We are delighted to announce the publication of The Art of Nick Cave: New Critical Essays, edited by our colleague John Baker and published by Intellect Books.

Known for his work as a performer and songwriter with the Birthday Party, the Bad Seeds, and Grinderman, Australian artist Nick Cave has also pursued a variety of other projects, including writing and acting. This collection of critical essays provides a comprehensive overview of his multifaceted career. The contributors, who hail from an array of disciplines, consider Cave’s work from many different angles, drawing on historical, psychological, pedagogical, and generic perspectives. Illuminating the remarkable scope of Cave’s achievement, they explore his career as a composer of film scores, a scriptwriter, and a performer, most strikingly in Ghosts of the Civil Dead; his work in theatre; and his literary output, which includes the novels And the Ass Saw the Angel and The Death of Bunny Munro, as well as two collections of prose. Together, the resulting essays provide a lucid overview of Nick Cave’s work that will orient students and fans while offering fresh insights sure to deepen even expert perspectives.

You can order the book here: http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/books/view-Book,id=4900/

A new piece by Chris Daley in the excellent online journal Alluvium about railway fiction. Here’s the first couple of paragraphs:

Railways are news. On the one hand, they are the source of consternation as above inflation fare rises couple with the perceived drudgery of commuting to characterise the railways as a site of soaring ticket prices and overcrowded, invariably late trains. But this sentiment lives alongside whimsy and romanticism, be it through preservation lines or the restoration of ageing steam engines. This paradoxical image of the railway system is, however, nothing new within the British popular imagination and as Ian Carter (2000) points out, this may have something to do with the railways’ historical link to contested areas of modern everyday life: “So much that we take for granted today was invented or perfected in the nineteenth century to facilitate railways’ development, or to limit their potential for political, fiscal or physical mayhem: standardised time, a disciplined and uniform labour force, large-scale bureaucratic organisation, joint-stock industrial corporations, close State regulation of private capitalists’ activities.”

Similarly, British fiction has maintained an ambivalent relationship with railways. Confronted with a new revolutionary transport system, Victorian novelists offered the most sustained exploration of the potentialities of trains, yet by being, as Nicholas Daly (1999) puts it, ‘the agent and icon of the acceleration of the pace of everyday life’ (463) in the mid-nineteenth century, the railways were also a source for the countless anxieties of industrialisation. Contemporary fiction, in Britain at least, is curiously quiet on the railways, with their appearance often limited to neo-Victorian narratives that attempt to reignite the energy of the steam age. However, to mark the 150 year anniversary of the London Underground, Penguin will release, in March, a series of railway writings that could, perhaps, ignite an imaginative investigation of a transport system that is often seen as mundane, yet is simultaneously a potent symbol of transformation. It is therefore apt to briefly map the terrain of railways in fiction and popular culture in order to anticipate where any future speculation may venture.

Read further at: http://www.alluvium-journal.org/2013/01/12/railways-and-fiction/

The IMCC is delighted to welcome Martin Willis who is joining us this month as Professor in Science, Literature and Communication based within the Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at Westminster. Martin’s main research interests lie in the intersections between Victorian literature and science, in particular the literary imagination’s response to marginal sciences such as mesmerism and spiritualism, and by literature’s interrogation of scientific sites and conflicts, from the laboratory and seance room to debates in disease theory and vivisection controversies. He is also Editor of of the Journal of Literature and Science, a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to scholarship exploring the cross-fertilisation between literature and science across all literary periods.

Martin’s most recent book, Vision, Science and Literature, 1870-1920: Ocular Horizons, was published by Pickering and Chatto in 2011 and was winner of both the 2011 British Society for Literature and Science Book Prize and 2012 European Society for the Study of English Cultural Studies Book Prize. Drawing on science, technology, and literature, the book aims to analyse the interaction between science, sight and the literary imagination in order to understand better how vision was continually transformed as its boundaries were breached by scientific and technological innovation.

We’re delighted to announce the publication of Leigh Wilson’s new book Modernism and Magic: Experiments with Spiritualism, Theosophy and the Occult (Edinburgh University Press), which we will be launching at the Green Man pub in Riding House Street on Thursday 10th January.

