9 West Road
News from the Faculty of English Volume 13 Autumn 2013
english.cam.ac.uk
The Future of Research in English
T
he Faculty of English at Cambridge has a long tradition of supporting a wide range of different kinds of research by individual scholars working in all areas and periods of the subject from medieval literature and culture to contemporary performance. It hasn’t always been easy for those looking in from outside to see the wood from the trees. Indeed, the inhabitants of this particular forest have been known to get lost, on occasion, whilst attempting to navigate from one part of it to another. In order to give some shape to its activities, the Faculty has during the past year created a flotilla of research groups to accompany and escort its flagship Centre for Material Texts. These are now readily accessible through a brandnew all-singing, all-dancing research page on the website: www.english.cam. ac.uk/research. The aim is to foster a sense of community, and to encourage collaborative endeavour, whether or not the researcher is working independently or as part of a larger project. Individual
thinking will remain for the foreseeable future the form research takes in the Faculty. But it doesn’t entail isolation. The sites maintained by each group themselves constitute a further mode of communication extending outwards from the Faculty by means of scholarly networks and social media. Graduate students have an important part to play in these groups. And that observation brings us to one of the sternest and most urgent challenges now facing universities in general, and arts and humanities departments in particular. The controversy surrounding the recent introduction of tuition fees for UK undergraduates has overshadowed the drastic withdrawal of government funding for those who wish to undertake a postgraduate taught course (the prerequisite for study at PhD level). The consequent decline in the total number of students on postgraduate taught courses in the UK poses a serious threat to the country’s ability to produce leading thinkers, researchers, and
If you have any comments or suggestions, or if you know of anyone who might like to receive this newsletter and is not on our mailing list, please contact:
Kasia Boddy Newsletter Editor Faculty of English 9 West Road Cambridge CB3 9DP Or email: newsletter@english.cam.ac.uk
teachers in the arts and humanities. The creation of alternative forms of funding for students on postgraduate taught (MPhil) and research (PhD) courses has become a top priority for the Faculty. Unless and until the Faculty is able to provide full funding for all graduate students, through a combination of University, College, and other resources, the longer-term future of our exceptional research community will remain in doubt. But there is hope for some. Last year two of our PhD students were able to find support outside the usual sources: Claire Wilkinson’s PhD on the literature of financial crisis is funded by David Harding, an alumnus of the University and founder of Winton Capital Management, while the Wolfson Foundation is sponsoring Kristen Treen’s PhD on modern memory and the American Civil War. They describe their research overleaf. David Trotter Chair of the Faculty
INSIDE:
Bubbles and Floods: The Literature of Financial Crisis At the Museum of the Confederacy Read Any Good Books Lately? Hamlet’s Sister River Man: Nick Drake in Cambridge An extract from Ali Smith’s Shire Scholarly Resources for Alumni Faculty People What.Where.When.
2 2 4 5 6 7 8 8 12
Bubbles and Floods:
At the Museum of the Confederacy
The Literature of Financial Crisis
I
have been working on my PhD since January 2013, looking at the relationship between financial crisis and literary output from 1720 to the present day. Over Michaelmas, I will be pulling together materials for my upgrade meeting (which will take place after Christmas), and I am currently writing about the South Sea Bubble of the early 1700s. The South Sea Bubble was the first financial crisis with a ‘modern’ shape; speculation surrounding the poorly governed South Sea Company saw stock prices escalate far beyond their value and the market eventually collapsed in 1720 with catastrophic effect for many private investors. One of the key parts of my current research is the development of metaphor in writing about finance at this time. The way that we talk about financial crisis today is very much shaped by how writers like Swift, Pope and John Gay spoke about financial crisis at the time. We do not think twice when we read news reports about ‘bubbles bursting’, ‘flooded markets’ and ‘underwater pricing’, but on inspection these terms are incredibly abstract. The research I have planned for 2014 will take this initial work on metaphor and the structure of financial crises, and extend it to look at moments of significant ‘turbulence’ in more recent history, including the crisis of 2008. The timescale covered by my work gives me an unusually large focus for an English PhD, and prior to returning to Cambridge I had worked on a relatively limited range of modernist writers from the 1920s. After graduating with an undergraduate degree in 2010, I spent two years working for an international consultancy in the city specialising in capital markets regulation, and this experience has proved invaluable in extending my perspective beyond academia. My work is funded by the Winton Studentship, a three year scholarship generously provided by a Cambridge alumnus, David Harding, founder of Winton Capital Management, and the dual literary / financial focus of my work was specified as part of the scholarship. The demands of balancing appropriate detail with necessary breadth (and with learning a lot about economic theory, something new to me) continues to be challenging; however it is very exciting to be working on a project that links the study of literature to the financial concerns that have had such impact recently on financial institutions, government and, of course, universities. Claire Wilkinson
2
9 West Road
T
