Abstracts

Siân Adiseshiah
Return to Politics: Caryl Churchill’s 21st Century

In the 21st century there has been a notable revival of political theatre, a revival that crosses dramatic
forms and styles. The striking fecundity of verbatim theatre over the last decade has rejuvenated the
stage as a vibrant site of political enquiry. Perhaps less predictably, playwrights associated more with
formal experimentation than political comment, such as Mark Ravenhill and Martin Crimp have also
joined in, writing plays that directly confront political issues, such as Iraq and the ‘war on terror’. Caryl
Churchill, a playwright who has been connected with both political commentary and formal
experimentation but who in the late 1980s and 1990s wrote plays that were often considered more
arcane than subversive has returned in the 2000s to explicitly political subject matter, such as
ecological crisis, collective complicity in American neo-imperialism, and the Israel/Palestine conflict. In
contrast to Dan Rebellato’s suggestion that Churchill’s plays of the last decade or so demonstrate a
‘withdrawal from’ or even ‘distaste of political commentary’, I argue here that there is a return to and
revitalisation of political agitation in Churchill’s recent work.
Churchill’s 21st century plays invoke the political in a variety of suggestive and provocative
ways, including through what Jacques Ranciére calls the ‘re-distribution of the sensible’ as well as
through the exploration of political subjectivisation. I look at Far Away (2000) as an ecological
dystopian parable, one that re-orders the sensible by subjectivising nature; Drunk Enough to Say I
Love You? (2006) as a play that re-imagines the personal/political and in doing so raises questions
about political subjectivity; and Seven Jewish Children (2009) as a polemical intervention that both
examines the discursive operation of Israeli self-justification as well as interpellating the spectator as
colluder in the continuing suffering of Palestinians.

Siân Adiseshiah is a senior lecturer in English at the University of Lincoln. Her research interests are
in contemporary British theatre, utopian studies, Marxism and feminism, and 21st century studies, and
she has published book chapters on these topics as well as journal articles and reviews in Utopian
Studies, Modern Drama and Times Higher Education. She is author of Churchill’s Socialism: Political
Resistance in the Plays of Caryl Churchill.

Karine Ancellin
Hijab, repossessing the ‘self’

Prompted by the post 9/11 stigma, ‘Muslim’ women writers have come out of silence and invisibility.
Their characters offer a fresh approach of the kaleidoscopic identities of modern era ‘Muslim’ women
and their relation to the western model of society. The ‘Muslim’ label is applied to these authors for as
much as their names have a Muslim ancestry, not that they hold Islam as a religious belief, of which
some are critical in their writings. The study is based on a corpus of 15 novels from authors of different
geographic backgrounds.
The paper will focus on the wearing of the hijab in Muslim women’s texts as a graphic
representation of their fluid selves; It is a deliberate choice in Randa Abdel Fatah’s ‘Does my head
look big in this?’ It is reluctantly self-imposed as with American born Azadeh Moaveni’s ‘Lipstick jihad’
on her journey to Iran as a journalist. It comes out in the secrecy of prayer in Moshiri’s ‘Against
gravity’. It holds the affection of home for Faqir’s ‘My name is Salma’, and eventually it is a symbolic
step for Najwa, in Aboulela’s ‘Minaret’. The writers stress the mobility and diversity of their character’s
modern personalities through the many possibilities offered with this element of clothing. It is held by
the authors as one of the metaphoric symbols of their selves’ complexity. It slips on and off the
characters, and the political statement it holds in the eye of the readers is deconstructed in one novel
after the other.

Karine Ancellin Saleck is a French-American Phd candidate and researcher in literature at the ‘Vrije
Universiteit of Brussels’ in the TALK division of the department of Germanic studies. Her PHD
research is on “Hybrid identities of characters in Muslim women’s fiction post 9/11” under the
supervision of Heidy Magrit Müller. Born and raised in New York she came to Europe to further her
studies. She holds a DEA (pre-doctoral studies) and a Masters in English literature and civilization at
the University Paris VII, Institut Charles V, Jussieu. She has worked as a journalist in Muslim countries
and abroad for 10 years writing on social issues before coming to Brussels in 2000.
5
John Baker
The Church of the Abandoned Christ: David Peace’s Bible of Hell

David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet – 1974, 1977, 1980 and 1983 – is one of the most controversial
and critically acclaimed bodies of British fiction to have been published in the twenty-first century. Its
depiction of a nightmare landscape of police corruption, child murder and the crimes of the Yorkshire
Ripper has won Peace many admirers and translated successfully to television in 2009. Peace’s
intense concern with cruelty, deception and violence – particularly against women – is not to every
reader’s taste, but it has an undeniable cumulative power for the reader bold enough to endure the
novels’ unrelenting assault. Peace’s Yorkshire is a place of utter darkness, illuminated only fitfully by
human compassion.
It would be a mistake, though, to see Peace as merely the practitioner of an unusually
extreme species of the crime fiction genre. One of the most disturbing features of these novels – a
feature almost completely absent from the television adaptions – is Peace’s depiction of absolute,
Satanic evil. These four novels depict a hellish universe in which isolated, flawed figures like Peter
Hunter in 1980 confront a malevolent, even demonic, force far more terrible than corrupt police officers
or even serial killers. Peace’s obsession with the nature – and reality – of evil is particularly clear
through a consideration of the novels’ most malevolent figure, the sinister ‘Reverend’ Martin Lawes,
abuser, trepanner and sole pastor of ‘the Church of the Abandoned Christ’. This paper will consider
Peace’s complex and adroit manipulation of both Biblical and Occult material in this savage quartet in
order to illuminate the novels’ unfashionable notion that evil is no mere human construct.

