Research English At Durham

Imagine yourself immersed in a  beautiful landscape, and being moved by the view before your eyes. To  remember the experience, perhaps you might take a photograph. But while a  photograph can snap a single moment, a still image doesn’t really  reflect the way your original experience unfolded through time. Can  writing achieve something different? Both William Wordsworth and James  Joyce were interested in the problem of how to represent the continuous  stream of conscious experience. Adam James Cuthbert trains his eye on  the poetry and fiction that they produced, and suggests that their  literary efforts can be understood through an analogy with the camera. For more information see https://wp.me/p2iX9Z-7h5

Do you walk on a sidewalk or a pavement? Eat fries or chips? The differences between American and British English can seem trivial at times, but they point to a deeper debate around language and identity that has been fought in the literary sphere as well as in everyday life.  What differentiates American writers from their English literary counterparts? And even looking within America rather than across the Atlantic, since America is a diverse and huge nation comprising many different forms of speech, how can one writer ever hope to represent the ‘American’ language or a quintessential American self?  Molly Becker charts how the American Midwest ended up as the pin at the centre of a complex map of language and identity. This region was memorably treated by writers such as Sinclair Lewis, whose novels of midwestern small town life, such as 1920’s Main Street, came not unproblematically to be seen as representative of the nation in the mainstream. Find out more at READ: Research English At Durham.

There can be few things in life more tragic than the death of a child. Not surprisingly, when this is represented in literature, the deathbed scene will surely be poignant, empathetic and emotionally memorable. But as Morven Cook and Oliver Hancock discuss in conversation together, nineteenth-century and twenty-first-century texts are very different in their approach, moving away from representations of the child as the angel of innocence to a more realistically human portrayal. For more information visit https://readdurhamenglish.wordpress.com/ 

“Vivam!” “I will live.” The final  word of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, proclaiming the poet’s hope that he will  continue to be known through his great work. It’s a prediction that of  course turns out to be true, as we’re still reading and influenced by  the Metamorphoses 2000 years after it was written. In this podcast,  Simona Martorana helps us to appreciate why the cast of mythical  characters that inhabit the Metamorphoses still survive in our  imagination and culture today. For more information, visit https://wp.me/p2iX9Z-7hN

When we say that a theatre  performance ‘brought the house down’, we usually don’t mean that  literally. But in the case of Shakespeare’s play Henry VIII, or as it’s  sometimes known, All is True, the phrase really does apply. In a  performance in 1613 a stray spark from a cannon ignited a fire that  burned the Globe Theatre to the ground. In fact, throughout its  chequered history of performance, this play has suffered or enjoyed a  variety of different climaxes. All of which makes Laura Jayne Wright  (University of Oxford) wonder: just what is the real ending of a work  of drama? For more information see http://readdurhamenglish.wordpress.com

When we listen to classical music, some of us might think we hear a story in the melody - but others will not. Some of us might know about the life of the composer and project their biography onto the piece – but others will listen with ears unbiased by context. The problem is that meaning doesn’t actually live anywhere that can be pinpointed in a particular sound or melody. Novels, on the other hand, tell us a story both about the characters within the text, and the music they listen to. So what happens when we read about music in their fiction? Can novels also help us to imagine the story of a tune? Does it change our interpretation of the novel if we already know the song being referred to and ‘hear’ it in our mind as we read? These are difficult and perhaps ultimately unanswerable questions, but Katie Harling-Lee invites you to try in this composition of words and music. Listeners are advised that this podcast includes some discussion of conflict and violence. Due to copyright restrictions, we’re unable t

Think of a medieval romance, and  you might imagine brave courtly knights dashing to the rescue of women  held captive by monstrous beasts and dragons. But think again. Olivia  Colquitt introduces us to the 14th-century Mélusine story, in which the  beautiful woman is not all that she seems and it is the man who ends up  in need of a rescuer. For more about this podcast, visit http://readdurhamenglish.wordpress.com

Which breakfast cereal do you prefer: Frosted Flakes or Sugar Puffs?  It’s the sort of decision many of us face, bleary eyed, each morning.  But if you watched Netflix’s interactive film, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch,  you might recognise that this is the first choice that viewers have to  make when deciding how the story of the protagonist will unfold. While  the ability to choose what happens next will have seemed like a novel  innovation to some, fictions that hand over power to the reader date  back to the 1960s. Do you want to time-travel back over six decades?  Then hit play and continue to listen to George Cox as he guides us through the labyrinthine history of interactive adventure. Find out more at https://wp.me/p2iX9Z-7GI

"Marley's ghost bothered him  exceedingly.  Every time he resolved within himself, after mature  enquiry, that it was all a dream, his mind flew back again, like a  strong spring released, to its first position, and presented the same  problem to be worked all through, 'Was it a dream or not?." Scrooge's  internal debate accurately reflects the mid-Victorian dichotomy on  Spiritualism, mesmerism and the supernatural. Claire Horton, of  Loughborough University, explains how in Dickens’s time the ability to  see ghosts was linked to mesmerism, a practice that fired the  imagination of the Victorians. For more information about this talk, see http://readdurhamenglish.wordpress.com/podcasts

As a poet, if you cooperate with language you end up ‘saying things  you didn’t know you were thinking.’ So claims the multi-award-winning  poet Rachael Boast, in this interview with Suzannah V. Evans.  But although poetry may emerge from somewhere unconscious, the course  of their conversation draws to the surface Rachael’s life and works.   Read more about this podcast on our blog.

