These are the abstracts for Work in Progress 2011
Bethan Carney: 'Terror and Retribution': Emotion, morality and realism in Dickens’s Oliver Twist
In November 1838 the Examiner published a review of the three-volume edition of Oliver Twist which engaged with a contemporary criticism of such ‘Newgate fiction’ - the dubious moral utility of depicting crime. The reviewer justifies the novel by claims that if the reader has wondered ‘to what just or useful end the author had set before him every imaginable incident from what might be called the Comedy of Crime, – he will find it in the emotion inspired by these later scenes, these fearful delineations of its Terror and its Retribution […]. Everything in short is as we see it in life’. This paper will explore the explicit tripartite connection made by this review between the work’s moral purpose, the emotion it inspires in the reader and its realism.
Early reviews of Dickens’s works were overwhelmingly positive, admiring his characters and situations as true to life and praising their moral and emotional effect on readers. However, from the mid nineteenth-century onwards reviews became increasingly hostile. Critics such as George Henry Lewes attacked his unrealistic characters and others, like Oscar Wilde, condemned Dickens’s sentimentality. Later Dickens criticism has challenged the assumptions lying behind the concepts of both ‘realism’ and ‘sentimentality’. However, one aspect of the relationship between Dickens’s ‘realism’ and his ‘sentimentality’ for his early readers has not been fully explored. I will argue that an important way of reading Dickens’s fiction in the first part of the nineteenth-century was to evaluate its ‘truth’ in light of its moral agenda and the strength of the emotions engendered in the reader. Using nineteenth-century reviews of Oliver Twist, which has subsequently been denigrated as sentimental and melodramatic, I will examine whether these readers valued Dickens’s characters and situations as realistic precisely because they inspired a strong, and morally improving, emotional response.
Harriet Cooper: The Disabling Encounter: Does The Secret Garden have anything to offer Disability Studies?
Critics from the discipline of disability studies have found little to celebrate in the portrayal of physical disability in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s 1911 novel, The Secret Garden. And why should they, when the novel aligns physical disability with moral weakness, whilst the recovery of able-bodiedness is associated with spiritual growth? My approach in this paper is not to take issue with these critics, since I agree with them that in curing Colin the novel sends an extremely problematic message about the value of the disabled body. I have chosen not to focus on Colin’s recovery but rather on what the novel reveals about the construction of physically disabled subjectivity. I ask what The Secret Garden can add, if anything, to the social model of disability, which distinguishes impairment, as a category of embodiment, from disability, which results from society’s disabling impact on the impaired body.
Drawing on Jean-Paul Sartre’s model of ‘the look’ and on the concept of ‘self as visual object’ developed by object-relations psychoanalyst Kenneth Wright, I show that Colin’s subjectivity has been constructed relationally, through the encounter with the Other. Whilst The Secret Garden does maintain a patronizing view of physical disability, depicting it as undesirable, the novel nevertheless partially deconstructs the binary opposition between able and disabled embodiment. It achieves this by showing the powerful role of the encounter with the Other in early infantile development: the Other’s gaze can have a disabling effect simply by perceiving disability in the subject in question. I conclude by suggesting that the notion of ‘the disabling encounter’ as demonstrated in The Secret Garden adds a psycho-social dimension to the social model of disability.
Zainab Hemani: Contemporary Female African Writers’ Revelations: Liberation or Double Oppression
African writers and critics globally agree that there were few African women writers in the first generation of African writers after independence. The few females that wrote were ignored, marginalized and suppressed by the males making it almost impossible for them to be published and acknowledged. The reasons for their invisibility and lack of writing include poverty, lack of education, family and work responsibilities, language barriers, and the prevailing ideology of women as inferior beings.
Critics note that it is only from the 1980s onwards that African female writers have gained an International readership. The central focus of the texts I will consider in this paper is to reveal to the world that there is a different way of looking at African women, which gains crucial insight from the women themselves. Often, their aim is to oppose their male counterparts’ depiction of women and bring African women to the centre by making them protagonists and making the plot revolve around these female African protagonists. By doing this they oppose any stereotypical images and generalizations about African women and hope to reduce the oppression that African women undergo till today.
This paper argues that contemporary African female writers are still colonized (neo-colonization). Whilst the increasing presence of African women’s voices in African literature makes visible their plight and the oppressional forces against them; it is often framed within a Western ideal of progress for women. Thus, the writers are unconsciously helping the West to have a stronger hold on Africa and African women in particular. My argument is that the female writers reiterate African women’s victimization by going overboard in their depiction of the realities of life for African women in their mission to avoid the idealized and stereotypical images of African women by African male and the colonizers’ writing.
