Global Conflict Alluvium Issue
Birkbeck's open access journal of 21st-century literary criticism, Alluvium, has recently published a new guest-edited special issue titled "Global Conflict." Edited by Dr Daniel O'Gorman, the issue examines contemporary fictions that address conflict situations – from the Iraq War, ongoing drone strikes, displacement during the Sudanese civil war, and the question of "grievability" in contemporary war reportage, to the collapse of space caused by displacement and the ambiguous position of international humanitarian agencies such as the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR), Amnesty International, and the World Food Programme. The issue is composed of three articles which each offer a different approach to these challenging issues. Emily Hogg's "Displaced Perspective" considers Ugandan author Goretti Kyomuhendo’s 2003 short story, "Do You Remember?", which criticises institutional responses to displacement through war. Dorothy Butchard's "Drones and Dissociation" analyses the "empathy gap" in contemporary responses to hyper-technologised drone warfare under the Obama presidency in fiction by Atef Abu Saif and Teju Cole. Finally, Dana Bönisch's "Pixels/Tissue" offers a comparative reading of drone warfare and the suicide attack, examining the use of aerial perspective in fiction by Thomas Lehr, David Mitchell and Julia Loktev’s film Day Night Day Night (2006). Tweet Featured image by AK Rockefeller under a CC BY...
Historical Fictions
Thursday 21st May 2015 6-7:30, Waterstone's, Gower Street WC1E 6EQ Historical fiction is a significant part of the contemporary literary field. The historical novel occupies its own niche in some bookshops, while literary fiction often centres on history. Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell sequence has not only taken her to a wider audience than ever before, but been adapted to both stage and screen. Meanwhile numerous other writers narrate different moments and segments from history in fictional form, often winning prizes for the effort. What is the appeal of historical fiction today? Can it teach us about the past? Does it reflect the changing history that is being told and received in our society? Do different nations have different traditions of the historical novel? Does the world-making of historical fiction form a counterpart to that undertaken by science fiction? At this round table, part of Birkbeck’s Arts Week 2015, three scholars of contemporary fiction will consider such questions. Dr Joe Brooker and Dr Martin Eve (Birkbeck) will be joined by Dr Caroline Magennis (University of Salford). Tweet Image by Mike Licht, used under a CC BY 2.0...
Underground / Overground
The Changing Politics of UK Music-Writing: 1968-85 Friday-Saturday 15-16 May 2015 Underground/Overground is a two-day symposium at London’s Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, consisting of panel discussions and Q&As. Run by Mark Sinker, former editor of The Wire, it will bring together writers, editors and readers of the underground and trade music presses of the 1970s and 80s with academics and other media commentators, to discuss the emergence and evolution of the countercultural voice in the UK, as inflected through the rock papers between these dates. The proceedings are being recorded and transcribed, to form the core of a subsequent published collection, alongside additional memoirs and essays from participants (especially those unable to attend). The two days of the conference will focus on the period when UK rockwriting emerged out of the conflict between a rising generation’s counterculture and the embattled establishment in the late 60s and early 70s, and how well (or badly) it reflected the turbulent times, and on the period when this distinctive milieu began significantly to be reintegrated back into the mainstream, the 1980s, and the form this reintegration took; it will also discuss the wider legacy, good and ill, from the 80s to the present day. Attending speakers, panelists and contributors currently include: Richard Williams, contributor in the 60s and later editor of Melody Maker, arts and sports journalist, currently artistic director of the Berlin Jazz Festival Charles Shaar Murray, contributor (as schoolboy) to Oz (legendary schoolkids issue), NME (70s/80s) Mark Williams, music editor at IT, contributor in the 70s to Melody Maker, motoring journalist Simon Frith, Tovey Chair of Music at University of Edinburgh, sociomusicologist, author; former rock critic at Let It Rock and Melody Maker, pop columnist for the Observer and the Village Voice Paul Gilroy, Professor of American and English Literature at King's College London, contributor to The Wire and other publications (80s) Val Wilmer, writer-photographer since the 50s, historian of Black music in Britain, contributor to Melody Maker, Jazz Journal, Spare Rib, etc David Toop, author, musician, editor-contributor atMusics (70s), Collusion (early 80s), columnist at The Face and The Wire (mid 80s and after) Tony Palmer, rock critic at The Observer (1967-74),The Spectator (1969-74), film-maker inc. TV doc series on pop and rock All You Need Is Love Jonathon Green, author of Days in the Life, chronicler of the underground Nigel Fountain, L'Idiot International and Oz in the 60s, Street Life and Let it Rock in the 70s, edited City Limits (with John Fordham) in the 80s; historian of the underground press Paul Morley, staffer at NME 70s/80s, media commentator Penny Reel, on production at IT (60s/70s), writer on reggae and early rock’n’roll for Let It Rock, NME,Echoes, Select Beverley Glick, wrote as Betty Page for Sounds in the 70s, editor of Record Mirror in the later 80s John (aka Jonh) Ingham, contributor to CREEM, Rolling Stone, Crawdaddy, Sounds during punk, founded BOMP w/Greg Shaw Cynthia Rose, contributor to NME 70s/80s, deputy editor The Wire, editor City Limits Tony Stewart, deputy...
Simon Pettet reads at Birkbeck
Friday 8th May 7:30pm Keynes Library (114), 43 Gordon Square The Contemporary Poetics Research Centre presents a reading from Simon Pettet: an English-born poet and long-time resident of New York's Lower East Side. Hearth, his Collected Poems and As A Bee (an addenda to his Collected Poems) appeared recently from Talisman. Talisman also issued his Selected Poems (1995) and the volume More Winnowed Fragments (2006). Pettet also compiled and edited the Selected Art Writings (Black Sparrow, 1998) of the poet James Schuyler, as well as co-editing with James Meetze Other Flowers (FSG, 2010), Schuyler's posthumous poems. Pettet made two celebrated collaborations with photographer and filmmaker Rudy Burckhardt – Conversations about Everything (Vehicle, 1987) and Talking Pictures (Zoland, 1994), as well as a fine-arts limited edition, Abundant Treasures (Granary Books, 2001) with painter, Duncan Hannah. "American and British poetry's most meticulous craftsperson. We dig the purity, dogged love, and artistic devotion of this rare personage […] A highly recommended volume" — Alice Notley on Hearth. "His poetry is always insightful, ardent, playful, right on the spot, and ahead of the current" — Joanne Kyger on As A Bee. All welcome to this event. Tweet Image by Chris Goldberg, used under a CC BY-NC 2.0...
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