Dr John Baker teaches English literature at the University of Westminster. His research interests
include literature and The Bible, D. H. Lawrence, Philip Pullman, Howard Barker and Morrissey. He is
currently editing a collection of essays on Nick Cave for publication by Intellect in 2011.

L. Michelle Baker
Beyond Form: Aesthetic Philosophy as Critical Theory

Linguistic and literary theories from the twentieth century presuppose the disappearance of a stable
referent, without which contemporary authors are left floundering to define the desire for
transcendence that pervades their work. Authors such as Salman Rushdie (in The Enchantress of
Florence - 2008) and Tarun Tejpal (in The Alchemy of Desire - 2005) typify the nostalgia found among
their Indian contemporaries and throughout the English-speaking world for an ideal declared dead by
modern theorists.
Both authors embody the search in characters and symbols that they then exhibit from a
variety of perspectives, hoping to generate a frenetic energy that will pull the detritus of interpretation
from the core of meaning and expose within the whirlwind of the shifting referent some stable
significance beyond individual human experience. Unfortunately, that process is slowed to the point of
stagnation by the questions surrounding the physical manifestation of meaning - what is its origin?
How do we reconcile its flaws with its magnitude? Is its value increased or negated by the desire it
generates? Thankfully, a critical model long in existence provides us with a structure to address
precisely such intellectual and moral quandaries.
Aesthetic philosophy originated as an axiological system to assign value to concepts such as
truth, goodness, and beauty that lack a stable, external standard by which to be assessed. It stalled
shortly after the European Enlightenment demanded from it a common standard of taste, a stable
referent. While desire theory now addresses some of its concerns, the need among contemporary
authors to define the transcendent and to establish a relationship between the real and the ideal
demands that we return to the classical roots and medieval flowerings of aesthetic philosophy for
explanations. This study will introduce a few of the methods by which such an analysis might proceed
and provide a brief demonstration in Rushdie and Tejpal.

L. Michelle Baker earned her PhD from The Catholic University of America in 2008. Her dissertation,
Blaming Helen: Beauty and Desire in Contemporary Literature, represents an ongoing effort to reclaim
aesthetic philosophy as a viable literary theory that could reconcile scholars with the authors they
study and that would demonstrate the value of the humanities to a democratic culture. Dr. Baker
continues her study of postmodern British and Anglophone literature in the forthcoming manuscript
Dying to Know: Postmodern Permutations of Classical Underworld Paradigms, in which she suggests
that traditional spiritual and agricultural narratives about death no longer hold the imaginative power
6
they once did and must be replaced by myths that are more relevant to our industrialized, global
society. While she writes, she teaches world literature past and present at Shepherd University in the
Appalachian mountains of West Virginia.

Timothy Baker
Nigh-No-Places: Island Language in the Poetry of Jen Hadfield and J.O. Morgan

Island life occupies a central position in twentieth-century Scottish literature, with poets ranging from
Hugh MacDiarmid to George Mackay Brown devoting much of their careers to explorations of the
relation between Orkney, Shetland, the Hebrides, and the Scottish mainland. As MacDiarmid writes,
only on an island can one understand the relation between solitude and universality. This paper will
examine the portrayal of islands in the work of two young poets, J.O. Morgan and Jen Hadfield.
Morgan’s Natural Mechanical (2008) is a verse biography centred on Skye, while Hadfield’s Almanacs
(2005) and Nigh-No-Place (2008) largely concern Shetland. Within these collections, both poets raise
the question of the connections between language, form, and place. Morgan’s non-linear narrative
poem uses standard English to examine the tension between the hero’s simultaneous need for
rootedness and escape, while Hadfield’s more formally experimental poems use a mixture of English
and Shetlandic, and present the reader with the tensions between the foreign and the domestic, the
literal and the figurative, and the minute and grandiose. For both poets, to know a place you must first
know how it sounds. Within these collections, a focus on island language allows for an investigation
into the relationship between the centre and the periphery, and what possibilities for separate
individual or cultural identities remain in a world that is ‘not our own and, much more, not ourselves’.

Timothy C. Baker is a lecturer in Scottish Literature at the University of Aberdeen. He is the author of
George Mackay Brown and the Philosophy of Community, and has recently published articles on
Robin Jenkins, Eamon Grennan, Ian Macpherson, and Bret Easton Ellis.

