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Praireal already

May 31, 2012, 1:13 pm
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"Cotswold or Malvern, sun or rain, my hills again"

June 7, 2012, 10:08 am
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Centre for Writing, History and Place

presents







'F.W. Harvey: A Poet for Today'

a talk by Roger Deeks, F.W. Harvey Society

F.W. Harvey (1888-1957), war poet, friend of and collaborator with Ivor Gurney, broadcaster and activist, was known as the Gloucestershire Laureate. This promises to be a fascinating talk on a local poet by Roger Deeks of the F.W.Harvey Society.


Wednesday 13 June

Francis Close Hall

FCH HC205, 5:15 p.m.

Everyone is welcome


The view from Cleeve Common. Image from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cotswolds_Cleeve_Common.jpg <accessed June 7, 2012>
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An existentialist masterpiece

June 15, 2012, 1:45 pm
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Had the Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan made only Uzak [Distant] (2002) his achievement would have been great, even in a country with such a remarkable cinematic history as Turkey. With his 2011 release Bir Zamanlar Anadolu'da [Once Upon a Time in Anatolia], Ceylan has produced his masterpiece.

Critics who have praised Ceylan for alluding to Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West, or for what they see as an extraordinary 'police procedural' movie, are misreading this work. Anatolia is an existentialist inquiry into what it means to be human.

In his essay 'Why Write?' (1948) Jean-Paul Sartre notes that the artistic impulse is motivated by 'the need of feeling that we are essential in relationship with the world'. That impulse works in dialectical opposition with another perception:

With each of our acts, the world reveals to us a new face. But, if we know we are directors of being, we also know that we are not its producers.

Martin Heidegger begins with 'Dasein', what Terry Eagleton calls 'the irreducible "givenness" of human existence' [... the world] has a brute, recalcitrant being of its own which resists our projects, and we exist simply as part of it'.

A murder has been committed; a group of officers, a forensic doctor and the chief of police haul a couple of miserable-looking suspects across rural Anatolia one night to identify where they buried the body. The suspects were too drunk at the time to remember. No motive for the crime is given. The officers, the doctor and their driver have their own preoccupations. One suspect may be covering for another. Human passions  - in all senses of that overused word - dwindle against the empty steppe, take shape by a field, an apple tree, a well, in the village chief's lamplit house, only to disperse into the darkness again. Detective Naci admits that after twenty years in the force, he has no more insight into human motivation than when he began.

At 157 minutes, lacking conventional markers of plot, action, beginning, middle and end, characters that the viewer can 'relate to' (that nostrum of pseudo-criticism), Anatolia may not be the best way to introduce oneself to Ceylan's work. But if you have the chance to see it, on the cinema screen, please don't hestitate - and please post a comment.

Photo: N. B. Ceylan, movie still: http://www.nbcfilm.com/anatolia/photos.php?mid=7 <accessed 15 June 2012>. Image copyright N.B. Ceylan/nbcfilm. Reproduced for educational purposes only. No copyright claim intended.

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The myth of the long academic vacation

June 30, 2012, 12:19 pm
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Classes ended in April and exams were over by mid-May. Our students rarely see us from April to mid-September and naturally they assume that this is down time for us. But the University's life carries on, most of us are still here, and in fact we are busier than we were before teaching recess.

First, when all the marking is in and moderated (the academic equivalent of flight attendants cross-checking doors before take-off), University examination and Award boards take place. Every single mark across every module must be checked and accounted for. Students who have been ill are re-assigned late due dates, all of them different; some students are entitled to reassessments on certain bits of coursework or exams. Those reassessments must be marked. The very few students who have gone AWOL for a year or three tend to wake up just before the Boards and let us know whether they are going to join us again next year. We re-read all the student evaluations for the modules to ensure that our teaching methods and practices are working well, and reports are created. The Awards Board checks the profiles of all graduating students and we check that their marks add up to the correct degree classification (well, okay, the computer calculates, but we have to double-check that the original figures are correct).

That's just the teaching stuff from the past year. Long before the Boards we have to start planning Induction week activities and arrangements. We make recruiting visits to local schools and FE colleges. We work on the recruitment plans for the next cycle. We timetable classes for 12/13 - hundreds of class meetings must be roomed. We plan who is going to teach what class for 12/13, balancing those hours with staff members' other non-teaching activities (such as committee work and external examining), prepare documents for our annual appraisal meetings, and participate in staff development sessions (for example, attending briefings on new university regulations).

