Narratives of Suburbia

Friday 15^th June 2012, 9.15am – 5.15pm
Room 354, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London

Programme attached here: Narratives of Suburbia Programme[1]

Entrance is FREE but space is limited so please book your place in advance by contacting the organisers, Christopher Daley (daleyc@westminster.ac.uk) and Aisling McKeown (A.Mckeown@westminster.ac.uk).

Narratives of Suburbia

Friday 15^th June 2012, 9.15am – 5.15pm
Room 354, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London

Programme: Narratives of Suburbia Programme[1]

The Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster is delighted to host the 17^th Westminster Colloquium  entitled ‘Narratives of Suburbia’ on Friday 15^th June 2012. The colloquium aims to assess contemporary representations of suburbia in British and North American fiction, with a particular focus on the exponential growth of suburbia since the Second World War and the fictional offshoots it has produced. By exploring the work of Anglo-American authors, the objective is to identify thematic and stylistic areas of convergence and  divergence.

Speakers:
John Beck (Newcastle)
Christine Berberich (Portsmouth)
Professor Neil Campbell (Derby)
Mark Clapson (Westminster)
Martyn Colebrook (Hull)
Martin Dines (Kingston )
Nick Hubble (Brunel)
Rupa Huq (Kingston)

Entrance is FREE but space is limited so please book your place in advance by contacting the organisers, Christopher Daley (daleyc@westminster.ac.uk) and Aisling McKeown (A.Mckeown@westminster.ac.uk). Full programme to follow. 

Th

Wednesday 21^st March, 1.15pm – 2.30pm
Room 257, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street

Aisling McKeown (University of Westminster)
‘Once Upon A Time In The West: the Rural Idyll in Contemporary Irish Fiction and Film’

Abstract: In 1952, John Wayne starred in John Ford’s film The Quiet Man, set in the west of Ireland. Playing a returned Irish-American emigrant, rather than his more customary role as that potent symbol of the American west, the cowboy, Wayne cut a swathe  through Ireland’s wild landscape. The film projected an image of Ireland as a rural idyll, populated by fiery yet charming natives. Contemporary film-makers and writers, unless being deliberately ironic, tend to avoid such clichéd treatment of rural Ireland. Combining discourses of tradition and modernity, their representations reflect the  socio-cultural evolution of this remote location, which inspired Yeats and Synge over a century ago. This paper will trace the development of these representations and discuss the blend of mythology and realism that underpins the work of today’s writers as they address such themes as immigration, identity and belonging.

Wednesday 7^th March, 1.15pm – 2.30pm
Room 257, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street

Matthew Taunton (Queen Mary, University of London)
‘Socialism, Literature and the Radiant Future: Before and After 1917’

Abstract: The idea that a “radiant future” (in Zinoviev’s phrase) was just around the corner was central to the Soviet myth. But how were Western ideas about the future affected by the advent of the Bolshevik revolution? This paper will suggest that the bright eyed visions of the future prevalent in the fin de siècle and the Edwardian period were increasingly replaced, after 1917, by sectarian debates about Russia. The future had become a spatial, rather than a purely temporal entity – whether it was to be welcomed as the true democracy (Shaw, the Webbs) or feared as a totalitarian nightmare (Orwell, Koestler, Nabokov). Speculative fictions like those of Morris, Bellamy, and Wells gave way to anti-Communist texts like Darkness at Noon, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Bend Sinister, and endorsements of Stalinism by Day Lewis, Shaw and others. This paper explores a range of ways in which ‘the future’ had to be rethought in light of the events of 1917.

PLEASE NOTE: We have changed seminar rooms this week and will be in Regent Street room 257.

Wednesday 22^nd February, 1.15pm – 2.30pm
Room 359, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street

Anthony Paraskeva (University of Dundee)
‘Wyndham Lewis, Cinema Hypnotism and the Frankfurt School’

A quick plug for the London Reading Club, a new blog for the book group attached to the MA Writing the City at the University of Westminster, which is run by our own Monica Germana. Check out posts that discuss London writings ranging from Virginia Woolf to Monica Ali here: http://thelondonreadingclub.wordpress.com/

A heads up on the line up of speakers and list of dates for this semester’s series of English Literature and Culture seminars. All will take place from 1.15-2.30pm on Wednesday lunchtimes in the University’s Regent Street building (room 359).

