Rediscovering Raymond Williams

Geoff Dyer on 'one of the left's great thinkers'

Raymond Williams

From Geoff Dyer (New Statesman):

“I come from Pandy . . .” The first words spoken by Raymond Williams in Politics and Letters: Interviews with New Left Review (1979) may not have quite the rolling loquacity of the opening line of Saul Bellow’s Adventures of Augie March – “I am an American, Chicago born . . .” – but in their brisk way they bespeak a similar confidence.

Bellow’s narrator immediately situates his experience in the heart of America; Williams announced one of his main concerns in the title of his first novel, Border Country (1960). Borders – how they are constructed and recognised, how they impede and are crossed – are central to his thought. In contrast to March’s unequivocal belief (“I am an American”), Williams, whose work concentrated on the English literary and cultural tradition, came to identify himself as “a Welsh European”, emphasising what lay either side of a presumed centre, both locally and within an international context.

“It happened that in a predominantly urban and industrial Britain I was born in a remote village, in a very old settled countryside, on the border between England and Wales.” This is the account Williams gives of his origins in The Country and the City (1973), the simple facts of the matter beginning to unfurl and expand in the recognisable style of his analytical writing: an authority that draws power from a suggested hesitancy; the unhurried accumulation of material and argument; a continual elaboration and deepening of meaning. While Williams was proudly conscious of the convolutions of his own method and mode – “all my usual famous qualifying and complicating, my insistence on depths and ambiguities” – a former student, Terry Eagleton, remembers his lecturing style as that of “somebody who was talking in a human voice”.

Eagleton was struck also by the way that although Williams’s background might, by Cambridge standards, have been regarded as humble, it was also sufficiently “privileged” to give him “a sort of stability, a rootedness and self-assurance, and almost magisterial authority”. It gave him the confidence, while still an undergraduate – albeit an undergraduate who had served in the war – to stand up and insist, after a talk in which L C Knights claimed that a corrupt and mechanical civilisation could no longer understand neighbourliness, that he knew “perfectly well, from Wales, what neighbour meant”.

Confidence counts for little unless it is allied with determination. Combining this with an Orwellian sense “of the enormous injustice” of the world, Williams had the resources to develop his early critical and theoretical project – one that stressed the importance of shared experience and common meanings – in comparative isolation. In the process of becoming articulate in the language of a new and expansive kind of cultural history he also, in Raphael Samuel’s words, “constructed a conceptual vocabulary of his own”. The vocabulary was the cerebral expression of a temperament shaped by a particular geography and history. In Border Country Harry Price is “waiting for terms he could feel”. You could almost say he is waiting for the author to coin his most famous term, “structure of feeling”. Where Williams came from was inextricably linked with what he came to say.

If Orwell’s sense of the injustice of the world was fed by a disposition to dwell on its misery, then the “privileged” background of the signalman’s son made the idea of defeat almost entirely alien. It also meant, according to his critics, that the political positions of his later years, with Thatcherism in full swing and the miners having suffered a catastrophic defeat, were nostalgic, even sentimental. Either way, the key thing is that his writing always carried an enormous freight of autobiography. “I learned the saturating power of the structures of feeling of a given society as much from my own mind and my own experience as from observing the lives of others,” Williams wrote.

This double combination – complexity of thought and clarity of expression, with a depth and intensity of personal feeling – made Williams an inspirational figure for the generation of students who came of age in 1968 and looked to him for political and moral as well as intellectual guidance. A representative of the next generation (ten in 1968), I set eyes on him precisely twice.

The first time was when he came to give a lecture at Oxford, where I was an undergraduate, in about 1978. Our tutor encouraged us to go, so we went. I had no idea who Williams was or what he was droning on about. Then, in the mid-1980s, I went to see him in conversation with Michael Ignatieff at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. I’m guessing that the occasion was the publication of his novel Loyalties – though if it was, how come I didn’t get my copy signed? I can only assume I was too intimidated because by then the old bloke who’d waffled on at Oxford had entirely reshaped my sense of life and literature and the way they were related. [Read More]

CFP: Women and Ageing: New Cultural and Critical Perspectives

University of Limerick, Ireland · 20-22 May 2015

Women and Ageing: New Cultural and Critical Perspectives
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

Modernism's Chronic Conditions: Temporality, Medicine, and Disorders of the Self

Free Public Event · University of Exeter, 17 April 2015

Modernism's Chronic Conditions: Temporality, Medicine, and Disorders of the Self
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]