Sarah Ives: Rethinking Confessional Poetry: Confessing 'speech acts' and the defendant self
Confessional poetry as a genre emerged contemporaneously with the publication of Robert Lowell's Life Studies in 1956, and since its inception, the term has carried with it an implicit pejorative connotation. At the very least, it is a term applied to reflect the assumed limited nature of the kind of poetry the category of the Confessional produces, a precedent set by the first critic to use the term, M.L. Rosenthal in The Nation in 1959. It seems apparent now, over fifty years since the Confessional "moment" in American poetry, that the category has been employed at least in part to simply unify a disparate group of poets, associated through their personal connections with one another and the group, rather than by virtue of poetic practice and its synergies.
This paper then, aims to give some indication as to how Confessional poetry as a genre might be broadened and deepened, not least in terms of the therapeutic framework that has commonly been applied, wherein the poet enacts a catharsis on the self through the unmediated 'speech' of the poem. This paper will therefore investigate what the speech act of confession means in a legal context, to play the role of the defendant self. As such we begin to see the Confessional not as a moment at all but rather as a sustained cultural practice that has fed into and informed the work of a number of different poets in the latter half of the twentieth century. It will also aim to ameliorate the perception of the Confessional as a kind of degraded poetic practice, unable to live up to its own aspirations to the weight and status of the lyric.
Robert Kiely: More Pricks Than Kicks as Menippean satire
My paper will re-assess Beckett’s early short-story collection, arguing that it is a scathing satire of intellectuals, and of Belacqua in particular. In doing so I hope to draw out the complexities of his intellectual context. After briefly summarizing the Menippean tradition, so-called after Menippus, who satirized philosophers, I discuss the texts that Beckett read which can be viewed as Menippean satires (Wyndham Lewis’ The Apes of God, Aldous Huxley’s Point Counter Point, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels) and argue that Beckett was working within this tradition. The techniques Beckett employs to satirize Belacqua conform to other Menippean texts, and the stereotype of the intellectual that Huxley and others use can shed considerable light on some of Belacqua’s stranger actions.
Of course, Beckett has been situated in the Menippean tradition by two critics: Keith Hopper and Sylvie Debevec Henning. Hopper has briefly referred to Watt as a Menippean satire and linked Beckett to another Menippean satirist, Flann O’Brien. Henning treats Murphy as a Menippean satire in her book Beckett’s Critical Complicity: Carnival, Contestation, and Tradition. However, Henning is more interested in the Bakhtinian carnivalesque in Beckett’s work, and Menippean satire remains secondary. I am more interested in a tighter definition of Menippean satire. The fact that More Pricks Than Kicks is a satire has been acknowledged by Rubin Rabinovitz, though he contends that the texts “satirical level” obscures “deeper meanings.” I would contend that the satirical nature of the text is the most important aspect of the work, and has not been looked at enough.
Alex Latter: ‘You can’t burn your boats when you live in land’: Barry MacSweeney and small-press publication
In late 1968, Barry MacSweeney was nominated as the Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. An unemployed nineteen-year-old from Newcastle, whose first book — The Boy from the Green Cabaret Tells of his Mother — had yet to be published, the nomination aroused national media interest: suddenly MacSweeney was everywhere from The Sunday Times to The New Statesman to Vogue. His nomination was met with derision and in the eventual election, he gained just three votes, an experience from which it took him ‘half a lifetime to recover.’ This paper takes his candidature as the starting point for a consideration of the shift MacSweeney’s poetic underwent between The Boy from the Green Cabaret and his masterpiece Jury Vet (1979-1981), considering mainstream and small-press publishing strategies, the legacy of his involvement with the worksheet The English Intelligencer and the conflicting strategies of British avant-garde poetics in the late 1960s and 1970s.
I present original archival research that charts both the scale of MacSweeney’s sudden celebrity and the effect that it had on him as well as contractual materials from Hutchinson, the publisher of The Boy from the Green Cabaret, arguing that his candidature was a cynical publicity stunt. I compare this with the nurturing but restricted publishing ethos of The English Intelligencer, as part of which a pirated facsimile of The Boy from the Green Cabaret was circulated for free, arguing that his involvement with the Intelligencer was a determining factor in his decision to renounce mainstream publishing. I conclude with an extended close-reading of the poetic shift that took place over the next decade, offering close readings of the key texts as well commentary from MacSweeney’s personal correspondence that charts an oscillation between ‘stoic composure’ and the ‘hysterical areas [...] from domestic to public life.’
