Wednesday 23rd March 2011, 1.15-2.30pm
Room 106, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T 3UW

Paul Crosthwaite (Cardiff University)
“Like a Flood or an Earthquake: Trauma and the Representation of Financial Crises”

Further details on the English Literature and Culture research seminar series here.

Wednesday 9 February 2011, 1.15-2.30pm
Room 106, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T 3UW

Jarkko Toikkanen (Visiting Research Fellow, IMCC)
“Suspended Failures: The Intermedial Experience of Horror”

Our new Visiting Research Fellow will be presenting a ‘promo’ for the research project on horror that he will be carrying out at the Institute this year. He has suggested that participants might like to read Robert Frost’s poem ‘The Fear’ in advance of the seminar.  An online copy can be found at: http://www.bartleby.com/118/14.html

Further details on the English Literature and Culture research seminar series here.

There is now a complete list of dates and paper titles for this semester’s series of English Literature and Culture seminars. All will take place from 1.15-2.30pm on Wednesday lunchtimes in room 106 in the University’s Wells Street building:

9th February 2011
Jarkko Toikkanen (Visiting Research Fellow, IMCC)
“Suspended Failures: The Intermedial Experience of Horror”

23rd February 2011
Nick Barnett (Liverpool John Moores)
“No Defence against the H-bomb: Popular reactions to the Thermonuclear Era”

9th March 2011
Samuel Thomas (Durham University)
“The Gaucho Sells Out: Thomas Pynchon, Nation Building & Argentina”

23rd March 2011
Paul Crosthwaite (Cardiff University)
“Like a Flood or an Earthquake: Trauma and the Representation of Financial Crises’”

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

Wednesday 1 December 2010, 4.15-5.45pm
Room 306, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T 3UW

Siobhan Chapman (University of Liverpool)
‘Implicated Meanings in Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night: a Neo-Gricean Approach’

Wednesday 24 November 2010, 1.15-2.30pm
Room 106, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T 3UW

Martin Willis (University of Glamorgan)
‘Martian Astronomy and Popular Fiction’

Further details on the English Literature and Culture research seminar series here.

Monday 29 November 2010, 6.30pm
The Foyer, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, London W1B

The Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at Westminster is holding a wine reception to celebrate the publication of a plethora of new books, many of which have been publicised already on this site: new books on creative writing and on Scottish women’s gothic by Matt Morrison and Monica Germana, respectively; the collection London Gothic, co-edited by Anne Witchard; and new editions of Mary Coleridge’s poetry and Mona Caird’s The Wing of Azrael by Simon Avery and Alexandra Warwick.

If you’d like to attend email Sharon Sinclair at: sinclas@westminster.ac.uk

Wednesday 27^th October, 1.15-2.30pm
Room 106, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, W1T 3UW

Nick Hubble (Brunel University)
‘Naomi Mitchison: From Intermodernism to Science Fiction (via Mass-Observation)’

From her 1920s novels, influenced by Lawrence but aimed at the audience of Wells, to her subsequent deployment of modernist techniques for political ends, Naomi Mitchison may be considered a key intermodern writer. Her relentless pursuit of the ‘just society’, free from gender-based and sexual repression, made her a controversial figure even in that controversial decade. And her close literary associates of that decade – including Auden, Aldous Huxley, Olaf Stapledon, Stevie Smith, Wyndham Lewis and Walter Greenwood – suggest different ways of thinking about literary networks and cultural history in general. She was also a friend and supporter of Tom Harrison and Mass-Observation, for whom she kept a wartime diary. Nick Hubble’s paper analyses this intermodern work and investigates how it relates to Memoirs of a Spacewoman (1962), a forerunner of the 1970s feminist utopian science fiction of writers such as Ursula Le Guin, Marge Piercy and Joanna Russ.

Rescheduled from last semester. Further details here.

Excellent guest blog by our own Michael Nath at Exclusively Independent about Gabriel Josipovici’s Whatever Happened to Modernism?  and the media fuss that it’s generated:

“Professor Josipovici argues that the English novel has become caged in recent decades, and that its famous practitioners have been putting on a tame show, for all their swaggering. This has annoyed the literary reviewers and metropolitan columnists, who’re in the habit of making a fuss of certain big names, and don’t appreciate being told they’ve been cheering cows; but it happens to be true. The ranking writers and the prize-winners make it solely because the idea has caught on that ‘Modernism is dead’; the consequence of this is that contemporary writing can prowl about quite safely in its cage, or not prowl at all but just peep through its fingers.”

Read more here. And while you’re at it, check out David Cunningham’s review of Nicolas Bourriaud’s Altermodern exhibition in a recent issue of the Journal of Visual Culture. The defence of modernism begins here!

Another day another new book from an IMCC associate. We’re delighted to announce the publication of Monica Germana’s first book, Scottish Women’s Gothic and Fantastic Writing, from Edinburgh University Press.

The book considers four thematic areas of the supernatural – quests, dangerous women, doubles and ghosts – each explored in one of the four main chapters. Being the first critical work to bring together contemporary women’s writing and the Scottish fantasy tradition, the volume pioneers in-depth investigation of some previously neglected texts such as Ali Smith’s Hotel World; Alice Thompson’s Justine; Margaret Elphinstone’s longer fiction, as well as offering new readings of more popular texts including A.L. Kennedy’s So I am glad, Emma Tennant’s The Bad Sister and Two Women of London. Underlying the broad scope of this survey are the links – both explicit and implicit – established between the examined texts and the Scottish supernatural tradition.

