Category: Events

The next session of the Modernist Magazines Research Seminar will take place on Tuesday 4 November at 6pm, in room G37 (ground floor) of Senate House, London. Catherine Clay, author of British Women Writers 1914-1945 (2006), will be speaking on ‘Time and Tide, Feminist Periodical Networks, and Cultures of the New’. Please see below for an abstract and speaker biography. The seminar is open to everyone interested in modernism. For more information, please email modernist.magazines.ies@gmail.com or visit http://events.sas.ac.uk/ies/seminars/387/Modernist+Magazines+Research+Seminar With best wishes, Charles Dawkins (University of Oxford) Aimee Gasston (Birkbeck, University of London) Chris Mourant (King’s College London) Natasha Periyan (Royal Holloway, University of London) ‘Time and Tide, Feminist Periodical Networks, and Cultures of the New’ In a discussion of the ‘Anglo-American feminist press and “emerging modernities”’ Lucy Delap and Maria DiCenzo warn of the ‘problems and pitfalls of modernism as a critical paradigm, as modernist studies expands into the field of print culture.’ (In Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880-1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms, p. 49) Literary and cultural approaches privileged in modernist studies provide a limited lens, they argue, for comprehending the ‘new’ in forms of print media that had other social and political priorities, and feminist periodicals show us that ‘it is crucial to look for and understand emerging modernities […] from a broader and more flexible perspective and critical context.’ (52) This seminar will consider the implications of these arguments for ‘modernist magazines research’ with reference to the modern, but not modernist, magazine Time and Tide. Locating this magazine within an overlapping set of feminist periodical networks, the seminar aims to address questions of the modern, modernity and the ‘new’ beyond the parameters of literary modernism, and to recover a neglected history of women’s modern print media. Author bio: Catherine Clay is Senior Lecturer in English at Nottingham Trent University. She is author of British Women Writers 1914-1945 (2006) and is currently completing a monograph on the feminist periodical Time and Tide. Supporting material: Lucy Delap and Maria DiCenzo, ‘Transatlantic Print Culture: The Anglo-American Feminist Press and Emerging “Modernities”’, in Ann Ardis and Patrick Collier (eds.) Transatlantic Print Culture, 1880-1940: Emerging Media, Emerging Modernisms (Basgingstoke: Palgrave, 2008), pp. 48-65. Catherine Clay ‘“WHAT WE MIGHT EXPECT – If the Highbrow Weeklies Advertized like the Patent Foods”: Time and Tide, Advertising, and the “Battle of the Brows”’, Modernist Cultures 6:1 (2011), pp. 60-95. Please note: consulting this material is not an absolutely prerequisite for attending the seminar. However, all supporting material will be sent to those on the Modernist Magazines Research Seminar mailing list. To sign up to our mailing list, please email modernist.magazines.ies@gmail.com

In Michaelmas Term 2014 the English Faculty at the University of Oxford (click here for a map) will be hosting a cross-period, interdisciplinary seminar series on literature and material culture. The seminars will take place on alternate Tuesday evenings at 5.15pm in the Faculty’s History of the Book Room throughout the autumn term. Drinks and discussion will follow each seminar.

Please see the attached poster and literaturematerial.wordpress.com for more information, or contact Claire Johnstone and Hannah Ryley at literaturematerial@gmail.com

Across the term, established academics (including Dr Adam Smyth, Dr Paula Byrne, and Dr Vike Plock) and graduate and visiting speakers will explore three main threads: material texts, clothing in literature, and object-oriented literary biography. We hope to see you there!

Tues 21 Oct (Week 2) Dr Adam Smyth (University of Oxford)

– Fallen books in early modern England: or, what can we do with errors in print?

Tues 4 Nov (Week 4) Dr Paula Byrne (University of Oxford)

– The Life of Small Things: researching and writing an object-based biography of Jane Austen

Tues 18 Nov (Week 6) Dr Vike Plock (University of Exeter)

– Edith Wharton, fashion, and the fictions of modernity

Tues 2 Dec (Week 8) Graduate & Visiting Speakers:

Beatrice Montedoro (University of Oxford)

– Reading early modern drama: the ‘material trace’ left in commonplace books

Dr Kate Macdonald (Sassoon Visiting Research Fellow)

– The missing bodies of the First World War

All at 5.15pm in the History of the Book Room,

English Faculty, University of Oxford

Reading Beckett Week runs from Wednesday 1st
October to Saturday 4th October 2014.

