding the tactics of the slim, idiosyncratic, and aesthetically or politically motivated volumes currently available in English, Stephen Sartarelli has chosen poems from every period of Pasolini’s poetic oeuvre. In doing so, he gives English-language readers a more complete picture of the poet, whose verse ranged from short lyrics to longer poems and extended sequences, and whose themes ran not only to the moral, spiritual, and social spheres but also to the aesthetic and sexual, for which he is most known in the United States today. This volume shows how central poetry was to Pasolini, no matter what else he was doing in his creative life, and how poetry informed all of his work from the visual arts to his political essays to his films. Pier Paolo Pasolini was “a poet of the cinema,” as James Ivory says in the book’s foreword, who “left a trove of words on paper that can live on as the fast-deteriorating images he created on celluloid cannot.”
This generous selection of poems will be welcomed by poetry lovers and film buffs alike and will be an event in American letters. [Read More]
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