TRACK

Oxford and Nottingham

Category: cultural geography (Page 2 of 3)

Suit of Lights? The Berkshire Hank Williams…

February 3, 2016 / / 0 Comments

marshfield mummers

So Shaun what are you actually doing now……

well..that’s an interesting question.

I currently have two PhD proposals submitted to Nottingham University and Loughborough. They both the same and the gist of the proposal is this.

I want to link two separate areas of art research together. Storicodes is an app developed at Nottingham University MRL ( Mixed Reality lab) which is an artier version of the rather banal QR code. It has been successfully deployed through large scale illustration which I was introduced to by Stefan Rennick Egglestone at Nottingham Writers Studio in 2015.

NWS November 2015

At the same time I became aware of the developments in digital embroidery especially through the work at NTU in textile and product design.

I was assured by Prof. Sarah Kettley (now at Edinburgh College of Art)  that there is no theoretical problem in creating lighting embroidery which could then be scanned by the storicode app.

Which Baldrick is where my cunning plan unfolds…

As a dead country star ( yes there a lot around) and folk performer/reviewer I aware that audiences falling and venues closing so would like to help counter that trend. An app that connected both consumers and artists and enabled connections would be great. So here we have a variation on the ‘added content’ idea. By wearing an embroidered suit whilst performing it may be possible for an audience member to focus the scanning app on a part of the design which lit up in sequence as songs played. This would trigger an illustration appearing (songbook cover/graphic novel page) as I performed. The audience member would only access this information at the performance. Thus re-establishing a live venue experience with added value. I keen on the idea of near-field content which limited and not ubiquitous. I have a plan for a museum tree that beams out archives..but that literally another story…

Finally and still in early stages of development I have friends who work with severe autism and it may be possible to develop child-friendly suits that enable communication. Music and rhythm can be the keys to unlocking those previously ‘blocked’ neural spaces. If I can get funding then that a route I keen to go down.

PhD funding is extremely competitive at present and I still hopeful. If I fail ( update July 2016..I did fail but only because I not keen on being a corporate intern which sad ). Then I may look at alternative ways of creating these projects such as Near Now at Broadway or ACE funding or even Crowdsourcing. Who knows.

But that is where I be at right now.

Here some artist’s suits for information….and of course Elvis Costello wrote a song called ‘Suit of Lights’

 

ANAMNESIA: Art, Technology and Modernism in the Thames Valley 1850-1950

June 3, 2015 / / 0 Comments

Back to where I started..literally…..first thought best thought?

amanesia

This explains where my ‘art research’ has gone…
It not classic ‘design’ art research any more it lies somewhere along the Iain Sinclair/W.G.Sebald/Patrick Keiller line. i.e. A travelogue based exploration of the historic impact of technology on a specific geographical region. I am now working exclusively on this as my ‘written’ output alongside my poetry.

I no longer consider myself to be exclusively in the fine art ‘drawing research’ area.

I am now seeking full or part-funding or a receptive institution to help develop this project.

And here my first mention of ANAMNESIA in 2010:

 

Revisiting ‘Deep Mapping’

April 13, 2015 / / 0 Comments

This post was originally posted on this blog in 2011!

Interesting how much of it now relevant again…

The following passage was taken from
“DEEP MAPPING:” A brief Introduction by Iain Biggs.
Mapping Spectral Traces

The concerns of deep mapping in its visual and performing arts manifestations are best indicated by Clifford McLucas text There are ten things that I can say about these deep maps. For McLucas deep maps appear in the interaction between three basic elements: graphic or freestanding visual work; a time-based component film, video, performance, or music; and a database or archival system that remains open and unfinished. He sees the process of deep mapping as challenging our presupposition that knowledge is the specialist domain of professional experts and wants it to bring together “the amateur and the professional, the artist and the scientist, the official and the unofficial, the national and the local.McLucas also argues that deep maps should be a politicized, passionate, and partisan evocation of a site, involving negotiation and contestation over who and what is represented and how.Deep mappings should give rise to debate about the documentation and portrayal of people and places and be unstable, fragile, and temporaryconversations not statements. Mapping Spectral Traces 2010.

Clifford McLucas

http://cliffordmclucas.info/

 

 

my post from 2010

I am intending to rewrite my initial proposal in light of research I have done.

