Thursday 30 January, 4.30pm, Edith Morley 124
Myra Bom (Royal Holloway, University of London)
‘Agency and Divorce. The Case of Constance of France (1165).’
Thursday 19 March, 4.30pm, Edith Morley 124
Christa Gray (University of Reading)
‘Dead body problems: burials in Jerome’s Lives of Holy Men.’
Thursday 26 March, 4.30pm, Edith Morley 124
Megan Leitch (University of Cardiff)
‘Sleep and its Spaces in Middle English Literature: Emotions, Ethics, Dreams’.
Monday 10 February, 1 pm, Edith Morley 181
Dr. Gillian Woods (Birkbeck),’ “Go make your liuely battel”: representing violence on the Renaissance stage’.
Monday 24 February, 1 pm, Edith Morley 181
Dr. Alanna Skuse (Reading), ‘Biting one’s tongue: glossotomy and gesture in The Spanish Tragedy‘
Monday 9 March, 1pm, Edith Morley 181
Dr. Lauren Working (Oxford, TIDE project), ‘Coming of Age with Empire: Performing Colonization at the Inns of Court’
We are delighted to welcome you to the University of Reading’s 2019 Beckett week, 6-9 November in the Minghella Studios, Whiteknights campus, Shinfield Road RG6 6BT.
Events include:
A conference on Beckett and Italy on 7th-8th November, 9.30am onwards. Minghella Cinema. You can book and find the fees and schedule here:
This link also allows you to book for the free performances on the evenings of Wednesday 6th, Thursday 7th and Friday 8th as below:
Wednesday 6th November 7.30pm. BULMERSHE Theatre Minghella Studios: Staged reading of Creative Fellow Robert McCrum’s play about Samuel Beckett and PG Wodehouse in Paris at the end of WW II directed by Michael Hoffman with David Horowitch and David Threlfall. Followed by Q &A
Thursday 7th November 7.30pm. BULMERSHE Theatre Minghella Studios:. Premiere of Creative Fellow Tim Parkinson’s string quartet followed by Q&A
Friday 8th November 6pm. BOB KAYLEY Theatre Minghella Studios: Public performance of ‘This Here: An exploration of fragility and embodiment amongst stroke survivors’, inspired by Beckett’s work, created and performed by Rosetta Life, a company that works with stroke survivors. Followed by Q&A
On Saturday 9th November we will be holding the 2019 Beckett International Foundation seminar from 10.30 – 17.30. You can find the schedule, fees and book by following the link below.
Last week The English Society and other students attended a research evening hosted by some of the staff from the English Literature department, Karin Lesnik-Oberstein and David Brauner. It was a very informative and enjoyable evening, giving students an interesting glimpse into pathways to follow for a potential career, one that many hadn’t considered. We have gained an insight into how our lecturers have developed their careers and come to find their specialist subjects, something that a lot of students have wondered about during their time at the university. Something the English Literature department has been lacking is a stronger relationship between the students and the staff and this event definitely started to bridge the gap. It was a nice chance to speak to our lecturers outside of lectures and seminars in an informal and personal setting. David’s specialist subject of graphic novels was interesting to learn about, hearing stories of how this had come from reading his older brothers comic books, eventually leading to a job as a lecturer in an English Literature department. Karin’s story was slightly different as she doesn’t have a set specialist subject. Despite this, it was just as interesting to hear about the ways in which she can apply literature to other departments such as maths and science, considering how reading can be applied to these things. We also enjoyed hearing about the favourite authors of the two lecturers; with David stressing his love for Leo Tolstoy, and Karin surprisingly yet interestingly labelling Freud as her favourite. The setting of this first research evening was perfect. It was such an intimate group, so everyone was able to ask the questions they had and got detailed and informative answers. Alongside the enlightening evening, we also had a selection of crisps and cakes – something that was appreciated by all.
We are all looking forward to the next evening in November with Nicola Wilson.
Seminars will be held on Thursdays at 4.30 pm in Edith Morley 124 unless otherwise stated.
11 October FRIDAY, 4.30pm Edith Morley 124
Helen Nicholson (University of Cardiff), ‘Queen Sybil of Jerusalem and the Third Crusade’
14 November
Stenton Lecture: 6.30pm in the Van Emden lecture theatre.
Ronald Hutton (University of Bristol), ‘Reconsidering the Question of Pagan Survivals in the Christian Middle Ages’.