Adam Lively: Fantastic Oscillations in Ludwig Tieck’s “The Runenberg”, Theodor Storm’s “The Rider on the White Horse” and Franz Kafka’s “The Burrow”'
In The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, Tzvetan Todorov defines the fantastic as characterised by the reader’s “hesitation” (usually mediated by the experience of a protagonist) before a series of phenomena capable of two mutually exclusive orders of explanation - natural and supernatural. According to Todorov, the fantastic effect is maintained as long as there is no resolution between the two orders: if the story is resolved in the direction of the natural it becomes merely a tale of the “uncanny”, while if it is resolved in the direction of the supernatural it removes itself to the realm of the “marvellous”.
The aim of this paper will be to question the epistemological bias of Todorov’s “fantastic” - its assumption that the aporia of the fantastic is situated at the level of the interpretation and that the trajectory of the fantastic is towards an (ideally unattained) epistemic closure. In “The Runenberg” (1797) and “The Rider on the White Horse” (1888), classics of the nouvelle tradition, the narratives weave between natural and supernatural worlds that nevertheless maintain their distinctiveness through characteristic chronotopes and a use of motifs (sparkling jewels, the flight of birds) that the nouvelle tradition learnt in part from Boccaccio. In “The Burrow” (1924), the narrative oscillation (in this case, between the natural and the “human”) is condensed to a flickering, an opalescence, at the level of the sentence. None of the three stories offers a prospect of closure.
The paper will conclude by putting these cases in the wider context of my thesis on narrative multiplicity in prose fiction by comparing them with other forms of narrative parallelism.
John Mackay: Lost for words: barriers to expression in poetry of mourning
Since death is not an experience inside life, but an event that takes place on its boundary, every elegy sooner or later reaches the limits of language – W. David Shaw, Elegy and Paradox: Testing the Conventions, 1994.
This paper seeks to ask questions about the failure of elegy, and specifically the failure of language to process and communicate the complex feelings initiated by personal loss. In this respect, I pay particular attention to the American poet Mary Jo Bang, whose 2007 volume Elegy was written in response to the death of her 37-year-old son from a drug overdose. Bang says of Elegy that ‘the poems ultimately fail to accurately measure the emotion’, not least, perhaps, because of the divide between the reality of death and the artifice of art. I will argue that the elegist’s efforts to transfer her feelings to the page are disabled by the words she uses – not simply because she is prone to the seductions of metaphor, rhyme and aural associations, whereby language masters her at the exact point when she would wish to exert a measure of control, but also because in a fundamental sense language is not equipped to convey the raw grief that permeates the territory of mourning. I will consider the extent to which much of the language of the bereaved is of a non-verbal form, and examine the obstacles faced by the elegist in trying to articulate what poet and critic Denise Riley calls the ‘myriad emotions never verbally shaped, stubbornly resistant to being voiced’ (2000, 36). With regard to such attempts at expression, I will examine the displacement of Bang’s emotion into inanimate objects and the natural world, and the poetic techniques that she employs to counteract her failure to write the reality of pain and loss.
Lisa Mullen: The eye of the beholder: bringing home the exotic in Powell and Pressberger’s ‘Life and Death of Colonel Blimp’ (1943) and ‘Black Eyes and Lemonade’, an exhibition of popular art at the Whitechapel Gallery 1951
This paper argues that the midpoint of the twentieth century marked a radical transformation in British cultural life, and that the culture of this period articulated anxiety about both future and past. Powell and Pressberger’s film exemplifies the backward-looking aspect of this process, while the Whitechapel exhibition gestures towards its future; a comparison between the two, based on their attitudes to collecting and display, illuminates midcentury estrangement from both tradition and the modern.
This paper focuses on a single thread running through ‘Blimp’: the title character’s ever-growing collection of souvenirs from his game-hunting and soldiering trips abroad. The film marks the passage of time through the stylised depiction of this display, as stuffed animal heads appear on the wall with a date-label underneath. Later, he uses the same exhibitionary space to create a shrine to an ideal woman who has haunted him in the form of three different characters played by the same actress.
Blimp’s nostalgic stagnation contrasts neatly with ‘Black Eyes’, where fixed binaries and barred thresholds are dissolved in a deliberately provocative refusal to draw lines between historic and modern, exotic and everyday, beauty and trash. The curator, Barbara Jones, drew from her personal collection to juxtapose decorative objects ranging from waxworks and ships’ figureheads to seaside souvenirs, beermats and agricultural feedsacks. I argue that the underlying theme of her exhibition was reflection and doubling – Jones’s eye was caught by things that looked like other things (a nutmeg grater in the shape of Brighton Pavilion; a fireplace in the shape of a dog), and the paper concludes by considering Freud’s concept of the unheimlich, and whether ‘Blimp’ and ‘Black Eyes’ could be said to articulate a sense of the midcentury interzone as an uncanny/ unhomely time-space.