From a starting point of a ‘portfolio’ piece which showcased work using GPS and some form of app/website I have moved to a much more general approach drawing on the whole Deep Mapping idea. Indeed the closest fit to my initial aspirations of a ‘regional focus’ has been my recent discovery of the whole ‘deep mapping’ area.

I had already seen Patrick Keiller’s work and especially Robinson in Ruins which came out recently chimed with my own concerns. This has linked with the Pearson and McLucas definitions of Deep Mapping as a framework for proceeding. Indeed so much so that I am going to rewrite my initial proposal to acomodate this shift in focus. Although keen on social interaction and the kind of idea expounded in the ‘Context Providers’ book I am putting this on back burner until after M.A. completed and may form part of a larger package to take to Didcot Cornerstone Gallery (at present a gallery exposition is no longer a focus).

Deep Mapping is a complex idea and has complex outputs so the rest of this RPT M.A. is very much concerned with fitting the range of inputs into a manageable ‘online’ outcome as well as producing a range of discipline specific outcomes. I am no longer as focused on a specific app although it may still be produced.

I am also looking at merging google maps and a traditional website (which can be accessed through responsive or purposefully ‘mobilised’ websites).

To me the technology is simply a frame or container for the subject matter which is my main interest. Contemporary developments in hand held devices affords greater on location interaction but this does not now seem as important to me as providing a coherent interface for my wide ranging concerns.

It is a tall order to bring together my work in disparate fields and I am aware that there will be problems and that indeed the whole project may fall over through to many inputs but that is the most interesting aspect of this kind of work for me and also something I can honestly reflect upon as being genuine research in a fairly new area.

As Cliff McLucas stated

  • “To investigate ways of dealing with landscape – in what the concept has come to stand for, in its permutations in various media (painting, photography, poetry, performance … ), in its disciplinary field of landscape studies (incorporating historical and cultural geography, art history, archaeology), in its association with contemporary notions of place and identity, in its implied cultural politics”

 

and I also influenced by Mike Pearson’s definition

  • ” deep mapping……..takes region as its optic, acknowledging the effective ties between people and place”.

To me this social, political and people-centered focus is at the heart of my enquiry.

Leverhulme bid- Proposal

December 5, 2014 / / 0 Comments

Here is the sadly failed application proposal but plenty of pointers to a future PhD proposal to work with…especially in regard to the mountain of Victorian art and railway literature in my studio….
[scribd id=249245353 key=key-emjYnJ5H6G6eFq1lsuLr mode=scroll]

Patrick Keiller Bibliography

September 12, 2011 / / 0 Comments

 

Patrick Keiller bibliography

Keiller, Patrick:”Imaging” in Matthew Beaumont and Gregory Dart (eds): Restless Cities (London: Verso, 2010), pp.139-154.

Keiller, Patrick: “Landscape and Cinematography”, Cultural Geographies, Vol. 16, No. 3, 2009, pp.409-414; http://cgj.sagepub.com/cgi/pdf_extract/16/3/409

Keiller, Patrick: “Popular Science” in Anthony Kiendl (ed.): Informal Architectures: Space and Contemporary Culture (London: Black Dog, 2008), pp. 32-37.

Keiller, Patrick: “Urban Space and Early Film” in Andrew Webber and Emma Wilson (eds): Cities in Transition: The Moving Image and the Modern Metropolis (London, New York: Wallflower, 2008), pp. 29-39.

Unwin, Richard: review of The City of the Future, BFI Southbank Gallery, in Frieze 114, April 2008; http://www.frieze.com/issue/review/patrick_keiller

Dillon, Brian: review of The City of the Future, BFI Southbank Gallery, London in Modern Painters, March 2008, pp.84-85.

Keiller, Patrick: “Phantom Rides: The Railway and Early Film” in Matthew Beaumont, Michael Freeman (eds): The Railway and Modernity: Time, Space, and the Machine Ensemble (Oxford etc: Peter Lang, 2008), pp.69-84.