Alex Beaumont
“We Are All Potentially Homo Sacer”: Never Let Me Go and the New Proletariat

Towards the end of How to Begin From the Beginning, Slavoj Žižek identifies four sites where the
need for a reinvigorated left-progressive praxis is urgently apparent. These include “the socio-ethical
implications of new techno-scientific developments, especially in biogenetics”, as well as those “new
forms of social apartheid” which will guarantee that any catastrophic consequences are delivered upon
the most excluded. Significantly, he implies that the latter are no longer represented solely by
subaltern identities in the West and the oppressed multitudes of the global South; in fact, the threats
we face now promise to proletarianise us all. As such, the figures of exclusion that have preoccupied
early twenty-first century theorists such as Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Rancière are increasingly
likely to resemble ourselves: “Today”, Žižek concludes, “we are all potentially homo sacer, and the
only way to avoid actually becoming so is to act preventively”.
This paper will deploy Žižek’s comments in approaching Kazuo Ishiguro’s 2005 novel Never
Let Me Go, in which those sites of antagonism detailed above feature prominently. It will argue that
Ishiguro’s narrative strategies seem to enact Žižek’s enigmatic warning, and imagine a new proletariat
to which the reader might soon conceivably belong. It will suggest that the novel gestures beyond the
agonistic, culturally-determined identities that have populated much British fiction of the last thirty
years, and re-establishes class as a fundamental rubric in thematising disenfranchisement at the
beginning of the twenty-first century. This is no return to class in an orthodox sense – the new
proletariat is less a socio-economic ontology than a (bio)political one; nonetheless, the paper will
conclude, some concepts of resistance that developed in response to class domination but have since
been disregarded by the left are represented by Ishiguro as continuing to bear resistant potential
today.

Alex Beaumont (BA Exeter, MA York) is a doctoral student in the Department of English and Related
Literature at the University of York, where he is completing a doctoral thesis entitled “Freedom and the
City: Urban Culture in British Fiction After Thatcher”. He is the author of “New Times Television?
Channel 4 and My Beautiful Laundrette” in Thatcher and After: Margaret Thatcher and Her Afterlife in
Contemporary Culture (eds L. Hadley and E. Ho, forthcoming from Palgrave 2010).

7
Alice Bennett
Remaindered Books: Glen Duncan’s Twenty-First Century Novels

In Glen Duncan’s second novel, Love Remains (2000), one of the characters offers a drunken critique
of publishing in the 90’s, arguing that, “Nobody cares about ordinary human novels any more . . .
Publishing’s turning into an imperative to discover definitive mutation and deviance narratives”. All
Duncan’s novels published since the turn of the twenty-first century have refused to succumb to the
allure of the definitive, exploring the stories that appear after the last word on a subject, and rewriting
the same themes, scenes and relationships in more than one book.
In this paper I argue for an understanding of Duncan’s work, and the literature of the past
decade, in the context of the remainder: the idea of what is left behind as evidence, what is
repackaged and resold, what survives and lives on. Duncan’s novels take the concept of remains to
the level of structuring principle and dominant understanding of temporality. This is more than a post-
millennial hangover, or the realisation of apocalypse averted. The novels reflect new contexts of the
twenty-first century, but also some very old-fashioned concerns, as the War on Terror, the iPhone,
internet porn and globalisation find a place in old stories about love, evil and the possibility of
redemption.

Alice Bennett teaches in the Department of English Studies at Durham University. She recently
completed her PhD in English at Durham. Her thesis, Narrative and the Afterlife in Modern Fiction,
offered an investigation of the narrative experimentation that goes along with the burgeoning
contemporary interest in fictional afterlives. She is interested in utopias, literary (and particularly
narrative) theory, and contemporary fiction.

Nick Bentley
Mind and Brain: The representation of trauma in
Martin Amis’s Yellow Dog and Ian McEwan’s Saturday

This paper will explore the contrasting representation of trauma in two contemporary British novels:
Martin Amis’s Yellow Dog (2003) and Ian McEwan’s Saturday. The first part of the paper will focus on
recent debates with respect to the way trauma has been represented in contemporary culture drawing
on theories of trauma, traumaculture, the traumatological and wound culture by a number of writers
including Cathy Caruth, Roger Luckhurst, Philip Tew and Mark Seltzer. It will also explore the
relationship between psychological and neurological understandings of the way trauma impacts on
individuals, identifying what has come to be seen as the ‘neurological turn’ in recent studies of the
mind and brain.
The second part will focus on Martin Amis’s Yellow Dog and particularly on the way in which
trauma caused by violence leads to a psychological regression to older forms of masculinity, and to
the desire for revenge. This will be discussed primarily with respect to the narrative of Xan Meo,
whose regression into predatory, violent and patriarchal forms of masculinity is initiated by the head
injury he receives when attacked by thugs who have mistaken his role in the ‘naming’ of a gangland
criminal.
The third part of the paper will explore McEwan’s representation of traumatic experience as a
form of neurological response manifest in the main character in Saturday, Richard Perowne, himself a
neuroscientist and brain surgeon. Perowne, and later his family, undergo a violent attack from a
character who is suffering from a neurological condition. My analysis will focus on the way in which the
effects of that attack are played out in the novel in terms of each of the characters’ responses to the
ensuing events.
My main argument will be that while Amis relies primarily on psychological models in his
exploration of traumatic experience, McEwan represents more of the ‘neurological turn’ in his
representation of trauma. I will also argue, however, that both writers produce problematic
representations in their conflation of medical discourses with metaphorical uses of trauma in their
fiction.

