2,877 research outputs found
Absented Women’s Voices: Problematising Masculinity in Jim Crace’s Fiction
No full textAbsented Women’s Voices: Problematising Masculinity in Jim Crace’s Fiction Kate Aughterson (University of Brighton) Kristeva’s formulation of Semiotic - the silent rhythmic undercurrents and disruptions to the dominant Symbolic order which dislocate narrative and (gendered) subjects - act as an intertext to Crace’s narratives. Narrative dis-location is central to Crace’s work. Kristeva’s poetics offer a way of seeing how Crace’s narrative gaps and silences function as self-conscious rhetorical and narratorial strategies to offer up spaces for ‘other’ identities. Through narrative sleigh-of-hand, partial focalisations, lacunae, slippery semantics and shifting grammatical tenses Crace disturbs the microcosmic worlds his (male) narrators create. The absence of female voices (dead wives, desired woman, the young girl violated) is key to Crace’s cumulatively semiotic rhetorical technique: a blank space - an ‘other’ – a rich silence on which the reader writes alternative histories and stories
‘Unlink the chain’:Experimentation in Aphra Behn’s Novels
No full textFeminist re-readings of science and masculinism in the late seventeenth century have contributed much to our knowledge of the ways in which the philosophy of science, methodologies and language have been complicit from the early modern period in the solidification of a bourgeois binary gender system. This chapter will argue that Behn’s prose fiction and translations were intellectually and aesthetically engaged with these contemporary ideologies and explicit practices of experimentalism. Experimentalism in the early modern period meant a combination of authentic empirical investigation with a discursive examination of what that meant for new modes of representation (famously evoked by Bacon’s ‘idols of the marketplace’). For Behn- as for Cavendish – ‘experiment’ was both a novel way of seeing the world, and a new way of writing – and one which they fdrew into their formal writing. Ian Watt’s classic The Rise of the Novel (1957) linked the emergence of the new genre to the rise of bourgeois individualism, reifying Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe as the archetypal novel: a historiography which has been rightly challenged by materialist and feminist critics, who variously acknowledge Behn, Manley and Haywood as Defoe’s contemporary or predecessor practitioners of the novel, as well as complicating an exact equation between individualism, style and form. Nevertheless, what remains is a critical consensus that a new genre emerges in the early modern period, recognised by contemporary readers, writers and booksellers by the unstable noun ‘novel’ (news/ new thing) which gradually came to refer to the genre. Aphra Behn’s prose publications from 1684 until her death in 1689 were dominated by experiments in this new form: she wrote a number of novellas in addition to Love Letters and Oronooko – in which she played with modes of voice, representation and the reliability of the narrator. By locating Aphra Behn’s experiments of the 1680s within the context of her political and dramatic career and contemporary philosophical experimentalism, this chapter acknowledges feminist re-calibrations of the history of the novel, and develops a more explicitly aesthetic account of that experimentalism through close textual analysis of Behn’s experimental prose techniques. It thus suggests that a binary classifications of experimentalism with liberal or left-leaning politics is a simplification of the relationship between aesthetics and politics, and conversely, that the recent critical commonplace that Behn’s Tory politics dominate all her political thinking and writing is a reductive simplification of both her political views and her aesthetic practice. Through such analysis, we can return to larger questions about how we might describe experiments in the novel form of the novel, as well as Behn’s status as an innovative writer and thinker. <br/
An Interview with Jim Crace
No full textInterview with Booker winner Jim Crace focussing on his novel Harvest.Held at Brighton University as part of the Man Booker sponsored 'Big Read'
Stage (im)Properties:Aphra Behn's Radical Stagecraft
No full textBehn’s final play performed before her death (The Emperor of the Moon) in 1687, ends on the socratic and enigmatic [they] ‘Knew only this – that he knew nothing yet’. Aphra Behn’s dramatic experiments ranged from generic and characterisation experimentation to stage business(es) in which she (to use Cixous’s phrase) ‘disconcerted’ the language of theatre and performance. This chapter will focus in particular on her experimentation with the stage property of the bed in a number of her plays, to show how she extended the language and the performability of space around the representation and acting of women on the restoration stage. While her near contemporary Pope observed: “the stage how loosely doth Astrea tread/ Who fairly puts all characters to bed”, positing and locating the author’s sexual identity in stage action, this chapter will by contrast argue that Behn’s use of the bed as locus during key narratological and revelatory moments in her plays (from earlier plays through The Rover, The City Heiress and The Luckey Chance) as a means of both focussing on female bodies as objects and constructing and enabling them as subjects. Many