Hanks, Robert: review of The City of the Future in The Independent Extra, 22 November 2007, pp.14-15; http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/reviews/a-cinematic-show-puts-a-new-twist-on-historical-perception-765004.html

Keiller, Patrick: feature article in Time Out, 21 November 2007, p.67; http://www.timeout.com/film/features/show-feature/3841/patrick-keiller-interview.html

Keiller, Patrick:”Phantom Rides”, The Guardian Review, 10 November 2007, p.14; http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2007/nov/10/2

Hardingham, Samantha and Rattenbury, Kester: Supercrit #1: Cedric Price Potteries Thinkbelt (Abingdon: Routledge 2007), pp.110-111.

Walker, Ian: So Exotic, So Homemade: Surrealism, Englishness and Documentary Photography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), pp.160-186.

Keiller, Patrick: “Londres, Bombay” in Vertigo Vol. 3 No. 6 Summer 2007, pp. 38-39, 42-23.

Keiller, Patrick: “Film as Spatial Critique” in Mark Dorrian, Murray Fraser, Jonathan Hill, Jane Rendell (eds): Critical Architecture (London, New York: Routledge, 2007), pp.115-123.

Keiller, Patrick: ‘The City of the Future’ in Alan Burton, Laraine Porter (eds): Picture Perfect: Landscape, Place and Travel in British Cinema before 1930 (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 2007), pp.104-112, abridged at http://www.bftv.ac.uk/newslet/0304p3.htm

Anderson, Jason: “London Mapping: Patrick Keiller’s Peripatetic Hybrids”, interview with Patrick Keiller, Cinema Scope 26, 2006.

Keiller, Patrick:”Coal Hopper, Nine Elms Lane, ” in Iain Sinclair (ed): London: City of Disappearances (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2006), pp.292-295.

Burke, Andrew: “Nation, Landscape and Nostalgia in Patrick Keiller’s Robinson in Space”, Historical Materialism 14:1, 2006, pp.3-29; http://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/brill/hm/2006/00000014/00000001

Connarty, Jane; Lanyon, Josephine and others: Ghosting: The Role of the Archive within Contemporary Artists’ Film and Video (Bristol: Picture This, 2006), pp.106-109.

Mazierska, Ewa & Rascaroli, Laura: Crossing New Europe: Postmodern Travel and the European Road Movie (London: Wallflower, 2006), pp.57-78.

Dave, Paul: Visions of England: Class and Culture in Contemporary Cinema (Oxford, New York: Berg, 2006), pp.119-140.

Making History: Art and Documentary in Britain from 1929 to Now (Liverpool: Tate Liverpool, 2006), pp.38, 46-47.

Pile, Steve: Real Cities: Modernity, Space and the Phantasmagorias of City Life (London: Sage, 2005), pp.4-12.

Keiller, Patrick: “Motion Pictures”, The Guardian Review, 21 May 2005, pp.18-19; http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2005/may/21/2

House, John & Keiller, Patrick: “River of Dreams”, Tate Etc. 3 (Spring 2005), pp.100-107; http://www.tate.org.uk/tateetc/issue3/riverofdreams.htm

Demorgon, Laurence: “Robinson, pélerin du monde global”, “Architecture d’aujourdhui“350, January-February 2005, pp.24-25.

Keiller, Patrick: “Tram Rides and Other Virtual Landscapes” in Simon Popple, Patrick Russell, Vanessa Toulmin (eds): The Lost World of Mitchell & Kenyon: Edwardian Britain on Film, (London: BFI, 2004), pp.191-200.

Mayer, Robert: “Not Adaptation but Drifting : Patrick Keiller, Daniel Defoe, and the Relationship between Film and Literature”, Eighteenth-Century Fiction 16:4, July 2004, pp.803-827; http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1721&context=ecf

Misselwitz, Philipp: “Reichtmer im Zerfall”, interview with Patrick Keiller in Philipp Oswalt (ed): Schrumpfende Städte, (Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2004), pp.554-559; English edition 2006, pp.554-559.

Keiller, Patrick: ‘The City of the Future’ in City 7:3, November 2003, pp.376-386.

Dillon, Brian: ‘London Calling’, interview with Patrick Keiller in Frieze 78, October 2003, pp.78-81 http://www.frieze.com/issue/article/london_calling/

O’Pray, Michael: Avant-Garde Film: Forms, Themes and Passions (London, New York: Wallflower, 2003), pp.107-118.

Keiller, Patrick: ‘London in the Early 1990s’ in Andrew Gibson and Joe Kerr (eds): London from Punk to Blair (London: Reaktion, 2003), pp.353-361 and AA Files 49: London: Postcolonial City (London: Architectural Association, 2003), pp.20-24.

