Tag Archives: literature

Victorian Dolls and Material Play

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This post was contributed by Emma Curry, a a PhD student in the Department of English and Humanities, working on Dickens’s representations of objects and body parts.

Birkbeck’s annual Arts Week joined forces with the Forum for Nineteenth-Century Studies on Tuesday night to host a fascinating and visually-splendiferous talk by Eugenia Gonzalez, on the thought-provoking theme of ‘Victorian Dolls and Material Play’.

Although Gonzalez opened her paper with a quotation from George Dodd, who wrote in Household Words in 1853, ‘dolls are trifles’, Gonzalez’s subsequent presentation went on to show us that in nineteenth-century culture, they were anything but. She began by uncovering the fascinating relationship between many notable Victorian women and their dolls, discussing the collections of Frances Hodgson Burnett, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and even the young Queen Victoria, whose extensive assemblage included a number of dolls that she had made and dressed herself. Gonzalez also highlighted the persistent presence of the doll in adult-authored texts, in which writers frequently attempted to theorize the various benefits a woman could acquire from playing with dolls as a child; from the cultivation of more conservative attributes such as nurture, decoration, and the ‘art of pleasing’, to more progressive ideas such as the development of imagination, and even, as Otto Ernst described in a narrative of his daughter’s doll-play, the ‘godlike’ powers of creation and dominion.

In the second part of her talk, Gonzalez moved on to Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, discussing the prominence Dickens gives in this novel to the character of Jenny Wren, the dolls’ dressmaker. Gonzalez highlighted here the connection between doll-play and writerly-play, linking Jenny’s powers to fashion form and imaginatively construct narrative for her dolls with Dickens’s own creative processes, in which characters are similarly constructed materially and experienced as if they are real: indeed, Dickens’s description of having to go and ‘extricate’ Mr and Mrs Boffin from the carriage after the Staplehurst rail crash was a particularly fascinating and pertinent addition here. Through such a focus on Jenny’s imaginative and interpretive power, Gonzalez suggested a reading of the novel as one concerned with materiality, manipulation, and (self-)fashioning, which I found wonderfully revealing and convincing.

The talk was followed by some lively discussion and a very wide-ranging selection of questions, testament to the fascinating and far-reaching nature of the topic. I’ll certainly be returning to Our Mutual Friend with fresh eyes now, and I definitely won’t look at my old Barbie doll collection in the same way again! I’d like to thank Eugenia for providing us with such fascinating and stimulating subject matter, and look forward to reading the completed project!

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Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures

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This post was contributed by Linda Grant, a Birkbeck PhD student working on the Renaissance reception of Latin love elegy, and jointly supervised in English and Classics by Professors Sue Wiseman and Catharine Edwards.

On Thursday May 232013 as part of Arts Week, Birkbeck was delighted to host a lecture by Leonard Barkan, Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton, on the ‘deliciously ambiguous’ relationship between words and pictures, poetry and painting. Leonard, with typical verve, energy, humour and keen insight drew on his recent book, Mute Poetry, Speaking Pictures (Princeton University Press, 2012), but also took the opportunity to explore some of the questions that, as he put it, weren’t in the book but should have been.

The concept and literary practice of ecphrasis, the textual description of a visual work of art, has a long history going back at least as far as Homer’s description of the shield of Achilles in the Iliad. But what happens when an art object is created out of words within a literary text, or when a painting turns on the mimetic representation of written language? Moving with enviable ease between classical antiquity and the European Renaissance, Leonard offered rich and perceptive analyses of some key cultural moments when poetry and image come together: Ovid’s Metamorphoses which insistently probes the relationship between name and physical form; Caravaggio’s 1602 painting St Matthew and the Angel with its central focus on the physical writing of the gospel; Desdemona’s vividly-described handkerchief in Othello.

Erudite and yet wonderfully relaxed and generous, Leonard gave us a stimulating talk which prompted many questions and much discussion afterwards.

Caravaggio_MatthewAndTheAngel_byMikeyAngels

Caravaggio – Matthew and the Angel

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The Art of Writing; Or the Science of Writing

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This post was contributed by Clare Brown, a student on Birkbeck’s MA History of Art. Clare also blogs at Renaissance Utterances.

‘Stop it with all the damn metaphors’
Kirk to ‘Bones’ McCoy in irritated exasperation 
Star Trek: Into Darkness (2013)

Science writing has held a peculiar interest for me this week, given my Trekkie credentials. I’ve seen the new Star Trek movie twice and have contemplated buying the original ‘Wrath of Khan’ to compare the change in writing and production styles. However for the purposes of these notes, the quote above is the perfect introduction to the Birkbeck Science and Writing Symposium, 21 May 2013.

A rare group of people – two poets, a playwright, an astronomer, a science/history/cultural academic, two actors and a cartoonist – were brought together not just to discuss the way they communicate their ideas but to actually demonstrate and showcase their skills. I’m not going to simply narrate what each person said but try to highlight themes. What I must say is, so often at academic symposia the emphasis is on the presentation of paper after paper with little or no presenter animation. No matter how interesting the topic, my eyes glaze over eventually but not here, not this time, we were off; starting with the Big Bang. Before I come on to the themes, I want to dwell a little on the poets and their poetry.

