The Contemporary: An Exhibition
Wednesday 18th May 2016 What is the contemporary? In this special exhibition, students on Birkbeck’s MA Contemporary Literature and Culture contemplate, through creative works, how they view, define, and reflect on contemporary life and culture. Asking questions like ‘what does the contemporary mean today?’ and ‘what does the contemporary involve?’, the students engage with art, film, poetry and artefact to explore these issues. The exhibition will feature the work of three students. The pieces are diverse, meaning there will be something for everyone. Kathryn Butterworth and guest James Watkinson are proud to showcase Technological Translations – an exciting piece about how technology and literature can come together to exhibit 21st century ways of writing, reading, seeing, and hearing, and the new possibilities this offers for understanding literature. Visitors will be able to look at, and touch, artefacts and experience an audio performance. One piece showcased will be ‘DNA poetry’, where poetry is transcribed into DNA coding. Guests will be able to see a mockup of a DNA coded poem. Dylan Williams will offer a reading of his original poetry: a series of short works written in response to the lived experience of contemporary London. During the event a fixed installation entitled Is It Just Me? will be screened by Dickon Edwards, who provides a witty meditation on social media, technology, and the paradox of the contemporary need to be original while still feeling part of the crowd. Other works, including photography will also be presented. Time: 6-7:30pm Venue: 112, 43 Gordon Square Book your place here. For more information, please contact Dr Grace Halden, Director of the MA Contemporary Literature & Culture, at g.halden@bbk.ac.uk. Image: DNA from MIKI Yoshihito, used under a CC BY 2.0...
Remembering Flann O’Brien
Tuesday 17th May 2016 The Irish writer Flann O’Brien died on April Fool’s Day 1966. Fifty years on, we remember him with a special workshop. Flann O’Brien may no longer be our ‘contemporary’, belonging rather to the late-modernist generation of Samuel Beckett; but his legacy may be detected in the work of living writers, notably from Ireland: Paul Muldoon, Julian Gough, Kevin Barry. Meanwhile critics like Carol Taaffe, Jennika Baines and Maebh Long have recently worked to deepen our understanding of his writing. In this commemorative session we will return to Flann O’Brien’s first novel, At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), considering again its innovations, challenges and comic delights, while also pondering its example for literature today. After an introduction to the author and text, we will consider key moments and issues in the novel, including: The question of how many beginnings and novels one novel should have The strange appearance of Wild West cowboys on the East side of Dublin The intricate scholastic dialogues of the Pooka and the Good Fairy Finn MacCool and the modern use of myth The strange births of the novel’s characters: parody of fiction, precursor of the postmodern? The session will be led by Flann O’Brien scholar and specialist Tobias Harris, with Dr Joseph Brooker, Director of CCL and author of Flann O’Brien (Northcote House, 2005). Time: 6-7:30pm Location: 112, 43 Gordon Square Book your place here. Image from Burns Library, Boston College, used under a CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 licence....
Comics Studies: Beyond the Canon?
Wednesday 11th May 2016 The study of comic books, graphic narratives and sequential art has been a significant focus at Birkbeck in recent years, with new scholarship emerging alongside the annual symposium Transitions. In this special panel, comics practitioner John Miers (Central Saint Martins) will share the stage with leading scholars in the field Harriet Earle (Birkbeck), Nina Mickwitz (London College of Communication) and Tony Venezia (Birkbeck), to discuss the current state of comics studies and where it might be going next. We will ask whether comics studies are now moving beyond a familiar canon (from Art Spiegelman to Alison Bechdel); what are the current gender politics of the comics field; how theory and practice relate; and where new creativity and criticism are happening in comics. Venue: B04, 43 Gordon Square Time: 6-7:30pm All those with an interest in the field are welcome to attend and join the discussion. Image by Richard Stevens, Diesel Sweeties, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.5 Licence....
Call For Papers: True Crime Fictions
We invite proposals for papers for True Crime Fictions, to be held on Friday 1st July 2016. This one-day, interdisciplinary conference investigates the growing corpus of hybrid fictions working with accounts of true crimes and their increasing interest to literary, legal and criminological scholars. With the establishment in 2012 of a prize rewarding fiction in the tradition of the journalist and author Gordon Burn, whose novels explored the mediation of crime reporting and whose non-fiction deployed novelistic technique in its accounts of true crimes, British literary prize culture has acknowledged a developing field with roots in the Gothic tradition, advanced in the work of Truman Capote, Norman Mailer and Don DeLillo and continued by James Ellroy, David Peace and Cathi Unsworth. Building on previous work in the field of genre fictions at Birkbeck’s Centre for Contemporary Literature, True Crime Fictions will consider the complex legal and ethical stakes of such work and its reworking of representational traditions. What cultural work is done in the interstices between the actual and the imagined of traumatic mass-cultural phenomena? To what extent does the new writing work into older traditions? Why is this form of fiction increasing in popularity now and how does it figure in the British and international literary landscape? We anticipate that this conference will be of interest to a range of researchers from the fields with which it intersects, but also to a general audience of creative writers and crime fiction enthusiasts. Practising authors in the field will contribute alongside critics. We particularly welcome proposals for papers that consider: The literary history of fictions based on true crimes The tradition of the non-fiction novel Theories of literary mediation and realism: ‘Reality Hunger’ The Great American Crime: Truman Capote, Norman Mailer, Don DeLillo Gordon Burn and David Peace The gender politics of crime The true crime fiction as meta-history The ethics of reportage-based fiction True crime comics. Please email proposals to m.blacklock@bbk.ac.uk by 23rd May 2016. The symposium will be held in Room 124, 43 Gordon Square, between 10am and 5pm. Admission will be £10. True Crime Fictions is organized with the generous support of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities....
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