China Miéville Double Book Launch at Birkbeck
Nov04

China Miéville Double Book Launch at Birkbeck

The Centre for Contemporary Literature is delighted to announce the launch of a scholarly edited collection which has been developed out of a conference we supported. "Weird Council: An International Conference on the Writing of China Miéville" was held at Birkbeck in September 2012 and brought together an international network of scholars working on the award-winning British novelist, China Miéville.  Dr Caroline Edwards (Lecturer in Modern & Contemporary Literature, Birkbeck) and Dr Tony Venezia (Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow, Birkbeck) have co-edited China Miéville: Critical Essays (Canterbury: Gylphi, 2015): a collection of scholarly essays which examine Miéville's novels, short fiction, comics, non-fiction and legal scholarship. Contributors include leading scholars of contemporary science fiction and fantasy scholarship – Sherryl Vint (University of California, Riverside), Raphael Zähringer (University of Tübingen), Dougal McNeill (Victoria University of Wellington), Joe Sutliff Sanders (Kansas State University), Paul March-Russell (University of Kent), Ben de Bruyn (Maastricht University), Matthew Sangster (University of Birmingham), Anthony F. Lang, Jr. (University of St Andrews), Mark P. Williams (Johannes Gutenberg University of Mainz) and Roger Luckhurst (Birkbeck). The collection also includes a Foreword by China Miéville himself. China Miéville: Critical Essays is being launched with a new monograph by Professor Carl Freeman (Louisiana State University), Art and Idea in the Novels of China Miéville (Canterbury: Gylphi, 2015). The double book launch will take place: When: Tues 24th November 2015, 6-8pm Where: Room 404, 30 Russell Square, Birkbeck, London WC1B 5DT To book your FREE TICKET, please visit the Eventbrite page:  https://www.eventbrite.com/e/book-launch-two-exciting-new-critical-works-on-china-mieville-gylphi-tickets-19404365981 To pre-order a copy of China Miéville: Critical Essays please visit Amazon.                                       Featured image by Anna Podedworna. Used with...

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Conference Report: Living, Thinking, Looking
Nov04

Conference Report: Living, Thinking, Looking

by Lawrence Jones On the 23rd October 2015 a large audience of scholars, students and interested others squeezed into the Keynes Library at 43 Gordon Square for the first international academic conference on the writing of the American author, Siri Hustvedt. The author of five novels and several collections of essays and non-fiction writings, Hustvedt attended as a guest for the day, contributing to the discussion and closing the conference with a reading at Woburn House. The conference also featured papers by the editors of a forthcoming book of essays on Hustvedt’s work, Zones of Focused Ambiguity (De Gruyter, forthcoming 2016). The opening keynote, by Professor Dr Hubert Zapf (University of Augsburg) positioned Hustvedt as an exemplary practitioner of what he termed the transdisciplinary knowledge of literature. His keynote followed Hustvedt’s lead in exploring the seemingly intractable dichotomy between science and literature. Through the centuries the relationship between literature and science, Zapf argues, is typified by subordination and ambivalence of the former to the latter. Contemporary literature, as evidenced by Hustvedt’s writings, is more than ever influenced by modern science, but it has become a source of complex thought in its own right. It is not simply a form of interdisciplinary knowledge but is a source of transdisciplinary knowledge; it transcends or moves beyond disciplines, and particularly the science-literature dichotomy, to create new models of knowledge and critical thought. This sense of between-ness, characterised by discursive transdisciplinary play, informs all Hustvedt’s works. The second keynote by Dr James Peacock (University of Keele) focused on the site-specificity of Hustvedt’s writing, specifically her exploration of authenticity through the Brooklyn district of Red Hook. In Hustvedt’s The Blazing World (2014), artist Harriet (‘Harry’) Burden moves to an old warehouse in Red Hook, a district on the outer margins of the borough withan industrial, working class and gangster heritage: Elia Kazan’s 1954 film featuring Marlon Brando, On the Waterfront, is set in the area. Peacock’s paper offered a commentary on Red Hook’s perceived gentrification, its fraying links with its industrial past, and the problematization of its authenticity: the neighborhood’s selfhood. In The Blazing World, Harry attempts to hold onto Red Hook’s industrial past as it slowly yields to the arguably surface flourishes of hipster bohemianism. Peacock commented that ‘Brooklyn Picturesque’ novels (such as My Old Man by Amy Sohn) examine hipster Red Hook, while ‘Brooklyn Motherhood’ novels discuss a post-hipster Brooklyn; a Brooklyn where the urban poor and artists cede territory to the American middle class. Peacock argued that Red Hook is at an intermediate stage of gentrification; it is in a state of transition but is holding onto its past with shop...

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