The week consists of an exhibition and series of events to showcase Reading
University’s internationally renowned collection of manuscripts from the
Nobel Prize-winning writer Samuel Beckett (1906-1989). The exhibition will
display the recently acquired notebooks for Beckett’s novel Murphy
alongside a wide range of fascinating supporting material. There will also
be a public lecture by Professor Dan Gunn, editor of the multi-volume
Letters of Samuel Beckett, a free two-hour workshop introducing the
University’s Beckett archive and a day-long advanced seminar on Beckett’s
work. All events are open to the public.

Exhibition: Samuel Beckett in London – The Murphy Notebooks Wednesday 1st
October to Saturday 4th October. Museum of English Rural Life, Redlands
Road, Reading. Free. Opening Reception 5-7pm on Wednesday 1 October. All
welcome.

Although we often associate Samuel Beckett with Paris or Dublin, the time
he spent in London as a young man was decisive in his emergence as a major
writer. Away from familiar networks of friends he was forced, as never
before, back on his own resources, walking for miles through the city or
spending long hours in galleries and the British Library. Eventually he
poured all his reading, looking and thinking into his first great novel
Murphy. This exhibition of manuscripts, drawings, notebooks and other items
from Samuel Beckett’s stay in London between 1934 and 1935 includes
material previously unseen by the public.

Manuscript Workshop : Introducing the Archive Thursday 2nd October 2-4pm
Museum of English Rural Life, Redlands Road, Reading. Free. Booking
essential.

In this two-hour workshop, we will investigate how studying Beckett’s
drafts and manuscripts, his personal correspondence, and his reading notes
on literature, philosophy, psychology and the visual arts can help enrich
our understanding of one of the most important writers of the
twentieth-century. Using the composition of Beckett’s first published novel
Murphy (1938) as a case study, participants will be given access to a wide
range of unpublished materials including the short story ‘Lightning
Calculation’ (1934), the ‘Whoroscope’ notebook (1932-39), and the six
Murphy notebooks (1935-36).

Public Lecture: Professor Dan Gunn (American University of Paris) –
‘Samuel Beckett Through his Letters 1957-1965’

Friday 3rd October at 5.30pm, followed by a reception. Minghella Building,
Whiteknights Campus, University of Reading. Free. Booking essential.

Professor Gunn will read from and discuss the third volume of The Letters
of Samuel Beckett, of which he is an editor. The letters in this volume
were written between 1957 and 1965, an era that sees Beckett more and more
involved in theatre and production of his own plays, even while he is
determined to return to writing prose. Through his work with BBC radio,
Beckett meets Barbara Bray, who becomes his chief correspondent for this
era, and with whom he shares his work in progress with an uncharacteristic
openness. Pulled between his ever-increasing public success and his need
for the privacy required by writing, Beckett writes letters that are
marvellously expressive of his ambivalent attitude towards his own work and
the fame it has brought him.

The Beckett International Foundation Research Seminar 2014

Saturday 4th October from 10am Museum of English Rural Life, Redlands Road,
Reading. £20 waged,
£15
unwaged. Includes lunch and refreshments. Booking essential. Speakers: John
Pilling and Andrew Nash, Helen Bailey, Judith Wilkinson and Anthony
Paraskeva.

For booking please contact:

Conor Carville on c.carville@reading.ac.uk to book for the workshop and/or
lecture. Mark Nixon on m.nixon@reading.ac.uk to book for the Beckett
Seminar.

Literature and Visual Cultures Research Seminar, Thursday 2 October, 6 pm
11 Bedford Square, London WC1B 3RA (Royal Holloway’s central building), Room G3

We are pleased to have organised the next session of the Literature and Visual Cultures Research Seminar in collaboration with Art Writing Writing Art, a Bristol-based research group for those interested in the intersections between art, writing and art history.

Our interdisciplinary panel will include papers on art writing from:

Kevin Brazil, ‘Samuel Beckett and the Histories of Art’

Henry Mead, ‘T. E. Hulme and Abstraction’

Sam Rose, ‘Inference and Intention in Formalist Art Writing: Lessons from Michael Baxandall’

See our website for abstracts
http://literatureandvisualcultures.wordpress.com

Kevin Brazil is a DPhil candidate in English Literature at New College, University of Oxford, working on a thesis on the relationship between postwar fiction and visual art. He has articles published or forthcoming in the Journal for Modern Literature and Modernism/modernity, and is a contributing editor on the Beckett Digital Manuscripts Project.

Sam Rose is a Research Fellow at Peterhouse, Cambridge. He is currently completing a book on art writing, aestheticism, and art theory in twentieth-century England.

We hope to see you there.

Sarah Chadfield and Sophie Oliver
Royal Holloway, University of London

The next Northern Modernism Seminar will be on the theme of

Modernism and Textual Scholarship

It will be held in the Sustainability Hub at Keele University

on Friday 14 November 2014

The event will feature the public launch of the

Richardson Editions Project.