Next seminar: 31st May

Hope you can join us for the next "The Uses of Literature" seminar, where three speakers from across the disciplines will reflect upon the forms and functions of utopian thinking in a time of public sector cuts and economic austerity.

 

 

"'These fanciful useless dreams'? A Panel Discussion on the Forms, Uses and Values of Utopia"

6pm, Tuesday 31st May 2011

Department of Engish Studies, Seminar Room, Hallgarth House, Hallgarth Street, Durham

 

Speakers

Lisa Garforth (School of Geography, Politics and Sociology, Newcastle University)

David Bell (School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham)

Adam Stock (Department of English Studies, Durham University)

 

Utopian studies is an interdisciplinary field of enquiry that examines utopian and dystopian strands of thought and practice across the arts, humanities and social sciences. At a time of cutbacks and austerity, how can the study of that most intangible of things – social dreaming – be justified? This panel will discuss critical and structural aspects of social dreaming, with particular attention to the privileged role of literary utopias within utopian studies. Between them, the three panellists will analyse some of the structural tools with which literary utopias are conceived and constructed, investigate the spatial formation of utopian spaces, and examine how utopian literature can take us beyond the analyses of social and political theory. Literary utopias offer a timely exemplar by which the arts, humanities and social sciences can be at once critically engaged with the crises of the present, and conceive as a critical enquiry radically different alternatives to our present.

Abstracts for each of the papers are available here: David Bell, Adam Stock, Lisa Garforth

Dr. Maebh Long's paper now available online!

  Dr. Maebh long - Whither deconstruction...? Wither deconstruction...? by inventionsofthetext

Dr. Andrew Crumey's paper now available as a podcast!

  Dr. Andrew Crumey - Knowledge and creative writing by inventionsofthetext

Matthew Griffiths' paper now available as podcast!

  Matthew Griffiths - Why we don't write poetry about Climate Change by inventionsofthetext

Two Uses of the Encyclopaedia: Narrative and the Archive in Tom McCarthy’s "C" and Nicola Barker’s "Darkmans" (Victor Sage)

We hope you can join us for the last "The Uses of Literature" session of this term, where we'll be joined by Victor Sage, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of East Anglia (and graduate of Durham University!), for a very special off-schedule seminar. Professor Sage's paper, about two of the most exciting and innovative novelists currently working in British contemporary fiction, will be followed by open forum discussion and a trip to the pub.


Two Uses of the Encyclopaedia: Narrative and the Archive in Tom McCarthy’s C and Nicola Barker’s Darkmans.


Victor Sage, Emeritus Professor of English Literature (Department of Literature and Creative Writing, University of East Anglia)
6.30pm, Thursday 17th March 2011
Hallgarth House Seminar Room, Hallgarth Street, Durham

Abstract
Encyclopaedism in fiction can be defined (crudely) as an assimilation of prose narrative to the Archive, and in particular to the concept of infinity, the infinity of Knowledge, the ideal form of which is the list. Knowledge as a journey off the map of whatever conscious or unconscious provincialism we happen to inhabit. The moods and effects of this writerly manoeuvre are many and various; in the case of the novel, Bakhtin has helped us begin to chart its long prehistory of subversion before we get to the lists of Rabelais. He showed us two things: that this assimilation of narrative to the conceptually open form of the quantitative is not just a Modern (let alone a Modernist) tradition. And he also showed that it is not just a high, intellectual tradition, but a popular comic tradition too. The effects of this writerly manoeuvre are various. This talk considers two recent examples of the assimilation of narrative to infinity in Tom McCarthy’s C, and Nicola Barker’s Darkmans, which gives an occasion to reflect on the tension between the high cultural and popular traditions in contemporary fiction.

Biography
Victor Sage is an Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of East Anglia. A graduate of the University of Durham, he is the author of three books of fiction. He has also written on the the novel in the 19th and 20th century Gothic tradition: on Ann Radcliffe, Mary Shelley, Dickens, Beckett, Katherine Mansfield, John McGahern, J.G.Ballard, and, recently, Kazuo Ishiguro. His most recent monograph is Le Fanu’s Gothic: the Rhetoric of Darkness (2004). He is the editor for Penguin Classics of Charles Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer and J.Sheridan Le Fanu’s Uncle Silas. He is currently working on A Cultural History of European Gothic for Polity Press.