his time last year I began work on a thesis examining the material influence of the American Civil War on modern literature and memory. The Civil War is renowned for the absence of worthy literature written about it: Walt Whitman once famously asserted that ‘Future years will never know the seething hell and the black infernal background of countless minor scenes and interiors … the real war will never get in the books’ . My work takes Whitman’s contention that the war disrupted linguistic representation of its horrors to ask how material culture might be used as an alternate way of speaking about and remembering this particular historical moment. I ask how writers such as Walt Whitman, Henry James, Eudora Welty and Ernest Hemingway use the war’s material artefacts to drive and shape commemorative narratives. I also ask how such artefacts trouble attempts to order the war into words, how they create tensions and silences, and the ways in which they enable people to forget the war’s enduring significance. A few months into the project, it soon became clear that the only way to begin to understand the material impact that the Civil War had on some of America’s social groups, was to go and see the ‘sacred’ battlegrounds and talismanic souvenirs of the war era in the flesh. As my research is supported by the Wolfson Foundation, which provides an annual grant towards research expenses, the trip was especially easy to arrange, and I was able to plan the trip around a big conference at Gettysburg, PA, entitled The Future of Civil War History: Looking Beyond the 150th, at which I was presenting a paper. During the process of organising the trip I soon discovered that American institutions are very happy to give international students access to their collections, as well as advice on navigating the enormous amount of archival material available to the Civil War scholar. What I hadn’t quite foreseen, though, was the strange feeling that attends the moment of contact with objects which have come to represent and convey the significance of a particularly bloody and cataclysmic part of a nation’s history. The Museum of the Confederacy (MoC) in Richmond, Virginia, brought me into contact with some of the most
curious and unsettling artefacts to come out of the war. My interest in the MoC stemmed from a visit I’d made to the States before my PhD started, a battlefields road trip which took in sites like Gettysburg, Appomattox, and the Confederate capital Richmond. The MoC is comprised mainly of military items – bloodied uniforms, Confederate weaponry and materiel, over 500 regimental battle flags – as well as an extensive but uncharted archive of documentation from and about the South, which is held in the modern-day Eleanor Brockenbrough Library facility. Yet one of the museum’s most fascinating but underrated rooms is dedicated to Confederate ‘knickknackery’. Here I was confronted by curios and ephemera: hair jewellery and prosthetic limbs, wartime scrapbooks and examples of Southern women’s home-made wartime clothing. I was struck by how forcefully the war had penetrated these women’s homes, and wondered how these domestic items, and the hand-written labels submitted by their donors describing their histories, had ended up in an institution dedicated primarily to male combatants’ experiences of the war. What did museum display mean for the original owners of these items? Established thirty-one years after the war’s end by the women of the Confederate Memorial Literary Society (CMLS) as a kind of commemorative ‘battle abbey’, the Confederate Museum was conceived as a home for ‘relics’ of the war which the CMLS gathered from across the Southern states. Research into the CMLS’s minute books and newspaper advertisements soon made it clear that these women not only contributed their own household items to the collection, but also went about maintaining and arranging the museum as though they were running a home. Based in the ex-White House of the Confederacy, the museum was lucky enough in its early days to have exFirst Lady of the Confederacy Varina Davis contribute some of her own items and hand-written explanatory notes to the displays. Mrs Davis also advised the CMLS on what each room had originally been used for, so that museological arrangement and interior decoration could resurrect a sense of the home at the same time as creating a museum and monument to the Confederate dead. This uncanny home
to the Lost Cause predictably excluded items and notes giving voice to the slaves whose labour had upheld the Southern way of life; pieces of homespun displayed to promote the white Southern woman’s skill and dexterity failed to acknowledge the fact that African American women had actually woven the material itself. Yet the women of the CMLS, and the white women of the South who donated domestic items, used the structure of this archetypal Confederate home to house their material memories and imbue them with a certain kind of meaning. In doing so, they wove their experiences materially into a grand collection which palpably exerted the force of their belief in a Confederate nation. They also found a space in which their often dubiouslyconstructed stories could be told and accommodated, and their artefacts provided a concrete point around which a narrative of a troubled time and a lost way of life could take shape. Included here are images of some items which I was allowed to examine in the flesh. Both come with their own stories, and the hair flower pendant gives an example of how donors wrote around their donations. The half-finished sock, constructed from unravelled Union tents, constitutes for me a kind of text in itself, an act of creation which tells a story about protest and subdued silence. Of course, being displayed within the museum would endow this artifact of silence with a new voice, with a renewed potential for protest and complaint. But the hair pendant, made of Jefferson Davis’s hair and accompanied by its note, embodies the questions I’m trying hardest to answer: how do things shape our experiences of conflict and trauma? How do they help us speak about unspeakable moments of loss? And how do people’s narratives about the war start to gain the significance and status associated with the material object in themselves? The conference in Gettysburg later in the trip would bring me into contact with a landscape redolent of chaos, which modern day National Park plaques seek, often controversially, to organise according to particular military narratives. At the MoC, socks and hair jewellery constituted acts of remembrance and resistance on the domestic battlefront. In displays constructed by the CMLS, these things served as soldiers fighting for a beloved Lost Cause, a way of life built on intolerance and enslavement for which these women continued to fight. Kristen Treen
Gold-rimmed crystal locket containing five-petalled flower made of Jefferson Davis' Hair. Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond VA. Note reads: 'A piece of President Davis' hair presented by Mrs Haywood Randolph of Tallahassee, Fla, - a sister-in-law of the lady to whom Mr Davis gave it.
Pair of socks knitted from the unravelled tents of the Union Army by Mrs Hugh Holmes Lee. Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond VA.
english.cam.ac.uk
3
Read any good books lately? Members of the English Faculty tell us what books, and other things, they’ve recently enjoyed. Gavin Alexander Senior Lecturer in English; Fellow and Director of Studies (Part 2) at Christ’s College
some kind of parkour maniac – ‘more like a man / Flying from something that he dreads, than one / Who sought the thing he loved’. Obstacles crash down from a greyscale sky – is the world ending? – as you leap from building to building. All you do is press the spacebar to jump, and it goes on forever (as long, that is, as you survive.) Despite its awkward name, dy4ia is more profound – this game tells, with bright, jagged colours and satirical intelligence, the tale of a trans person undergoing hormone replacement therapy. A kind of interactive story which uses metaphors to make its point; over quickly, it will stay with you.