Keiller, Patrick: ‘London-Rochester-London’ in Cedric Price and others: Re:CP (Basel, Boston, Berlin: Birkhäuser, 2003), pp.168-185.

O’Neill, Eithne: London and Robinson in Space review in Positif 509/510 (July/August 2003), p.138.

Keiller, Patrick: ‘The Poetic Experience of Townscape and Landscape’ and ‘Atmosphere, Palimpsest and Other Interpretations of Landscape’ reprinted in Nina Danino & Michael Mazière (eds): The Undercut Reader (London, New York: Wallflower, 2003), pp.75-83, 204-208.

Keiller, Patrick: ‘Sexual Ambiguity and Automotive Engineering’ in Peter Wollen and Joe Kerr (eds): Autopia (London: Reaktion, 2002), pp.342-353.

Evans, Gareth: The Dilapidated Dwelling review in Time Out (8-15 May 2002); http://www.timeout.com/film/reviews/65464/the-dilapidated-dwelling.html

Keiller, Patrick: ‘Architectural Cinematography’ in Kester Rattenbury (ed): This Is Not Architecture (London, New York: Routledge, 2002), pp.37-44.

Martin-Jones, David: interview with Patrick Keiller, Journal of Popular British Cinema, 5-2002, pp.123-132.

Keiller, Patrick: The Robinson Institute, eBook in series Species of Spaces for diffusion.org.uk, 2002; http://diffusion.org.uk/?p=62

Keiller, Patrick: ‘Port Statistics’ in Iain Borden, Joe Kerr, Jane Rendell, Alicia Pivaro (eds): The Unknown City (Cambridge MA, London: MIT, 2001), pp.442-458.

Eisner, Ken: The Dilapidated Dwelling review in Variety, December 18-31, 2000; http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117796949.html?categoryid=31&cs=1

Bruzzi, Stella: New Documentary: a critical introduction (London: Routledge, 2000), pp.99-123.

Dave, Paul: ‘Representations of Capitalism, History and Nation in the Work of Patrick Keiller’, in Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson (eds): British Cinema, Past and Present (London: Routledge, 2000), pp.339-351.

Smith, Claire: ‘New Art Cinema in the 90s’, in Robert Murphy (ed): British Cinema in the ’90s (London: BFI, 2000), pp.145-155.

Keiller, Patrick: ‘Popular Science’, in Landscape (London: British Council, 2000), pp.60-67.

Kerr, Joe: interview with Patrick Keiller in Bob Fear (ed): Architecture + Film II, Architectural Design, 70:1, January 2000, pp.82-85.

Keiller, Patrick: Robinson in Space and a Conversation with Patrick Wright (London: Reaktion Books, 1999).

Richard Wentworth’s Thinking Aloud (London: National Touring Exhibitions, 1998), p.33.

Keiller, Patrick: ‘The Dilapidated Dwelling’ in Sarah Wigglesworth and Jeremy Till (eds): The Everyday and Architecture, Architectural Design 68:7-8, 1998, pp.22-27.

Dave, Paul: ‘The Bourgeois Paradigm and Heritage Cinema’, New Left Review 224, July-August 1997, pp.111-126; http://www.newleftreview.org/?view=1914

Barwell, Claire: interview with Patrick Keiller, Pix 2, 1997, pp.158-165.

Sinclair, Iain: Lights Out For the Territory (London: Granta, 1997), pp.306-317.

Sorensen, Colin: interview with Patrick Keiller, London on Film (London: Museum of London, 1996), pp.160-161.

Daniels, Stephen: “Paris Envy: Patrick Keiller’s London“, History Workshop Journal, 40:1, 1995, pp.220-222; http://hwj.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/pdf_extract/40/1/220

Keiller, Patrick: ‘The Tourist Poem’, Umeni XLIII:1-2, UDU AVCR, Prague, 1995, pp.45-47.

Price, Anna: interview with Patrick Keiller, Artifice 1, 1994, pp.26-37.

Keiller, Patrick: ‘The Visible Surface’, Sight and Sound, November 1994, p.35.

Keiller, Patrick: 1994 Berlin Film Festival programme text for London, reprinted as ‘Filming London Obliquely’, Regenerating Cities 7, 1994, pp.54-55.

