Call For Papers: Child Be Strange
Child Be Strange: A Symposium on Penda's Fen 10 June 2017 10am–5pm, with a public screening at 6:20pm Venue: NFT3, BFI Southbank, London Featuring a Q&A with screenwriter David Rudkin Including contributions from: Roger Luckhurst (Birkbeck), Yvonne Salmon (Cambridge University), Will Fowler (BFI), Gareth Evans (Whitechapel Gallery), and more tbc. The Centre for Contemporary Literature is glad to support Child be Strange, a one-day symposium on the TV series Penda’s Fen, organized in partnership with the British Film Institute, the Birkbeck Institute for the Moving Image, and Strange Attractor Press. Proposals are now invited for papers at this conference. When Alan Clarke’s Penda’s Fen was first broadcast in 1974 as a BBC Play for Today, The Times commented that it was a “major work of television” and praised David Rudkin’s writing for its “beauty, imagination and depth.” Including the film in its 2011 selection of the best 100 British films, Time Out magazine described Penda's Fen as a “multi-layered reading of contemporary society and its personal, social, sexual, psychic and metaphysical fault lines.” It has since been recognized as an extraordinary contribution to 1970s counter-cultural investigations of alternative ‘pagan’ histories of landscape, myth, theology and psyche at a crucial transitional moment in post-war Britain. The film vanished into unseen cult status, but after decades of unavailability the BFI has released Penda’s Fen on Blu-ray and DVD. This one-day symposium seeks to bring together academics, writers, and artists from across different fields to excavate this weird and wonderful cultural artefact. Suggested topics for papers might include but are not limited to Penda’s Fen and: History – Folklore & Folk Horror – Politics, Nationalism & Romanticism – Music – Genre – Gender – David Rudkin – Television studies – Theology, Paganism & Occulture – Queer studies – Ecocriticism – Landscape and Place Conference organisers Matthew Harle (BFI/Barbican) and James Machin (Birkbeck) invite abstracts of 350 words for 20-minute papers; please submit along with a short biographical note by 1st March 2017 to childbestrangeconference@gmail.com. Strange Attractor Press will be producing a critical anthology of writing on Penda’s Fen, edited by the conference organizers, which will include outcomes from the conference. Image by … …, used under a CC BY-NC 2.0...
Mark Blacklock on Experimental Fiction
Dr Mark Blacklock of the Department of English & Humanities recently appeared on Free Thinking on BBC Radio 3 to discuss experimental fiction. Dr Blacklock was in conversation with the acclaimed novelist Eimear McBride, whose work has been described as engaging and reactivating the legacies of modernism and who is in conversation with Professor Jacqueline Rose at Birkbeck on 25th January. The radio discussion can be heard on iPlayer here. Image by Joe Haupt, used under a CC BY 2.0...
First Contact
The ‘First Contact’ Research Cluster First Contact is a group of researchers at Birkbeck College in the School of Arts, both faculty and students. Our work is focused on science fiction, weird fiction and ‘slipstream’ literature, but investigates the implications of technocultural transformation in modern narrative through a wide diversity of forms that include literature, film, comics, photography, art, and cultural history. We meet informally as a support group for our individual projects and to explore the potential for collaboration. We meet formally through Birkbeck’s Centre for Contemporary Literature, but like to think we are slowly corrupting its DNA to produce new kinds of hybrid monsters. Our ambition is to set up a series of Futurological Congresses to explore a number of inter-related SFnal themes. Since we are all committed to the idea that this fiction is good to think with, we envisage First Contact as a think tank dedicated to wrestling the future back from apocalyptic forces intent on cancelling it. Recent publication highlights: Martin Eve, Password (Bloomsbury, 2016) H. G. Wells, The Time Machine, edited by Roger Luckhurst (Oxford World’s Classics, 2017) Faculty includes: Heike Bauer teaches on 21st century feminism and fiction and writes on graphic narratives, co-editing special issues of Studies in Comics and Journal of Lesbian Studies. Mark Blacklock teaches Science Fiction at Birkbeck and convenes the MA in Cultural and Critical Studies. His first monograph, The Emergence of the Fourth Dimension, forthcoming from Oxford University Press in 2017, investigates the roots of the science-fictional idea of higher-dimensional space, reading its imaginative forms in work by H.G. Wells and H.P. Lovecraft. He has recently published articles on Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of J.G. Ballard’s High Rise and New Horror Theories and is planning a research project into science-fictional languages. Dr Blacklock is also a novelist and writer for the national press. Joseph Brooker is Reader in Modern Literature at Birkbeck: author of books on Irish modernism and on British writers of the 1980s, he is now writing a book centred around the US novelist Jonathan Lethem which explores questions of genre hybridity, the relations of SF to mainstream fiction and other genres, and new connections between contemporary writing and literary history. Caroline Edwards is completing a book about time in contemporary fiction. She is co-editor with Tony Venezia of China Miéville: Critical Essays (Gylphi, 2015). An expert on dystopian and utopian narratives, she is often invited to discuss these topics in public forums and national media. Dr Edwards is currently co-editing a Special Collection on ‘Powering the Future: Energy Resources in Science Fiction and Fantasy’ with Graeme Macdonald for the Open Library of Humanities. Martin Eve specialises in...
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