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/

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.

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.

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.

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.

Thursday 20 January 2011, 6-8pm
Main Foyer, 309 Regent Street, University of Westminster, London W1B 2UW

One we should have posted earlier, but if anyone is around this evening you are warmly invited to join Dame Antonia Byatt to celebrate the publication of a new monograph on A S Byatt’s work by Westminster’s Alexa Alfer with Amy Edwards de Campos.

This stimulating and comprehensive study of A S Byatt’s work spans virtually her entire career and offers insightful readings of all of Byatt’s works of fiction up to and including her Man-Booker-shortlisted novel The Children’s Book. The authors combine a clear and accessible overview of Byatt’s oeuvre to date with close critical analysis of all her major works. Uniquely, the book also points beyond the immediate context of Byatt’s fiction by considering her critical writings and journalism alongside her novels and short stories.

To book your place, please visit westminster.ac.uk/criticalstorytelling

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’

David Cunningham’s essay ‘Capitalist Epics: Abstraction, Totality and the Theory of the Novel’, published in the September issue of Radical Philosophy, is now available online as a pdf on the journal’s Recent Highlights page of their website.

Download it here.

Update: David will be speaking on Philosophy, Capitalism and the Novel at the University of Dundee on Wednesday 24 November (4-6pm). He’ll also be in Glasgow on Thursday 25 giving a talk on the concept of modernism.

Wednesday 10^th November, 1.15-2.30pm
Room 106, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, W1T 3UW

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

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

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.

Videos from the Royal Academy event Ballardian Architecture in May, including David Cunningham’s talk on Pop art, Brutalism and Ballard’s prose of space, have now been posted online.

You can watch the videos 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.

The latest issue of Radical Philosophy is out now, including a new article by David Cunningham entitled ’Capitalist Epics: Abstraction, Totality and the Theory of the Novel’. The issue also includes cracking pieces on James Ellroy and Rodolfo Kusch, as well as the latest analysis of Benjamin and Brecht’s now infamous chess game… Buy it in all good bookshops or subscribe here.

Route have posted a video up on their YouTube channel of the launch, back in December, for Michael Nath’s superb debut novel La Rochelle at Westminster. Watch it here. There’s also an interview with Michael on the Route website here.

There have already been excellent reviews for La Rochelle – described by Michael Wood as stylish, very funny, discreetly surprising’ – in both The Independent and the Big Issue. Buy the novel at: www.route-online.com

Thursday 11th March, 6pm
The Boardroom, University of Westminster, 309 Regent Street, W1B 2UW

Following a successful first event with urban visionary Iain Sinclair, in the second of a new series of talks at Westminster entitled 21st Century London, exploring the challenges and opportunities the city offers to the contemporary writer, Toby Litt will be speaking at Regent Street.  Toby was winner of the 2009 Manchester Fiction Prize, and his many novels include Corpsing (2000), Ghost Story (2004) and Hospital (2007). Future speakers will be 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 10th March, 1.15-2.30pm
Room 106, University of Westminster, 32-38 Wells Street, W1T 3UW

Andrew Smith (University of Glamorgan)
‘Haunted Houses and History: Locating the Anglo-American in Henry James’

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.

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.