Sinclair, Iain: ‘Necropolis of Fretful Ghosts’, Sight and Sound, June 1994, pp.12-15.

The British Art Show 1990 (London: South Bank Centre, 1990), pp.76-77, 134.

Keiller, Patrick: ‘Modern Architecture in Czechoslovakia 1919-1939’, published as ‘Czech Perspective’, Building Design, 13 March 1987, pp.22-25.

O’Pray, Michael: review of Norwood, Monthly Film Bulletin, October 1984, pp.322-323.

Keiller, Patrick: ‘Atmosphere, Palimpsest and Other Interpretations of Landscape’, in Undercut 7-8, 1983, pp.125-129.

Keiller, Patrick: ‘The Poetic Experience of Townscape and Landscape’, in Undercut 3-4, 1982, pp.42-48.

see also:

http://www.rca.ac.uk/patrickkeiller

http://thefutureoflandscape.wordpress.com

 

What is Rural Symposium: report

March 29, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Photo: Nick May from Food Chain Exhibition

These observations base on notes taken on day. Thoroughly enjoyable but as notes reveal patchy.

Full website here : http://www.thecollaborators.org.uk/What_is_Rural.html

Steve Messam: Site-specific public artist
First speaker was standing in for Ian Hunter from Littoral.

Site-specific ‘sculpture’ mostly financed by business and aimed at the spectacular rather than the sublime.
To me suffered from the ’roundabout art’ disease that aflicts much ‘public art’ i.e. it grand and spectacular bit like a firework display to draw attention to itself and satisfy the ‘sponsors’ but as actual art almost non-existent. Mr. Messam was genuinely concerned with local issues and genuinely believes he not only drawing down significant wads of sponsorship but also highlighting important issues. At time there some depth as in his sheep pen covered in hides but mostly it looked like big buck = big bang art and the actual art almost irrelevant…i.e. why not fireworks and be done with it?

EMMA HEALD: Advisor for Natural England
Good overview of Natural England remit and challenges in current economic climate. Little direct relationship to arts it seemed.

LIZ and PAUL GENEVER: Farmer
Excellent grounded non-academic highlighting of real issues affecting modern farming. Learnt something…

TALKSCAPE exhibition: KATE GENEVER and ADAM O’MEARA

Kate had been instrumental in bringing symposium together drawing on twin background in farming and the arts.

I found actual show confusing and the noble aspiration of rehanging it did not really help give a sense of artists in it. I reserve judgement and Adam’s drawings appeared interesting.


JOHN PLOWMAN: DAVID GILBERT: ROSALIND STODDART

Three speakers round table. Not very enlightening and revealed more about the scarcity of funding post ACE.
Plowman safely berthed in academia and as with all three there an almost missionary zeal to ‘bring’ art to the poor downtrodden masses or as in Norfolk these days Bankers in 4X4s. None seemed to exist in real world at all compared to the farmer.

Indeed it could be argued that projects like Beacon are actually part of the problem not the solution for rural communities if they actually still exist. The proportion of residents actually living in coastal holiday towns and villages is below 40%. No number of art interventions or decorative arts galleries can hide that. I was irritated by the religious opportunism of ‘metropolitan’ minds who without hesitation believe ‘rural’ people need a site-specific application or another dubious alter-modern happening. I was not the only one who felt this.

Top-down not bottom up attitudes despite the conviction by the instigators/curators (and funding recipients) that they doing just that…naive in extreme and very Old Labour approach..i.e. throw culture at masses they will like it…..now as empty as the towns they tried to save……

Sarcastic footnote: Stoddart calls herself an INDEPENDENT CULTURAL ENGINEER..this cuts no ice with me and just shows the ego inflation prevelent these days in the sector…..curators ten a penny so I suppose this cultural re-branding..god help us

DAVID WALKER-BARKER: Artist

Old-school approach (Royal College) actually made beautiful artworks and had a significant practice founded on genuine knowledge and a historic sense of place and history. Note I have to highlight this as this kind of work few and far between these days!

