Professor Roger Ebbatson speaks on Hardy, Jefferies this week at Francis Close Hall

The Centre for Writing, Place and History (CWPH)

 

Research seminars 2013

 

 

 

Professor Roger Ebbatson

 

Emeritus Professor of English Literature, University of Lancaster

 

 

'Traversing the South Country: 1850-1914'

 

Wednesday 15 May

 

Francis Close Hall

 

HC202A, 5:30 - 7:00

 

Everyone is welcome

 

 

Humanities 'webinar' with prospective students

Last week, as we finished the semester's work, the School of Humanities ran a 'webinar' for students who have applied to study with us in September.  Using Skype technology, the webinar allowed prospective students to log into a live chatroom with the Course Leader and students of their selected course. Matthew Butcher (English Literature and Language) and Chris Moore (History) joined me in the chatroom to answer questions about the course, their experience of studying, the University's social life, the Literature Festival, and even whether Kindles can be used for studying (an excllent question, and the answer is....well, take a look).

http://glos.adobeconnect.com/p8whdpby4yf/

Please note that you will need the current version of Adobe Flash Player to see the webinar.

If you use Skype, you'll know that it is a great way to keep in touch with friends. It's also terrific for making new acquaintances. Wendy, Scarlett, and Rebecca, thanks very much indeed for taking the time to log on. We enjoyed meeting you and hope we answered your questions. Speaking of which, applicants who have further questions or who would simply like to keep in touch, do please join our Facebook group. Click on 'request' and Dr Dave Webster will add your name to the group.

My special thanks to Matt and Chris, scholars and stars both.

Chinua Achebe 1930-2013

African writing is thriving and enjoys a worldwide readership.  It was not always so. The late Nigerian Ibo novelist, short story writer, editor, political activist and critic Chinua Achebe was for many the years the only African writer other than Wole Soyinka who European audiences could name if asked. Things changed slowly, however. Many of us can remember the orange covers of the Heinemann African writers series and the authors published: Ngugi Wa Thiong'o, Buchi Emecheta, among others.

Achebe's novel of 1957 Things Fall Apart takes its title from a poem by W.B. Yeats to critique western cultural and political domination of colonised Africa. Blending oral and written traditions in his novels, Achebe refuses to allow the fictions of universalism to co-opt African representation:

Does it ever occur to these universalists to try out their game of changing names of characters and places in an American novel, say, a Philip Roth or an Updike, and slotting in African names just to see how it works? But of course it would not occur to them to doubt the universality of their own literature.
(From Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1989), p. 75

Achebe may have considered a lecture he gave on Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness in 1974 just one piece of writing from his professional career. It caused outrage among academics and gave him a certain notoriety (we are judged by the quality of our enemies). As part of his programme of satire by reverse psychology, Achebe dared to anlayse what T.S. Eliot had called 'the mind of Europe' sixty years earlier:

[...]  Conrad did not originate the image of Africa which we find in his book. It was and is the dominant image of Africa in the Western imagination and Conrad merely brought the peculiar gifts of his own mind to bear on it. For reasons which can certainly use close psychological inquiry the West seems to suffer deep anxieties about the precariousness of its civilization and to have a need for constant reassurance by comparison with Africa. If Europe, advancing in civilization, could cast a backward glance periodically at Africa trapped in primordial barbarity it could say with faith and feeling: There go I but for the grace of God. Africa is to Europe as the picture is to Dorian Gray -- a carrier onto whom the master unloads his physical and moral deformities so that he may go forward, erect and immaculate.

Wilde stated in the Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray that 'The nineteenth century dislike of Realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass'. Rage of Caliban? 'The main thing', as Edward W. Said writes, 'is to be able to see that Caliban has a history capable of development, as part of the process of work, growth, and maturity to which only Europeans had seemed entitled' (Culture and Imperialism (1994), p. 257. But it took Achebe to turn the mirror back to face Europe.

School of Humanities Applicant Day, 27 March

Our visitors made heroic efforts last Wednesday to get to the University of Gloucestershire through snowdrifts and Siberian breezes.  Once they got here safely, and thawed out, we had a great day of meeting, talking, and learning. We run a couple of Applicant Days each year as special information and learning events for students who have accepted a place with us but want to find out more about what we're like. The Head of Humanities, Dr Shelley Saguaro, welcomed students, parents and friends before we split into course groups for taster sessions. We try to give students a sense of what they'll experience in the classroom in their first year of study. It's quite an adjustment for students to go from the periphery of learning to its centre; social as well as academic skills are required.