The lecture will be proceeded by a colloquium in the afternoon – more details to follow
28 November
Jonathan Harris (Royal Holloway, University of London), ‘The late Byzantine aristocracy and the mystery of the Perivleptos’
12 December
Carole Hillenbrand (University of Edinburgh) ‘Odd men out? The Turks in twelfth-century Syria’
On 1 October, “From Switzerland”, Peter Robinson’s new sequence of poems, appeared on the LONGITŪDINĒS website, the first publication of this new founded magazine.
LONGITŪDINĒS is an arts and literature magazine, with annual print editions and online content. It is conceived as an arts and literary platform that gathers in one place the work of the most interesting writers and artists based in Europe. Its aim is the promotion and the dissemination of a European Art and Literature, at a time in which local politics seems to push towards the construction of walls and closure of borders. Its name LONGITŪDINĒS reflects this intention to cross boundaries.
The print edition includes the original texts alongside their English translation. Translations into other languages are published on the website when they become available.
LONGITŪDINĒS recognises the fundamental role covered by translation in the dissemination of culture and aims to make it an integral part of its project and to give translators a too often unrecognised credit. Translators who would like to collaborate are invited to get in touch with the editors at editors@longitudines.com.
LONGITŪDINĒS is now inviting submissions for its First Issue, due to be published in Autumn 2020. They are looking for artworks, and short prose, poetry and drama written in any European language.
Submitted artworks and texts must be previously unpublished. Multiple submissions are acceptable as long as we are notified immediately if they are accepted for publication elsewhere. Print quality artworks and texts in PDF must be submitted by 1 January 2020 to submissions@longitudines.com. All submissions must be accompanied by a short bio of the author. Texts should not exceed the following specifications:
Prose: 6,000 words
Poetry: 150 lines
Drama: 3,000 words
Submissions will be acknowledged. Authors will be notified of editorial decisions.
For queries contact us at info@longitudines.com or visit www.longitudines.com.
You will expect your masters to feel like the natural step up from your undergraduate degree. You will expect to feel confident and comfortable discussing theories, criticism and your own literary analysis. After the longest summer, fuelled by the success of your undergraduate achievement you will feel prepared and excited for this new journey. This is short lasting. I’m sorry. In your first seminar you will feel like your brain has replaced all literary intellect with each episode of that summer’s Love Island. Your peers will each seem like literature student deities; omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent both in and out the classroom. This is intimidating, you will sit in the least noticeable spot, feeling inherently incapable and refusing eye contact. You are incessantly aware that at any moment MI5 will storm the room with warrants and evidence of your wrongful acceptance onto the course, revealing you as the fraud you are and whisking you away in the back of a van never to be seen again (this will make it difficult to focus on Margaret Cavendish’s The Blazing World and make it unlikely you investigate the utopia in your end of term essay).
After a few weeks of perpetual self-torture and agonising over manuscripts and Mary Shelley you will organise a meeting with the director of your course. You reveal your fraudulence in the programme, confess your complete inadequacy and admit your inability to understand even the likes of Biff and Chip let alone Materiality and Textuality. You will plead guilty to your failure and announce you are dropping out of the course. They suggest you wait out the term, hint at brighter skies ahead and wryly muse on Imposter Syndrome. You will self-diagnose yourself with Imposter Syndrome after reading the Wiki-page on the walk home, console yourself and remind yourself of the evidence of your competence. You will then start to wonder if you might be faking the whole imposter thing and that at any moment MI5 will storm the room, reveal you as a fraudulent fraudster and whisk you away in the back of a van never to be seen again.
Regardless, I am happy to announce that the reversion to first year seminar silence only lasts the first half of first term. You will succeed in your first assignments and put the MI5 investigation into jeopardy. By second term you will have found your voice again, your deity-peers will appear more human and you will voluntarily participate in seminars. The crippling self-doubt remains – I am afraid it comes part and parcel with the pursuit of knowledge – though you will find ways to drown it out (Lo-Fi Hip-Hop Beats to Study/Relax To). You will spend all your time reading and researching, at some mundane moment at approximately 3.08pm on a Thursday you will realise this is enjoyable not terrifying. The transformation concludes with a preference for Park House over Park Bar, shocking.
I appreciate this sounds like hard work and survival. It is. Not forgetting the money worries, working part-time job(s) and maintaining a social life, it will be the hardest year of your life. Also the best. In twelve months you will make the same level of self-discovery and self-improvement that took three years during your undergraduate. Friendships will deepen, new ones will come, you will continually improve your close reading and writing. You will spend a summer writing a 15,000 word dissertation so central to your life, your dreams and your ego that upon completion you consider going to the council and registering a birth. You will surpass yourself in all ways. MI5 are no longer at the door. (This being said, I won’t feel safe until I graduate.) – Imogen Mason-Evans
BBC Radio 4 recently aired a documentary on Hairy Art that featured Professor Karin Lesnik-Oberstein.