The book presents a new account of the relation between modernism and occult discourses. While modernism’s engagement with the occult has been approached by critics as the result of a loss of faith in representation, an attempt to draw on science as the primary discourse of modernity, or as an attempt to draw on a hidden history of ideas, Wilson argues that these discourses have at their heart a magical practice which remakes the relationship between world and representation. As she demonstrates, the courses of the occult are based on a magical mimesis which transforms the nature of the copy, from inert to vital, from dead to alive, from static to animated, from powerless to powerful. Modernism and Magic explores the aesthetic and political implications of this relationship in the work of those writers, artists and filmmakers who were most self-consciously experimental, including James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Dziga Vertov and Sergei M. Eisenstein.

A quick plug for Stir Magazine, edited by former Westminster student Jonny Gordon-Farleigh. Having published over the last couple of years online, Stir is launching into print as a quarterly in April. The issues will feature co-operatives, community-led politics and lots of other bottom-up alternatives.  The first issue will be specially themed on the commons and will be co-edited by David Bollier (editor of The Wealth of the Commons: A World Beyond Market and State).

Annual subscription will be £14 for four issues including P&P. In the meantime, you can read the online publication at: http://stirtoaction.com/

Room MG14, University of Westminster, 35 Marylebone Road, NW1
Thursday 24th January, 6.30-8.30

Speakers: David Garcia, Jack Self, Matthew Butcher, Mark Prizeman

Staff and students at University of Westminster are collaborating with Hanmi Gallery, Fitzrovia, on a forthcoming exhibition entitled ‘The Global Archive’. Please do come along for the Private View.

‘The Global Archive’
24th Thursday January – 9th Saturday February 2013, 12-6 pm (Monday closed)

Private View : 23rd Wednesday January, 6 – 9 pm

Artists: Tom Corby, Shezad Dawood, Young-In Hong, susan pui san lok
Curated by: Marquard Smith with Emma Brasó and Nina Trivedi

In collaboration with: Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture, University of Westminster, and the International Association for Visual Culture

Artists:

Tom Corby is an artist and writer interested in issues of climate, technology and systems. His interdisciplinary works have been presented at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and the Victoria and Albert Museum, as well as internationally at the Japan Media Art Festival or the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM) in Karlsruhe. He lives and works in London.

One of the winners of the 2011 Abraaj Capital Art Prize, Shazed Dawood’s work has been exhibited internationally, including presentations at Tate Britain, the 53rd Venice Biennale, and the Busan Biennale, 2010. Recent projects include a solo touring exhibition that opened at Modern Art Oxford in April 2012, and the installation of his New Dream Machine Project II at Parasol Unit. In 2012, he was nominated for the Jarman Award. He lives and works in London.

Young-In Hong completed her PhD at Goldsmiths in 2011. She has developed a number of site-specific projects including Double Encounter at i-myu Projects, London and The Performing City in Aicho, Japan. Recent group exhibitions include the Museum of Art and Design, New York, Rokeby Gallery, London, and A Foundation Liverpool. She lives and works between London and Seoul.

susan pui san lok is an artist and writer based in London. Her multidisciplinary works evolve out of interests in notions of nostalgia and aspiration, place and migration, translation and diaspora. Recent solo projects include Lightness (2012) and Faster, Higher (2008), both in collaboration with Film & Video Umbrella, DIY Ballroom/Live (2007) and Golden (2005-7), an exhibition/residency at Beaconsfield, London, and Chinese Arts Centre, Manchester.

Curators:

Marquard Smith curates, writes, programmes, commissions, and edits. He is Director of the Institute for Modern and Contemporary Culture at University of Westminster, and Editor-in-Chief of Journal of Visual Culture.

Emma Brasó was curatorial fellow at CCA Glasgow in 2012. She is a curator and art historian conducting a PhD on pseudonymity at University of Westminster.

Nina Trivedi is currently a doctoral researcher at University of Westminster. She has a MFA in Curating from Goldsmiths College and has had recent curatorial projects in London and Berlin.