Infinite Fictions: Essays on Literature and Theory

A collection of essays by upcoming literary critic, David Winters

David Winters

A promising new title from Zero Books: ‘David Winters has quickly become a leading voice in the new landscape of online literary criticism. His widely-published work maps the furthest frontiers of contemporary fiction and theory. The essays in this book range from the American satirist Sam Lipsyte to the reclusive Australian genius Gerald Murnane; from the distant reading of Franco Moretti to the legacy of Gordon Lish. Meditations on style, form and fictional worlds sit side-by-side with overviews of the cult status of Oulipo, the aftermath of modernism, and the history of continental philosophy. Infinite Fictions is indispensable reading for anyone interested in the forefront of literary thought.’ [Read More]

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

A still from Terrence Malick's Tree of Life (2011)

From the European Society for Literature, Science and the Arts (SLSAeu):

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]

The Bleed 03: Launch at BALTIC book market

Magazine launch. 5 December – 6 December 2014

The Bleed (03)

“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” – Ernest Hemingway

The new issue of The Bleed magazine will be launched at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art this week.

The independent magazine’s latest issue will be available for the first time at the two-day BALTIC Artists’ Book Market, which takes place at BALTIC in Newcastle-Gateshead on 5-6 December . Copies of The Bleed 03 will be free to visitors to the event with original artwork and signed copies of previous issues also on display. In 2011, BALTIC became the first UK venue outside of London to host the Turner Prize. It will be The Bleed’s first appearance at the prestigious gallery.

The Bleed 03, written by Daniel Thomson and designed by Jonny Speak, features photography by Helen Taylor and artwork by Tom Boyle, Abi Buchan, Meaghan Ralph, Karen Yumi Lusted and Helen Gorill, who has exhibited internationally and was included in the New York Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A Sackler Center for Feminist Art archive. Previous issues have included work by artists such as Lauren Jane Forster, Mike Barnes and Nick Willis. The debut issue featured a cover by Eisner Award-winning comic creator Bryan Talbot.

“There is a great quote by Kurt Vonnegut, ‘we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be’ which I discovered after I had finished writing issue 03”, says writer Daniel Thomson. “At its heart, this is what the new story is about. A struggling actor is hired to impersonate his friend and starts to become someone else. As he loses himself, his entire world becomes a fiction.”

Since its launch three years ago, The Bleed has established a reputation for its ambitious, high-concept issues, which bring together diverse content, from prose and poetry to photography and illustration, into a single narrative to push the boundaries of how stories can be told.

The Bleed is an independent magazine based in Newcastle upon Tyne, with contributors from across the UK as well as from New York and Japan. It is open to any artist, working in any medium, from anywhere in the world and is dedicated to showcasing new, original talent. Follow The Bleed magazine on Twitter @thebleedmag and its editor Daniel Thomson @thebleededitor.

Read more at: www.thebleedmag.tumblr.com

To get a free copy of The Bleed 03 come to BALTIC Artists’ Book Market on 5-6 December . For more about BALTIC+ go to: http://balticplus.uk/

Free Event: Nicola Humble on The Literature of Food

Assuming Gender Annual Lecture · Cardiff University, 10 December 2014

Design: Rhys Tranter

Announcement from Assuming Gender:

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.

Hotel: A New Journal for Literature and the Arts

Call for submissions

An announcement from Hotel:

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

Staging Beckett and Contemporary Theatre and Performance Cultures

Minghella Building, University of Reading 10-11 April 2015

Samuel Beckett. Photograph: Reg Lancaster/Getty Images

Staging Beckett and Contemporary Theatre and Performance Cultures
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

Staging Beckett is a three year collaborative research project undertaken by the universities of Chester, Reading, and the Victoria & Albert Museum which started in September 2012, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). The project explores the impact of productions of Beckett’s plays on British and Irish theatre practice and cultures while also looking at how Beckett has been staged internationally, and it is compiling a database of professional productions of Beckett’s plays in the UK and Ireland which will be available in 2015.

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).

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Staging Beckett at the Margins
• Staging Beckett: Constructing Performance Histories CFP
• Staging Beckett: Constructing Performance Histories
• Staging Beckett: Ian Rickson in Conversation

Samuel Beckett Society Inaugural Conference (2015)

How to get involved

Design: Rhys Tranter

In collaboration with the Samuel Beckett Society, Arizona State University will host an international conference at the Clarendon Hotel in Phoenix, AZ on February 19th and 20th, 2015. The inaugural conference of the Samuel Beckett Society will bring together new, emerging, and established perspectives on the Nobel laureate’s writing for a sustained exchange of ideas. Distinguished Professor David Lloyd will deliver a keynote address; ASU will present a concert at the Arizona Irish Cultural Centering, featuring pieces associated with Beckett and his work; and a roundtable session will focus on Beckett and the digital humanities.