If you missed it when it first aired (Tuesday, 13th August at 11.30am), you can still listen to it on BBC Sounds.
For more information on Professor Lesnik-Oberstein’s research, please visit her webpage.
Karin did an interview for ABC Australia on women and body hair recently, another sign of the continued interest in her work. You can read the article here.
We recently posted about Dr Sue Walsh in conversation with Anindya Raychaudhuri and Frances Hardinge in the ‘Proms Plus’ series discussing Kipling’s The Jungle Book.
You can now here that conversation on BBC Sounds:
You can also access it on BBC iplayer and download it as a podcast.
And Sue’s article on The Jungle Book is now available at The Conversation.com.
If you would like more information on Sue’s work, you can contact her through the Department of English Literature’s website.
On 20th August, Dr Sue Walsh will be taking part in a Proms Plus Event that will be broadcast on Radio 3 during the interval that evening. That evening’s Prom features Charles Koechlin’s Les Bandar-log, a work seen as part of the composers ‘nearly life long effort to set The Jungle Book to music’. Dr Walsh will be discussing Kipling and The Jungle Book with the author Frances Harding, and the discussion will be chaired by Anindya Raychaudhuri (University of St. Andrews).
Sue writes:
The Jungle Books themselves were first published in 1894 and 1895, and they feature stories about Mowgli, a boy raised by wolves in the Indian Jungle. Since their initial publication these stories have remained popular, inspiring numerous adaptations, but their attitudes have been questioned by some parents and critics, who see them as a relic of Britain’s colonial past. In my research into Kipling’s children’s literature I note that a classic way of reading the tales is as an allegory for the position of the white colonialist born and raised in India, with Mowgli, the Indian boy who becomes ‘Master’ of the jungle being understood to be ‘behaving towards the beasts as the British do to the Indians’ (John McLure, Kipling and Conrad: the colonial fiction, 1981).
This account, while persuasive in many ways, seems to me to be a bit reductive, and it misses some of the interesting ways the stories potentially raise questions about notions of belonging and identity. To start with, the standard account relies on the idea that the human and animal identities within the stories are clearly distinguished from each other and fixed, and that this fixity of distinction extends via allegory to ‘white’ and Indian identities. But what happens to our understanding of the stories if we don’t treat the human and animal identities therein as predeterminedly distinct? In my research I argue that a species name doesn’t necessarily fix identity. For example, Bagheera the black panther is described in terms of a series of other animals, he is ‘as cunning as Tabaqui [the jackal], as bold as the wild buffalo, and as reckless as the wounded elephant’. Here then, attributes that are supposedly intrinsic to one animal can be found in another and this thus undermines any claim that those attributes are in fact the preserve of a particular species and it also implicitly undermines narratives of essential difference between species.
Also doesn’t a closer look at the relationship of the child Mowgli to the inhabitants of the jungle complicate accounts of the Jungle Books as straightforwardly imperialist in character? The clearest marker of Mowgli’s apparent difference from the jungle animals is his look which becomes his way of controlling the animals and could then be said to assert and fix a distinction between him and them. Mowgli’s stare subdues the animal’s instinctual response but Mowgli’s difference from Bagheera is written precisely not as an absolute difference from the animal, but as the difference between the expressed and repressed animal. Bagheera the panther’s eyes convey exactly how he feels, they ‘blaze’ when he is angry, but Mowgli’s eyes, even when he is angry are ‘like a stone in wet or dry weather’ according to Bagheera, ‘they say nothing’. Thus Mowgli is constructed as having a hidden aspect to him (beneath what his eyes reveal), he has the same emotions as the panther but these feelings are repressed and it is this that marks him as human, but it also means that at the heart of Mowgli – at his core – there is the animal.
Finally, as I’ve already indicated, the Jungle Book stories return to the issue of belonging over and over again, raising questions about the grounds on which one may claim to belong to a particular group or community. They ask whether belonging is a matter of essence or of convention and social agreement.
These aspects of the stories lead me to feel that there is more to them than an imperialist narrative, and in my monograph, Kipling’s Children’s Literature: Language, Identity and Constructions of Childhood (https://www.routledge.com/products/isbn/9780754655961) I deal with all these questions and extend my discussion to a number of Kipling’s other books for children.
if you wish to attend the concert itself, booking is not required and entry is on a first-come-first-served basis (doors open from 30 minutes before the event begins; capacity is limited). To hear the discussion, tune into Radio 3 at 17:45.