Eleanor Packham: At sea in a walnut shell: Dickens’s steam ship and the aesthetics of the miniature
In 1842, Charles Dickens travelled to Boston aboard the Britannia, the first Atlantic steam ship. Much larger and better equipped than the sailing packets that preceded them, ‘floating palaces’ like the Britannia made possible new aesthetic and social experiences. They were both miniatures and giants: little worlds of their own inside enormous pieces of industrial hardware. Steam ships were subject to dramatic shifts of perspective: that which seemed enormous when measured against the shoreline felt tiny when adrift on the vast expanse of the North Atlantic, which threw the flickering gas-light and upholstered comfort of the saloons into sharp relief. In American Notes (1842), Dickens describes the perspectival shift he was forced to make on boarding the Britannia to discover that his ‘state-room’ was in fact a cabin not much larger than a coffin. There follows an account of his struggle to re-calibrate his vision to the shipboard world: a task made more difficult by the constant pitching and rolling of the vessel which caused a kaleidoscopic re-ordering of the furniture of his cabin and the contents of his portmanteau. My paper will explore how Dickens represented in literary terms the optical shifts experienced aboard the Britannia. I will consider the poetic dissonance created by his troping of the steam ship’s machinery and accommodation as throbbing giants and fairy bowers, before concluding with a consideration of whether Dickens’ account is evocative of a Victorian sublime in which the snug spaces of bourgeois domesticity are brought into startlingly close relation to a vast, indifferent and godless wilderness: the dialectic of a culture where growing technological mastery and scientific understanding of the natural world led to the painful realization of the total arbitrariness of its relation to human schema.
Susie Paskins: An American explains Buddhism to the Buddhists: the intriguing case of Henry Steel Olcott
Henry Steel Olcott (1832-1907), the self-styled ‘White Buddhist’, was the first American to proclaim himself a Buddhist by taking Buddhist vows, in Galle, former Ceylon, in 1880. He is best known today as the founder of the theosophical movement with H. P. Blavatsky, and yet in modern day Sri Lanka, where the day of his death is still celebrated annually, he is credited with the extraordinary achievement of reviving Buddhism on the island when it was being suppressed by Christian missionaries. He is remembered for founding Buddhist schools and the Young Men’s Buddhist Association, devising the Buddhist flag, agitating for the Buddha’s birthday to be made a national holiday, negotiating for Sinhalese Buddhists not to be forced to marry or be baptised in a Christian church, and in general representing their interests to the colonial government in London.
Olcott’s work has been fully assessed by historians of the period, but his writings have received little attention outside theosophical circles. This paper analyses Olcott’s introductory work on Buddhism, A Buddhist Catechism, which he wrote in 1881 to be used as a primer in Sinhalese schools, and which is still so used. I assess Stephen Prothero’s claim in his book, The White Buddhist: the Asian Odyssey of Henry Steel Olcott, that Olcott’s construction of Buddhism is a hybrid one: ‘While the lexicon of his faith was almost entirely Buddhist, its grammar was largely Protestant’, in Prothero’s striking metaphor. I argue for a more nuanced interpretation of A Buddhist Catechism to give due weight to the contradictory elements of Buddhist, Christian, Orientalist and theosophical discourse which are to be found in the work, and in the process I assess the nature of Olcott’s evangelical attempts to revive Buddhism.
July Ramsey: James Stansfield (1820-1898): Breathing life into an archival narrative
My enquiry focuses on sexual politics within the British Raj through the prism of prostitution and venereal disease. The initial chapters of my thesis involve mapping out the domestic discourse associated with the English Contagious Diseases Act of 1864-1869 and the subsequent agitation against them. Much current scholarship suggests that the CDAs were the most important legislative enactments addressing sexuality in the C19th, representing a high point in sanitary intervention.
Anyone familiar with the social history of the C19th will know the name of Josephine Butler whose leadership of the campaigns against the CDAs is legendary. Much of the agitation and ensuing divergence onto women’s personal rights and freedoms originated with Butler’s unswerving devotion to these campaigns. There was however one extremely influential man, mentioned only en passant within both the numerous historical accounts of the CDAs and the many tomes on Butler herself, with but a single biography devoted to him, written in 1932.