8th February 2012
Morgan Daniels (Queen Mary, London)
‘Satire and Childishness’

22nd February 2012
Anthony Paraskeva (University of Dundee)
”Wyndham Lewis, Cinema Hypnotism and the Frankfurt School’

7th March 2012
Matthew Taunton (Queen Mary, London)
‘Socialism, Literature and the Radiant Future: Before and After 1917′

21st March 2012
Aisling McKeown (Westminster)
‘Once Upon a Time in the West: Rural Idyll in Contemporary Irish Fiction and Film’

Further details at: http://seminarserieswmin.wordpress.com/2012/01/11/semester-two-seminars-unveiled/

The IMCC’s Anne Witchard will be speaking about her forthcoming book at the following event organised by our friends in the Contemporary China Centre:

Wednesday 7 December 2011, 4.30-6.30pm
Westminster Forum, Fifth Floor, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T 3UW

‘Lao She: A Chinese Writer in Modernist London’
Anne Witchard (University of Westminster)

Chinese cultural and intellectual texts engaged in various ways with Western constructions of modernism. Of these exchanges and encounters, my focus in this paper will be on the early life and work of the famous Chinese novelist and short story writer, Lao She (1898 – 1966). Lao She was uniquely positioned in his engagement with specific conditions of modernity and nationhood both in Britain and in China. By birth a disenfranchised Manchu, he lived and worked in London during the late 1920s, a period seen as the apex of high modernism and his writing registers this interaction in ways that suggest we rethink his work beyond the parameters of the socialist realist tradition to which, chiefly because of his proletarian magnum opus, Rickshaw Boy (1936), it has largely been confined. Reading Lao She as an incipient modernist, initiating in China new subjects and new styles of writing in the endeavour to remake the sensibility of the Chinese people, serves also to unsettle Eurocentric considerations of modernism as exclusively Western, its place of origin unquestionably the metropolitan West.

Anne Witchard teaches in the Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster. She specialises in representations of China and the Chinese in early-twentieth-century Britain (see her book Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie, Ashgate, 2010; and most recent of various papers, a chapter in the collection Chinatowns in a Transnational World, Routledge, 2011). Her book Lao She, London and China’s Literary Revolution will be published in Autumn 2012 by the University of Hong Kong Press.

All welcome, but non-Westminster attendees should register in advance with Derek Hird: d.hird@westminster.ac.uk

Wednesday 23 November, 1.15pm – 2.30pm
Room 359, 309 Regent Street, University of Westminster

Samuel Thomas (Durham University)
“The Gaucho Sells Out: Thomas Pynchon, Nation Building & Argentina”

Wednesday 16 November, 4.15pm – 5.45pm
Room 312, Wells Street, University of Westminster, London W1T

‘Pragmatic Implicature and the novel’
Ruth Schuldiner, University of Oxford

This paper will discuss the sustained use of implicature to communicate central, unambiguous elements of plot in fiction novels; specifically, it will look at instances in which a reader’s understanding of an implicitly communicated event is integral to their understanding of the remainder of the narrative.  It is proposed that, in third-person narratives, a perceived context of fictionality is depended upon for the construction of some of these implicatures: many of them exploit the perceived omniscience of the narrator, and by extension the fictionality of the text.  This conclusion feeds into a broader argument concerning the possible differences associated with reading fictional vs. nonfictional texts, or how an assumed context of either fictionality or nonfictionality affects readers’ interpretations of individual utterances and the coherence of narratives as a whole.  When an author chooses to communicate central narrative information through implicature, the reader is faced with the important puzzle of why an omniscient persona would opt for an inarticulate mode of communication.  It is this implicitly posed question that emphasizes the relevance of the implicatures to their context, dispersing the ambiguity of superficial ellipses.  The paper discusses excerpts from M.E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret to evidence the argument.