Some new modules have been approved for 12/13, and now is the time to design these modules, create a syllabus and reading lists, and preapre essay and exam questions. Existing modules are also updated around now, with staff deciding on set texts. The reading lists go live in the summer, because students, who are also extremely busy people, have to get some reading done before September.

Did I mention that lecturers also do scholarly research? The nature of university life means that extended research tends to get crammed into this ever-shrinking summer period between reassessment in July and Clearing in early August. Time to start speed-reading. Deo gratias that I live only an hour's train ride from the Bodleian Library in Oxford. Travelling to London to use the British Library will not be on this summer. I'd be better off flying to Manchester, as indeed a friend of mine plans to do.

Vacation? Maybe the first week in August.

Students, we miss you. Things get dull when classes end. But please be assured that most of us are not getting into any mischief while you're away.
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Article 20

June 30, 2012, 12:20 pm
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Another reason to read books

July 9, 2012, 12:09 pm
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Last week I ordered books from ABE and Amazon. They arrived packed carefully in layers of compostible cardboard. One book was wrapped in a Budweiser 12-pack box.




The cardboard has now entered the nitrogen cycle:



Books are food for the mind, and if you're smart, you can use them to help you grow vegetables and to save the planet.

You already know that e-reader manufacturers are spying on you, right?

Photos: H. Weeks

 



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The Word in the world

July 15, 2012, 6:00 am
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Last year English speakers across the world marked the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible. William Tyndale of Gloucestershire's translation is one of the greatest works of English literature. Without it, the work of Shakespeare, Milton, Shelley, Dickens, Tennyson, TS Eliot, Henry James, Yeats, Iris Murdoch - the list is endless - would not exist. It also formed the basis of the Douai-Rheims and most authorised versions of the Bible since.

Tyndale's translation was the first printed edition of the Bible, ensuring its distribution throughout Europe and thus helping to disseminate the ideas of the Reformation. Today I found a commemorative £2 coin minted last year that celebrates the printed word. If you look closely you'll see the opening words of the Gospel of John on the right-hand side, and its printing plate, with the characters reversed, on the left.

Humanities staff at the University of Gloucestershire created a blog to reflect on Tyndale's translation and how it shaped English language and culture. I hope you enjoy reading some of it here.

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Alfred Tennyson in Cheltenham

July 23, 2012, 4:26 am
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Most people associate Alfred Tennyson with Lincolnshire, with good reason. The sights and sounds of the North Sea coast at Mablethorpe haunt his poetry - 'Break, break, break/On thy cold grey stones, O Sea'. However, the poet spent lots of time in Cheltenham in the 1830s and 1840s, partly because his widowed mother and his siblings took a house in the town, but also in the hope of improving his health. You can see his house with its plaque in St James's Square.



Photos of house & plaque from Reading Matters http://kimbofo.typepad.com/readingmatters/2009/10/the-house-where-alfred-lord-tennyson-once-lived.html <accessed 23 July 2012>

Tennyson's father, Dr George Tennyson, had 'taken the waters' at Cheltenham Spa like many other eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century health-seekers. By the 1840s, a new and more dangerous procedure had become the rage. Practitioners believed that bad circulation produced chronic disease, and that stimulating the circulation with cold baths, cold wraps (patients swaddled in sheets dipped in icy water and left for several hours) and cold showers, plus plenty of cold water to drink, would allow the body to purge toxins. 'Hydropathic' establishments often appeared in spa towns like Cheltenham and Malvern, not simply for the water supply but because they were social centres; the fashionable could take a 'cure' while enjoying a holiday. Tennyson endured treatment at Prestbury, today a pretty section of east Cheltenham, and at Malvern, a few miles north in Worcestershire. It can't have been fun.



Last weekend,  the Tennyson Society celebrated the poet's local connections with a conference, Tennyson in Cheltenham. We gathered to hear research papers from Professor Roger Ebbatson, Professor Marion Shaw (Emerita, University of Loughborough), Dr Ann Thwaite FRSL, Dr Valerie Purton, and from your Course Leader; and then on to Malvern on the trail of the notorious Dr Gully and his water cure. Judging by his fancy house, this treatment made money. The Malvern Museum has a great display on the water cure and other aspects of local Victorian life.


After that we visited another of this region's architectural beauties, the Camelot-like Eastnor Castle in Herefordshire. Look who was once a distinguished guest.






Photos of Eastnor: H.Weeks. G.F Watts's famous 'moonlight' portrait of Alfred Tennyson dates from about 1859.