David Ledbetter's Unaccompanied Bach: Performing the Solo Works (Yale University Press, 2009) sets Bach's great solo violin, cello, and lute works in their historical contexts, explores and explains their formal characteristics, and enables the performer to build interpretation on an understanding of the music that can't be reached by playing alone. A beautiful example of how scholarship and creative artistry can cooperate, and an invaluable tool as I worked on the six solo cello suites in viola transcription for my own cycle of performances this year:
www.adamatomic.com/canabalt www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/591565
http://suiteviola.blogspot.co.uk
Libby Tilley Faculty Librarian
Kasia Boddy Lecturer in American Literature; Fellow and Director of Studies (Part 2) at Fitzwilliam College Discovering more of William Dean Howells has been a pleasure this last year. For anyone thinking of moving house, I warmly recommend his novel A Modern Instance (1882), in which a couple of newlyweds look for cheap lodging in Boston, and A Hazard of New Fortunes (1890), where a middle-aged Boston couple move to New York, and make an exhaustive study of the mod cons, elevators and heating systems of the city’s apartments for roughly a hundred pages. As his friend Henry James observed, Howells imparts a ‘palpitating interest to common things and unheroic lives’. Leo Mellor Roma Gill Fellow in English and Director of Studies (Part 1) at Murray Edwards College Gavin Maxwell did not always love aquatic creatures. Long before his companionship with anthropomorphised otters he vaingloriously attempted to hunt Basking Sharks (placid, with oil-rich livers) using ex-Royal Navy gunboats off the west coast of Scotland. Harpoon at a Venture (Rupert Hart-Davis, 1952; new edn. House of Lochar, 1999) manages to make an epigrammatic fable out of the abjection and disasters which overtook Maxwell in the waters around the Hebrides. But it is more than a bloodthirsty curio: it mixes wartime reverie with inchoate longing, and it shows how British neo-romanticism always had a strain of the militarised sublime.
4
9 West Road
Abena Osei Faculty Receptionist In Giovanni’s Room James Baldwin uses evocative language to powerfully and poignantly describe the homosexual relationship between an American man named David and an Italian bartender called Giovanni in 1950s Paris. Baldwin’s novel, which was published in 1956 by Dias Press and which was highly contentious for its era, is engrossing, beautifully written and a highly-recommended read. Vidyan Ravinthiran Keasbey Research Fellow in American Studies at Selwyn College At the risk of appearing lowbrow, I’d like to recommend two free-to-play computer games. The first is Canabalt, where a little pixelated man runs from left to right like
I have recently taken the plunge and started Game of Thrones, by George R.R. Martin, following rave reviews by my husband. I'm well into Book Two (A Clash of Kings) now, and I am honestly wondering if I'm enjoying them enough. It's partly that it feels like the story has, at minimum, a thousand-character cast, and I can never quite remember who was doing what and when. But it's also the slight sense of irritation as my favourite characters only get a chapter every now and then, and the tension that I suspect this is supposed to engender hasn't quite worked for me. Possibly more intriguing for me as a librarian is that I am reading the books on a Kindle, and I really don't think that this was the best choice. I can't get a sense of where I am going or where I have come from very easily, and I suspect this isn't helping my disorientation with the characters. Shall I persevere? Possibly....or just wait to watch it all on DVD! David Trotter King Edward VII Professor of English; Chair of the Faculty Mark Miodownik’s Stuff Matters (Viking, 2013) contains everything you always wanted to know about the stuff we now make stuff out of (but were afraid to ask): from grapheme and self-healing concrete via 3D printers to silica aerogel, at 99.8 per cent air the lightest solid in the world. An eye-opener for those of us who grapple with literature’s enduring if oblique relation to technology and media: http://literature-technology-media.co.uk
Hamlet’s Sister John Harvey John Harvey taught in the Faculty from 1974, and in 2000 became University Reader in Literature and Visual Culture. He is a Life Fellow of Emmanuel College. His latest book, The Story of Black, which came out from Reaktion in September, is a sequel to Men in Black (1997) a history of the growing use of the colour black in men’s dress between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries. The new book records the inward movement of the colour through history, as successive blacknesses were discovered in our entrails, our psyches and our souls – and then transformed again into masterpieces of art.
I
n Dürer’s copperplate engraving around Melencolia I a large, handsome woman sits slumped in despondency, idly holding a geometer’s compass, while unused tools – a plane, a saw, a hammer and nails – lie round her. And the skin of her face is dark or black. It may not always be seen as black since one could say her face is deeply shadowed. But the shadow on her face is deeper than the shadow on her dress, and the contrast between her cheeks and temples, and the white of her eyes, make it clear that she is dark-skinned. Her features are European, not Indian or African: she is black from the rising fumes of Black Choler, as melancholics were said to be, and the blackness shows most in her face, the window to her mind or soul. That soul is not well: she is marked by despondency, she is sullen, she scowls. I make a point of her mood, because in criticism she is sometimes romanticized. Erwin Panofsky wrote: ‘Her gaze, thoughtful and sad, fixed on a point in the distance, she keeps watch, withdrawn from the world, under a darkening sky, while a bat begins its circling flight’. The elegiac tone makes her sound like a Pre-Raphaelite maiden, though her look is surely more discontented, even baleful? Robert Burton called her ‘a sad woman leaning on her arm with fixed looks . . . surly, dull, sad, austere’. One could say her face shows the ill will of the deeply unhappy. The print has many elements of contradiction, negativity and the grotesque. Meteors were portents of sudden disaster, and this meteor blazes at our eye, itself an eye of rage. The rainbow above could be a blessed sign. It is clearly an arc from a perfect circle, perhaps marked by the compass Melancholia holds; it suggests colour in this black-and-white plate, and God’s covenant with the new world after the Flood. And the sea beneath it has risen in flood, as seas were known to do when meteors fell. But what a contrast between the head-on fury of the meteor itself and the inert, leaden weight of this dead-flat water. Its waveless, rippleless, stagnant surface could