Nick Bentley lectures in English literature at Keele University in the UK. His main research interests
are in post-1945 British fiction and literary and cultural theory. He is author of Radical Fictions: The
English Novel in the 1950s (Peter Lang, 2007) and Contemporary British Fiction (Edinburgh University
Press, 2008), and editor of British Fiction of the 1990s (Routledge, 2005). He has published journal
articles and book chapters on Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Zadie Smith, Doris Lessing, Alan Sillitoe,
8
Colin MacInnes, Sam Selvon and the representation of youth in British New Left writing. He is
currently working on two monographs: one on Martin Amis for the Writers and Their Work series, and
one on the representation of youth subcultures in post-war British fiction.

Michele Braun
Form and Function. Or, If You Are Made for a Specific Purpose,
What Obligation Do You Have to Fulfill that Purpose?

Justina Robson’s Natural History (2005) imagines a future in which humans have developed
biotechnologies in order to create the Forged, people who are designed using animal genes and
machine parts to perform jobs in conditions the unmodified human body could not withstand.
Envisioning their different form and functions as that of a new species, the Forged fight for a
homeworld independent of the Unevolved humans on earth. One of the points of contention in this
struggle is what obligation the Forged may have to those Unevolved humans who designed them to
fulfill the purposes for which they were designed. Similarly, in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go
(2005), the “students” are cloned in order to provide replacement organs for non-cloned humans.
Although Kathy and her friends do not relish their roles as donors, for the most part, they accept the
purpose for which they have been created.
What these two very different novels both suggest in their questioning of function or purpose is
that contemporary discussions of the bio- and nano-technologies that will facilitate the transformation
of the human into the posthuman will need to attend to the ways in which the ability to manipulate the
human body requires careful attention to the ways that manipulation challenges autonomy and identity
of those whose bodies have been formed for a specific purpose.

Michele Braun is an instructor at Mount Royal University in Canada where she teaches writing and
contemporary British Literature. She works in contemporary representations of science and technology
and literature, and “Form and Function” emerges from her dissertation project, Cyborgs and Clones:
Figuring Citizenship and Redefining Humanity in Contemporary British Literature.

Sophie Bush
Writers need to look at paintings:
Self-reflexivity in Timberlake Wertenbaker’s The Line

“You’ll have to read if you want to be an artist, just as writers need to look at paintings.” (Timberlake
Wertenbaker, The Line)
The work of playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker has a history of self-reflexivity, often using
metatheatrical techniques, such as the play-within-the-play, to explore and interrogate its own
medium. The best known example of this is her influential 1988 work, Our Country’s Good, which
imagines a convict production of The Recruiting Officer in the early days of the Sydney penal colony.
Throughout the 1990s, Wertenbaker continued to write plays peopled with actors, directors and
playwrights, but she also began to depict other artistic and cultural mediums, such as the visual arts in
her 1991 play Three Birds Alighting on a Field.
Her most recent play, The Line (produced by the Arcola Theatre last November), follows the
relationship between Edgar Degas and his rebellious pupil Suzanne Valadon. It is evident that
Wertenbaker is using the frame of visual art as a synecdoche for exploring, more generally, the role of
the arts and the ‘artist’ in society, particularly the position of her own art of theatre and playwriting.
Though set at the turn of the twentieth century, The Line poses pertinent questions about the role and
condition of the arts at the turn of the twenty first century. My paper will examine how the play
achieves this, through its discussion of issues such as fame, celebrity, commercialisation, the position
of women in art, the economic pressures on artists and the respective values of tradition and
innovation.

Based at and funded by the University of Sheffield, Sophie Bush is currently in her third year of
doctoral research into the contemporary playwright Timberlake Wertenbaker. Informed by extensive
work with Wertenbaker’s archive at the British Library, her thesis will address ideas of identity
formation across Wertenbaker’s oeuvre. Her other work includes directing and facilitating theatre
projects for young people.