If there is a modern invention that is apocalyptical, it is not the atomic bomb. It is the automobile…

A quick notice that Vol 1, no. 4 of ARCHITECTURE_MEDIA_POLITICS_SOCIETY is now available on-line. This month’s issue, ‘A Critical Architecture: Comments on Politics and Society’, is a fascinating interview-article with Kenneth Frampton.

Read it at: http://architecturemps.com/full-text/

Listen this Saturday 1^st December at 3.30pm to our own Anne Witchard on the Lucky Cat show on Resonance FM, hosted by Zoe Baxter. Anne will be talking about her latest book Lao She in London (Hong Kong University Press 2012) which details the time Chinese writer Lao She spent in London in the 1920s. The book reveals Lao She’s encounter with British high modernism and literature from Dickens to Conrad to Joyce as well as his tiem spent in the notorious and much sensationalised East End Chinatown of Limehouse.

If you don’t happen to be in central London, you can listen online at: Resonance 104.4FM.

Stefan Szczelkun’s Agit Disco has been widely and very positively reviewed in a number of recent publications. The project collects the playlists of its 23 writers to tell the story of how music has politically influenced and inspired them. The book provides a multi-genre survey of political musics that goes beyond protest songs into the darker hinterlands of musical meaning.

In Anarchist Studies 20.2, Jim Donaghey describes Agit Disco as ‘highly effective in sparking a reconsideration of the reader’s or listener’s experience of music and politics’, in a way which ‘will surely encourage others to begin their own dialogues, and contribute to those million compilation CDs that Szczelkun hopes for’, while Phil England, in The Wire, remarks that the ‘personal selections inside, directly or indirectly, prompt all kinds of questions, reanimating them as a living dialogue in the present.

In a lengthy review in the journal Socialism and Democracy, Matt Callahan is particularly insightful: ‘The music industry long ago made pop music journalism an extension of its dominance over music production, distribution and consumption. Agit Disco has the great virtue of enabling informed discussion of music by people who clearly cherish the music they are discussing. The value of music, therefore, is of a different order of magnitude than that of a disposable unit manufactured for financial gain. What comes across is a love and respect for music, a celebration of music’s timeless role in the life of communities and in their resistance to oppression … The task Agit Disco sets out to accomplish, therefore, bears a superficial resemblance to both cultural studies and pop music journalism while on a more profound level making a critique of both. That this critique comes in the form of a praxis as opposed to a conventional polemic is actually part of the critique – targeting self-proclaimed or institutionally sanctioned “experts” who in addition to passing judgement on what is good music and its proper relationship with politics, rule out the intelligence and creativity of working-class and other supposedly less qualified people’.

There is also an interview with Stefan Szczelkun and Anthony Iles published in BANTmag (Turkey): http://www.bantmag.com/mag/04/page/view/448

Agit Disco is published by Mute books, 46 lexington st, london, w1f 0lp. www.metamute.org

For fans of Jacques Derrida, David Cunningham’s review of Benoit Peeters’s recently published biography, which appears 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/web/grande-biog

Wednesday 14th November, 4.00pm – 5.15pm
Wells Street, room 106

Bianca Leggett (Birkbeck College, University of London)
Englishness Elsewhere: Exploring Parochialism in the Contemporary English Travel Novel

Ever since the days of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, English fiction has repeatedly portrayed travelling protagonists who feel possessed by the need to be English elsewhere, that is, to travel. Terry Eagleton has suggested that the ‘striking number of contemporary novels written in England but set in some non-English locale suggests ‘a sense that from the viewpoint of “creative” writing there is something peculiarly unpropitious about the typical social experience of an industrially declining, culturally parochial, post-imperial nation.’ This paper traces the historical and cultural origins of the myth of the English as a nation that both loves travel and yet remains staunchly parochial, suggesting that contemporary Crusoe-stories are part of how the English have attempted to understand their role in a post-war postcolonial world. It considers how this myth is revisited and revised in three stories of Englishmen in Continental Europe, Ian McEwan’s The Innocent (1990), Julian Barnes’s Metroland (1980) and Geoff Dyer’s Paris Trance (1998). While each novel comments on historically distinct moments in English attitudes to European identity, their similarities suggest a shared desire to critique English insularity. Finally, the paper asks whether the portrait of Englishness which finally emerges is more ambivalent than it first appears, suggesting that its admonitory messages are tempered by elements of postcolonial melancholia and nostalgia.