remind us of the dead seas – sterile and hopeless – in the late paintings of L. S. Lowry. From over this sea, perhaps out of the meteor, there flies towards us, not a bat, as Panofsky said, but a snake-rodent, a flying deformity, with ‘Melencolia I’ blazoned on its bat-wings: its snake- tail writhes, its blind rat-head snarls as it shrieks. It is the horror-face of melancholia – and stands then in a strange relation to the grand Melancholia who fills our sight. For she is an angel, with her fair hair and flowing robes and those lustrous white wings. With their aid, one would think, she could soar to a height, though mainly they show that she cannot or will not fly. The wings relate her to the bat-winged abortion in a visual syllogism. For it is Melancholia and she is Melancholia: they are aspects of one thing. Dürer’s double vision shades towards the surreal. Some angel this, sunk in lethargy and resting her cheek not on the palm of her hand but on a plump, clenched fist. The beautiful, sharpedged Dürer light – the white, cold, north-European light – is in her clothes, her wings, her victor’s wreath of cress and laurel, but her face is black; the blackness seeming as much a metaphor as
a humoral symptom. One must wonder if Dürer knew from the inside – in himself, in a parent – the state he draws from the outside here: the failure of will, impulse, art, which can befall us, no reason given. There are odd visual ironies in the engraving – in the beautiful drawing of the carpenter’s tools in the foreground: the plane, the straight-edge, the vicious-looking saw whose spike is the nearest thing to our eye. And in the metal pincers that advance from under her skirt as though she had, beneath voluminous taffeta, not only the pretty slipper we glimpse (through which we can count her toes) but also iron crab-claws, nipping. Whose are these tools? Including the modern-looking clawhammer, which is distinctly bigger than life-size, if we follow the perspective. Does this strong-limbed angel, when not seized with melancholy, tie up her loose sleeves and bend to at a bench? Or does a giant carpenter live nearby, strong enough to lift the odd stone polyhedron (known as Dürer’s solid) or the grindstone on which a sleepy cherub sits, as if it were the angel’s baby – making a picture one could lightly read as a caricature of Venus on a loveless day, beside her winged child Cupid? Christ was born to the carpenter’s trade, and died on a piece of carpentry. Does the ladder in the background lead to Heaven, or greatness – though how should the angel need it, since she has wings? For whom should the bell toll, that hangs un-rung on the wall, near the hourglass halfway through its hour? Behind Dürer’s solid a flame flares in the crucible of an alchemist. In the foreground, clear white, is that image of perfection, a sphere; it could represent the world, or God’s Creation. The sleeping greyhound is drawn with the minute attention to living things with which Dürer always draws. But it sleeps, the cherub dozes, the world is frozen, except for the rat-snake-bat, and the angel, who looks ahead, expecting nothing, from that place (within life) where journeys halt, values are cancelled, and where art, craft and science fail, not from difficulty but from the enigma that may swallow everything – depression, the paralysis and death of impulse. Dürer said the purse at her feet was riches, the key at her waist was power: that is their meaning, and they have no meaning; they are no use to her now. english.cam.ac.uk
5
River Man Nathan Wiseman-Trowse
Nathan Wiseman-Trowse is Associate Professor of Popular Music at the University of Northampton. His new book, Nick Drake: Dreaming England (Reaktion Books), is available now.
I
f you mention the name Nick Drake to anyone, one of two responses tends to occur, either a blank look or a deep grin. Drake has almost become the archetypal cult musician since his death in 1974; you rarely hear his music on the radio and there are no filmed live
6
9 West Road
performances to hunt down on YouTube. Yet for those who have been introduced to his small body of work, he tends to inspire utter devotion. Having recorded only three albums between 1969 and 1972 (Five Leaves Left, Bryter Layter and Pink Moon), none of which sold well, Drake has posthumously come to inspire Paul Weller, Kate Bush, Beck, Alison Goldfrapp, Kathryn Williams, Robert Smith of The Cure, Peter Buck of REM and countless bedroom singer-songwriters around the world.
Drake spent two years studying English Literature at Fitzwilliam College between September 1967 and October 1969 when he informed his tutor Ray Kelly that he wouldn’t be returning to complete his degree, stating that ‘it would be best for me…to devote myself to my musical activities’. By all accounts he didn’t apply himself as thoroughly to his studies while he was at university as he might have done, yet his time in Cambridge was pivotal not only in his career as a musician but also in the shape and sound of the music that he would go on to produce. Drake would often be found in his ground floor room overlooking Fitzwilliam’s Tree Court endlessly honing his guitar technique or previewing his growing collection of songs to fellow students. It was in Cambridge that Nick would meet Robert Kirby, a Gonville and Caius student who produced Drake’s early demos and orchestrated many of Drake’s most ravishing songs across his first two albums, and it was the walk from his second year digs on Carlyle Road across the Cam that would inspire his most famous and evocative song ‘River Man’. Whilst Drake’s academic reports tended to begrudgingly use the word ‘satisfactory’, the first steps of his musical career seemed highly promising. When he should perhaps have been devoting more energy to his studies, Nick was already gigging in London, leading to a record and management deal with Joe Boyd’s Witchseason imprint. By the time Drake left Cambridge in 1969, his first album Five Leaves Left had already been released and it is this album which mostly fully encapsulates the idea of Drake as a specifically English songwriter. Almost all of the instrumentation, much of it provided by various members of Fairport Convention, is acoustic and Drake’s voice has an unmistakably upper-middle-class lilt to it, something that was very much at odds with the Americanised vocal delivery of many British artists of the same period. In ‘River Man’ one can hear the sun filtering through the trees onto a gently lapping river as Drake ponders the transitory nature of mortality. Part of Drake’s appeal today rests on his ability to represent a somewhat narrow vision of English pastoralism with the lost bohemian ideal of the sixties; as one commentator put it, ‘choristers, dope and Englishness’. Despite his untimely death at the age of twenty six, many listeners are still beguiled by the musical vision that Nick Drake conjured up during his Cambridge days.