Conference Registration
We have set up an easy online registration system for the conference. Please navigate to our Reg Online site and sign up ($175 for faculty; $100 for students) at your earliest convenience.

Samuel Beckett Society Membership
All non-ASU affiliated attendees must be current members of the Samuel Beckett Society ($35 per year faculty; $20 per year students). If you are not a member, please visit the SBS Membership Page.

Accommodations
We have secured a discounted conference rate of $139 per night at the Clarendon Hotel. February is peak season in the Phoenix area, so please reserve your room as soon as possible. Space is limited. For more information, please visit the accommodations page of the official conference website.

Facebook Page
Like us on Facebook and receive updates regarding conference programming, meal menus, area tours, and more.

Questions
If you have any questions about the conference please contact us at beckettconference2015@gmail.com.

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Lisa Dwan on Beckett, Rehearsal, and Audience Response
• George Hunka on Waiting for Godot
• The Samuel Beckett Theatre Project Oxford c.1967-76
• Brian Evenson on Samuel Beckett's Molloy

Adorno, Benjamin and Pop Culture

From Alex Ross (New Yorker)

Illustration: Patrick Bremer

From Alex Ross (New Yorker):

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]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• The Life and Influence of Walter Benjamin
• Eli Friedlander, Walter Benjamin: A Philosophical Portrait
• Walter Benjamin's Paris Address Book
• Walter Benjamin, Early Writings 1910-1917
• Walter Benjamin's Library Card

Mapping Space in Fiction

Aashish Kaul on Joseph Frank's 1945 study

Nora and James Joyce

From Aashish Kaul (3:AM Magazine):

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]

Find on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time
• Dostoyevsky's Demons: Political Activists
• Byatt on Dostoyevsky and Execution
• McGrath on Coetzee's Master of Petersburg
• Dostoyevsky on Politics and Personal Vanity

Why Walking Helps Us Think

Nabokov, Joyce, Woolf and the science of walking

Photograph: Nick Walton

From Ferris Jabr (New Yorker) (thanks to Emily Blewitt for the link):

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]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Will Self: Obsessed with Walking
• Will Self, Walking to Hollywood
• Will Self: Walking is Political
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of a Solitary Walker
• Granta Interview: Nick Papadimitriou

Metamorphoses: The Third International Flann O’Brien Conference

Charles University, Prague, 16-19 September 2015

Prague

Metamorphoses: The III International Flann O’Brien Conference
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.

Abstracts: If you would like to propose a paper (not exceeding 20 minutes), or panel (maximum 3 speakers) please submit your title and an abstract of 250 words accompanied by a short biographical sketch to viennacis.anglistik@univie.ac.at by 1 March 2015.

Find Flann O'Brien on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Reading Brian O'Nolan's Libraries
• Flann O'Brien & Modernism
• http://www.apieceofmonologue.com/2011/08/flann-obrien-beckett-joyce-irish.html
• Re Joyce
• Reading Finnegans Wake

Samuel Beckett Week 2014

University of Reading · 1-4 October 2014

A manuscript notebook of Samuel Beckett's first novel, Murphy

From the University of Reading:

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

Find Samuel Beckett on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• John Haynes' Photography
• Journal of Beckett Studies: ‘The Performance Issue’
• Brian Evenson on Samuel Beckett's Molloy
• Anna McMullan on 60 Years of Godot

Lost Highway Screening: V&A, London

Introduced by author Richard Martin

Lost Highway (dir. David Lynch, 1997)

Lost Highway (dir. David Lynch, 1997)

Lost Highway (dir. David Lynch, 1997)

From V&A: ‘Special Event: Richard Martin, author of the forthcoming book The Architecture of David Lynch, introduces Lynch’s uncanny noir thriller, Lost Highway (USA 1997 / 135mins / Certificate 18) and discusses how we might unlock the secrets of Lost Highway by looking carefully at the film’s design elements and architectural spaces.’ The screening will take place on 13 September 2014 [Read More]

Find David Lynch on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Filmmakers: David Lynch
• Mulholland Drive Screening: Barbican, London
• David Lynch's Club Silencio
• David Lynch Artwork Retrospective
• The Production Design of Lynch, Malick & Anderson

Mulholland Drive Screening: Barbican, London

Introduction by author Richard Martin

Mullholland Drive (dir. David Lynch, 2001)

If you are in London on 27 September 2014, the Barbican are organising a screening of David Lynch's Mulholland Drive (2001). The screening comes complete with an introduction from Richard Martin, author of The Architecture of David Lynch:

David Lynch’s surrealist neo-noir marries a mood of urban anxiety to a narrative that is not simply set in Los Angeles, but actually scrutinizes the collective dream that is LA. How many aspiring starlets have come to the city, only to have their dreams smashed?