Words and Wars
Group for War and Culture Studies Research Seminar
Monday 21 November 2011, 5.30-7.30pm
Room 152, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B

Adam Piette (University of Sheffield), “Sputniks, Ice-Picks, KGB: Nabokov’s Pale Fire”

Adam Piette is the author of Remembering and the Sound of Words: Mallarmé, Proust, Joyce, Beckett and Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry, 1939-1945. His latest book, The Literary Cold War, 1945 to Vietnam (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), is a study of the psychological and cultural impact of the Cold War on the imaginations of citizens in the UK and US. The Literary Cold War examines writers working at the hazy borders between aesthetic project and political allegory, with specific attention being paid to Vladimir Nabokov and Graham Greene as Cold War writers. The book looks at the special relationship as a form of paranoid plotline governing key Anglo-American texts from Storm Jameson to Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, as well as examining the figure of the non-aligned neutral observer caught up in the sacrificial triangles structuring cold war fantasy.

Alan Morrison ( University of Westminster), “Virginia Woolf: War and Patriarchy”

Alan Morrison is also a Research Associate at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, and teaches on the Museum Studies Master’s Program at Johns Hopkins University. He is currently working on education and exhibition programmes linked to the centenary commemorations of World War I.

Including Book Launch for Adam Piette, The Literary Cold War, 1945 to Vietnam

Entrance FREE but RSVP Dr Caroline Perret: C.Perret@westminster.ac.uk or tel. 020 7911 5000 ext. 2307.

Wednesday 9 November, 1.15pm – 2.30pm
Room 359, 309 Regent Street, University of Westminster

Caroline Edwards (University of Lincoln)
‘Fictions of the Not Yet’

As the first decade of the twenty-first century comes to a close, there is a growing critical awareness of the current fascination with alternative and future worlds in contemporary British fiction. In addition to the continuing popularity of – and growing scholarly interest in – speculative and genre works, an emerging body of “literary” fictions is revealing a wide-ranging preoccupation with narratives of apocalypse, transmigration and haunting. Writers like David Mitchell, Jeanette Winterson, Jim Crace, John Burnside, Marina Warner, Maggie Gee, Jon McGregor and Sam Taylor are thus shifting the parameters of realist literary fiction and its generic borrowings, and in the process articulating a shared concern with the question of temporality. We need to develop a new strategy of reading such fictions in order to examine the formal innovations executed by these visions of temporal alterity and futurity. This paper will outline a refunctioning of Ernst Bloch’s category of the “Not Yet” (Noch Nicht) in order to provide a methodological framework that can draw out the distinctly utopian implications that are prevalent in the contemporary British novel. This refunctioning not only reconsiders the relationship between philosophical discourse and narrative imaginaries, but also helps us outline the distinctive structural, thematic and stylistic characteristics shaping an emerging caucus of fictions.

David Cunningham’s review of Jacques Ranciere’s The Politics of Literature, published in the latest issue of Radical Philosophy, is currently up as a freebie on the website. You can read it here: http://www.radicalphilosophy.com/uncategorized/flaubert%e2%80%99s-parrot

Wednesday 26^th October, 1.15pm – 2.30pm
University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street building, room 359

Anna Katharina Schaffner (University of Kent)
‘Havelock Ellis and the Literary Imagination: On Sexology and Fiction’

Many important nineteenth- and early twentieth-century pioneers of the scientific study of sex make extensive use of literary sources in their works. Not only do they adopt terms and concepts from fictional sources, but literary representations and their authors frequently serve as case studies which are deemed as valid as empirical observations. Surprisingly, this blending of discourses, which has substantially shaped the nosologies of the early sexologists, has received little critical attention. This paper analyzes the epistemological status and functions that are assigned to fictional representations in the works of the British sexologist Havelock Ellis, as well as the wider theoretical ramifications of factualizing fictions. The way in which literary sources are used in Ellis’ and other sexological texts not only sheds light on the production of sexual knowledge and processes of discourse formation, but also brings to the fore the enmeshment of fantasy, language and desire, as well as the dependence of an entire scientific discipline upon narratives – both fictional and factual in nature.

Michael Nath’s first novel La Rochelle was shortlisted for the 2011 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction. At the award ceremony held at the Edinburgh Book Festival, chair of the judges Lee Spinks outlined his appreciation book in conversation with Sally Magnusson.