The Commission Ali Smith Ali Smith arrived in Cambridge in 1985 on the University of Aberdeen Lucy Scholarship to Newnham College. Shire, published by Full Circle Editions earlier this year, is a homage to a woman Smith met in Cambridge by chance who’d come the same route more than five decades earlier, the noted Spenser scholar, specialist in Medieval and Renaissance studies, and a founding Fellow of Robinson College, Helena Mennie Shire. It also pays tribute to Shire’s friend, the poet and unhappy Girton student, Olive Fraser, to Woolf and Plath (the latter also once a Newnham student) and above all, to the transformative power of language and literature. It has been designed and illustrated by Sarah Wood, who was a student at Robinson in the 1980s and taught by Shire. One thing, one person, one story always leads, generously, to another, and so the book ends with a story about ‘man in a poem written in the late 1500s by Alexander Montgomerie’, a poet whose works Shire wrote about and recontextualised via her revelatory rediscovery of the Scottish pre-Reformation poetic tradition. Shire consists of four stories; fusions of autobiography, biography, fiction and poetry. This is the opening of the third piece, ‘The Commission’. This was back when I was still a Catholic; I know because it began one light spring evening, I think probably in 1988, when I came out of the front door of the church on Hills Road, St Mary and the English Martyrs, ahead of everyone else, straight after Communion without waiting for the final prayers (a ropey kind of Catholic) to meet you where you usually waited for me on the brick wall by the traffic junction. You were talking to a spry-looking elderly lady who turned and watched me come down the steps of the church. The elderly lady was blonde-grey and bright at the eye. She noticed my accent. She asked me where I was from. You introduced me to her and told her we’d met when I’d written a play and you’d directed it, and about how we were planning to take that play to the Edinburgh Fringe later this year. When she spoke again I could hear in her voice that she was Scottish too, probably east coast. Her name was Helena Shire; she’d taught you Medieval Literature last year, when you were in your first year, and she was a Fellow at Robinson, the college you were at. She invited us both to come to lunch there a couple of weeks later. One of the things about Mrs Shire was that she always looked prepared, you say:
our lunch then she took us upstairs to her bright college rooms and gave us coffee. I remember there were books about the Marx Brothers on her coffee table. One of them was a book of stills from their earliest films. I had this same book at home. I had never met anybody else who had this same old American book as I had, or anyone else who might actually want to read about or know about the Marx Brothers. When we were leaving, the lady I’d now met a total of twice and known for about two hours handed me a sealed envelope. Don’t open it until you get home, she said. I did as she told me and opened it when I got back to our student house. Inside there was a cheque for a substantial amount, three hundred pounds I think, though I can’t remember for sure. I remember it was easily enough to live on, food wise, for three or four months. I phoned the lady from the big grey coinbox phone installed in our hall cupboard, which was our landlord’s way of avoiding being left with bills in a student house whose turnover of tenants was high. It’s far too kind. I can’t possibly accept this, I said. Yes you can, she said. Don’t be stupid. And if you phone me again, phone before nine am because I don’t like answering the phone later in the day. I only really answer it between seven am and nine am. Next day I paid the cheque into the bank and you and I went to Sainsbury’s. The money lasted months. About a year later – maybe even sooner – she sent me another cheque, this time through the post. I dialled her number and thumbed the ten pence piece into the slot. Next time only phone me if it’s between seven am and nine am, Mrs Shire said. She sounded quite strict about it. But Mrs Shire, you’ll have to allow me to find a proper way to thank you, I said. Oh, very proper, she said with a laugh. In that laugh, I remember, the meaning of the word proper shifted so that properness meant – what? Something witty, something else.
I think of seeing her walking home across a field next to the College, her coat buttoned up against autumn and her bag dapperly slung across her like a satchel or like a person would wear setting out on a walking holiday in another time. We went for lunch one Sunday soon after. We ate in the refectory in Robinson, surely the coolest college in Cambridge, not just because you went there but also because of its John Piper stained glass in the chapel and the way the college had been built with money donated not by kings or aristocrats but by a Cambridge man who’d made an unexpected fortune selling and repairing bicycles. The lady was charming, interesting, very witty, very funny. She told she had studied, like I had, at Aberdeen as an undergraduate, that she’d been brought up in Aberdeen and had come down here to Cambridge to study at Newnham (which was the college I was now at) fifty-five years ago. She paid for english.cam.ac.uk
7
Scholarly resources for alumni
I
know from speaking to many undergraduates that JSTOR is their favourite place to search for online information. As librarian I confess that I spend more time than I care to think about trying to remind them that there is much more available to them than just JSTOR. I fear my pleas fall on deaf ears. And from one perspective, why not? After all JSTOR is a brilliant online archive of journals, and for anyone wanting to quickly track down some relevant research they will undoubtedly strike gold quickly. And as a bonus the site is so easy to use. The combined efforts of the UL and Development and Alumni Relations (DAR) have now extended access for JSTOR beyond the magic curtain of graduation so that alumni can access material from it should they want to. Instructions on how to set this up are on the DAR site at www.alumni.cam.ac.uk/benefits/ jstor. It would be wonderful for alumni if this were just the beginning of wider access to other institutional subscriptions, but time will tell. In the meantime along with this change in access to subscription databases, remember that there are plenty of other open access initiatives constantly springing up that may also be useful to you, such as the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) www.doaj.org. Libby Tilley
