1,721,012 research outputs found
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'
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
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
‘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/
‘Working from the Wound: Trauma, memory and experimental writing praxis in Jeanette Winterson’s Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?’
No full textThis chapter examines Jeanette Winterson’s experimental writing praxis in her 2011 memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Focusing on the intersection between trauma, memory and experimental narrative forms. It locates the text as a ‘limit-case autobiography’ (Gilmore 2001), which transgresses the boundaries of autobiography, historical discourse, myth and fiction. I show how the text draws on a range of narratives as a framing device for conveying Winterson’s account of her traumatic childhood experiences of abandonment, adoption and emotional neglect. Winterson’s ‘act of remembrance’ draws inter alia on personal memory, the history of working class Manchester, Greek mythology, and theories of trauma. Acknowledging the radical provisionality of memory, the text provides a version or reconstruction of events and Winterson’s shifting responses to them. In revisiting the experiences explored in Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and elsewhere, Winterson presents her earlier work as a ‘cover story’; usually seen as postmodern device to foreground the artifice of fiction, the memoir reconfigures the cover story as a narrative strategy to ‘cover over’ material which is/was unspeakable. Thus, the memoir encourages us to reread Winterson’s fiction in the light of traumatic omission and textual survival strategy. As in limit-case autobiographies, the memoir has no clear-cut resolution: although Winterson is reunited with her birth mother some 50 years after her adoption, there is no unambiguous healing of wounds. Moreover, while Winterson acknowledges the power of stories to mitigate suffering, she adopts a more ambivalent model of ‘working from the wound’ in which trauma is acknowledged as an aspect of self. For her, trauma carries a double legacy as something which motivates her work but which writing can never entirely ‘heal’
Experiment on a Dissected Reading:Maternal Absence in Frankenstein’s Gothic
No full textPositions Mary Shelley as an expereimental writer; reads maternal absence in Frankenstein as a Gothic trope connected to the depiction of the maternal body in eighteenth and nineteenth century obstetric textbooks and medical imagery
The Clothes on Our Back:A Collaborative Project to Diversify The Curriculum in Higher Education
No full textA report by the UK National Union of Students (NUS), ‘Race for equality’ (NUS, 2011) identified continuing, unresolved issues around BAME student participation within HE. Student dissatisfaction was highlighted with 42% of BAME students who took the survey stating they did not believe their curriculum reflected issues of diversity, equality and discrimination, and a third (34%) stated they felt they could not bring their views to lectures, noting that institutions often ‘did not take into account diverse backgrounds and views’ (NUS, 2011:4).This collaborative education research article reports on a project with Diversity Lewes, the University of Brighton and Brighton Museum that engaged members of the BAME community in Sussex and university students and staff to work on archival material and create poems, textiles and prose. The workshops focused on identity and clothing and looked at the history of the Khanga, which is a sarong popular in parts of Africa (Kalume et al. 2018). These fabrics contain symbols and messages that relate to autobiographical experiences including empowering sayings and statements. The workshops generated material for an exhibition in Black History Month at The Brighton Dome and at the University of Brighton. We argue that this project offered pedagogic opportunities in higher education that arose from the collaboration and partnership: bringing together community partners and academia in the spirit of social justice to tackle issues of diversity and inclusion by celebrating identity via the clothes on our backs. Please note that this article uses Black Asian Minority Ethnic (BAME) as this is the term used in much education research on this topic but we respect that it is not a term that many people would use to describe themselves and apologise for any offence caused.<br/
Maternal Performance: Relations and Embodiments
No full textIn this chapter the authors examine the synchronous relationship between the artform of performance and the maternal. The contribution takes the form of a correspondence between the two authors in order to emphasise the relational, which is crucial to both maternal and performance matters as the performer must relate to their audience or the mother to her other. Additionally, both performance and the maternal privilege the body of the artist or the mother, the body which is making real actions in a specific time and place. It is through performance and live art that mother/artists' maternal bodies are employed as a transgressive site of meaning, allowing a renegotiation of what it is to mother and what is a maternal act. The chapter discusses the work of some of the most transgressive and radical bodily acts of maternal performances (Hannah Ballou, Amanda Coogan, Lynn Lu, Nathalie Angeuzomo Mba Bikoro), which are brought to public consideration through performance art
Performing Healing: Stitching the Autoethnography of a Pandemic Hysterectomy
No full textI propose a chapter that presents autoethnographic creative writing, drawings and a series of hand-embroideries as a personal and introspective performance of my changing relationship with my maternal, reproductive self, following a full hysterectomy. Within it I will both mourn and celebrate my womb; exploring its loss and the impact of surgical intervention. I will also reflect upon the role of writing, drawing and quiet, contemplative stitch in helping me to know and understand my new maternal self. Last year I was diagnosed with a large benign uterine-tumour, or fibroid. This had a huge and surprising impact on my view of myself as a woman and mother. The first Covid-19 lockdown meant this operation was postponed, so by the time it was removed I was over 6-months ‘pregnant’ and as such my relationship with my womb, the carrier of my babies, became a negative one. Along with the pain, I struggled particularly with ‘looking pregnant’ when I was not. Without my womb, I worried if I would I still feel like a woman; would I age, what would the menopause feel like, and would my mothering instincts change without oestrogen coursing through my body? In the months leading up to my operation I suffered an anticipated loss of maternity, which I documented through drawings and words, seeking solace and knowledge through the process of making and privately performing my concerns. Throughout my subsequent recovery I continued to draw and write, going on to stitch a ‘womb diary’ and a series of embroideries remembering my children as the foetuses who grew there. This process has brought closure to my loss and has enabled me to move forward as a ‘woman without a womb’, who I now realise, is no less a mother than before. <br/
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