TIM NEAL: Anthropologist (Wildsite and Tourism)
Wild card literally and at time seemed a little out of place but in hindsght the area which actually provoked most interest for me.
Instead of art practice buffoonery we had some fairly in depth analysis of what actually made people consider places as ‘rural idylls’ from Samuel Palmer on. His observations of English in France chimed perfectly with my experience on the ground in NORTH NORFOLK.
The images of ‘rural myth’ created by artists are along with curators above seriously implicated in the destruction of viable healthy rural communities. To wander through a pitch dark rural idyll as second home owners and holiday properties lay empty is to experience first-hand the effect of rural gentrification. Abstract pontificating or arty musings do not hide this desperate state of affairs.

The rural landscape is an increasingly depopulated picture-postcard manned by the modern swains i.e. transient workers and illegal immigrants. They if employed in something more than service industries man increasingly ruthless mass food production facilities which hidden from the Range-Rovers gaze by screens of trees.

NICK MAY: FOOD CHAIN EXHIBITION

The following exhibition of farm workers in 21st century brilliantly spotlighted this and suggested that the true artform of the modern era is documentary photography as nothing else is keeping pace with the destruction of rural values.

http://www.skegnessinternational.com/nick-may.html

The Tuning of Place

January 11, 2011 / / 0 Comments

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12154

The Tuning of Place
Sociable Spaces and Pervasive Digital Media
Richard Coyne

Table of Contents and Sample Chapters

How do pervasive digital devices—smartphones,  iPods, GPS navigation systems, and cameras, among others—influence the way we use spaces? In The Tuning of Place, Richard Coyne argues that these ubiquitous devices and the networks that support them become the means of making incremental adjustments within spaces—of tuning place. Pervasive media help us formulate a sense of place, writes Coyne, through their capacity to introduce small changes, in the same way that tuning a musical instrument invokes the subtle process of recalibration. Places are inhabited spaces, populated by people, their concerns, memories, stories, conversations, encounters, and artifacts. The tuning of place—whereby people use their devices in their interactions with one another—is also a tuning of social relations.

The range of ubiquity is vast—from the familiar phones and handheld devices through RFID tags, smart badges, dynamic signage, microprocessors in cars and kitchen appliances, wearable computing, and prosthetics, to devices still in development. Rather than catalog achievements and predictions, Coyne offers a theoretical framework for discussing pervasive media that can inform developers, designers, and users as they contemplate interventions into the environment. Processes of tuning can lead to consideration of themes highly relevant to pervasive computing: intervention, calibration, wedges, habits, rhythm, tags, taps, tactics, thresholds, aggregation, noise, and interference.

About the Author

Richard Coyne is Professor and Chair of Architectural Computing, University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Designing Information Technology in the Postmodern Age: From Method to Metaphor (1995), Technoromanticism: Digital Narrative, Holism, and the Romance of the Real (2001), and Cornucopia Limited: Design and Dissent on the Internet (2005), all published by the MIT Press.

from website

http://ace.caad.ed.ac.uk/richard/

Tom Pow’s Dying Villages project

January 10, 2011 / / 0 Comments

http://www.dyingvillages.com/index2.php

 

By 2030 it is estimated that Europe will have lost one third of its population. It is already an ageing population with a low birthrate. The effect of this demographic change – the greatest since the Black Death – will be felt most acutely in rural areas. In 2007,  I received a Creative Scotland Award from the Scottish Arts Council for a project aimed at responding in poetry and prose to the social, ecological and cultural effects of demographic changes on villages in Europe.

In 2007 and 2008,  I made trips to affected areas in Spain, France, Germany, Poland, Bulgaria, Russia and Greece. The Dying Village website reflects these trips in sound, image, interviews and artworks.

Dying Villages is an ongoing project. Related works of poetry and prose will appear elsewhere.

Tom Pow

Regional Literary Cutures and Modernism: University of Nottingham Conference 2011

November 24, 2010 / / 0 Comments

http://www.humanitiescentral.com/regional-literary-cultures-modernism/

Paper sub­mis­sions of 20 min­utes are invited for this one-day post­grad­u­ate con­fer­ence hosted by the Cen­tre for Regional Lit­er­a­ture and Cul­ture at the Uni­ver­sity of Not­ting­ham on 14 April 2011. The event will be fol­lowed by a one-day sym­po­sium of invited speak­ers,  includ­ing Prof. Patrick McGuin­ness (Uni­ver­sity of Oxford), Prof. Andrew Thacker (De Mont­fort Uni­ver­sity), and Dr Nadine Holdsworth (Uni­ver­sity of Warwick).