8
9 West Road
Faculty People We are very sad to announce the death of Professor Susan Manning. Sue graduated from Cambridge with a BA in English in 1976, and, while raising a young family, went on to do a PhD on American and Scottish Literature which formed the basis of her first book, The Puritan-Provincial Vision. In 1981, Sue was appointed a research fellow at Newnham College, becoming a College lecturer in 1984 and a Faculty lecturer in 1988. In 1999, she left Cambridge to take up the post of Grierson Professor at the University of Edinburgh where, in 2005, she became the Director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities. Sue submitted the manuscript of Poetics of Character: Transatlantic Encounters 1700-1900 to Cambridge University Press shortly before she died. It will appear in November. Newnham College will be holding a celebratory memorial for Sue on Saturday 9th November at 4pm, where an appeal to fund a Susan Manning Postgraduate Studentship will also be launched. For further details contact: roll@newnham.cam. ac.uk
2013 also saw the early retirement of this newsletter’s previous editor, Kathleen Wheeler. Kathy, who joined the Faculty in 1981, taught and published on Romantic and American literature. She will be much missed. Happier news includes the election of Professor John Kerrigan and Professor Christopher Page as Fellows of the British Academy, and the appointment to the Faculty of five new lecturers – Orietta Da Rold, Sarah Haggarty, Hester Lees-Jeffries, Zoe Svendson and Ross Wilson. They took up their posts in October and introduce themselves here, along with Nicolette Zeeman, who took up her post in October 2012. Orietta Da Rold My research interests are diverse. I primarily work on medieval literature and textual culture c. 1100-1500 with a keen interest on the digital humanities. Chaucer and the rather complicated textual transmission of The Canterbury
Tales introduced me into the world of medieval authors, readers, scribes and book makers. The production, consumption and circulation of medieval texts and books constitutes an important aspect of my research interests. I research how literature is influenced by questions of book production: where did authors read their texts? In which social and cultural network did medieval literature circulate? Who copied literature and for whom? I am particularly keen on exploring how codicology (the study of a book) can help us to answer some of these questions, and thus better understand the rich literary
The significance of the material text, for instance, is integral to the construction of meaning in medieval literature. Books in Chaucer’s works are real physical objects which Chaucer uses to define his stories and his characters. Chaucer keenly tells us that the Clerk owns ‘Twenty bookes, clad in blak or reed‘ (The General Prologue, CT , l. 294), and then again uses the tearing of a page (possibly paper rather than parchment) from Jenkin’s book (The Wyfe of Bath’s Prologue, CT, l. 636) to liberate the Wyfe of Bath from domestic tyranny. Medieval paper and its multifaceted use in medieval books is of special interest to me. The importation of paper in the fourteenth century altered forever handwritten communication in Britain. Chaucer infers that paper was a commonly used material both in book production and in letter writing at the end of the fourteenth century, and other contemporary authors freely refer to paper in their works. My project considers how paper emerged to become such a success story, paving the way to the printing press. After all paper is still a dominant medium today, yet to be displaced by Ipads or Kindles. I am delighted to join the Faculty of English and the Centre for Material Texts at Cambridge. I very much look forward to working with students and colleagues to develop ideas, research and teaching.
culture of medieval Britain. I am also fascinated by how technical innovation can enhance our research experience by inspiring, formulating and answering new research questions. I combined some of these interests in my facsimile edition entitled The Dd Manuscript: A Digital Edition of Cambridge University Library, MS Dd.4.24 of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales (HRIOnLine: 2013). My teaching is inspired by my research trajectory both at undergraduate and postgraduate level, as I believe that students appreciate a variety of methodologies in the study of medieval literature and culture.
Sarah Haggarty I come to Cambridge (or strictly, come back, as I began my academic life as a student at St Catharine’s) from a series of appointments elsewhere: as a Junior Research Fellow at University College, Oxford, a Teaching Fellow at the University of Southampton, and, most recently, a Lecturer at Newcastle University. I was appointed to my current post as Lecturer in English and Fellow of Queens’ College, Cambridge in September 2013 I research and teach about the literature and culture of the eighteenth-century and Romantic periods in Britain, and have specific, longstanding interests in William Blake, the economics of literary production and consumption, material culture, religion, and critical theory. Whilst I was at Newcastle my scholarly interests diversified yet further, to encompass Thomas Bewick and natural history, it-narratives and anthologies, the global eighteenth century, and popular literature, all of which leave a trace in my current research, as well as shaping the lecture and graduate seminar courses I will run for the Faculty. Most decisive for me, intellectually, have undoubtedly been Blake’s poetry, prose, and