This hallucinatory tale of a perky blond ingénue (Naomi Watts) caught up in a mystery involving an amnesiac brunette (Laura Elena Harring) begins with a bone-crunching car accident on the famous road above the city. [Read More]

Find David Lynch on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Filmmakers: David Lynch
• David Lynch and Digital Modernism
• David Lynch's Club Silencio
• David Lynch Artwork Retrospective
• The Production Design of Lynch, Malick & Anderson

CFP: The Turn into the Twentieth Century and the Problem of Periodization

Critical Essays on American Literary History

New York: Fifth Avenue Looking North. 1913.

The title is a bit of a mouthful, but this promises to be an interesting publication. From bams.ac.uk:

Despite the substantial reconceptualization of the field of American literature in recent decades, century-based constructs typically remain in place throughout the field, particularly in relation to “nineteenth-century American literature” versus “twentieth-century American literature.” Courses are taught, textbooks sold, and academic jobs are constructed around such distinctions. Such logic particularly limits scholarship on the turn into the twentieth century, often characterized as a midpoint on a teleological trajectory culminating in literary modernism. This collection of essays aims to complicate and challenge the conceptual divide between the 19th and 20th centuries by exploring turn-of-the-century works (“T-20” works) in light of the particular negotiations engaged in by writers from the 1880-1920 era, or those that render writing from this period irreducible to a clear periodization by century. We are especially interested in essays that rethink boundaries denoted by century and in those that create models for extending both “19th c thought” and “modernity,” so as to interrogate the meeting of a long, late 19th century and an extended, emergent modernity.

Proposals for 25-page essays might consider the following:

• What constructs, authors, and texts are particularly useful in exploring the unique historical and ideological assumptions about literature from the century’s turn?
• In what ways does the language we use to describe cultural and literary movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reinscribe the logic of periodization by century? How, for example, might rhetorics of progress and teleology reveal assumptions that undergird our approach to turn-of-the-century American literature? In what ways might these assumptions/terms be reconsidered?
• In what ways does the idea of the “turn of the century” emerge as a useful category through which to explore continuities across centuries rather than stark divisions between them? If there is a “long nineteenth century,” where might it end? If there is an “emergent modernity,” at what point(s) might it begin?
• In what ways does the profession of literary studies—the job market, academic conferences, scholarly journals, and book publishing—reproduce or challenge these divides in regard to specific authors or works? In what ways can scholars and students take a less temporally restrictive view of the field?

Send abstracts of 250-500 words and short c.v.s to Melanie Dawson (mvdaws@wm.edu) and Meredith Goldsmith (mgoldsmith@ursinus.edu) by September 15, in anticipation of full-length essays being due by 15 February 2014. Enquiries welcome.

Journal of Beckett Studies: ‘The Performance Issue’

Co-edited by Jonathan Heron (Warwick) and Nicholas Johnson (TCD)

First the body. No. First the place. No. First both.

Samuel Beckett, Worstward Ho, 1983

In April of 2014, Edinburgh University Press published a special issue of the Journal of Beckett Studies (23:1), ‘The Performance Issue’, which seeks to link the heritage of scholarship on Beckett and performance with current practices and methodologies. Noting the link between performance and associated discourses of phenomenology and embodiment, the edition attempts to treat performance as both an ‘issue’ subject to debate that has not been fully resolved, and an ‘issue’ in the sense of that which comes forth and flows out. The edition explores the tension between ‘the archive and the repertoire’, as articulated by Diana Taylor in 2003, which continues to ghost our memories of Beckett in performance, and has withstood both the theoretical and materialist ‘turns’ of the field. In doing so, the co-editors have drawn upon recent work in Beckett Studies and Performance Studies, including Catherine Laws (2007), Tracy C. Davis (2008), Ulrika Maude (2009), Anna McMullan (2010), Baz Kershaw (2011) and Mark Fleishman (2012).

