Media, English and Culture staff and student research seminars

The School of The Arts at The University of Northampton host Media, English and Culture seminars with a guest speaker every month.

The seminars take place every second Thursday of the month at 6pm in room MY120 in the Maidwell building on Avenue Campus.

13 October - Ted Sullivan

'The Journalism of John Pilger: Pilger, Chomsky and the Discourse of Dissidence'

The Australian journalist and documentary film maker John Pilger can lay claim to being one of the most renowned investigative reporters in the English-speaking world. For more than 40 years he has literally 'covered the world' from his adopted home in the UK. He has garnered many awards for his work, twice- named as Journalist of the Year, winning a BAFTA and an Emmy for his TV and film work. Now in his seventies and still writing and producing films, a critical review of his journalistic work seems in order.

Pilger's dissident approach and unrelenting criticism of Western military and economic power has meant that, despite the accolades, he still remains in many respects an outsider, a position he shares with the legendary American academic and activist Chomsky Chomsky. Pilger has interviewed Chomsky for the BBC, shared conference podiums with him and referenced Chonsky many times his books.('His pursuit of truth is unquestionably heroic, and I, along with millions who have been informed by him, owe him much'). Chomsky's admiration for Pilger is equally fulsome. ('Pilger's work has truly been a beacon of light in dark times.')

For both men the deployment of language and discourse in the mass media is key to understanding how power operates around us to subvert democratic accountability. Words, expressions, linguistic codes, the privileging of some voices over others-all these things matter. With reference to critical discourse analysis and Chomsky's propaganda model of the mass media (developed with Edward S. Herman) I hope to shed some analytical light on Pilger's work and reputation.

Born and educated in Toronto, Ted Sullivan has more than 30 years experience as a journalist, press officer, PR practitioner and lecturer in journalism and media studies. He took a degree in Journalism in 1976 from Ryerson Polytechnical University, Canada's leading school of journalism. He has worked as Desk Editor for the Canadian Press, as freelance contributor to Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and Hong Kong Standard, as Sub editor and contributor to South China Morning Post, and the Asian Wall Street Journal. He was Editor of a healthcare magazine for doctors and health care managers in South East Asia 1979-1981, published by IPC based in London, and of two weekly newspapers in Cambridgeshire 1981-1983. He was PR copywriter and editor for Miller Wilson PR agency in Vancouver, BC, Canada working on large development project for Alcan Aluminium Ltd. 1983-85, and Editor and Press Officer for Perkins Engines, a leading multinational industrial company based in Peterborough. He is now a writer for regional press and radio on topics ranging from Tai Chi to the phone hacking scandal at the News of the World.

27 October - Professor Janet Wilson

National Narratives: Adaptation in New Zealand and Australian Cinema

How does cinema contribute to the telling of the nation's story, and to shaping the national imaginary? In what ways does the cinema of Australia and New Zealand address what Graeme Turner has called the 'national fictions' of their cultural identities? In this paper I will look at two screen adaptations to examine how the process of transference from the written to visual medium helps refocus and re-contextualise familiar motifs of national identity. The reinterpretation of 'nuclear' texts for cinema requires an act of conscious reconstruction often directed towards the creation of new cultural capital. My interest is in how the process can overlay and redefine pre-existing narrative structures with contemporary concerns, images and cultural formulae that might attract the global market, while also preserving narrative clusters that are cornerstones of 'national' stories. I will take as my examples the Australian urban Gothic story Bliss (Dir. Ray Lawrence, 1985) from Peter Carey's novel, Bliss (1981), and the story of family dysfunction in the New Zealand film Rain (Dir. Christine Jeffs, 2003), adapted from the novel Rain by Kirsty Gunn (1994).

Janet Wilson is Professor of English and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Northampton, and previously taught at the University of Otago, New Zealand. Her research interests are in the white settler society, Australian and New Zealand literature and film, postcolonial and diaspora studies more generally. Her recent publications are the co-edited volumes, Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism (Continuum, 2011) and Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays (Palgrave, 2011). She is editor of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. Her current research is on adaptation in New Zealand and Australian cinema, and Katherine Mansfield as a colonial traveller writer.