art, which have absorbed my attention for over a decade now, and been at the centre of many of my publications: notably a coedited essay collection, Blake and Conflict (2009); several chapters on the early reception history and criticism of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, to be published in a co-authored readers’ guide this coming December; and a monograph, Blake’s Gifts: Poetry and the Politics of Exchange (2010). This last brings into mutual implication Blake’s persistent use of the word gift and its cognates; long eighteenth-century writings about economics, patronage, charity, inspiration, and salvation; and the work of more recent theorists such as Mauss, Bourdieu, and Derrida. The book suggests that the concept of a gift given both freely and obligatorily is central to Blake’s writing, art, and commercial and sociable practices. It also begins to outline a longer intellectual history of gift-giving from archaic Greece to the present day, a topic I plan to return to in the future. At present, however, what began as a side-project—part of an effort to prove that I was not just a one-author pony, something that teaching took care of in any case—has become the topic of my next, projected monograph, about time and genre over the course of a long Romantic century (1740s to 1840s). The side-project was an article about William Cowper and the tempo of epistolary exchange: how did Cowper represent his experiences of the postal service and epistolary etiquette, I wondered, and how did he negotiate the asynchronism of correspondence, especially the nonarrival of a letter? What did it mean in the late eighteenth century to expect a letter, and what did it mean to wait for one? The monograph adds to letters the genres of pocket-books or almanacs, seasonal and graveyard poetry, and occasional essays, asking how each of them mediates between time-frames that scholars have been newly wary of opposing: clock and natural, linear and cyclical, abstract and embodied. If there are historical questions here, about the extent to which full, heterogeneous time, with some transition to modernity, became empty and homogeneous, then there are also problems of method— of how to articulate amid competing temporalities writers’ and readers’ hesitant, improvisatory, and imaginative experiences of present time, forestalling its dispersal into retrospect or chronology. Acts, then, not just reasoned history—if also inevitably, for the moment, the return of that author from whom it seems impossible for me to escape. english.cam.ac.uk
9
Hester Lees-Jeffries The Centre for Material Texts (www. english.cam.ac.uk/cmt) is ‘about’ much more than textual bibliography or ‘history of the book’, although those things certainly fall within its remit and are undertaken by many of its members. My own research engages with the material text in a number of ways: most straightforwardly, I’m a contributing editor to the Oxford Complete Works of James Shirley (Caroline poet and dramatist); in the past I’ve also edited the Elizabethan poet Thomas Watson’s translation of a treatise on water supply by the French engineer and ceramicist Bernard Palissy (more interesting than it sounds), and worked on the Cambridge Works of Ben Jonson and the Works of John Webster (also Cambridge). I’ve also investigated the reception history of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili in sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury England, tracing some of the ways in which this strange Italian romance, first printed in Venice in 1499, influenced English writers and, perhaps, their gardens. I certainly wouldn’t describe myself primarily as a textual critic, however, and my current research project is far more literally material: with the working title Textile Shakespeare, it explores the works of Shakespeare and other early modern writers in relation to textiles, aimed in part at recovering the centrality of fabric (broadly interpreted) in early modern English culture. For Shakespeare and his contemporaries, cloth was ‘something to think with’. So I’m interested (inter alia) in garments (not just costumes) and their construction (especially principles
10
9 West Road
of folding, as in ruffs, or the way a glove might be pieced together, not least as these relate to the processes of making printed books, or actors’ cue-scripts), and in connections between black cloth and black ink. (I’m very concerned not to lose sight of the text in the midst of all these lovely ‘things’.) My research has in general been characterized by interdisciplinarity: my first book, England’s Helicon (Oxford, 2007), arose out of my doctoral work on fountains in early modern literature and culture, and my second, Shakespeare and Memory (Oxford, 2013) draws on ideas about memory from Plato to recent work in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. After completing my BA and MA at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, I came to Cambridge as a Commonwealth Scholar in 1999, and finished my PhD (supervised by Pippa Berry) in 2002. From 2003-6 I was a Research Fellow at Magdalene, and since 2006 I have been a Fellow and College Lecturer at St Catharine’s. I mostly supervise for the Shakespeare and Renaissance papers, and more recently (as a Newton Trust Lecturer) have offered lecture courses on topics including Spenser, feminist approaches to early modern literature, and Shakespeare on film. I have a modest claim to fame as the co-creator of Greater Shakespeare, the ‘Shakespeare Tube Map’ which adorns a very successful range of souvenirs for the RSC: this remains my most tangible contribution to ‘literature and the material text’ in that I am, I think, the only member of the English Faculty to have my name on a tea-towel.
Zoë Svendsen Over the past ten years I’ve combined doctoral and post-doctoral study with professional practice in the theatre. As Director of Cambridge-based performing arts company METIS (www.metisarts. co.uk), I collaborate with other artists to make interdisciplinary projects that utilise small spaces and digital technologies to create immersive audience experiences. These have focussed on contemporary political subjects such as capitalism and poker; climate change; the relation between the real and the virtual. Directing/ writing projects include (currently) World Factory (Arts Admin, New Wolsey Theatre), 3rd Ring Out (UK tour 201011 www.3rdringout.com; TippingPoint Commission Award), and an adaptation of Brecht’s Four Men and a Poker Game (Northern Stage). As dramaturg I work with institutions such as the Young Vic (The Changeling), the National Theatre (Edward II – currently playing) and the RSC (Arden of Faversham – forthcoming). I am also Associate Artist with Company of Angels and the New Wolsey Theatre, a script reader in the literary department at the National Theatre, and an honorary research fellow at Birkbeck’s Centre for Contemporary Theatre. Drawing on my professional theatre experience, my current practice-led performance research focuses on dramaturgy and concepts of ‘rehearsal’ and ‘attention’ as ways of considering politics in performance.
Image below, centre: Vanessa Kirby as Queen Isabella, Bettrys Jones as Prince Edward, and John Heffernan as Edward II in the National Theatre production of Christopher Marlowe's Edward II; photograph by Johan Persson.