The English Literature session, 'Blake's 'Jerusalem' and the Politics of Romantic Poetry' asked students to think about Blake's well-known but never-understood poem 'Jerusalem'. This hymnlike poem appears in the Preface to a much longer epic poem, Milton (composed c. 1804-11).  The second odd point is that far more people have heard the poem than read it. Hubert Parry set it to music in 1916, and it was adopted by the Suffragette movement. English (not always British) people like to sing it at various national events, from football to the Womens Institute AGM, and of course every year at the Last Night of the Proms.

But is the poem a statement of triumph, or a warning? Students noted that the poem seemed full of ironies, that it contained folkloric elements that perhaps suggested a popular mode, or an anti-style. Until lunchtime, we began a conversation that will not end, but will continue to open up inquiry indefinitely.

 

Image: The William Blake Archive

 



Student input is such an important part of the day for potential students, and we've been so lucky this year to have the help of three eloquent third-year students, Matt Butcher, Amy Hall and Mike Jordan. Amy joined Debby Thacker and Shelley for a Q & A session with parents; and after lunch, Mike  kindly took time away from writing his dissertation on Raymond Chandler's novels to speak to students and parents about the experience of studying English Literature at the University of Gloucestershire. Mike, and Matt on a previous occasion, put everyone at their ease with candid responses and personal testimony. And they are such pros to work with, for which we give them our special thanks.

 

As the event broke up at around 2:30, we wished everyone a safe journey home. We'll see them, we hope, in September.  Thanks to everyone who gave up their day to visit us.

 









'Hardy and the Inaugural': Professor John Hughes's Inaugural Lecture at the University of Gloucestershire

Stinsford Church, Dorset, burial site of Hardy's heart.

Old and new friends and colleagues gathered together last Wednesday to hear John Hughes, Professor of Nineteenth-Century English Literature, give his Inaugural Lecture. The poet and novelist Thomas Hardy, about whom John has published for many years, is fascinated by beginnings and transitional states. In his lecture 'Hardy and the Inaugural', John took up the notion of the 'inaugural' as a particular quality of lyric poetry. He remarks:

The lecture explores the idea of the inaugural as to do with transitions, turning points, transformations, and new beginnings. It links this discussion to an account of the effects of poetic language in general, and to some examples drawn from the poetry of Thomas Hardy, in particular. 

And, he might have added, from Bob Dylan. In an unexpected departure**, John drew insights from Hardy's poetry to show how Bob Dylan represented an inaugural stage of 1960s culture, a poet who shares Hardy's awareness of creative moments of transition. Dylan is as famous for the way he appears in photos as for the way he sounds; John argued persuasively that these visual representations contained what Hardy would have called poetic 'Moments of Being'. Even politicians are keen to borrow some of Dylan's aura for themselves; one of John's lecture slides, showing David and Samantha Cameron in a photo from the Huffington Post in which their body language imitated that of Dylan and Suze Rotolo on the cover of The Freewheeling Bob Dylan, brought the house down. But John was making a serious point about how the inaugural can be recuperated, morally, politically and aesthetically, so that its representations can create the illusions of transitions.

The Vice-Chancellor, Stephen Marston, introduced John, and Professor Peter Childs proposed the traditional vote of thanks afterwards.

**but we await eagerly Professor John Hughes's book Invisible Now: Bob Dylan in the 1960s, to be published by Ashgate in August 2013.

'Love and Romance in the Song of Songs, the Bible's Only Romance Poem

The Severn Forum

 

presents

‘Love and Romance in the Song of Songs, the Bible’s only love poem’

 

 

Cheryl Exum, Professor Emerita of Biblical Studies, University of Sheffield, and Director of Sheffield Phoenix Press

 

Park Campus, Tiered Lecture Theatre (TC014), Thursday 21^st March, 7.45.

Free to students

£3 entry (for non-students, non-members).

 

 

 

Ivor Gurney, poet of the Severn and the Somme

The Gloucestershire poet Ivor Gurney (1890-1937) was also a composer. This week, one of his hitherto unknown sonatas was released from the  Gloucestershire Archives for the first time. Gurney wrote the Violin Sonata in E-Flat Major on his return from the front in 1918. Gurney's beautiful songs and settings are well-known. Listen to 'Sleep' here.

 

 

The South Midlands is a musical land, the birthplace of Ralph Vaughan Williams, Herbert Howells, Gustav Holst (Gloucestershire) and Edward Elgar (Worcestershire). It also became famous for its poets after World War I. Some poets, like Gurney and F.W.Harvey, were born here; others, like Edward Thomas, Robert Frost, and Eleanor Farjeon, who identified themselves as the Dymock Poets, were drawn by the special magic of this region. Perhaps the landscape spoke to them in ways that silenced the horrors of war.

 

The University of Gloucestershire holds the entire Dymock Poets archives and the Edward Thomas collection, among many other things of interest. Be sure to visit.