Money, Time, Representation: Literary Explorations (CFP)

In his Philosophy of Money, Georg Simmel notes that “we invest economic objects with a quantity of value as if it were an inherent quality” but “the question as to what value really is, like the question as to what being is, is unanswerable”. The element of unaccountability in money can also be seen in Marx, although he articulated the nature of money quite differently as an expression of social relations. Literature has always been very sensitive to the contingent, hence fictional, aspect of money.

A proposed session is planned on the topic for the IAPL (International Association for Philosophy and Literature) 2012 conference Archaeologies of the Future: tracing memories/imaging spaces to be held in Tallinn, Estonia next spring. We are looking for papers where the nature of money is explored in literature, and papers that ask how and if money in literature is the same as money in philosophy. The issues can include, but are not limited to, the nature of money as representation of value, or as representation of authority, or the role of money as an expression of a temporal pact that affects our sense of time. If you are interested in the topics of money in literature and/or money in philosophy, or parallels between writing and money, please send in your abstract ASAP (max. 1000 words) to the email address below. The session can include four to five speakers. Please note that all speakers must be IAPL members by the end of September 2011. For more details, see: www.iapl.info

Dr Tiina Käkelä-Puumala, University of Helsinki, Finland
email: tkakela@mappi.helsinki.fi

‘New Ways of Working with Image’ Seminar and Workshop
Wednesday 14 September 2011, 11.00am – 4.30pm
Room 257, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B

Update: Schedule Announced:
11.00 welcome and introductions (RS257)
11.15 opening panel (Jesse Ash, Andrew Fisher, Elena Gualtieri, Nigel Mapp)
12.30 lunch
13.30 workgroups (chairs)
Image and Performance (Marquard Smith)
Imagescapes (David Cunningham)
Imaginary Image (Jarkko Toikkanen)
Remediating Image (Lise Mortensen)
15.00 coffee
15.30 closing discussion 

How do we understand ‘image’ today, and how has our notion of the image changed over time? What is the status of the image in current theory, and how does the study of image translate into visual culture? In which ways do words and verbal communication relate to or conflict with images? Do we work differently with images today, compared to the practices of previous generations? And if we do, why? Questions such as these underlie the Institute’s autumn Workshop which focuses on a practical, hands-on angle approach to working with image today.

Participants in this experiment are invited to discuss what they understand by the notion of ‘image’ and which methods they have chosen to work with it. Instead of discussing general themes and motifs without knowledge of each other’s premises, talking about what one does, and how one does it, reduces the chance of conceptual miscommunication and provides the opportunity for learning from new viewpoints. Interested academics, scholars and postgraduate students in particular are all invited to attend!

The format of the day will be an interactive opening panel of invited speakers from art history, photographic theory, visual culture, philosophy and literary studies reflecting on their own approaches to the image in both disciplinary and transdisciplinary terms, followed by smaller group workshop sessions open to signed-up members of the audience, and concluding with general discussion. Individual workshop themes will include: (1) Image and Performance: on the nature and role of images in and as performance; (2) Imagescapes: what kinds of scenes and spaces images form and come to interact in; (3) Imaginary Image: how images condition and affect the reading experience; (4) Remediating Image: the slide and change of images between different semiotic modes.

Confirmed panel participants and workshop chairs include: David Cunningham (IMCC, Westminster), Andrew Fisher (Visual Culture, Goldsmiths College), Elena Gualtieri (Centre for Visual Fields, Sussex), Nigel Mapp (English Literature, Westminster), Lise Majgaard Mortensen (Aarhus University/IMCC), Marquard Smith (IMCC, Westminster), Jarkko Toikkanen (University of Tampere/IMCC).

This workshop is free and convened by our Visiting Research Fellows in the Institute, Lise Majgaard Mortensen and Jarkko Toikkanen. For further information or to reserve a place (numbers are strictly limited!), please email Jarkko at: Jarkko.Toikkanen@uta.fi

Materialities of Text: Between the Codex and the Net
An Online Conference, from October 24^th – November 4^th 2011.