IMCC member Matt Morrison’s book, Key Concepts in Creative Writing, is published by Palgrave this week - a comprehensive writers’ guide to the terminology used across the creative writing industries and in the major literary movements. Packed with practical tips for honing writing skills and identifying opportunities for publication and production, it also explains the workings of publishing houses, literary agencies and producing theatres.

There is now a complete list of dates and paper titles for this semester’s series of English Literature and Culture seminars. All will take place from 1.15-2.30pm on Wednesday lunchtimes in room 106 in the University’s Wells Street building:

27th October 2010
Nick Hubble (Brunel University)
“Naomi Mitchison: From Intermodernism to Science Fiction (via Mass-Observation)”

10th November 2010
Joanne Murray (Birkbeck College, University of London)
“JG Ballard and New Brutalism”

24th November 2010
Martin Willis (University of Glamorgan)
“Martian Astronomy and Popular Fiction”

8th December 2010
Stephen Ross (University of Victoria, Canada)
“Ghostmodernism and Ethics”

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

Chris Daley and Jo Wargen have set up a useful new wordpress site for the Wednesday lunchtime English Literature Research Seminars run by the Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at Westminster. The address is: http://seminarserieswmin.wordpress.com/

Check next semester for details of upcoming seminars.

Thursday 4th March, 6pm
The Boardroom, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, W1B 2UW

In the first of a new series of talks at Westminster entitled 21st Century London, exploring the challenges and opportunities the city offers to the contemporary writer, Iain Sinclair will be in conversation with David Cunningham, Deputy Director of the IMCC.  Future speakers will be Toby Litt (March 11), Diran Adebayo (March 18) and visiting research fellow at the Institute Rachel Lichtenstein (April 22).

For more information, please email Monica Germana at m.germana@westminster.ac.uk. Events are free of charge, but booking is essential: please email Sharon Sinclair at sinclas@wmin.ac.uk to book a place.

Wednesday 24th February, 1.15-2.30pm
Room 106, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, W1T 3UW

Nigel Mapp (University of Tampere, Finland)
‘Milton, Life, Heresy’

Free to all.

Wednesday 24th February, 4.15pm
Room 106, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, W1T 3UW

Joe Bray (University of Sheffield)
‘Conceptual Metaphor and the Language of the Early Nineteenth-Century Portrait’

Hosted by our colleagues in Westminster’s English Language and Linguistics section, Joe Bray examines the meanings generated by frequent references, both literal and metaphorical, to the portrait in the early nineteenth-century novel. As critics have noted, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century novel drew on a well-developed cultural understanding of the portrait-novel connection, and this is particularly true of the novels analysed in this paper: Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda (1801) and Jane Austen’s Emma (1816). Each novel is extensively permeated by a metaphor of the countenance, or in some cases the whole body, as a painted portrait. The mapping involved would seem to create a ‘blended space’ which suggests that the emotions on the face can be easily read and understood, and thus that the body serves as a reliable index to ‘character’. Yet the implications of transparency and legibility that the metaphor of the painted countenance evokes are challenged in various ways in each novel.

Free to all.

Wednesday 27th January, 1.15-2.30pm
Room 106, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, W1T 3UW

Peter Johnston (Royal Holloway, University of London)
‘The Mathematical Contexts of J.M. Coetzee’s Early Poetry (1958-1964)’

Free to all.

A very successful one-day colloquium at 309 Regent Street celebrating the centenary of Ezra Pound’s lectures at the Regent Street Polytechnic on Friday 4th, with presentations from Massimo Bacigalupo, Walter Baumann, Becky Beasley, Helen Carr, Nick Selby and biographer David Moody, in front of an audience also including Ian Bell and Peter Brooker, among many others.

As an addendum to the day’s events, here’s a chronology of Pound’s involvement with the old Polytechnic: Continue reading Pound at the Poly: A Chronology

Wednesday 9th December, 1.15-2.30pm
Room 106, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, W1T 3UW

Mary Grover (Sheffield Hallam University)
‘Why Middlebrow Matters’

Free to all.

Michael Nath & Anne Witchard Book Launch
Monday 14 December 2009
The Boardroom, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, 6pm onwards

Two members of the Institute are launching their new books at Westminster on the 14^th December. Michael Nath will be reading from his first novel, La Rochelle, published by Route, while Anne Witchard will be introducing her marvellous monograph Thomas Burke’s Dark Chinoiserie: Limehouse Nights and the Queer Spell of Chinatown.

Ezra Pound and Modern Criticism: 100 Years in London
Friday 4 December 2009, 9.30-5.00
Cayley Room (room 152), University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street

The programme is now available for the day’s anniversary celebration of Pound’s lectures at the Poly:

9.30                            Coffee/Tea

10.00                         Introduction

10.15-11.30            Session One
Massimo Bacigalupo, University of Genoa, ‘The Didactic Muse’
Walter Baumann, Ulster, ‘“Swinburne My Only Miss” (82/543): Snapshots from Pound’s London Years’

11.45-1.15             Session Two
Helen Carr, Goldsmiths, ‘Pound and “World-Poetry”’
Nick Selby, UEA, ‘“Found Full of Nomads”: Pound as American Critic in Patria Mia and Cathay’

1.15-2.30             Lunch

2.30-4.00             Session Three
Rebecca Beasley, University of Oxford, ‘Pound’s New Criticism’
David Moody, University of York, ‘This is Not A Philological Work’

4.15-5.15             Round Table and Final Discussion