The final Michealmas term seminar!

Dr David Miller

Enlightened Anxieties: Some Observations on Poetry and Civil Society in Ferguson and Adam Smith

7th December 2011

4:30 – 6:00 pm

Department of English Studies,

Hallgarth House Seminar Room

***

ABSTRACT:

This work takes a close look at what the principal theorists of ‘civil’ society in the Scottish Enlightenment, primarily Ferguson and Smith, have to say about the place and function of poetry in ‘civil’ society and how poetry is supposed to operate in established capitalist economies. The work tends to show that poetry, as opposed to what both writers called ‘literature’, operates as an index of ‘civilisation’ but at the same time cannot be made to comply with the generals theories they expound. In other words, poetry is the site at which the main problems of the theories can be located and poetry becomes the test of all that the theories try and fail to achieve.

The paper attempts to put forward some possible reasons for this and also tries to show why poetry is such a ‘problem’ for the exponents of enlightened ‘civil society’. There are some observation on the ‘decline of manners’ and the role of ‘opulence’ in civil society, but in general the paper is focused on question of poetry in its relationship with ideas of ‘sociability’, ‘social contract’, ‘law’, and ‘community’.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Dr David Miller works on nineteenth century and early Modernist poetry, in particular on the way poetry interacts with philosophy, political theory and cultural commentary. He has written a book based in this area, With Poetry and Philosophy: Four Dialogic Studies and a number of related articles and presentations. His research is primarily concerned with the means by which poetry resists incorporation into ideological and theoretical ‘systems’ and he is currently working on a monograph on poetry and theories of civil society. Dr Miller has taught at universities in Rome and Edinburgh and is currently research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, University of Edinburgh. He is the general editor of the international Journal of Literature and Trauma Studies.

Third Inventions seminar of the term!

 

Michael Shallcross

‘The Parodist’s Game’: Scrutiny of Cultural Play in Jonathan Coe’s 

What a Carve Up!

30th November 2011

4:30 – 6:00 pm

Department of English Studies,

    Hallgarth House Seminar Room

ABSTRATCT:

F.R. Leavis considered parody to belong to a branch of literary culture ‘which, in its obtuse and smug complacency, is always the worst enemy of creative genius’. Consequently, forLeavis, ‘people who are really interested in creative originality regard the parodist's game with distaste and contempt’. This paper will develop the concept of the ‘parodist’s game’ in the context of Coe’s novel, to explore the ways in which self-conscious cultural play may not only foster creative originality, but also generate the deeper moral seriousness which Leavis implies to be incompatible with formally playful modes of discourse.

Amidst the prodigious range of popular and ‘high’ cultural references played upon in Coe’s novel I will highlight his use of game imagery, with particular emphasis upon theCluedo motif that underpins much of the plot. Through a wider analysis of the popularity of mass-produced household games in the mid-to-late-twentieth century, and the various cross-generic adaptations of Cluedo that have emerged, I will argue that Coe identifies a self-sabotaging ambivalence within the capitalist homogenisation of private leisure activity which makes it a fecund source for parody. As I will demonstrate, this reading not only serves to challenge Leavis’s reductive conception of the ethical parameters of parody, but also the comparably partial account of a figure who is in some ways Leavis’s critical antithesis –Roland Barthes.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Michael Shallcross is currently researching a PhD on ‘G.K. Chesterton and Parody’ at Durham University.The thesis examines the parodic motifs permeating Chesterton'sdiverse output, with particular emphasis upon his detective fiction, but also with reference to his nonsense verse, journalism, novels, critical essays, and public performances.Having graduated from Sheffield Hallam University in 2004, Michael studied an MA by Research at the University of York.