9
Mónica Calvo-Pascual
User I.D.: Virtual Selves and Consumerism, or the Untraceable Character of Identity
in 21st Century Self-Conscious Fiction

Professor and writer Jenefer Shute, raised in South Africa and currently living in New York City, where
she teaches writing and literature at Hunter College, has published four novels that, despite their
disparate themes and plots, have a significant element in common: the troubled identity of their female
protagonists. My paper focuses on Shute’s latest novel, User I.D.: a Novel of Identity Theft (2005),
which provides the parallel stories of its two first-person narrators: a female non-tenured university
lecturer in the middle of a personal and professional crisis, and the underclass, consumerist cosmetics
saleswoman and hacker who steals the lecturer’s identity (both virtually and financially). Thus, my
contribution first analyzes the contingent, unstable quality of the concept of one’s “identity” in present
day capitalist culture as represented in User I.D.
On the one hand, identity is portrayed just as a collection of codes and ciphers (one’s email
account, passport, social security, and credit card numbers) in a computerized world where every
identity trait becomes nothing but virtual and can be easily supplanted. On the other, the hacker’s
attempts to create an identity of her own by means of possessing luxury goods and undergoing plastic
surgery in order to embody what she imagines to be the glamorous life of a professor contrasts with
the miserable reality of the lecturer living on a scarce budget who feels the gradual dissolution of her
sense of self. Yet, my paper also points out the strategies through which the novel’s self-conscious
irony is (self-) addressed at postmodernist and poststructuralist debates on the nature of identity and
language, poking fun at the sometimes far-fetched tautological discourses of the academic world.

Mónica Calvo-Pascual is a lecturer in the Department of English and German Studies at the University
of Zaragoza, Spain, where she obtained her PhD on contemporary US narrative and is currently
teaching Contemporary American Literature and Commentary of Literary Texts in English. Her main
research interests include the ethical dimension of US historiographic metafiction, the representation
of trauma in contemporary narrative in English, and the politics of popular culture. Calvo-Pascual has
published on a variety of topics, like Stephen Marlowe’s and Jenefer Shute’s fiction as well as on other
US and British cultural and literary texts.

Cheryl Cliffe
A Question of Time in the Twenty-First Century:
Does Instantaneity Destroy Inner Time Duration?

Innovations in technology result in an altered relationship between time and space. Cultural theorists
such as Zygmunt Bauman and Paul Virilio identify the emergence of a new concept of global time: that
of ‘instantaneity’, as information is disseminated around the world simultaneously. Accordingly, the
relationship between time, distance, and space diminishes as instantaneity provides immediate on-
the-spot fulfilment. In view of the fact that Henri Bergson deems the relationship between space and
consciousness as vital to the creation of duration, the paper considers the effects of global time upon
the lived experience of time. The paper analyses whether or not the perception of time today is
radically different from that at the beginning of the twentieth century.
The theories of Bergson and Martin Heidegger are re-evaluated in view of Bauman and
Virilio’s assertions. Bergson’s theory that instantaneity involves duration and spatialised time, is
compared to the current understanding of the term. The representations of time in literary texts from
the Modernist period through to the present day are analysed in order to evaluate Virilio’s suggestion
that instantaneity results in a perpetual present and a diminishment of the past and the future. Virginia
Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway is compared to Michael Cunningham’s The Hours and Stephen Daldry’s 2002
film adaptation of the novel, in order to determine whether the effects of instantaneity are apparent in
this contemporary, spatially-extended adaptation of Woolf’s Modernist text.

Cheryl Cliffe is a graduate of the University of Lincoln with an MA in English Studies. She has a
particular interest in the way contemporary literature challenges past literary and philosophical
theories. Her undergraduate research includes a study of intertextuality in the fiction of Ian McEwan,
and her postgraduate research focuses upon literary representations of the perception of time in the
twenty-first century. She is employed as a Library Officer in the University of Lincoln Library.

10
Tricia Connell
"Strange and Beautiful to See": Revenants and Reversals
in Carol Ann Duffy's "Premonitions"

This paper is concerned with the question of voice and the role of memory in Carol Ann Duffy’s poetry.
It begins by identifying some concerns articulated both in contemporary, poststructuralist discourses
about language and experience, and in well-established feminist and humanist debates about poetry,
identity and the poet’s relationship with “dead voices”. Moving on, it demonstrates how Duffy’s poetry
betrays a preoccupation with these familiar theoretical and literary concerns, but argues that in order
to understand the significance of its engagement with them, due consideration has to be given to the
historical and cultural contexts of the period between the early 1980s and the present, with particular
reference to the Women’s Movement. After establishing some important influences and developments
in this period, the paper offers an analysis of one of Duffy’s most recent poems. In so doing, the paper
suggests that the poem marks a distinct turning point in literary tradition and the idea of voice and
considers the implications of this for developing feminist literary criticism.

I am a Senior Lecturer in English Literary Studies at the University of Worcester and my main teaching
and developing research interests are in 20th century and contemporary poetry, postcolonialism and
women’s writing. My doctorate, gained in 2006 from the University of Hull and supervised by Professor
Gabriele Griffin, was on indeterminacy in poetry by Carol Ann Duffy.