Recent crit­i­cal work on region­al­ism in lit­er­a­ture has sought to reassess both its scope and its con­tin­u­ing impor­tance over the course of the twen­ti­eth and twenty-first cen­turies. For instance, Scott Her­ring has recently empha­sised ‘the impor­tance of local­ity to modernism’s world-imaginary’, echo­ing Ray­mond Williams’s call for the equa­tion between mod­ernism and the met­ro­pol­i­tan to be reassessed.

This col­lo­ca­tion of local­ity and moder­nity can be seen in the fic­tions of, among oth­ers, D.H. Lawrence, Storm Jame­son, George Moore, Caradoc Evans, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Lewis Gras­sic Gib­bon. Even James Joyce’s Ulysses derives its cos­mo­log­i­cal uni­ver­sal­ism from a micro­scopic atten­tion to the local details of its provin­cial urban set­ting. In the post-war period, the cur­rency of regional themes in British fic­tion is appar­ent in nov­els by writ­ers like Alan Sil­li­toe, Muriel Spark, Ray­mond Williams, Gra­ham Swift, Pat Barker, and Jim Crace.

A sim­i­lar rich­ness of inter­ests in ideas of place and intra-national iden­ti­ties can be found in the late mod­ernist poetry of Hugh Mac­Di­armid, David Jones, and Basil Bunting, and Patrick Kavanagh’s advo­cacy of the ‘poetry of the parish’ has also had a wide and last­ing influ­ence. Regional themes, set­tings, and dialects strongly colour the work of Ted Hughes, R.S. Thomas, George Mackay Brown, Paul Mul­doon, Gillian Clarke, and Roy Fisher, amongst many oth­ers. In the work of a younger gen­er­a­tion of poets and nov­el­ists there is a strik­ing con­ver­gence between local expe­ri­ence and the pres­sure of inter­na­tional con­texts and relations.

British and Irish drama saw a resur­gence of local pride at the start of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury. From 1904, the act­ing and play-writing ener­gies of Dublin’s Abbey The­atre were emu­lated by a num­ber of other regional reper­tory the­atres in Man­ches­ter, Birm­ing­ham, Liv­er­pool, Glas­gow, and Belfast. And in recent years, com­pa­nies includ­ing The­atre Work­shop, Druid, Knee­high, and Field Day have attempted to stage work that speaks to audi­ences away from the usual cen­tres of the­atri­cal power and influence.

It will be the pur­pose of this sym­po­sium to explore the vari­ety and diver­sity of expres­sions given to region­al­ism in British and Irish lit­er­a­ture and cul­ture dur­ing the twen­ti­eth and twenty-first cen­turies, with a par­tic­u­lar empha­sis upon mod­ernism and its after-effects. Con­trib­u­tors are also encour­aged to con­sider the inter­sec­tions and con­ver­sa­tions that occur between region­al­ism, nation­al­ism, inter­na­tion­al­ism, and cosmopolitanism.

Con­firmed Keynote Speak­ers:
Prof. Luke Gib­bons (NUI Maynooth)
Prof. Dominic Head (Uni­ver­sity of Nottingham)

We would there­fore wel­come papers on a wide vari­ety of themes and top­ics, such as:
• The loca­tions of mod­ernism
• Regional lit­er­ary geo­gra­phies
• Region­al­ism, form, and lan­guage
• Arch­i­pel­agic rela­tions and the cul­tures of the ‘Four Nations’
• Gen­der and regional iden­tity
• Writ­ing, read­ing, and the poet­ics of place
• Region­al­ism and glob­al­i­sa­tion
• The pol­i­tics of regional cul­tures
• Crit­i­cal genealo­gies of ‘region­al­ism’
• Map­ping and cul­tural car­togra­phies
• The phe­nom­e­nol­ogy of the ‘local’
• ‘Parochial­ism’ and ‘provin­cial­ism’ in con­tem­po­rary writing

Please sub­mit an abstract of 300 words to neal.alexander@nottingham.ac.uk by 28th Jan­u­ary 2011, ensur­ing that you include the fol­low­ing details: your name; your affil­i­a­tion; your email address; the title of your paper.