Anyone who has written poetry is aware of the painstaking care that goes into the selection of words, creation of sentences and the presentation of it on paper. Simon Barraclough is instantly ‘get-able’ with his ability to have words fall out of his subconscious. He is currently working on various projects; the first is penning a contribution to a collection of poems inspired by Light Show, the recent Hayward gallery exhibition, as well as his own Sun inspired collection. He entertained with his series of From Big Bang To Heat Death, my favourite being this one, because of the perfect combination of religion, science and cultural reference:

Our fusion
Which art in heaven
Stelliferous
From evil 

However Rosie Sheppard is a different kind of poet. With her scientific background and a fascination with DNA she uses the everyday, such as food, as a way of conveying the complex patterns and processes of nature and science. Earlier I was rereading one of the poems she recited and her astonishing images conjured by words and situations are tightly structured in a way that is suggestive of the double helix. But only because she told me it was there. Which is like telling a person who likes flowers purely for their scent that behind all the pretty smell is a complicated list of chemicals and chemical reactions. Interesting but without the specialised knowledge, some of the clever stuff goes over my head.

The themes which predominated were roughly these:

  • Science fiction is the absolute favourite way of linking writing and science. From wildly speculative space travel to the sci-fi closer to home, as demonstrated by Nick Payne with ‘Constellation’, the enduring popularity of the incorporation of science into fiction will continue. Science provides a way into a story, writers can play with it, laugh at it, imagine all possibilities and explore what would otherwise be difficult topics. As Nick said, the cosmologists he spoke to rubbished his multiverse theory but he has none-the-less produced a wondrous ‘what if’ play about death.
  • Rise in popular science and the use of accurate and clear summaries of contentious science to inform the public. Darryl Cunningham, cartoonist/graphic novelist has used the power of the image to blast bad science such as the MMR Scandal.
  • Scientists spend a lot of time writing, whether it is grant applications, reports or articles, communicating with the public, so a number of different styles are required. The Public Astronomer Marek Kukula emphasised the importance of getting precisely the right words, which was then immediately echoed by the poets. Another interesting linguistic point Marek made was the importance of foreign scientists working in English, for example, returning to home institutions and having to create new words in their own language to explain new concepts.
  • A continuing collaboration between the writers of art and science. The more theoretical and exploratory areas of science are perhaps more aligned to the arts; financially speaking they may not have a direct payoff but it’s culturally vital to have that inspiration and ‘blue sky’ understanding of our infinitely complex world. Scientists are working on imagining unimaginably abstract ideas, multiverses, esoteric maths, string theory, god particles, black holes. Some writers use art to explain science and this scientific language in turn enriches art. Science provides new metaphors. As Laura Salisbury stated, this is a hybrid language, a juxtaposition of communications ‘abraiding’ with one another.
  • An undeveloped theme was science as a new faith. For the majority of us, we live in a world in which we have to trust because we don’t understand the science behind every-day objects. Laura Salisbury in her cool articulate way outlined the importance of cultural assumptions, drawing on the ideas of French sociologist of science anthropologist Bruno Latour. Interestingly he said that we only become truly modern when we separate the rational from the irrational/superstitious. Scientists and their theories are often found to be wrong and the conservative religious right suggest this is a flaw. But all theories and ideas are incomplete and the enquiring mind is happy to uncover layers of truth.
  • Unrealistic expectation in medical science was also touched upon with examples of illness and resuscitation on television discussed. Marek says that there is no problem with fiction bending  scientific rules but when you’re on a real operating table you want it right. This takes us back to the way that hard science is communicated and the style that the doctor, scientists selects when disseminating methods, procedures etc. No art or metaphor required there.
  • There is a perception that science is dull because of the way it is taught in school and this raised some interesting points. Nick in his role as everyman said he had no clue what he was getting into with cosmology and multiverses but he spoke with people who did know. It was suggested that scientists are like dancers – they have learnt the basics and practiced and practiced – they use their knowledge, analytic thinking, and experience to put on their performance. School children are still learning; exercising at the barre, not yet ready to perform and what they need is ‘cool science’ to inspire.

The evening generated plenty of interesting discussion, each one easily a separate essay topic. There was a final note of caution from Laura on the dangers of metaphor, not just as a Star Trek character devise, but that it may cause a blurring in the precision of scientific language. But despite this, the most important feeling to take away was the acknowledgement that science and art are actually of equal importance; certainly the language of each, informs and enriches the other.

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Man Booker at Birkbeck – Kazuo Ishiguro

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This post was provided by Emma Curry, a PhD student in the Department of English and Humanities, working on Dickens’s representations of objects and body parts.

Last year’s inaugural Man Booker event at Birkbeck was an entertaining and fascinating evening, and this year’s discussion between Prof. Russell Celyn Jones and Kazuo Ishiguro (or ‘Ish’ as he was happy to be referred to) continued that high standard. The talk was warm, witty and wide-ranging: Ishiguro spoke at length on his connections with Japan, his writing practices, his use of different voices within his novels, his interest in both individual and collective memory, and the place of art in an exploration of what it means to be human.

As someone with an interest in the process of novel-to-screen adaptations, it was particularly fascinating to hear Ishiguro talk about the film versions of The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go. He amusingly revealed that whilst he is credited as ‘executive producer’ on Never Let Me Go, he has very little idea what this title actually means! It was also interesting to hear in this part of the discussion about the process of writerly exchange: whilst Ishiguro writes screenplays, he prefers not to adapt his own work: instead the screenwriter for Never Let Me Go was Alex Garland, who in turn is himself an author, having written the novel (but not the screenplay) The Beach. Whilst some writers dislike the film adaptations of their work, Ishiguro praised what he called the ‘natural’ alliance between the novel and the cinema, suggesting that it was an important connection to both cement and develop in an age of somewhat formulaic, brainless blockbusters.

The discussion was followed by questions from the audience, all of which Ishiguro answered generously and thoughtfully. All in all, the evening was highly enjoyable and a fascinating exploration of a writer’s motivations and inspirations. It uncovered fresh approaches to Never Let Me Go, as well as providing some encouraging suggestions and amusing thoughts on the creation of fiction in general. I look forward to reading much more of Ishiguro’s work!

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