Review: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha 2018: Faulkner and Slavery
Review: Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha 2018: Faulkner and Slavery, University of Mississippi, 22-26 July 2018 “What did slavery mean in the life, ancestry, environment, imagination, and career of William Faulkner?” This was the guiding question posed by the Call for Papers of this year’s annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference, centered on the theme “Faulkner and Slavery,” and held at the University of Mississippi. As more work is undertaken across the globe to re-contextualize historical monuments, and to recover subjugated narratives, critical re-evaluations of the past are central to current scholarship; the time to critically re-assess Faulkner’s relationship to slavery is now. While on the surface, Faulkner’s own interaction with “the peculiar institution” might appear somewhat secondhand – the author was born in 1897, thirty-two years after the Emancipation Proclamation – the specter of slavery was never far from his life. Through his African American “Mammy”, Caroline Barr (born an enslaved person somewhere […]
Continue ReadingReview: The British Association of Contemporary Literary Studies Biennial Conference: What Happens Now 2018
Review: The British Association of Contemporary Literary Studies Biennial Conference: What Happens Now 2018, Loughborough University, 10-12 July 2018 If the inaugural British Association of Contemporary Literary Studies (BACLS) conference is anything to go by, academics are a dedicated lot. Even persistent hot weather and a World Cup semi-final did not deter over a hundred scholars from gathering at Loughborough University for three days of literary exploration. What Happens Now 2018 (WHN18) evolved from the conference series of the same name that was hosted by Lincoln University from 2010 onwards. In Loughborough the title proved to be a particularly apt description of the conference’s scope. WHN18 showcased the variety of contemporary literary studies as a field, as well as its ability to address pressing issues within academia and beyond. Three broad themes connected many of the papers. Some presenters explored the ability of literary studies to facilitate social activism by making […]
Continue ReadingReview: 2001: Beyond 50
Review: 2001: Beyond 50, Bangor University, 16 June 2018 2001: Beyond 50 – a commemoration and celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Stanley Kubrick’s ground-breaking and influential science-fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey – was no ordinary academic event. Organised by Professor Nathan Abrams (Bangor University) and hosted by the Centre for Film, Television and Screen Studies at Bangor University, it featured debate and discussion from academic experts on the film as well as scholars from a range of other disciplines. These included psychology, psychiatry, evolutionary biology, artificial intelligence, religion and philosophy, contributions from key industry practitioners who worked on it, a live concert featuring music from Kubrick’s films, an exhibition of student work inspired by 2001, and two screenings — one for families in the morning and one for the general public in the evening — of the film itself. It was a celebration of a masterwork of cinema that […]
Continue ReadingLiterature, Education and the Sciences of the Mind in Britain and America, 1850 – 1950
Review: Literature, Education and the Sciences of the Mind in Britain and America, 1850 – 1950, University of Kent, 17-18 July 2018 Dr Sara Lyons and Dr Michael Collins welcomed international contributors to the University of Kent to investigate how British and American novelists understood and represented the sciences of the mind between 1850 and 1950. During this period, the development of psychology and psychiatry led to increasing concern regarding the nature of knowledge, pedagogy, and individual ability. This two-day conference traced and explored how these concerns were frequently reflected and registered in literature of the time. A recurring theme of the conference was, as Emma Burris-Jansen (University of Connecticut) put it in her discussion of changing abortion narratives, ‘dangerous knowledge’. Novels were often the only source of information for women about their reproductive systems and were therefore vehicles for both repression and discovery. Olga Ackroyd (University of Kent) developed […]
Continue ReadingReview: The Half-Life of Philip K. Dick
Review: The Half-Life of Philip K. Dick, Queen Margaret University, 27 April 2018 Philip K. Dick is a strong candidate for serving as the twentieth century’s science fiction prophet—his novels and essays still resonate with audiences across the globe fifty years after they were written. Whether scholars are analyzing cinematic adaptations of his most popular works, such as The Man in the High Castle (1961) and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1969), or critically reading his lesser-known publications, such as The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick (2012), or The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), Dick’s presence is palpable in both the arenas of academia and popular culture. Organized by Terence Sawyers of Queen Margaret University, “The Half-Life of Philip K. Dick” invited scholars to explore how Dick’s science fictional futures have predicted our science fictional present. The conference began with a tangent to Dick’s work, a “hard-science” presentation […]
Continue ReadingEvent Review: Student-Led Midlands3Cities American Studies Retreat, 22nd – 29th June 2018
Between the 22nd and 29th of June, 2018, a group of research students from across the East Midlands – united by a shared passion for American Studies – gathered in Matlock, Derbyshire, with the intention of bursting their academic bubbles. This academic retreat was a student-led project generously funded by the Midlands3Cities Doctoral Training Partnership (M3C) and was attended by both M3C and non-M3C PhD candidates representing Birmingham City University, Nottingham Trent University, the University of Leicester, and the University of Nottingham.
Continue ReadingBOOK REVIEW: THE QUIET CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN NOVEL, BY RACHEL SYKES
Rachel Sykes’ much-needed monograph, The Quiet Contemporary American Novel (TQCAN) compellingly argues that there is a vein of quiet that runs through American literary canon and remains prevalent in contemporary US culture.
This book explores ‘quiet’ as a narrative concept in contemporary US fiction. In her thorough development of the term, Sykes gives us an idiom for a narrative aesthetic that is motivated by values of contemplation and characterised by its interest in the lives of introverted scholarly characters.
Conference Review: Recovering May Alcott Nieriker’s Life and Work, Université Paris Diderot
This special guest review comes to us from Amelia Platt, a fifteen-year-old student from Litcham Comprehensive High School and a participant in the Brilliant Club, a charity that employs PhD students to tutor pupils from low-participation backgrounds. Amelia would like to thank her mentor, Azelina Flint, a doctoral candidate and AHRC CHASE Award Holder at the School of American Studies, University of East Anglia.
Continue ReadingBOOK REVIEW: HILLBILLY ELEGY: A MEMOIR OF A FAMILY AND CULTURE IN CRISIS, BY J.D. VANCE
Joe Bageant’s Deer Hunting with Jesus (2007) drew a global readership’s attention to underprivileged Appalachian communities. J.D. Vance replicates this with his memori Hillbilly Elegy. Published, like Nancy Isenberg’s White Trash, in 2016, Vance and Isenberg agree that despite constitutionally enshrined freedom, social mobility remains unattainable for many disenfranchised white working-class US citizens.
Continue ReadingReview: DISCO! An Interdisciplinary Conference
Review: DISCO! An Interdisciplinary Conference, University of Sussex, 21-23 June 2018 The word ‘disco’ refers to several things, both the genre of music which the OED describes as ‘strongly rhythmical pop music mainly intended for dancing’ that was ‘particularly popular in the mid to late 1970s’, to the nightclub or dance-hall venue where such dancing takes place. But it also describes a sensibility, an adjective conjuring up numerous erotic or musical or sartorial associations, or particular figures from its scene, perhaps least fortunately the image of John Travolta in flares that has become the lingering symbol of its populist zenith (and thus perhaps its nadir.) The expertly curated ‘DISCO! An Interdisciplinary Conference’, recently held at the University of Sussex and co-organised by Arabella Stanger, Michael Lawrence and Mimi Haddon, drew much of its strength from the way this central word moved between these states of description, offering a portrait of […]
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