The Institute is excited and delighted to welcome our new Visiting Professor in the IMCC, Professor Allan Stoekl. Allan will be based at the Institute during 2012-13, while on research leave in London from his position as Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Pennsylvania State University.

Allan’s many publications include the books Politics, Writing, Mutilation: The Cases of Bataille, Blanchot, Roussel, Leiris and Ponge (University of Minnesota Press, 1985); Agonies of the Intellectual: Commitment, Subjectivity, and the Performative in the Twentieth-Century French Tradition (University of Nebraska Press, 1992); and Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability (University of Minnesota Press, 2007). He was editor of a seminal special issue of Yale French Studies, ‘On Bataille’ (1990), and also translated Paul Fournel’s Need for the Bike (2003).

During his time at Westminster, Allan will be working on a new book provisionally entitled Avatars of the Postsustainable City, while also contributing to the work of the Institute in various ways. We very much look forward to working with him!

Advance news of the next series of English Literature and Culture research seminars taking place in the first semester this year.

Seminars are fortnightly on Wednesday afternoons, from 4pm to around 5.30pm, and will be held in room 106 in the University’s Wells Street building.

Wednesday 17^th October
Christopher Daley (University of Westminster)
‘Too Many Machines’: British Science Fiction Film and Television of the 1950s

Wednesday 31^st October
Zara Dinnen (Birkbeck College)
Did we Miss it? The Legacy of Cyberculture in Contemporary Representations of Digital Technology

Wednesday 14^th November
Bianca Leggett (Birkbeck College)
Englishness Elsewhere: Considering Cosmopolitanism in the English Travel Novel

Wednesday 28^th November
Martin Eve (University of Sussex)
‘Opening children’s eyes’: Pynchon, Bolano, Overloaded Forms and the Didactic Function

The Institute is delighted to welcome three new members who are joining the Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies this academic year.

Georgina Colby joins us as a Lecturer in Contemporary Literature. She is the author of Bret Easton Ellis: Underwriting the Contemporary (Palgrave), and is currently working on a second book on the author Kathy Acker. She has also published widely on the intersections of literary practice and visual culture in contemporary US art, and is presently organising a major series of events to be held in London on ‘Death and the Contemporary’.

Lucy Bond is joining us as post-doctoral research and teaching fellow. Her PhD at Goldsmiths focused on the commemoration of 9/11 in the American public sphere, looking particularly at memorial practices embodied in literature and material culture, and at the ways in which a reification of the discourse surrounding the attacks has limited the production of a successful counter-narrative able to critique the attacks’ appropriation and manipulation by the institutions and individuals of the wider hegemonic sphere.

Matt Charles is also joining us as post-doctoral research and teaching fellow. Matt’s PhD thesis was completed at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, now based at Kingston University, titled ‘Speculative Experience and History: Walter Benjamin’s Goethean Kantianism’. He is also a member of the editorial collective of the journal Radical Philosophy. Matt’s current research concerns theories of mass education, and the recent pedagogical turn in theory, and he will be organising a major conference on Walter Benjamin’s pedagogic materialism at Westminster later next year.

ARCHITECTURE_MEDIA_POLITICS_SOCIETY is a new on-line, fully peer reviewed academic journal.

The journal is a forum for the analysis of architecture in the mediated environment of contemporary culture. It seeks to expand an understanding of architecture and its relationship with media, politics and society in its broadest sense. One international paper is published each month that deals with an issue or theme relevant to the journal. Dual language publications are encouraged. Selected authors are also invited to submit articles for a printed version of the journal.

Currently, the journal forum operates as a platform for a research project entitled Architecture as Political Image; an investigation into the use of architecture in political campaign imagery in the United States and the United Kingdom. It is run in affiliation with Ravensbourne (University College), London, and Florida State University, Tallahassee.

