Literature & the Intermedial Gaze: Cinematic Configurations of Literary Process

Please join us for the next seminar of Inventions of the Text 2012/13

 Literature & the Intermedial Gaze: Cinematic Configurations of Literary Process

Professor Judith Buchanan

University of York

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Wednesday 22nd May 2013

5:30 – 7:00 pm

Department of English Studies, Hallgarth House Seminar Room

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Speaker: Dr. Judith Buchanan, University of York

ABSTRACT

  Recent years have seen a proliferation of films about writers, real and fictional, and an enhanced interest in acts of writing as a filmed subject. In the first half of my talk, I ask how filmmakers have narratively and iconographically configured writers’ lives and acts of writing, and how they have reflected upon the material, imaginative and commercial operations of literary processes. In the second half, I will take one example of a fairly recent film in which (in this case, fictional) acts of writing are narratively and iconographically central. Von Donnersmarck’s Das Leben der Anderen/ The Lives of Others (2006) is anchored in two politically and aesthetically opposed acts of writing emerging from two comparably opposed authors. As the film identifies and then tracks the incremental erosion of this opposition, the suspicions that attach to author figures in the literarily censorious GDR before 1989 come under scrutiny. The self-preserving imperative to anonymise a dissenting piece of work is here shown to be matched by the comparably insistent institutional imperative to deanonymise such a work. And the series of counterposed quests to discover the author of a work – the Stasi operative’s desire to know the playwright, the state’s desire to know the dissident writer, the playwright’s desire to know the writer of his surveillance report – illustrate, in hyperbolised form, a psycho-social ‘desire’ for the author that arguably informs every act of reading.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

  Judith Buchanan is Professor of Film and Literature in the Department of English and Related Literature and Director of the Humanities Research Centre at the University of York. Publications include the monographs Shakespeare on Film (Longman-Pearson, 2005) and Shakespeare on Silent Film: An Excellent Dumb Discourse (Cambridge University Press, 2009), the edited collection The Writer on Film: Screening Literary Authorship (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and numerous articles on literature and silent cinema, and early cinema's relations to the other arts. Current projects include work on The Tempest in performance, on murderous women in film and literature and on cinema and the machine. She speaks regularly in arts cinemas as well as to academics.

For more information, find us on facebook, follow us on Twitter (@inventionsSem) or check our blog: inventionsofthetext.blogspot.com

Literature and the Book Trade

Please join us for the next seminar of Inventions of the Text 2012/13

Literature and the Book TradeProfessor David Duff

Trinity College Dublin

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Wednesday 1st May 2013

5:30 – 7:00 pm

Department of English Studies, Hallgarth House Seminar Room

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Speaker: Dr. Clemens Ruthner, University of Aberdeen

ABSTRACT

A significant feature of the Romantic book world is the ‘prospectus’, a type of printed flyer (typically between one and four pages long) used to announce a projected book, series, journal or newspaper. Associated particularly with subscription publishing and with expensive, large-scale ventures such as encyclopaedias and other multi-volume series, the genre acquired new visibility in this period as the publishing industry expanded, periodicals proliferated, and pre-selling techniques became more common. In the revolutionary 1790s, prospectuses took on an increasingly polemical tone, often becoming a form of pamphlet or manifesto, as in Coleridge’s ‘flaming Prospectus’ to The Watchman and the much-cited Prospectus to The Anti-Jacobin, while also heralding an ever-widening range of publications (and lecture series) across literature, science and other fields. At once preview and overview, foretaste and rationale, the prospectus shares with other paratextual devices like the ‘preface’ an anticipatory and explanatory function, but differs in its more speculative emphasis, since the announced work may not (and often did not) appear, its realisation being dependent in part on the response of prospective readers/investors to the announcement itself. The incorporation of the prospectus into the metalanguage and generic repertoire of literary Romanticism, most famously in Wordsworth’s description of a seminal passage from his unfinished philosophical poem The Recluse as ‘a kind of Prospectus of the design and scope of the whole poem’, thus raises a number of interesting questions. On the one hand, it epitomises the provisional, preparatory quality of Romantic writing, interpretable positively in terms of a Schlegelian poetics of the fragment or sketch (and as an especially confident form of theoretical self-reflection), or negatively along the lines of Peacock’s Paper Money Lyrics, which satirise contemporary poetry, with its over-ambition and dismal record of completion, as a series of worthless promissory notes. On the other hand, it offers further evidence of what Andrew Piper calls the Romantic ‘bibliographic imagination’, the saturation of Romantic aesthetic discourse in the language and logic of book-making, notwithstanding writers’ problematic relationship to publishers and deep- seated mistrust of the reading public. My paper will explore these questions, charting the development of the genre and term, and treating a wide range of prospectuses and prospectus-like writings from the period 1770 to 1820.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