10 November - Dr Rajinder Dudrah, University of Manchester

Bollywood Popular Cultures and Haptic Urban Ethnoscapes in the City

Drawing on the author's theoretical framework of the "haptic urban ethnoscape," which develops multi-sensory understandings of film and media in relation to urban cultural geography (Ethnoscapes, 2010), this paper will situate and advance the study of Bollywood cinema-going and related popular cultural activities in the city of Manchester, UK. The social act of Dudrah cinema going at the Trafford Centre mall, the cultural geography of the Wilmslow Road in which South Asian music and video stores are located, and the dancing to Bollywood songs and music at a South Asian queer club night will be considered as producing an affective sensation in and of the city.
The paper will explore these three disparate, yet related, texts and geographies in Manchester, attempting to bring them closer through a focus on the cultural ties that draw them together: Bollywood cinema in the diaspora as popular culture. The workings of Dudrah cinema at these sites will be considered as haptic media: operating within the senses of the audio-visual and beyond, including the senses of touch and taste. How these sensations become embodied in and around their sites of consumption, moving literally and imaginatively across each other's geographies will enable them to be Rajinder as operating within the flows of the haptic urban ethnoscape. Rather than focus on the cultural texts at each site alone, an argument will be made to Bollywood them together as part of their disjunctive social flows that enables them to be considered as part of the layered and textured components of diasporic film, media, bodies and skins, rubbing up against each other.

Reference:
R. Dudrah (2010) "Haptic Urban Ethnoscapes: Representation, Diasporic Media and Urban Cultural Landscapes", Journal of Media Practice, 11. 1, pp.31-46.

Dr Rajinder Dudrah is Senior Lecturer in Screen Studies at the University of Manchester, where he also served as Head of Department of Drama (2007-2010). He has researched and published widely in Film, Media and Cultural Studies. His books include Bollywood: Sociology Goes to the Movies (Sage Publications, 2006); Bhangra: Birmingham and Beyond (Punch Records, 2007); and The Bollywood Reader (with Jigna Desai, Open University Press, 2008), and Theorising World Cinema (with Lucia Nagib and Chris Perriam, IB Tauris, 2011). He is the founding co-editor of the journal South Asian Popular Culture (Routledge). In 2010 he was honored by the Triangle Media Group, UK, with a Top 50 Global South Asian Achiever Award in the category of Education. Other recipients of the award included AR Rahman (Oscars Award winner and music composer for Slumdog Millionaire) and Professor Amartya Sen (Nobel Memorial Prize winner in Economic Sciences).

24 November - Dr Erik Tonning, University of Bergen (Norway)

'The Christ disbelieved by Beckett: Christian iconography in Samuel Beckett's work and dramaturgy'

The reference in Beckett's Watt to 'the Christ believed by Bosch, then hanging in Trafalgar Square' (alluding to Hieronymus Bosch's Christ Mocked/The Crowning with Thorns, still owned by the National Gallery in London) is perhaps the clearest example of his extensive knowledge of painting being directly incorporated into the work. The topic of Beckett and the visual arts has been much discussed since James Knowlson's biography (and subsequent papers) provided unprecedented detail of his gallery visits in London, Dublin, Florence, Paris, and not least during his stay in Germany in 1936-37 (lately also the subject of an excellent book by Mark Nixon). However, Beckett's comments on Christian iconography specifically have not previously been analysed. This paper gathers some of Beckett's available remarks (published and unpublished) about aspects of Christian iconography in both Old Master and modern paintings, and places these in the context of his lifelong agon with Christianity itself. After tracing his documented attitudes in this way, the paper will examine some allusions and Palgrave appropriations of Christian iconography in Beckett's oeuvre, including the famous dramaturgical deployment of such imagery in Waiting for Godot.

Dr Erik Tonning is Research Director of the 'Modernism and Christianity' project in the Department of Foreign Languages at the University of Bergen, and Visiting Fellow in Media, English and Culture at Northampton University. He completed an undergraduate degree at Bergen (1999) and an MA at Oslo (2001), before going on to the University of Oxford for his DPhil (2006). He has held a Norwegian Research Council postdoctoral grant (2006-2009) for a project on 'Samuel Beckett and Christianity', and has also been affiliated with the Oxford Centre for Christianity and Culture at Regent's Park College (2005-2010). In 2010, he held a Tutorial Fellowship at Regent's Park College, Oxford, before starting his new post in Bergen in January 2011. His publications include Samuel Beckett's Abstract Drama: Works for Stage and Screen 1962-1985 (2007), Sightings: Selected Literary Essays (2008) by Keith Brown (editor: Tonning) and Samuel Beckett: Debts and Legacies (Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd'hui 22, 2010: editor). He is currently writing a monograph for the Palgrave book series Modernism and ... called Modernism and Christianity (forthcoming, 2012). He is also Series Editor (with Dr Matthew Feldman) of the new book series Historicizing Modernism from Continuum Books.