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Welcome to all new English Lit students

August 17, 2012, 4:43 am
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I'm glad to tell you that the reading list for the first year (level 4) modules is now up on the Facebook Humanities Applicants Group. If you are not a member, do please request to join. Here is the link:  http://www.facebook.com/groups/humsatglos/
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Welcome, and welcome back

September 16, 2012, 5:05 am
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Voices are returning to Francis Close Hall. The Virginia creeper has turned red. An autumn of reading, learning, hard work and delight is upon us. We love September, the best month of the year. See you all next week.

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Two passings

September 18, 2012, 1:29 am
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This week we read the sad news that the feminist writer Shulamith Firestone had died. Her work is little read now, a neglect that ought to be rectified. Her book The Dialectics of Sex: the Case for Feminist Revolution (London: the Women's Press, 1970) was one of the first works - certainly the most famous in its day - to combine Marxian and feminist analysis.


Just as we have assumed the biological division of the sexes for procreation to be the fundamental 'natural' duality from which grows all further division into classes, so we now assume the sex division to be the root of this basic cultural division as well. The interplay between these two cultural responses, the 'male' Technological Mode and the 'female' Aesthetic Mode, recreates at yet another level the dialectic of the sexes - as well as its superstructure, the class, and the economic-class dialectic.

(Quoted from Maggie Humm, Feminisms: A Reader (London: Harvester, 1988), p. 69)

We'll be reading a little of her work, in tribute, in the EX302 Modern Literary Theory module later this year.

Eva Figes died last week at the age of 80. Her most noted work, Patriarchal Attitudes, also appeared in 1970 - a remarkable year for feminist writing. Figes was perhaps a more controversial and politically active writer than the reserved and private Firestone. However, few remember her work on behalf of authors and their rights, as Tim Jeal notes in The Guardian.



You can read more about these writers in their obituaries at New York Times and the Guardian.


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Our students investigate Cheltenham's cultural delights

September 23, 2012, 10:19 am
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Induction week is over. We combine work and play as best we can, and try to get to know each other a little before classes begin. English Literature students and tutors enjoyed a visit to Cheltenham's gorgeous Everyman Theatre , recently restored to its late-Victorian glory.



 

For an hour and a half, we walked around the theatre, onstage, backstage, under the stage, up in the lighting galley, in the props room and the scene-painting area, the green room, and out onto the roof. The theatre is like a small factory dedicated to producing illusion and fantasy, challenging us to think about the relationship between reality and representation. Dick Whittington is the Christmas panto in 2012. We're going. Oh yes we are!

The visit formed the basis, or at least the inspiration, for the Induction week project, Literary Cheltenham: Writing the Town. Students researched some aspect of the town's cultural and literary life and history, and in a very short time - with a late night on Thursday, I hear - produced some sterling presentations on their findings. In the session I attended, discussion ranged from theatre architecture to Byron, from Lewis Carroll to C. Day Lewis, from Jane Austen to Thomas Hardy, from Stephen Fry to Geoff Dyer, from the local jazz scene to Jilly Cooper. We were impressed not only with the quality and engagement we saw, but with students' poise and confidence. It was a great start to the academic year. Our thanks to all English Literature students who took part.

Photos: H. Weeks
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The Odyssey at the Parabola Arts Centre, Cheltenham

October 5, 2012, 10:15 am
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Robert Macfarlane delivers the Laurie Lee Memorial Lecture at the Cheltenham Lit Festival

October 13, 2012, 2:01 am
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As usual, students and staff are enjoying a fortnight of all things literary, cultural and book-obsessed at the Cheltenham Festival of Literature. Yesterday something really special took place. Robert Macfarlane delivered the annual  Laurie Lee Memorial Lecture, sponsored by the University of Gloucestershire, to a capacity audience at the Forum. Dr Shelley Saguaro, Head of the School of Humanities, introduced Professor Macfarlane's talk on walking the ancient paths and track-ways of Britain.  His long walks helped reconnect him with the landscape, as well as with walker-writers such as Laurie Lee, whose long walk from Gloucestershire to London and then on to Spain to fight in the civil war is described in As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning (1969). Professor Macfarlane's book The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (2012) explores, in all senses, 'the relationship between paths, walking and the imagination'. The autumn weather participated in the talk; thunderclaps and a terrific rainstorm forced him to stop speaking for several minutes. We felt that it was a tribute to his book.