T.S.Eliot's Shakespeare on 9th November

Please join us for the second seminar in the Inventions of the Text 2011/12 series:




Jason Harding


T.S.Eliot’s Shakespeare


***

9th November 2011

4:30 – 6:00 pm

Department of English Studies,

Hallgarth House Seminar Room

***

ABSTRATCT:

'T. S. Eliot's Shakespeare': This paper argues that Shakespeare is the most persistent presence in Eliot's poetry and criticism throughout his writing career, tracing the long arc of Eliot's Shakespeare from the iconoclasm of the early avant-garde provocateur which, in due course, was obliged to give way to the need to accommodate the greatness of Shakespearean tragedy to Christian belief, before a final period in which the modern verse dramatist sought to do justice not only to the 'musical' but the 'dramatic' excellence of Shakespeare's language.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER:

Jason Harding is Reader in English Studies at Durham University and Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, University of London. His publications include a critical history of interwar British literary journalism, 'The Criterion' (Oxford, 2002), the edited collections 'T S Eliot and the Concept of Tradition' (Cambridge, 2007) and 'T S Eliot in Context' (Cambridge, 2011) and over forty articles, essays and reviews in books and in various journals, including the TLS, the London Review of Books, Modernism/Modernity, The Cambridge Quarterly and Essays in Criticism.

***

Inventions of the Text is the Department of English Studies staff-student forum, run by postgraduate students. It is an opportunity for postgraduate students and staff to present their research, and to contribute to lively discussion on key issues raised.

Full programme for the academic year 2011/12 will be announced shortly. All sessions will be held in the Hallgarth House Seminar Room on Hallgarth Street and followed by drinks and discussion at the Victoria pub, Hallgarth Street.

If you would like to participate, contribute a paper, or if you have any questions, please email inventionsofthetext@gmail.com. For further updates find us on Facebook, or visit our blog http://inventionsofthetext.blogspot.com

Thanks,

Annabel, Avishek and Kaja

Inventions of the Texts 2011/2012

Please join us for the first seminar in the Inventions of the Text 2011/12 series:

19th October 2011

4:30 – 6:00 pm

Department of English Studies,

Hallgarth House Seminar Room

We are delighted to open this year’s series with two talks on aspects of Ezra Pound’s poetry:



"Oh my England": Memory and Revaluation in the Cantos


Jack Baker, Department of English Studies, Durham University



and



"The Peasant's bent shoulders" / "gritty grinding": The politics of labour poeticised in Ezra Pound and Basil Bunting

Annabel Haynes, Department of English Studies, Durham University



***



Inventions of the Text is the Department of English Studies staff-student forum, run by postgraduate students. It is an opportunity for postgraduate students and staff to present their research, and to contribute to lively discussion on key issues raised.


Full programme for the academic year 2011/12 will be announced shortly. All sessions will be held in the Hallgarth House Seminar Room on Hallgarth Street and followed by drinks and discussion at the Victoria pub, Hallgarth Street.


If you would like to participate, contribute a paper, or if you have any questions, please email inventionsofthetext@gmail.com. For further updates find us on Facebook, or subscribe to this blog!


Annabel, Avishek and Kaja

"The Uses of Literature: the Uses of English Departments"

Please join us for the final instalment of "The Uses of Literature" seminars. In a fitting end to our series, we're delighted to welcome Professor Robert Eaglestone (Royal Holloway, University of London) for a talk about literature and education.


Please note that this seminar will start slightly later than usual, at 6.30pm, and will take place on Monday 13th June 2011.

"The Uses of Literature: the Uses of English Departments"
Robert Eaglestone, Royal Holloway, University of London
6.30pm, Monday 13th June 2011
Hallgarth House Seminar Room, Hallgarth Street, Durham

"Intellectual history is to a large extent simultaneously the history of educational practices. Disciplines as bodies of knowledge are simultaneously communities of practice, performing their own protocols, for argument and dialogue" - Ben Knights

One central activity, one thing we use literature for in universities, is teaching. While the media representation of the academic still suggests we only care for our 'arcane' research, I want to suggest that the experience of how and what we teach, and our commitment to education, shapes our discipline (our numerous sub-disciplines, in fact) much more than we often admit. And this, in turn, of course, shapes our - and others - view of literature.

Drawing on work by Clifford Geertz, Tony Becher and Ben Knights, I want to explore the ways we use literature common to all 'Englishes', what some of this might mean both for us and for literature, and to look at some possibilities for the future of the discipline(s).