Biljana Djoric-Francuski
A Century in Which the West and the East Finally Meet

At the end of the first decade of the 21st century, it is obvious that the novelists originating from the
Indian Subcontinent left a distinguishing mark on the English literary scene during these ten years.
Their increasing worldwide renown can be substantiated, inter alia, by numerous literary prizes they
have been awarded since 2000. For instance, the famous British Booker Prize was won within that
period by Aravind Adiga (2008), Kiran Desai (2006), and Monica Ali (2003). Logically speaking, there
must be a reason for such a growing interest in the works of Indian English writers, a rational
explanation of the post-colonial literature’s development into such a "hot commodity".
This paper proposes an explanation by examining specific aspects of the cultural history
reflected in the post-colonial that had the most significant impact on the recent English fiction. My
hypothesis is that the complex issues which were pertinent to post-colonial writing of the second half
of the 20th century, namely the search for identity, diversity of the self and the other, transcendence of
thought, cultural differences and conflicts, now preoccupy both Western readers and critics, and that is
precisely why the Indian English writing is becoming more and more popular in the Occidental world.
In order to find proof for this supposition, in my analysis of the role of some 21st century Indian English
authors in creating new trends in contemporary prose, I shall rely on the works of Orientalist scholars,
as well as on those of certain theorists belonging exclusively to Western thought.

Biljana Djoric-Francuski graduated from two departments of the Faculty of Philology, University of
Belgrade: the English Department and the French Department. She gained her Master’s Degree in
Contrastive Analysis, and her PhD in the Reception of the Post-War English Novel. Since 1997, she
has worked at the English Department of the Belgrade Faculty of Philology, where she is currently
holding a position of an Assistant Professor and teaching British Cultural Studies and Non-Literary
Translation. The focus of her work includes: cultural studies, post-colonial literature, modern and
contemporary British novel, translation quality assessment, and translation studies. She has so far
published the book Echoes of the English Novel: Modern English Novel in Serbo-Croatian Criticism (in
Serbian), and 35 articles in Serbian and foreign journals and books (including a chapter in History /
Stories of India, Macmillan, 2009, and one in Recounting Cultural Encounters, Cambridge Scholars
Publishing, 2009), as well as participated in the work of 20 Conferences in the country and abroad (for
instance, in France, Morocco, the United States of America, India, Slovenia, Romania, and the Czech
Republic).

11
Irralie Doel
Meeting-Places in Contemporary Poetry

In The Life of Poetry (1949), Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) insists that, through poetry, dynamic
relationships can be forged, which are constantly fluid and changing, endlessly variable, unfixed, and
in motion. This happens in the space of the poem, where, through writing, different, even disparate,
ideas, emotions, or images can be brought together. Rukeyser calls these imaginative spaces
meeting-places. Through forging these poetic meeting-places, Rukeyser believes, new ways of
seeing, communicating and connecting can be formed and shared.
Using Rukeyser’s formulation, this paper explores the concept of the meeting-place in poetry
published since 2000. Using work by a range of contemporary poets, I discuss the meeting-place as
variously a physical, imaginative and performative space in which the mapping of geographical or
architectural space intersects with the mapping of history, genealogy and memory, and identity.
Through a consideration of these differing poetic configurations of self, home, and place, I
demonstrate how meeting-places facilitate the preservation of a constantly evolving renegotiation of
the diverse interior and exterior spaces contemporary poets encounter.

Irralie Doel teaches in the School of English and the Department of Continuing Education and
Professional Development at the University of Liverpool. She also runs creative writing, reading and
arts projects at SWAN Women’s Centre in Bootle, researching inclusive practice and arts and health.
She is co-director of Reach Consultancy which provides research, CPD, teaching and training for
schools and universities, organisations and communities. She has recently completed a PhD in poetry,
creative process and practice at the University of Liverpool. Her research interests include: poetry,
twentieth and twenty-first century literature, women’s writing, creative process and practice, art history,
and creative writing and she is interested in making connections between these areas in her work.

Beatriz Domínguez García

‘Case Histories,’ ‘Unexpected Turns’ and ‘Good News:’

Unveiling Hidden Stories of Abuse in Kate Atkinson’s Recent Fiction.

To date, British author Kate Atkinson has published six novels (together with a play and a collection of
short stories) and is currently writing her seventh. Even though the three first novels differ in form and
content from the last three ones, it can be affirmed that Atkinson’s oeuvre is deeply concerned with the
portrayal of violence towards women. If Atkinson portrayed violence through the telling of family
histories in her three first novels, in her last three she has adopted the genre of the “murder mystery,”
as her fourth novel’s subtitle indicates, and/or the “detective novel” to display these issues of violence
towards women.
Using the conventions of the genre to highlight issues of gender violence is not her only
achievement. In fact, these three novels—namely: Case Histories (2004), One Good Turn (2006),
When Will There Be Good News (2008)—focus on the same male detective who, through his
investigations, unveils the different “cases” he is engaged with. The novels, thus, not only try to solve
the murders and/or disappearances the protagonist is investigating but, at the same time, try to
construct the real stories that the “case histories” tell. In this sense, Atkinson does follow her previous
interest in personal/family histories—as it was the case of her first three novels—through the eyes of a
private investigator who does take an interest in what lies behind the official records. Moreover, it
seems that Atkinson has not entirely rejected the Bildungsroman she so strongly focused on in her first
three novels. It is my contention then that, by means of a gender blurring—the detective novel, the
“murder mystery” and the novel of development—, Atkinson continues with her task of unveiling
female stories of abuse and violence, exposing the ways in which these forms of violence have
shaped the lives of the survivors. This paper will try to analyse how these histories are constructed
within the genres of the murder mystery and detective novel together with the traditional
Bildungsroman, to study the ways these tragedies have shaped the development of the different
characters involved in the different stories.