critics have noted (often as an aside) how many of her scenes (including ‘discovery scenes) are set in bedchambers - yet no critics have examined how in doing so the boundaries of conventional dramaturgy and stage business are tested and challenged. Behn’s beds problematise and foreground the enactment of the restoration male gaze, and provide a Medusa-like torqued distorted mirror which is simultaneously mimetic and non-mimetic, critical and utopian. In the bed’s double-function as space of revelation (in the uncovering of woman’s body and the resolution of plot) and privacy (the bed as private space) Behn finds the perfect stage property to dramatically unveil her radical dramaturgical ambitions. This chapter will show how her theatre-making was at cutting edge of her contemporaries, and that the successful performance of and sharing new practices simultaneously met and challenged the needs of her demanding audience
Aphra Behn: the comedies
No full textKate Aughterson provides readers with an approachable and fascinating critical guide to the dramatic works of an important seventeenth-century woman writer. Aughterson analyses Aphra Behn's abilities as a playwright, showing particularly how she skillfully employs comic and dramatic conventions to radical ends, and how she forces her audience to engage with issues about gender and sexuality whilst retaining her witty and accessible style. Chapters in the first part of the book provide close readings of the comedies, addressing such topics as openings, endings, character types, staging, and politics and society. In the second part, Aughterson not only examines Behn's literary career and the Restoration contexts of her plays, but also looks at some sample criticism and explores Behn's drama as performance
Socially Engaged Creative Practice:Contemporary Case Studies
No full textAughterson and Moriarty argue that fluid concepts of communities in conjunction with the practice of socially engaged practice in arts and theatre both trace an ideological heritage back to the emergence of community art and performance in the 60s, and retain a vibrant relevance in different artistic fields today. The practitioners, theatre makers, artists, writers and academics who contribute to this collection share a sense in which their social engaged practice works with a local community through art to create change
The English Renaissance: an anthology of sources and documents
No full textThis is a scholarly book, and an unusual one at that. Consisting, as it does, of more than 600 pages of quotations from original sources and documents, it will be of great interest and use to historians and students of the English Renaissance, which is here defined as happening between the years 1550 and 1660. The compiler of this anthology is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Central England, and she is a specialist who has already produced a source book entitled Renaissance Women, published by Routledge in 1995. Before probing into the book proper it is important to read Aughterson’s introduction. After those pages have been studied, it will then be found that her volume is presented in eight parts under the headings of Religion, Politics, Society and social life, Education, Literary and cultural theories, Science and magic, Gender and sexuality, and finally Exploration and trade. Under each of these heads come the quotations, usually twenty or more, from Renaissance writers and these, read with care and not a little patience, are certain to help students to expand their knowledge of this period. Most of the writers cited are well-known. A few random names include William Tyndale, John Foxe and William Laud in the field of religion; Hooker, Bacon and Hobbes in the political part; Elyot, Ascham and Cornelius on education; Sidney, Nashe, Spenser and Jonson on literary aspects; Raleigh and Hakluyt appear under exploration and trade. And so on. But one of the real merits of this collection is that Aughterson has cast her net very widely, and there are many quotations, equally significant, from lesser-known and sometimes anonymous writers. This makes the volume a real treasure-house for all those who are interested in how man’s knowledge developed during the Elizabethan and early Stuart years of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. At the end of the book Aughterson provides a helpful chronology, notes, select bibliographies, and the necessary index. Altogether, this is an anthology of original sources which no English historian can afford to ignore. (Article citation: K.C. Harrison, (1998) "The English Renaissance: An Anthology of Sources and Documents", Reference Reviews, Vol. 12 Iss: 8, pp.12 - 12
Guidelines for Data Annotation
No full textIncluded here are a coding manual and supplementary examples of gesture forms (in still images and video recordings) that informed the coding of the first author (Kate Mesh) and four project reliability coders
Declining Unionization, Rising Inequality: an Interview with Kate Bronfenbrenner
Full text linkKate Bronfenbrenner is director of labor education research at the New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations at Cornell University. She worked for many years as an organizer with the United Woodcutters Association in Mississippi and the Service Employees International Union in Boston. She is the author, co-author and editor of numerous books and articles on union strategies
- …