ISSN 2050-9006 For details about submissions visit the web site: www.architecturemps.com

UPDATE: The second volume of issue one has just been published entitled Mythopoetics of the Kunsthalle. The issue contains an article arguing for a major reconsideration of the architectural profession that uses the notion of the Kunsthalle as its theoretical framework. The author, Manuel Schartzberg, is an architect and tutor currently working in the US. Previously, he worked for David Chipperfield Architects in the UK and his paper is partly based on his time there. You can read it at the web site: www.architecturemps.com

Joe Banks, former AHRC Research Fellow at the Institute, is out and about over the next month or so, promoting his Rorscach Audio project. The Times Literary Supplement has reviewed the “Rorschach Audio” book as “engaging… packed with interest” (TLS 5707, page 30), the project’s research archive is also on-line, and talks are now confirmed for The ICA, London, 15 Sept 2012 (as part of the closing events for Bruce Nauman’s exhibition “Days”) and at the Liverpool Biennial, 6 Oct 2012, organised by Mercy.

Please come along, we will be hosting a reception to celebrate the publication of Journal of Visual Culture’s ‘The Ways of Seeing 40th Anniversary Issue’, published this month. Join us on Saturday 8th September from 4:00-5:00 at King’s College, University of London to raise a glass (or two). The launch coincides with the three-day ‘Ways of Seeing John Berger’ conference organized by King’s and the British Library. You can find details of the venue for the Reception, and the conference more generally here: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/ahri/centres/lifewriting/berger/index.aspx

Edited by Raiford Guins, Juliette Kristensen, and susan pui san lok, our ‘Ways of Seeing 40th Anniversary Issue’ includes contributions from: Mieke Bal, Geoffrey Batchen, Sonia Boyce, Alan Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, Lisa Cartwright, Jill H. Casid, Laurie Beth Clark, Mike Dibb, Clive Dilnot, Jennifer A. González, Raiford Guins, Ben Highmore, Richard Hollis, Martin Jay, Guy Julier, Louis Kaplan, Juliette Kristensen, susan pui san lok, Peter Lunenfeld, Tara McPherson, Tom Overton, Griselda Pollock, Adrian Rifkin, Julian Stallabrass, Marita Sturken, John Timberlake, and Ming Wong. Further details can be found here: http://vcu.sagepub.com/content/current

We’re delighted to announce the publication of Anne Witchard’s new monograph from Hong Kong University Press, Lao She in London. Focusing on one of China’s great modern writers, the book contributes to the rethinking of modernism as an event outside the boundaries of a single language, a single historical moment, or a single national formation.

“A beautifully written book that combines literary biography with a remarkably succinct account of British modernism and an evocative portrait of interbellum London, as viewed through Chinese eyes. Anne Witchard reminds us eloquently of the key role played by Chinese influences—both classical and modern—in literary modernism, and makes a great contribution to our understanding of Lao She’s London years.” — Julia Lovell, Birkbeck College, University of London

Details at: www.hkupress.org/book/9789888139606.htm

August 2012  188 pp.  14 b/w illus.
Paperback ISBN 978-988-8139-60-6

We’re excited to announce that Thomson and Craighead been shortlisted for this year’s Jarman Award amid a fantastic group of artists. You can find more info on the shortlist here: http://flamin.filmlondon.org.uk/projects/projectscurrent/jarmanaward/jarman_award_12

In other news, Thomson and Craighead are premiering their series of karaoke videos as part of the Film & Video Umbrella exhibition, ‘Our Mutual Friends’ launching online and for an event at Jerwood Space, London on 30th August 2012. The videos take a fresh look at unsolicited spam emails and their affinities with notions of romanticism and realism. You can view online versions of the videos here: http://www.youtube.com/user/songsofinnocence100

The duo have also been commissioned to make a new installation for this year’s Brighton Photo-biennial: a documentary artwork that looks at the burgeoning Occupy movement and its explosion worldwide during October 2011. The recent documentary artwork, ‘Belief’ is streaming online as a single screen work at Animate Projects alongside an interview and an essay by Morgan Quaintance.  Finally, ‘The Time Machine in alphabetical order’ is showing as part of ‘Trans Adriatic Grey Area’ exhibition at LAMPO in Italy. The exhibition is curated by Darko Fritz for Lampo Net & Contemporary art Exhibition, D’Annunzio Room, Aurum, Pescara from August 25th – September 24th 2012.