Ross Wilson Before returning to Cambridge this year as Lecturer in Criticism, I spent four very happy years in the School of Literature, Drama, and Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, where I was a Lecturer in Literature and sometime Director of Teaching and Chair of Examiners. I studied as an undergraduate at Emmanuel College, took a Master’s degree at UCL, and then returned to Cambridge to do a PhD. I’m especially pleased that my latest return to Cambridge coincides with the publication of my book, Shelley and the Apprehension of Life (CUP), which came out in August. In a fragmentary essay of 1819, Shelley states gnomically that ‘we live on, and in living we lose the apprehension of life’. I imagine my book as an extended reading of that statement, in which I tease out Shelley’s distinction between ‘living on’ and ‘the apprehension of life’. I argue that, for Shelley, poetry is in various ways fundamental to the furthering of the latter, which is always threatened by the deadening effects of the former. As it happens, I’ve been quite interested in the topic of ‘life’ for a while now and I plan to write a book on the persistent idea in the Western tradition of commentary on art that artworks are, in some way, living. That, it should be admitted, is quite an odd idea. So, for instance, when the German critic Walter Benjamin says that ‘the idea of the life and afterlife of artworks should be regarded with an entirely
unmetaphorical objectivity’, does he really, unmetaphorically, mean it? And when Charles Algernon Swinburne scoffs at the utter stupidity of people who don’t believe that books are alive, is he being fair? I hope to be able to answer these questions, along with a range of similar ones. In addition to my book on Shelley, I’ve written on other topics in the poetry of the period from around 1750. For instance, I contributed the chapter on Robert Browning to The Oxford Handbook to Victorian Poetry and I’ve also written on vagueness (not necessarily a term of abuse, I suggest) in John Clare’s poetry. I occasionally review books for the TLS, and enjoyed recently looking (appreciatively) at the fourth edition of the mighty and indispensable Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics for that organ. I enjoy lecturing and am looking forward to offering a number of new courses in the history and theory of literary criticism from 1750. One of these, a history of criticism, while introducing students to some major moments in critical history will also emphasise the ways that criticism is written – its genres, styles, and tones. The hope is to encourage the same degree of attention to critical writing that we (should) pay to creative writing, and thus to scrutinise the distinction between the critical and the creative. The subsidiary hope is that a further future research project on the writing of criticism will have its test bed in this course. Nicolette Zeeman For a long time my research revolved round the strange and iconoclastic fourteenthcentury spiritual and political poem Piers Plowman, and in particular the middle part of the poem, where the dreamer takes an allegorical ‘journey’ into the soul. The study of this part of the poem, with its special focus on psychology, knowledge and desire, meant that much of my work was oriented towards medieval spiritual and intellectual history, theories about the inner workings of the mind and literary theory. One result of this kind of work was that I became very interested in the ways that theories and formulations originally developed in the medieval schools, and articulated in Latin, reappear in lay and vernacular texts; when they do, however, their implications and underlying ideologies are often radically reshaped – not infrequently at the expense of the institutions in which they were originally formulated. This is particularly true in the area of medieval literary theory, but also of medieval medicine, whose implications for
medieval pastoral thought and images of ‘the vices’ have recently been preoccupying me. Since the appearance of my book, Piers Plowman and the Medieval Discourse of Desire (2006), I have published essays on Chaucer, song, grail romance, Piers Plowman, the Roman de la rose, Lydgate, and Latin and vernacular poetic commentary and literary theory. Recently, I have written on Piers Plowman ‘in theory’ and, from a psychoanalytic perspective, dream poetry and the will in devotional thought. Long discontented with the way that intellectual history tends to omit the Middle Ages from histories of scepticism, last year I collaborated in organizing an interdisciplinary conference entitled Uncertain Knowledge in the Middle Ages; we are hoping that the resulting book will contribute to a serious reassessment of the field. My current book, Arts of Disruption. Five Langlandian Histories of Allegory, is about five types of medieval allegorical narrative that exploit an internal structural tension or contradiction in order to excite changed spiritual awareness or understanding. Each of the five narrative traditions addressed in this book is reflected and reworked in Piers Plowman, often at its most difficult junctures. Given that Piers Plowman does not fit easily into the traditional histories of medieval allegorical narrative, I also envisage this book as contributing to an alternative history of ‘disruptive’ medieval allegorical narrative. Much interesting, and often collaborative, work is currently happening at the interface of medieval poetry and music, and I expect to continue working on vernacular lyric, or song. I have also long been interested in medieval art, in particular in issues of idolatry and iconoclasm; another long-term project, therefore, is a study of the body ‘as idol’ in the later Middle Ages, provisionally entitled Caught in the Body. Many of these interests are reflected in my teaching. For the Faculty this year, for instance, I am lecturing on Chaucer as a philosopher of the emotions, later medieval devotional art and literature, Piers Plowman and the ‘arts’ and poetry of love, as well as providing sessions for the Part II Literature and Visual Culture and Lyric papers. At some stage it would be fun to tackle the topic of medieval comedy systematically. To find out what other members of the Faculty have been doing, see www.english. cam.ac.uk/people english.cam.ac.uk
11
What. Where. When. To celebrate the 450th anniversary of the birth of Christopher Marlowe, the Marlowe Society will be staging his complete works across the 2013–14 academic year. The Marlowe Festival begins with Dido, Queen of Carthage, directed by Michael Oakley and performed at Emmanuel College Chapel from the 12 to 15 November followed by a gala performance in the Senate House to launch the Marlowe Festival on Saturday 16 November. 26 November 2013: Dr Rowan Williams will give the fifth annual T.S. Eliot Lecture, ‘Eliot’s Christian Society and the Current Political Crisis’. The lecture is sponsored by the T.S. Eliot Society in association with the Faculty of English and will take place in the Riley Auditorium, Clare College. 10 February 2014: Caryl Phillips will give the Graham Storey Lecture: ‘Literary Celebrity: Richard Avedon, James Baldwin, and Truman Capote.’ The lecture will begin at 5pm in the Lady Mitchell Hall, on the Sidgwick Site. For more up-to-date information on these and other events, visit the Faculty website - www.english.cam.ac.uk - and, depending on your interests, see what’s happening at the Centre for Material Texts or through any of the new Research Groups.
Other news from around Cambridge and the University Thresholds was a project that placed ten poets in nine University of Cambridge Museums and in the University Library. Jackie Kay’s ‘Kettle’s Yard’, Jo Shapcott’s ‘The Polar Museum’, Daljit Nagra’s ‘The Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology’, and all the others, are available at www.thresholds.org.uk. Hilary Mantel received an honorary degree at the University in June. The Institute for Continuing Education has just begun offering an MSt in Creative Writing. Contact Course Director Sarah Burton for more information: www.ice.cam.ac.uk/mst-creativewriting. WordFest continues to attract a wide range of writers to the city. The Winter WordFest takes places on 1st December and includes readings and discussions form Jonathan Coe, Margaret Drabble and John Sutherland. Details of the spring programme will be available soon: www.cambridgewordfest.co.uk. But enough about us... next time we want to include your news, and your views on what you’ve read in these pages. Do you have memories of Susan Manning, Helena Shire, Nick Drake or any other inspirational teacher or fellow student to share? Please write to us at newsletter@english.cam.ac.uk