Dr. Beatriz Domínguez-García works as a lecturer in the Department of English at the University of
Huelva. She teaches Contemporary Women’s Fiction, and History and Culture of the UK and USA.
Her research interests are contemporary fiction by women, especially Kate Atkinson’s oeuvre; the
intersections of history, culture, postmodernism and feminism; and issues of literary genre. In 1999
she published Hadas y brujas: la re-escritura de los cuentos de hadas en escritoras contemporáneas
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en lengua inglesa and in 2004 co-edited the volume Literature, Gender, Space. She has also
contributed to several volumes dealing with issues of historical fiction, intertextuality, identity and
feminism. She is currently working on a book-length analysis of Kate Atkinson’s fiction and on two co-
editions born out of the International Conferences “Gendering Citizenship and Globalization” (2005)
and “Experiencing Gender” (2009) which took place at the University of Huelva.

Anja Annette Drautzburg

“I could say a lot about a lot of things” –
The Contemporary in the Poetry of Emily Berry, Miriam Gamble and Heather Phillipson

According to Giorgio Agamben “[t]he poet – the contemporary – must firmly hold his gaze on his own
time” (“What Is the Contemporary?” 44). Emily Berry, Miriam Gamble and Heather Phillipson do
exactly this. They belong to a new generation of aspiring British poets that are currently being
supported and boosted by several Faber & Faber and Bloodaxe publications. Emily Berry asks
important questions as to the role of women, having invented a dubious doctor character and created
a bitingly sarcastic Short Guide to Corseting. Miriam Gamble engages her readers in reflections on
contemporary popular culture declaring her love for American film stars and Northern Irish football
player George Best. Also, she immerses in Greek mythology and thus shows a true awareness of the
past, another quality Agamben attributes to the contemporary. Heather Phillipson’s topics range from
the multiplicity of love to philosophy and art, juxtaposing these with everyday occupations such as
sharing dinner. In her poems she unites philosophers, famous authors and her family at the table, or
dances on the edge with a sheep. The work of the three poets always demonstrates immediacy,
originality and intelligent subtlety. Furthermore, they “share an ability (rare in poetry) to give something
of themselves away – neither cheaply or freely – when opening up the experience of the poem to the
reader” (Byrne and Pollard Voice Recognition 14).
This paper is going to explore how far these young women’s poems stand as paradigmatic for
contemporary British poetry and why it is so apparent in their work that “[t]hose who are truly
contemporary, who truly belong to their time, are those who neither perfectly coincide with it nor adjust
themselves to its demands” (Agamben “What Is the Contemporary?” 40).

Anja Annette Drautzburg, M.A. born 1982, studied English, German and Comparative Literature at
Trier and Bonn Universities. 2008: M.A., thesis ‘When is a Man a Man? Masculinities in Crisis in
Victorian Women’s Writing’ (to be published 2010). Since 2009 PhD, advisor Prof. Dr. Marion Gymnich
of Bonn University, thesis ‘Heal Britannia! Representations of Sick Bodies and Tormented Souls in
Contemporary British Literature’. Research interests: 20th/21st century British literature and culture, In-
Yer-Face drama, contemporary British poetry, Victorian literature and culture, dialogues between
medicine and literature, representations of the body in literature.

Shaun Duke
Shaping the Shapeless: New Weird, Bizarro, and Bending Genres

The past ten years have changed many things in science fiction and fantasy. The former has had what
some have called a golden age in film, while the latter has seen a remarkable explosion of interest in
literature with the power of the urban fantasy and young adult markets essentially turning the entire
genre into one of the most lucrative and vibrant writing fields around--more so than it ever was. But
what of science fiction literature and the margins of speculative fiction?
The new Millenium has resulted in a curious array of changes within speculative fiction. Two
movements have been primarily responsible in what one might call the “weirding” of the genre: New
Weird and Bizarro. Each places emphasis on an impossible-to-define exceptional weirdness, and the
result has been the development of a cult following and a significant, if not unintentional, influence on
the wider range of science fiction and fantasy being written today. The 2000s, as a result, have been
noticeably experimental in form, style, and content, with new and old authors approaching speculative
fiction from an odd, even surreal perspective.
In this paper I will analyze the emergence of the “weird” through New Weird, Bizarro, and
other as yet un-named categories and their widespread influence on speculative fiction, from the
unique, spatially disconnected short fiction of Jason Sanford to the characteristically nonsensical
atmospheres and concepts of writers like Jeff Vandermeer, Brian Francis Slattery, China Mieville,
Steve Aylett, and others.