The debate surrounding Britain’s vote to leave the European Union  exposed, among other things, a suspicion of ‘experts.’ How did  intellectuals become alienated figures? And how might citizens and  academics come together in order to better understand the attitudes and  experiences of the other? English lecturer Simon Grimble reflects on why  despite being in the position of an 'intellectual' he failed to engage  with the democratic process and discussion. This podcast was recorded at a workshop organised by Durham University Department of English Studies, in 2017. For more information visit https://readdurhamenglish.wordpress.com/2017/05/16/brexit-and-the-democratic-intellect/

It can seem dauntingly difficult for a young poet to gain a name  and to get published by a respected press or magazine. But that’s  exactly what Will Harris has achieved with his 2017 pamphlet All this is implied, a collection that explores the complexities of being a person of mixed Anglo-Indonesian heritage.  In this conversation with Suzannah V. Evans,  recorded at StAnza poetry festival in 2018, Will shares some advice for  up-and-coming writers, borne of his own experience as an editor and now  established author. They discuss creative writing degrees, the value of  poetry magazines and the challenges and benefits of reading so much of  the work of other poets when learning to be a writer. They also have a  look at trends in contemporary poetry in the UK and the US.   Will reads three poems at the end: ‘Self-Portrait in Front of a Small  Mirror’, ‘Identity’, ‘With Cornflowers’. These come from his collection All This is Implied, published by Ha

On June 9th of 1865, sitting comfortably on his train home from Paris,  Charles Dickens had a brush with death. Workmen on a bridge had failed  to signal that a section of the track was missing. Several of the  carriages plunged into the river below, with Dickens’ own carriage left  teetering at the top. The following year, Dickens would publish his most  haunting ghost story, ‘The Signalman’. Claire Ashworth shows how this  inspired tale is a representation of repressed trauma, that both looks  back to Dickens’ own experiences but also anticipates the work of later  psychological theorists. For more information visit https://wp.me/p2iX9Z-7En

In reality death may be a one-way trip, but literature allows us to  travel imaginatively to and from the afterlife, visiting the ghosts of  the past, often encountering them  in that strange meeting room  represented throughout Western culture as the underworld. Dr Madeleine  Scherer (Warwick University) is our guide to spectral depths from  classical Greece to contemporary Ireland. For more information visit https://readdurhamenglish.wordpress.com/2019/11/01/new-podcast-the-classical-underworld-as-a-memoryscape/

Polly Atkin published her first full length poetry collection, Basic Nest Architecture, in 2017. Like her two pamphlets before it – bone song (2008) and Shadow Dispatches (2013) – Basic Nest Architecture won critical acclaim, including New Writing North’s Andrew Waterhouse Prize. Suzannah V. Evans  chatted with Polly about the roots of her poetic life in places like  Cumbria, where she now lives, as well as within the StAnza poetry  festival, where this interview was recorded.  Read more about this podcast on our blog.

All the world’s a stage – one of Shakespeare’s more famous sayings, and perhaps now almost a cliché. However, Helen Clifford uses the work of Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin to cast a new light on how Shakespeare’s stage and language are indeed bounded to coordinates in the world. His metaphors often ask us to imaginatively look up or down to heaven or hell, and to visualise where different symbolic spaces might exist in the actual theatre – something that different venues and theatre companies have exploited over the centuries. For more details, visit https://wp.me/p2iX9Z-7y0

When she was growing up in rural New Jersey, JL Williams  wrote a play about pirates. Today, Williams is best known as a poet,  but she has continued to sail across various genres, including visual  arts, dance, theatre, and, most recently, opera. Although Williams may  have put pirates long behind her, associations with the sea, and the  dramatic portrayal of a vividly realised world, still run deep in her  poetry, as Suzannah V. Evans discovered when she caught up with her at StAnza poetry festival in 2018. Read more about this podcast at our blog.

An island nation that wants to be involved in the politics of wider  Europe, but also removed from it. A fractious debate over power,  sovereignty, the rule of law. The experiences of emigrants and  immigrants. Not a potted summary of twenty-first century political  events, but rather of the themes raised by the thirteenth-century  Icelandic poem, Egil’s Saga, and the travels and travails of its eponymous hero. Kate Marlow tells a tale that gives us a tantalising glimpse into identity, place and history. Find out more at https://wp.me/p2iX9Z-7xr

Gillian Allnutt is the author of nine collections of poetry, the most recent of which, Wake, was published by Bloodaxe in 2018. Ahead of its publication, Suzannah V. Evans  caught up with Gillian Allnutt at the StAnza Poetry Festival in St  Andrews, to reflect on her career in writing and to hear her read from  some of her earlier work. For more about this podcast, visit our blog. 

Sound is part of our everyday life experience, but it’s hard to understand and define its meaning and workings; sound can feel strange or unfamiliar when we try to put it into words. Professor Helen Abbott, a specialist in nineteenth-century French poetry and music at the University of Birmingham, introduces us to various ways we might grasp on what sound is, especially through its relationship with voice and language. For copyright reasons we are unable to include the music recordings themselves in this podcast. However, you can listen to most of the missing tracks via Helen Abbott's Spotify playlist. For more information visit https://wp.me/p2iX9Z-7qc