30 May 2009
2009 saw the 25th anniversary of the publication of Martin Amis's novel Money. Birkbeck hosted a one-day symposium on Saturday 30 May to mark the novel’s influential presence in recent British fiction.
The anniversary was a good opportunity to give this remarkable book the most sustained attention that it had ever received in an academic setting. May 2009 also happened to be the thirtieth anniversary of Margaret Thatcher's first election victory: a fitting enough time to discuss what is widely thought of as one of the definitive novels of Thatcherism.
The symposium formed the basis of a special issue of Textual Practice (26:1, 2012). In taking a day to focus with rare intensity on one text, it also heralded the series of symposia on individual writers that have been a hallmark of the Centre for Contemporary Literature.
Programme
Panel 1: The Ironic High Style: Literary Contexts
“Style is Morality”: Aesthetics and Politics in the Amis Era
David James (Nottingham)
The Artist as Critic: Self’s Style and Amis’s American Voices
Isabelle Zahar (Birkbeck)
Panel 2: Brother, Sister: Gender, Sexuality and Subjectivity
“Oh New Man Dog”: the Comedy of Masculinity
Cathryn Setz (Birkbeck)
Self-Abuse: The Pornography of Modern Life in Money
Kaye Mitchell (Manchester)
Panel 3: Very Twentieth Century: the Moment of Money
Alexithmyia and the Broken Plastic Umbrella: the Characterization and Emotional Range of John Self
Philip Tew (Brunel)
“I’m The New Kind”: John Self and the Age of the New Right
Claire Feehily (Birkbeck)
Response
Finn Fordham (Royal Holloway)
Image by Images Money, under a CC BY-NC-SA license.
Recent Comments