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Victorian Spiritualities

November 6, 2012, 10:00 am
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Many scholars are working across disciplines as well as in their own. The Centre for Bible and Spirituality runs a seminar series each year that brings together theologians, litearture specialists and philosophers. Last week Dr Hilary Weeks presented a seminar paper on Tractarian (Oxford Movement) configurations of Victorain spirituality. Read all about it over at their blog Theoglos.
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All the world's a stage

November 6, 2012, 10:19 am
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Cheltenham is a great town for lovers of the dramatic arts. The School of Humanities has long-standing partnerships with local theatres. Dr Rebecca Bailey, Senior Lecture in English Literature, and her students have been very busy lately on the dramatic front. Here's her report:

This term returning students have benefitted from wonderful local opportunities to enrich their studies. In October, third year students from EX340 had front row seats at the Cheltenham Literary Festival for a conversation with award winning, contemporary playwright, Jez Butterworth. Talking about his new play, The River, currently running at London’s Royal Court Theatre and reflecting on the success of Jerusalem (2009), Butterworth discussed the role of the playwright in contemporary society. A fascinating experience for staff and students alike!
 
 
 
Second year students from the Stages of Drama module have enjoyed theatre trips to the beautifully restored Cheltenham Everyman Theatre to see Oscar Wilde’s delightful comedy The Importance of Being Earnest and Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Our Country’s Good. Both texts are discussed on the module and students relished the chance to see such excellent live performances.



 
Whilst, last week, students from the Renaissance, Restoration, Revolution module ventured to Bristol’s Old Vic for a rare chance to see John Ford’s classic revenge tragedy ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. Produced by the renowned Cheek by Jowl theatre company, this was an electrifying and darkly funny staging which gave a fascinating insight into the early modern imagination.
 
 
 More theatrical delights are in the offing! I understand the English Society is planning a trip to see the terrifying Woman in Black later this month and I’ve heard whispers about a Christmas pantomime extravaganza and a trip to Stratford to see As You Like It in the spring.
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Should your Humanities degree make you 'employable'?

January 19, 2013, 11:25 am
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Just before the Christmas break, research students and staff from the School of Humanities staged a debate on a subject exercising everyone in the HE sector: employability. Rowan Middleton, a postgraduate student of English Literature and Creative Writing, reports.

Panellists Dr Will Large, Dr Martin Randall, Professor Melissa Raphael, Dr Arran Stibbe and Dr Debby Thacker each outlined their position on the topic 'Should the Humanities embrace or resist the pressure to incorporate "employability" into its programmes?" before engaging in a lively debate. Some of the issues and questions raised are as follows.
  • The difficulty of defining 'employability'
  • A ‘wary handshake’ approach which combined ‘employability’ skills with a critical awareness of work.
  • A potential ‘backlash’ arising from the increased use of internships in the workplace.
  • The dangers involved in seeing people as ‘human capital’.
  • The need for humanities students to put more work into improving their CVs.
  • Are the arts ‘parasitic’ on society or a necessary part of society itself?
The debate could have continued, but we ran out of time – now is your chance to join the debate online by leaving a comment below...
Readers, what do you think?




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George Orwell Day

January 21, 2013, 10:42 am
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Placa de George Orwell, Barcelona. Photo: H. Weeks
 
 
President Obama's second inauguration may have pushed the first annual George Orwell Day out of the headlines, but both occasions are remarkable and deserving of our notice. To mark the 63rd anniversary of Orwell' s death, Penguin Books have declared January 21 a day to remember and to re-read Orwell's novels, essays, and journalism. Today's Guardian collects the events in this article. It includes links to the  upcoming season,  The Real George Orwell  and to Orwell's celebrated 'Politics and the English Language'. Do Orwell's five rules of good writing still mean anything in the digital age? You decide.
 
 

 
 
He thought of the telescreen with its never-sleeping ear. They could spy upon you night and day, but if you kept your head you could still outwit them. With all their cleverness they had never mastered the secret of finding out what another human being was thinking.
              from Nineteen-Eighty-Four (1949): 2.7
 
George Orwell (Eric Blair) 
25 June 1903 - 21 January 1950
 


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Ivor Gurney, poet of the Severn and the Somme

February 3, 2013, 10:11 am
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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.
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'Love and Romance in the Song of Songs, the Bible's Only Romance Poem

March 15, 2013, 1:17 pm
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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 21st March, 7.45.
Free to students
£3 entry (for non-students, non-members).
 
 
 
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