 David Duff is Professor of English and Research Coordinator for English Literature in the School of Language & Literature. A graduate of the University of York, from where he holds a doctorate, he taught in Poland at the Nicholas Copernicus University of Torun and the University of Gdansk before joining the staff at Aberdeen. He has also been a visiting professor at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, USA, and a guest lecturer at other American and European universities. He is a founding member of the English Department's Centre for the Novel and a contributor to the Research Institute of Irish and Scottish Studies. His professional affiliations include membership of the British Association of Romantic Studies, the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, and the European Society for the Study of English. He is Chair of the Council for College and University English and a Fellow of the English Association.

For more information, find us on facebook, follow us on Twitter (@inventionsSem) or check our blog: inventionsofthetext.blogspot.com

When a Narrative Really Sucks: Literature & Vampires

Please join us for the next seminar of Inventions of the Text 2012/13

When a Narrative Really Sucks: A Brief Historical Survey of Vampirism in Culture, Literature, and Film (18th-21st c.)

Dr. Clemens Ruthner

Trinity College Dublin

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Tuesday 12th March 2013

5:30 – 7:00 pm

Department of English Studies, Hallgarth House Seminar Room

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Speaker: Dr. Clemens Ruthner, Trinity College Dublin

ABSTRACT
Vampirism not only thematizes 'undead life', it also sucks the life out of other texts and thus becomes the epitome of intertextuality. This talk will lead you through the different stages of the cultural appropriation of the vampire as viral mask of the Other: from the demonic "proto-vampires" of Antiquity to the spectacular historical cases of vampire mass hysteria in Serbia (1725-32) and their 'media' aftermath, and then further to the first literary texts, until the narrative of vampirism as a secular cultural phantasma is fixated by Stoker's Dracula in 1897, and its current, postmodern format by Anne Rice, not to forget the various 'young adoslecent' versions of vampire who is also used as a trope of immigration lately.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Dr Clemens Ruthner is Assistant Professor of German and European Studies and Director of Research at the School of Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies of Trinity College, Dublin. His research /publications focus on Austrian literature and culture from the 19th to the 21st century, Central European Studies, constructions of identity and Otherness, imago logy, Imperial and  Postcolonial Studies (Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1878-1918) and literary/cultural theory. He is one of the leading vampire experts in German Studies and working on a comprehensive literary and cultural history of the phenomenon in the German-speaking world.

For more information, find us on facebook, follow us on Twitter (@inventionsSem) or check our blog: inventionsofthetext.blogspot.com

Imagined States: Literature and Law

Please join us for the next seminar of Inventions of the Text 2012/13

Imagined States: Literature and Law

Dr. Katherine Baxter

Northumbria University

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Tuesday 26th February 2013

5:30 – 7:00 pm

Department of English Studies, Hallgarth House Seminar Room

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Speaker: Dr. Katherine Baxter, Northumbria University
ABSTRACT

This paper will introduce my current monograph project, Imagined States: Law and Literature during Nigerian Decolonization. This project explores the presentation of the law in popular and canonical literature from and about Nigeria between c.1910 and 1966. I proceed from the observation that law and literature both attempt to delimit the human world in distinct yet similar ways. Laws, in prescribing boundaries to human action, reflect the ideals of the social institutions they intend to uphold. Likewise fiction, whether it endorses or challenges legal and social norms, is ineluctably conditioned by the ideals and ideologies of those institutions. Law and literature thus can be seen as privileged sites of imaginative and ideological construction. By examining how such imaginative constructions play out in both popular and canonical fiction this project offers a new approach to, and an important reconsideration of, late colonialism and decolonization in Nigeria.


The paper will introduce the project as a whole before providing specific examples of the textual analyses I am developing.






ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Following Dr. Baxter's first degree in English and Hebrew, she was awarded a Ph.D. from the University of Glasgow in July 2003. She then worked for several years in London both as a lecturer and as a cataloguer and curator at the British Library. In 2007 Dr. Baxter was appointed as Research Assistant Professor in Cross-Cultural Studies in English at the University of Hong Kong. She then moved, in 2010, to the United States where she was a lecturer at Stanford University before joining Northumbria University in 2011. Dr. Baxter's work is characterized by my longstanding interest in cross-cultural and interdisciplinary scholarship. British and West African twentieth-century literature form the main focus of my research. She is also interested in literary bilingualism as well as archival issues.