Remit:
The book, in its traditional codex form, appears in transition from print media to digital media; a condition nevertheless complicated by its forms of survival, as indicated by the term ‘webpage’. Despite the epochal significance of the scroll, the codex, and the digital text, such material figures of inscription are necessarily hybrid; a hybridity that especially characterises the current historico-technical relation between print and digital media. Hybridity, of course, has been championed, for example, in postcolonial studies, as a figure of subversion, but it is also clear that hybrid text, as much as it is an object of possible democratisation within the digital public sphere, is also an object of intense capitalisation. Thus, the apparent waning of the hegemony of print is drawing questions of the politics of textual materialism into critical perception, and the need to interrogate the specificity of these materials, in their complex relations to the sensual form of paper and the ‘dispersed’ textuality of the digital medium. What, then, are the new materialities of hybrid text-media? What are the politics of digital/print hybrids, artists’ books, writing technologies, and digital publishing? How does media hybridity transform the political book, the artists’ book, or the work of literature? What effects do new materialities of text have on patterns of reading? Has media process replaced the media object? What are the sensory forms of new media materialities? How is the commodity-form of the book altered by new media platforms? What are the conditions and forms of specific media hybridities? What does new media do to the ‘perversions’ of the book – to bibliomania, to fetishism? Are we still ‘people of the book’ – what remains of the authority of the book? How has independent publishing responded to new materialities of text? What might figures of the book offer in the way of new or counter-knowledges, forms of community and communication?

Platform / Participants:
In keeping with its theme, the project will centre on an online conference, held on this website, which will allow the uploading of short texts and images, and user-generated commentary and debate. The organisers invite responses to texts and related questions from thinkers in all disciplines: literary-cultural studies, art-practice, critical theory and philosophy, book and publishing history and practice, etc.

Abstracts of included texts: Janneke Adema & Gary Hall (Coventry University): ‘(Im)materialities of Text: The Book as a Form of Political & Conceptual Resistance in Art and Academia’; Richard Burt (University of Florida): ‘Shelf-Life’; Johanna Drucker (UCLA): ‘Diagrammatic Writing’; Davin Heckman (Siena Heights University): ‘The Politics of Plasticity: Neoliberalism, Deliberation & the Digital Text’; Sas Mays (University of Westminster) ‘Mnemopolitics: Philosophy & the Archive in the Digital Public Sphere’; Daniel Selcer (Duquesne University): ‘Invisible Ink: Atomizing Textual Materialism’; Nick Thoburn (university of Manchester): ‘Materialities of Political Publishing’.

The organisers – Sas Mays (IMCC, Westminster) and Nick Thorburn (Manchester) – intend this forum to allow discussion that may be included within the second form of dissemination, and may feed into contributors’ articles within it: a special issue of the journal New Formations to be published in 2012.

An early heads up on the line up of speakers and list of dates for next year’s first semester series of English Literature and Culture seminars. All will take place from 1.15-2.30pm on Wednesday lunchtimes in the University’s Regent Street building (room 359).

12th October 2011
Helen Glew (History Project, University of Westminster)
“Women at the Regent Street Polytechnic, 1882 – 1945″

26th October 2011
Anna Katharina Schaffner (University of Kent)
“Havelock Ellis and the Literary Imagination: On Sexology and Fiction”

9th November 2011
Caroline Edwards (Surrey University)
“Fictions of the Not Yet”

23rd November 2011
Samuel Thomas (Durham University)
“The Gaucho Sells Out: Thomas Pynchon, Nation Building & Argentina”

Further details at: http://seminarserieswmin.wordpress.com/

We are happy to announce the most excellent news that Michael Nath’s debut novel La Rochelle, for which we helped to organise the official launch in 2009, is one of four books shortlisted for the prestigious the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for fiction. The shortlist was announced at Dover House, London. The winners will be announced at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in August.

The James Tait Black Award, worth £10,000 to the winner, is awarded annually by the University of Edinburgh’s School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, and were founded in 1919 by Janet Coats, the widow of publisher James Tait Black, to commemorate her husband’s love of good books. Past winners of the awards include the likes of DH Lawrence, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Spark, Angela Carter, Cormac McCarthy, Martin Amis, AS Byatt, William Golding and Ian McEwan.