8 December - Mike Starr

Striating the Stubborn Beast-Flesh: H.G Wells's The Island of Dr Moreau and Deleuzoguattarian Space.

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari are arguably the twentieth century's most spatial philosophers, with much of their writing concerning the human desire to make their physical, social, or psychological environments comprehensible by means of delineating, quantifying and measuring. Conversely Deleuze and Guattari also emphasise the ways in which our world resists these attempts at over-coding and hierarchisation. Deleuzoguattarian thought often features allegorical uses of islands, but these are never simply geographical representations; instead they function as philosophical exemplifications of cultural spaces, existing virtually as 'plateaus', enabling the 'becoming' of concepts, creatings and creatures. This approach is especially pertinent when applied to the depictions of islands in literature, in which they are a commonly used device, particularly in the science fiction genre. H.G. Wells, the 'father of modern science fiction' (Stableford et al 1076), uses the island motif multiple times in various ways: literally in The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), as well as metaphorically in the depiction of communities isolated by other means, such as in The Country of the Blind (1904) (a valley estranged from the rest of the world), and also in The Time Machine (1895) (an island not in space, but in time). This paper unites the Deleuzeoguattarian concepts of smooth, striated and nomadic spaces as defined in A Thousand Plateaus (1980), with H.G. Wells's The Island of Doctor Moreau, demonstrating how these philosophical concepts serve to emphasise the significance of the physical setting and spaces of the novel, and the physical transformations that occur within them.

Dr Michael Starr is an associate lecturer in media, popular culture and cultural theory at the University of Northampton. Specialising in science fiction and poststructuralist philosophy, his doctoral thesis, titled 'Untimely Mutations: Deterritorializing H. G. Wells's Scientific Romances', explores the work of H.G. Wells in the light of the theories of Gilles Deleuze. Recent research and conference papers include modernity and the concept of the cyborg in the science fiction film, mortality in the science fiction series Battlestar Galactica, and the assemblage of self in Joss Whedon's Dollhouse. He is the co-editor of the latest edition of the Intellect publishing journal Studies in Comics and has a chapter forthcoming in the I.B. Taurus collection Time on Television, concerning time and virtuality in the sf series Caprica.

Spring Term 2012

19 January - Rosemary Hill

University of York: Pleasure in Metal: what women metal fans like about metal

Rosemary Lucy Hill is a PhD candidate in the Centre for Women's Studies at the University of York. Her research focuses on women hard rock and heavy metal fans' experiences of fandom and community, and she has contributed articles on the ideology of metal and the moral panic around emo to the Journal for Cultural Research and the Metal Music and Politics series. She also contributed on the topic of subcultural theory to the BBC Radio 4 discussion programme 'Thinking Allowed'.

16 February - Dr Matthew Sangster

Royal Holloway, University of London: Towards a Long History of Fantasy Writing

While the articulation of Fantasy as a genre is a comparatively modern development, fantastical elements have always been common in imaginative writing.  In the past couple of centuries, though, the social and institutional attitudes relating to the uses of fantasy have undergone some extremely significant shifts, and it is the consequences of these that this paper will examine.  Drawing on Brain Attebery's distinctions between the broad fantastic mode, the historical genre and the modern formula, I will offer a longer historical perspective on the employment of the fantastic, paying particular attention to the moment at the close of the eighteenth century when realism became strongly articulated in opposition to the emergence of popular gothic fictions.  I will contend that the successful articulation of realism as the dominant literary ideology in the face of an increasing torrent of print led to the occlusion of fantastical elements in canonical works and to the creation of a literary hierarchy based as much on types of content as on form, originality or brilliance.  The talk will pay special attention to Mervyn Peake as an example of an excellent writer who sits uncomfortably both in the realist tradition and within formulaic definitions of fantasy, but who strongly and idiosyncratically engaged with both mimetic and fantastical literary pasts.