James Stansfield (1828 – 1898) was the Liberal MP for Halifax from 1859 – 1895. For many generations his family had been Nonconformists, specifically Unitarians and the combination of the Liberal and Unitarian influences are very apparent throughout his political life. To the themes of C19th prostitution and feminism therefore, we must add C19th political liberalism, an ‘ism’ with which I was at the beginning of this journey, extremely ignorant.
A biography should contain personal as well as public details, but the scarcity of print on Stansfields’ private life is challenging. My intention in this short presentation is to share what has become rather a pilgrimage in trying to ‘get inside’ this man further and to make his narrative come alive for the audience.
Laura Seymour: ‘What if I do obey?’: is there an imperative to intervene in Othello?
‘The usual joke’, writes Stanley Cavell, ‘is about the Southern yokel who rushes to the stage to save Desdemona from the black man’. This paper, expanding from the specific issue of race here, but built upon the suggestion that we should examine more closely the case of the southern yokel before condemning him outright, examines why any audience does not (usually) intervene in Othello, and whether they in fact should. The reasons for non-intervention seem twofold: interpersonal distance created between the actors and the audience, and the altered function of speech acts on stage whereby performative utterances, commands or pleas on the part of characters in Othello seem inapplicable to the audience; the soliloquy is examined as a case that possibly counteracts this second argument.
The paper questions whether these two key arguments against intervention are not only plausible but justified, and whether the issue of an audience’s responsibility to intervene is ever relevant to Othello. I argue firstly that Othello stands out amongst Shakespeare’s works as a play in which for the most part the characters that are the subject of other characters’ utterances (such as requests for information, and pleas for help) are very clearly defined. However, there are certain crucial moments in which utterances in Othello provide, and may invite, an opening for audience intervention. Secondly, I argue that there are some crucial points in Othello at which an imperative on an audience member to intervene, though not explicitly invited by an opening in the use of speech acts, becomes prominent, both with respect to early modern (anti)theatrical theory and dramaturgical theory of the present day.
Simon Smith: ‘The sweet resounding of whose pleasing straines, / Delightes the sences, captiuates the braines’: The dramaturgical role of music in The Winter’s Tale
My paper explores how certain widely circulating notions about the experience of music interacted with the dramaturgical uses of music on the Jacobean stage, and the subsequent musical experiences felt by auditors in the playhouses. There are many references to the experience of hearing music in non-specialist literature of the period, including in books of printed music, broadside ballads, in manuscripts relating to music and in sermons, as well as in contemporary Continental works of musical humanism that demonstrably influenced English thought, and in the familiar musical treatises such as the anonymous Praise of Musicke.
Despite their incidental and often expedient use in material aimed at non-specialists, there is remarkable unanimity around certain terms and certain notions of musical experience, which indicates the wide cultural currency of certain understandings of the affective qualities of music. I trace the prevalence of one such idea in a range of non-dramatic sources, particularly in books of printed music, in order to argue that the use of music in the final scene of The Winter's Tale is informed by this particular understanding, substantially shaping the dramaturgy of the scene. Furthermore, by considering the use of music in the final scene in the context of early modern understandings of music's power and effects, developed from the most widely held views rather than necessarily the most theoretically sophisticated, I then make a reading of what is actually happening in the 'statue scene' that challenges and extends the current critical consensus around what takes place at the conclusion of the play.
Jackie Watson: A Tacitean reading of Hamlet
My paper will explore the interface between early modern attitudes to Roman history and contemporary drama, focusing on two plays written within a year of the Essex Rebellion in 1601. The Earl of Essex’s links to Roman history are well documented and I should like to begin with a brief survey of the ideas his circle took particularly from the works of Tacitus, such as the first four books of the Historiae, translated by Henry Savile in 1591. Tacitus’s exploration of the rise of the Roman Empire from the ashes of the Republic led many early modern readers to compare their own political situation with that of Rome. In the final years of Elizabeth’s reign, with their anxiety over the succession and their fear of civil unrest, those in the ruling elite found much to link their own times with those Tacitus describes, exploring the consequences of the rise of personal rule and the potential for accompanying corruption. I propose to examine these two, in some vital ways similar, plays in the light of these anxieties. Henry Chettle’s Tragedy of Hoffman was written in response to Hamlet, and both raise questions about different styles of leadership, as well as looking at the effect on a kingdom of poor leaders, or doubts over succession. The interest the plays demonstrate in the military strength of rulers, in the power of favourites and in the moral issues raised by an effective spy network also reveal preoccupations in common with the Essex circle. Equally, although different in some key ways, the plays’ protagonists are not so dissimilar as they first appear.