Following an introduction provided by general editors Mark Nixon and Dirk Van Hulle, the contents of the special issue include the first article on Beckett performance histories by the team of the Staging Beckett AHRC-funded research project (Anna McMullan, Trish McTighe, David Pattie, and David Tucker), complemented by studies of Beckett and Performance Art (Derval Tubridy) and Beckett and New Musical Composition (Catherine Laws). The first results from the Samuel Beckett Laboratory, a performance-based workshop held as part of the annual Samuel Beckett Summer School and facilitated by Johnson and Heron, are published in the form of a “Dossier,” including contributions from directors Gavin Quinn and Sarah Jane Scaife, as well as Summer School participants Burç Îdem Dinçel and Áine Josephine Tyrrell. Directors Ian Rickson and Robert Wilson were interviewed specially for the edition, and artists featured in a new “Practitioners’ Voices” section include Rosemary Pountney, Rieko Suzuki, and Barry McGovern. Obituaries of Frederick Neumann and Herbert Blau follow. The edition concludes out with production reviews of Peter Stein’s 2012 Krapp’s Last Tape and Pan Pan’s 2013 Edinburgh productions of All That Fall and Embers, as well as book reviews focusing on Beckett’s televisual work and laughter in Beckett. A full table of contents is available online at [Journal of Beckett Studies].

About the editors

Jonathan Heron, Artistic Director of Fail Better Productions and IATL Senior Teaching Fellow at University of Warwick, is a core member of AHRC Beckett and Brain Science and co-convenor of the IFTR Performance-as-Research Working Group. His writing has been published in Open-space Learning (Bloomsbury, 2011) and Performing Early Modern Drama Today (CUP, 2012).

Nicholas Johnson is Assistant Professor of Drama at Trinity College Dublin and co-director of the Samuel Beckett Summer School, as well as a director and performer. His research has been published in The Plays of Samuel Beckett (Methuen, 2013), Theatre Research International, Forum Modernes Theater, the Journal of Art Historiography, and the Journal of Beckett Studies.

Find Samuel Beckett on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Writers: Samuel Beckett
• Herbert Blau and Martin Esslin on Samuel Beckett
• Working with Samuel Beckett
• The Right Way to Say 'Godot'
• The Samuel Beckett Theatre Project Oxford c.1967-76

Becoming Freud: The Making of a Psychoanalyst

From a review by Joshua Rothman

Sigmund Freud

From Joshua Rothman (The New Yorker):

“Becoming Freud,” by the British psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, is short for a biography—less than two hundred pages—and it contains no startling revelations. But, in its own way, it’s an audacious book. It’s a revisionist history of Freud and his enterprise; its implicit goal, never stated but always clear, is to help us salvage the best parts of Freud’s work while leaving behind the rest—the outmoded theories and unwieldy jargon that make Freud a caricature rather than an intriguing thinker. (Whether that’s a worthy goal is an open question.)

Phillips is probably today’s most famous psychoanalyst, and a quietly controversial figure. For seven years, he was the principal child psychologist at Charing Cross Hospital, in London. (He’s now in private practice.) Famously, he spends most of the week with his analysands and writes only on Wednesdays; somehow, on that schedule, he’s produced eighteen books. Phillips is obviously brilliant—John Banville has called him “an Emerson of our time”—and yet it’s never quite clear how seriously you should take his writing. Like Emerson, he seems to regard much of it as exploratory or performative. (“When I write something and it sounds good, I leave it in, even if there’s doubt about it,” he has said, because he’s curious to see what readers will think.) He’s the editor of Penguin’s new series of Freud translations, even though he doesn’t speak German; last year, reviewing one of his books for this magazine, Joan Acocella wrote that “Phillips loves Freud. He cites him again and again. But his Freud sometimes doesn’t look much like the Freud we thought we knew. He looks more like Adam Phillips.” How much that bothers you depends on how seriously you take Freud. There are some people who would rather have Phillips.

It’s especially easy for the Freud of “Becoming Freud” to look like Phillips, because, in the book, the facts of Freud’s life are largely absent. “One of the first casualties of psychoanalysis, once the facts of our lives are seen as complicated in the Freudian way, is the traditional biography,” Phillips writes. Phillips doesn’t trust in the ability of a conventional “life story,” with its procession of names, dates, and places, to tell us what anyone, least of all Freud, was really about. Anyway, he thinks, the most important story about Freud’s life is psychoanalysis—that’s the story Freud himself chose to tell the rest of us about our lives and his. And because, as Freud knew, “whatever story we are telling, we are always also telling the story of our own wanting … at any moment in Freud’s life we can ask, encouraged and legitimated by his own work, what is Freud wanting from psychoanalysis? What is the pleasure he seeks? What is he doing it for and what is it doing to him? What about himself is he seeking to sustain and enjoy, and what would he prefer to ignore?” By starting with the flower, in short, you might get an idea of the root. [Read More]

Find on Amazon: US | UK

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Psychoanalysis and Interior Design
• On the Couch: Freud and the New Yorker
• Freud and Love
• Tom McCarthy in Praise of Freud
• Homes of German Philosophers