For more information, find us on facebook, follow us on Twitter (@inventionsSem) or check our blog: inventionsofthetext.blogspot.com

Please join us for the sixth seminar series of Inventions of the

Text 2012/13

Life-writing at the limits: dementia in

contemporary autobiographies and life-

writing projects

 

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Wednesday, 13th February 2013

5:30 – 7:00 pm

Department of English Studies, Hallgarth House Seminar Room

 

 

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Rebecca Bitenc, Durham University

Dementia, due to world-wide increasing incidence rates, has come to the fore of public awareness. Its alleged loss of self raises a number of ethical and thus social and political issues. Etymologically denoting a person who is “out of mind”, dementia today designates a specific syndrome and, together with other mental disorders, has undergone a process of medicalization, which influences the way we understand it. At the same time, a growing number of cultural representations have flooded the literary market – from novels, dramas and films to autobiographies by care-givers and people with dementia.

This paper will look at a number of autobiographies by people with early-onset Alzheimer’s as well as the published output of two arts projects by writers in residence in care homes, to analyse how these texts and their authors and co-authors negotiate and challenge the issue of selfhood and its loss in dementia.

About the speaker:

Rebecca Bitenc is currently reading for a PhD in English Literature at Durham University. Her thesis on "Losing One's Self: Dementia in Autobiography, Biography and Fiction" (working title) explores how, in contemporary literature, the alleged loss of self in dementia is expressed across different genres - with particular focus on the ethics of literary form. Her PhD project is funded by the AHRC and supervised by Professor Patricia Waugh and Professor Corinne Saunders. She completed her M.A. at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universitat Freiburg, Germany in English, French and Psychology in January 2011.

Please join us for the sixth seminar series of Inventions of the

Text 2012/13

 

Life-writing at the limits: dementia in

contemporary autobiographies and life-

writing projects

Rebecca Bitenc, Durham University

Dementia, due to world-wide increasing incidence rates, has come to the fore of public awareness. Its alleged loss of self raises a number of ethical and thus social and political issues. Etymologically denoting a person who is “out of mind”, dementia today designates a specific syndrome and, together with other mental disorders, has undergone a process of medicalization, which influences the way we understand it. At the same time, a growing number of cultural representations have flooded the literary market – from novels, dramas and films to autobiographies by care-givers and people with dementia.

This paper will look at a number of autobiographies by people with early-onset Alzheimer’s as well as the published output of two arts projects by writers in residence in care homes, to analyse how these texts and their authors and co-authors negotiate and challenge the issue of selfhood and its loss in dementia.

 

About the speaker:

Rebecca Bitenc is currently reading for a PhD in English Literature at Durham University. Her thesis on "Losing One's Self: Dementia in Autobiography, Biography and Fiction" (working title) explores how, in contemporary literature, the alleged loss of self in dementia is expressed across different genres - with particular focus on the ethics of literary form. Her PhD project is funded by the AHRC and supervised by Professor Patricia Waugh and Professor Corinne Saunders. She completed her M.A. at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universitat Freiburg, Germany in English, French and Psychology in January 2011.

Literature and Children

Please join us for the fifth seminar of the academic year:

Literature and Children:

Poetry for Play Hours: 

Victorian Poets & the Culture of Children's Verse

Professor Kirstie Blair 

University of Stirling

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Wednesday, 23rd January 2013

5:30 – 7:00 pm

Department of English Studies, Hallgarth House Seminar Room

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Speaker: Professor Kirstie Blair, Stirling University

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Professor Kirstie Blair has just moved to a Chair at the University of Stirling, after working for seven years at the University of Glasgow. She has also recently been employed as a visiting professor by the Armstrong Browning Library in Texas. Professor Blair is the author of two monographs on Victorian poetry, "Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion", which came out in 2012, and "Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart". She has published a variety of articles and book chapters on Victorian literature, particularly in the fields of poetry and poetics, literature and religion, and literature and medicine. 

ABSTRACT

This talk provides an introduction to the new project I am starting, which will consider transatlantic poetry for children in the Victorian period, with particular focus on the involvement of major ‘canonical’ poets – primarily Tennyson, Browning and Longfellow – in writing for a child audience and participating in the emerging publishing culture of children’s literature. I will consider some of the possible directions that this research might take and highlight the peculiar investments of major Victorian writers in poetry for children. The talk concludes with a more in-depth consideration of Tennyson, and a reading of ‘The Brook’, in terms of its ambiguous status as a ‘children’s’ poem.

For more information, find us on facebook, follow us on Twitter (@inventionsSem) or check our blog: inventionsofthetext.blogspot.com