"Converging Cultures: Film, Fiction and Celebrity"

Please join us for the next session in our "The Uses of Literature" series, where we'll be joined by James Annesley of Newcastle University's School of Literature, Language and Linguistics.

ABSTRACT
More than just a description of technological changes that are working alongside the increasing integration of media businesses, convergence is a social process that works on our cultural consumption at the same time as it affects the aesthetics of the culture we consume. Films are increasingly resembling video games, literary texts are merging with other forms of media on Ipad and Kindle.

Beyond these technological, industrial and sociological changes, there is also, this paper argues, evidence of increasing convergence in creative practice. The self-reflexive quality of Bret Ellis’ recent fiction and Spike Jonze’s films, for example, not only illustrates the ways in which convergence works to blur and undermine familiar aesthetic categories, but does so in terms that offer important insight into the boundary-less creative gene pool that provides a context for cultural production in a converged mediascape. Focussing on the functioning of celebrity in their work (particularly Ellis’ portraits of himself as the celebrity author, and the games Jonze plays with John Malkovich and Christopher Walken), the argument is that convergence is not only affecting the kinds of material that writers are filmmakers are producing and changing the ways in which their cultural production is financed, disseminated and consumed, but is at the same time transforming the ways in which they are making their work. Jonze in particular seems to have very clear sense that the perceived divisions between music, advertising, cinema and television have as little meaning for his creative practice as they do for media businesses and consumers. Even as "Being John Malkovich" encourages us to reconsider our expectations about the aesthetics of film in a converging culture, it also helps us understand the extent to which it, like many other contemporary cultural artefacts, is the product of a creative practice that is itself convergent.

BIO
James Annesley is Senior Lecturer in American Literature at Newcastle University with research interests including American literature, contemporary literature and culture, globalization, consumer society and lifestyle. His publications include Fictions of Globalisation: Consumption, the Market and the Contemporary American Novel (London: Continuum, 2006), Blank Fiction: Consumerism, Culture and the Contemporary American Novel (London: Pluto: 1998).

“Cognition, Narrative, and the Force of Fictionality”

Hope you can join us for the next seminar in our "The Uses of Literature" series, lead by Richard Walsh of the University of York. Dr Walsh will be discussing the role of fictionality in human understanding (abstract follows below). As ever, his paper will be followed by open forum discussion and then a trip to the pub.

ABSTRACT
The literary text is inherently metadiscursive, and like all metadiscourse if offers understanding of something already within the human domain of meaning, rather than natural phenomena. This paper elaborates upon that quality with specific reference to fictionality, and shows how the built-in self-consciousness of fictionality as a rhetorical orientation connects highly wrought literary fictions with the most elemental functions of human understanding. At a cognitive level, narrative sense-making is both an adaptive faculty offering unprecedented mastery over temporality and experience, and the inauguration of a reflexive cycle of representation that works both to define the parameters of human value and to expose the contingency and limitations of its own frame of reference. Fictive rhetoric, by virtue of the self-consciousness integral to its operation, uses this cycle as the engine of the creative imagination; and literary fiction raises it to the highest degree. My argument maps out this view of fictionality, moving from a cognitive-evolutionary frame of reference, via a consideration of the status of narrative in relation to the theory of natural selection itself, to a distinction between value and force that characterizes the duality between what narrative reflexiveness says and what it does.


BIO
Richard Walsh is a senior lecturer in English and Related Literature at the University of York. He is the author of "Novel Arguments: Reading Innovative American Fiction" (Cambridge 1995) and "The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction" (Ohio State, 2007), which proposes a fundamental reconceptualisation of the role of fictionality in narrative, and in doing so challenges many of the core assumptions of narrative theory. He has published articles in "Poetics Today", "Narrative", "Style", "Modern Fiction Studies" and "Storyworlds", among others, and has contributed essays to edited volumes such as the "Blackwell Companion to Narrative Theory" (2005), "Toward a Cognitive Theory of Narrative Acts" (2010) and "Postclassical Narratology: Approaches and Analyses" (2010). His current research interests include narrative across media and narrative theory in interdisciplinary contexts, in particular the relation between narrative and the concept of emergence. He is the leader of the Fictionality Research Group, and director of Narrative Research in York’s Centre for Modern Studies.