Matthew Sangster is completing a PhD at Royal Holloway on literary success and failure in the Romantic Period.  As part of this project he is cataloguing the archive of the Royal Literary Fund at the British Library, where he also recently co-curated an exhibition on 'The Worlds of Mervyn Peake'.

1 March: Dr Susan Reid, University of Northampton

"The insidious mastery of song": D. H. Lawrence, Music and Modernism

Around 1907 or 1908 traditional ideas concerning the tonality of music collapsed. Since the concept of tonality is broad - encompassing all aspects of melody and harmony, particularly hierarchical relationships - the disruption caused by musical innovations in the period is perceived by some to have been seismic in its effects. On a par, perhaps, with Virginia Woolf's much-quoted pronouncement that "on or about April 1910 human nature changed". Woolf was, in part, reflecting on a new era in the visual arts, but how might the equally radical developments in music have affected what she called "human nature" and, most particularly, the writer's expression of it? Indeed, by 1910, Woolf Diaghilev was shocking audiences with performances by the Ballets Russes which combined avant-garde music, choreography and design, in a way that seems quintessentially modernist according to Daniel Albright's conception that "the arts seem endlessly interpermeable, a set of fluid systems of construing and reinterpreting, in which the quest for meaning engages all our senses at once". To what extent, then, did D. H. Lawrence belong and contribute to this stream of modernism? Did he respond to developments in music, in the way that critics suggest that he responded to art, literature and philosophy? And what might we learn about his creative development by putting music at its centre?

Taking the two versions of Lawrence's much-anthologized poem 'Piano' as a frame, this paper will look at how his responses to music shaped his early, experimental poetry (1906-10) and his post-war novel Aaron's Rod (1922), exploring the influences of Wagner, Debussy, and Schoenberg.

Susan Reid was a postgraduate student at University of Northampton, completing her Palgrave on 'D. H. Lawrence and Masculinities' in 2008. She is Co-Editor of the peer-reviewed journal of Katherine Mansfield Studies, Editor of the 'Katherine Mansfield Blog', and Reviews Editor for the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. She recently co-edited Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism (Continuum, 2011). Her published work includes chapters in Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism (Continuum, 2011), New Versions of Pastoral (Fairleigh Dickinson, 2009) and Englishness: Diversity, Differences, & Identity (Midrash, 2007); articles in the Journal of D. H. Lawrence Studies (2011) and proceedings of the 2007 International D. H. Lawrence Conference and the 2006 International Virginia Woolf Conference; and numerous reviews. She co-organized the Mansfield Symposium held in Menton, France, in September 2009, and the inaugural and second Katherine Mansfield Birthday Lectures in London, October 2010 and 2011.

15 March - Dr Jon Mackley, University of Northampton

'Anglo-Saxon Gods and the Days of the Week'

Details coming soon.

29 March: Valerie Sanders, University of Hull

'Joyful convulsions': Dickens's Comings and Goings

When Dickens returned home from his six-month tour of America in 1842, his eldest son Charley, aged five, nearly died of joy at being reunited with his parents. Focusing on Dickens's complex emotions as a father, this article considers his response to the wild emotionalism of partings and reunions, first within his own family, as he dispatched his young sons to careers in the colonies, and then in his treatment of parent-child separations in some of his novels. As a father who frequently played down the emotionalism of 'real life' partings in his family, it considers the gap, in Dombey and Son and Bleak House, between the child's impulse for reconciliation, and the parent's shame or silence. The family reunion that segues unstoppably into another parting becomes a way of confronting failed elements that in terms of Dickens's domestic ideology cannot be subsumed invisibly into a new and improved version of the family. With fathers, however, the outlook is more hopeful than with mothers, as Dickens shows how the prospects of reunion between errant daughters and unforgiving fathers are ultimately more successful than those between errant mothers and forgiving daughters.

Valerie Sanders is Professor of English at the University of Hull. Her most recent monograph is The Tragi-Comedy of Victorian Fatherhood (Cambridge UP, 2009), and she is currently a volume editor for Pickering and Chatto's ongoing Selected Works of Margaret Oliphant. Previous publications include The Brother-Sister Culture in Nineteenth-Century Literature: From Austen to Woolf (Palgrave 2002), Eve's Renegades: Victorian Anti-Feminist Women Novelists (Macmillan 1996), and a Selected Letters of Harriet Martineau (Clarendon Press, 1990).