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Related Posts

* Styl­is­tics across disciplines
* Bridg­ing the Gaps, Mind­ing the Context
* Spaces of Alter­ity: Con­cep­tu­al­is­ing Counter-Hegemonic Sites, Prac­tices and Narratives
* Lan­guage, Lit­er­a­ture and Cul­tural Poli­cies – Cen­tres and (Ex-) Centricities

Regional Modernism?

November 24, 2010 / / 0 Comments

Accessed 24.11.2010
http://gradworks.umi.com/32/72/3272054.html

Regional modernism: The vanishing landscape in American literature and culture, 1896–1952
(Sarah Orne Jewett,  Edith Wharton, Willa Cather, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison)

by Shimotakahara, Leslie, PhD, BROWN UNIVERSITY, 2007, 0 pages; 3272054

Abstract: For traditional literary criticism, the term ‘Regional Modernism’ no doubt represents a contradiction in terms. By idealizing communities tied to the soil, regional fiction gratifies the tastes of urban middle-class readerships that could still imagine their origins in this kind of locale at the fin-de-siècle. Modernism, by sharp contrast, addresses an international readership detached from any soil or homeland. Coining the term ‘regional modernism’ is my way of suggesting that, during the early twentieth century, major American novelists appropriated the language of regionalism and reworked it by means of aesthetic strategies we now characterize as modernist. Modernism simultaneously offers the reader a sense of experience specific to an American place and yet renders that place a phantasm that an individual carries within his consciousness. Beginning with Jewett’s The Country of the Pointed Firs, I argue that this famous regional novel acknowledges a problem in representing a place of origins: as rural New England is flooded by mass culture, it loses its semblance as a unique folk culture and thus its ability to designate origins. The next chapter considers how Wharton’s The House of Mirth imagines a high culture distinct and apart from the economy as a means of resurrecting the culture of ‘Old New York’ that mass culture effaced. Turning to The Professor’s House, I show how Cather seeks a form of aesthetic compensation for the way that conspicuous consumption disfigures the Midwest. She creates a purely imaginary landscape that her protagonist contains within his head as a fantasy of the primitive origins of universal man. My next chapter proposes that Faulkner appropriates this method in Absalom! Absalom! to represent the South as the white nation’s authentic identity. His fiction collaborates with a sociological school called the ‘New Regionalism’ in mystifying the South’s economic history of slave labor and remaking it as an organic folk culture. The dissertation concludes by asking what an African-American writer has to do to write as a modernist. I argue that Invisible Man seizes on cosmopolitan modernism’s stereotype of the African as nature incarnate and reshapes it into a black subject characterized by unique individuality.

Advisor: Armstrong, Nancy
School: BROWN UNIVERSITY
Source: DAI-A 68/07, p. 2947, Jan 2008
Source Type: DISSERTATION
Subjects: American literature
Publication Number: 3272054

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MFS Modern Fiction Studies
Volume 55, Number 1, Spring 2009

E-ISSN: 1080-658X Print ISSN: 0026-7724

DOI: 10.1353/mfs.0.1596
Afterword:
Regional Modernism and Transnational Regionalism
Marjorie Pryse

At the 2002 Modernist Studies Association Fourth Annual Conference, several of us participated in a seminar titled “Regionalism and the Modern.”1 In the discussion that revolved around previously shared position papers, seminar participants considered the idea that regionalism allows modernism to be understood as a crisis of definition. The seminar developed the idea of modernism as a process of layering—in space, of regions; in the social world, of identities; and in narrative, of time—a sedimentation that excavates the regionalist bedrock of the modern text. Earlier in the conference we had listened to Simon Gikandi note (in his plenary talk “Africa and the Epiphany of Modernism”) that “the process of developing categories in modernity depends on the purification of categories.” He argued that modernism derives its energy from the “other,” but that the institutions of modernism “separate out and ‘tame’ the sources” of that very energy, as when museums of modern art categorize African art as “primitive” instead of as integral to the history of art. For Gikandi, the region of Africa creates an epiphany of “what the ‘other’ is for the moderns.” Modernism becomes transnational when Gikandi explores the relationship between regional—African—art and modernism. At the same time, modernism becomes regional, and the challenge to modernism becomes one of including heterogeneity and global regions in its categories. [End Page 189]

Accessed: 24.11.2010
http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/modern_fiction_studies/v055/55.1.pryse.html

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