Bio
Robert Eaglestone is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is Deputy Director (and was formerly Director) of the Holocaust Research Centre and was Deputy Dean of Arts and Humanities at Royal Holloway. His main interests are in the contemporary, spanning literature (mainly fiction), philosophy and history. He works on contemporary literature and literary theory, contemporary philosophy and on Holocaust and Genocide studies. He is also strongly committed to interdisciplinarity and collaborative research work and has an interest in pedagogy. Professor Eaglestone is currently completing a manuscript on the Holocaust and genocide in contemporary literature and culture, and a volume of the Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Literary and Cultural Theory (Volume 2 1966 to Present day).
 
As usual, the paper will be followed by a discussion and then drinks at the Victoria.

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.

"Imaginative Worlds: Medical Humanities and ‘the uses of literature’"

Please join us for the first "The Uses of Literature" seminar of Epiphany Term, where we'll be joined by members of the Centre for Medical Humanities here at Durham University.


ABSTRACT

The Medical Humanities is an emerging interdisciplinary field of enquiry in which humanities and social sciences perspectives are brought to bear upon an exploration of the human side of medicine, broadly conceived. Literary studies has been a key contributing discipline to the development of this field; however, driven as it has been by the imperatives of medical education, the Medical Humanities has tended to value literature mainly as a form of training (in how to be empathetic, to tolerate ambiguity, to develop 'narrative competence' in the context of clinical practice). The central argument of this paper is that a more sophisticated account of the ‘uses of literature’ in the Medical Humanities is needed if the field is to continue to flourish. To that end, our paper, which is very much a work in progress, takes some first steps in the attempt to rethink the role of literature in understanding medicine and, indeed, human experience. Beginning with an overview uses of literature dominant in the Medical Humanities, we then explore alternative approaches by looking at the imaginative worlds of pre-modern literature and the Zuckerman novels of Philip Roth.


BIOGRAPHIES
Corinne Saunders is Professor in the Department of English Studies, Associate Director of the Centre for Medical Humanities, and Director of the Institute of Medieval and Renaissance Studies. A key focus of her current work is the study of pre-Cartesian models of mind-body-affect and their links with contemporary neuroscience. Michael Mack is a Reader in the Department of English Studies and the Centre for Medical Humanities. He is currently completing a book about how literature changes the way we think. Angela Woods is a Lecturer in Medical Humanities whose first book "The Sublime Object of Psychiatry: Schizophrenia in Clinical and Cultural Theory" is forthcoming in 2011.

EPIPHANY TERM PROGRAMME

We hope you'll join us for the next batch of seminars in the "The Uses of Literature" series. Our Epiphany Term programme runs the gamut of the arts and humanities disciplines, from the Medical Humanities to Film Studies, taking in topics including rethinking the role of literature in medicine; fictionality and human understanding; the commingling of film, fiction and celebrity culture and new, innovative tendencies in the British novel.

"The Uses of Literature" Epiphany Term Programme

6pm Tuesday 25th January 2011
"Imaginative Worlds: Medical Humanities and ‘the uses of literature’"
Corinne Saunders, Michael Mack & Angela Woods (Centre for Medical Humanities, Durham University)

6pm Tuesday 8th February 2011
“Cognition, Narrative, and the Force of Fictionality”
Richard Walsh (Department of English and Related Literature, University of York)

6pm Tuesday 22nd February 2011
"Converging Cultures: Film, Fiction and Celebrity in Spike Jonze and Bret Easton Ellis"
James Annesley (School of Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University)

TBC, March 2011: Vic Sage (School of Literature and Creative Writing, University of East Anglia)

Please note the seminars will take place on Tuesday evenings this term. As ever, the seminars take place in the Seminar Room at Hallgarth House, Hallgarth Street, Durham and are followed by drinks and discussion in the Victoria pub.

PODCAST #1: "GENRE AND DISCIPLINE" - ALASTAIR RENFREW

We're delighted to announce that the first of our "The Uses of Literature" seminars, a spirited defence of the arts and humanities by Durham University Department of Russian's Alastair Renfrew, is now available to stream.

Dr. Alastair Renfrew - 'Genre and Discipline' by inventionsofthetext

We still have spots available for the latter part of the series, if you'd like to contribute, please email inventionsofthetext@gmail.com

"THE USES OF LITERATURE" PODCAST

We will shortly be making our "The Uses of Literature" seminars available to stream as podcasts. Please stay tuned for more information.