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Shaun Duke is a graduate student at the University of Florida. He studies science fiction,
postcolonialism, and fantasy and can be found blogging at the World in the Satin Bag
(http://wisb.blogspot.com/)

Caroline Edwards
Exploring Metachronous Temporalities in Contemporary British Fiction:
The Case of Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods

The persistence of utopianism as a viable critical vocabulary that remains productive across
disciplinary discourses has been noted in recent years. What has gone unnoticed, however, is the
usefulness of a utopian methodology in approaching contemporary fiction. A host of British writers –
among them Jeanette Winterson, Maggie Gee, Jim Crace, John Burnside, David Mitchell and Ali
Smith – not only refer self-reflexively to Utopia in their novels but point towards a deconstruction of
large-scale (totalitarian) utopian imaginaries in favour of critical, scaled-down utopian communities.
Winterson’s “Alternative” in The Stone Gods, for instance, offers a “minor” alternative to the
authoritarian “mass dreamworld” of Tech City, defending “unreal” utopian thinking against ‘[t]he
realistic, hard-headed practical types who got us to the edge of melt-down’ (p. 175).
The Stone Gods also articulates the persistence of a utopian mode of analysis in a second
and more important way. Winterson’s abiding interest in historical time as protean and
transmigrationally intersecting with various other (real and imagined) temporalities is, in fact, a
temporal strategy being adopted by many other twenty-first-century writers. This paper will analyse
The Stone Gods as a useful case study in the use of utopian temporalities by contemporary British
novelists to address wider issues concerning historical representation, memory, and futural projections
of ecological disaster through what I call “metachronous” representations of time. These novelists’
preoccupations with rupturing historical progress and their engagements with the apocalyptic “end of
time” through an immanent “time of the end” within the present offer a fascinating contribution to
theories of historical temporality by such thinkers as Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida
and Giorgio Agamben. The theorisation of this group of novelists as expanding the boundaries of how
we can subjectively and collective conceive of temporal imaginaries thus reorients the relationship
between critical theory and art in a way that avoids merely reinscribing hierarchical applications of
theory to literature.

Caroline Edwards is a PhD candidate in the Centre for Critical Theory at the University of Nottingham.
Her PhD research “Microtopias: Exploring Utopian Temporalities in Contemporary British Fiction”
develops a “microtopian” literary analysis that reorients our understanding of the negotiations between
utopianism and contemporary British fiction. She has published articles in Textual Practice and is
currently editing a special issue of the Palgrave Macmillan journal Subjectivity titled “Towards New
Collective Subjects.” She has also co-edited Mortality, Dying and Death: Global Interdisciplinary
Perspectives (Oxford: Inter-Disciplinary Press, 2008). She is a regular reviewer for the Routledge
Annotated Bibliography of English Studies. Her research interests include twentieth- and twenty-first-
century British fiction, utopianism, Marxism/Post-Marxism, critical theory and Western Marxism, post-
apocalypticism and theories of radical subjectivity. She has lectured on postmodernism in film, TV,
literature and critical theory. She currently runs the postgraduate Marx Reading Group and Marxist
Film Screenings at the University of Nottingham.

Jane Elliott
Science Fictions of Neoliberalism

Many of the most prominent science fiction of texts of the 1980s and 1990s, from William Gibson’s
Neuromancer trilogy to the film The Matrix, express political views that dovetail neatly with the major
epistemological positions of post-structuralism, particularly the resistance to totalizing knowledge
regimes. In such texts, the imagination of advanced technology frequently serves as a means to
explore the ways in which the world is increasingly locked into a single, totalized and oppressive
system of meaning. In contrast, I argue, recent novels such as Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go,
Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road strive to discover a means of
representing and resisting a world in which oppression functions more through risk and randomness
than through unification and centralization; in the process, I suggest, they shift the epistemological

14
premises of the form away from the tenets of poststructuralist reason. Examining transformations in
both form and content, I suggest that contemporary shifts in literary science fiction arise from a
struggle to reshape the genre in order to respond to neoliberal means of domination that had not yet
been imagined in the 20th century. In particular, because it operates through the application of
incentives and disincentives to individual choice, neoliberalism requires that subjects possess a clear
and accurate idea of the very real effects that their actions will have on their welfare, an approach at
odds with theories that emphasize totalizing ideological obfuscation and the emptiness of individual
choice. Ultimately, I argue that these novels both enact and describe the slow death of these earlier
ways of imagining political experience through science fiction conventions—and the attempt to
generate new metaphors, narratives and styles that capture the modes of suffering particular to
neoliberalism.

Jane Elliott is Lecturer in Department of English and Related Literature at the University of York. Her
first book, Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory: Representing National Time, was published
by Palgrave in 2008, and her work has also appeared in Cultural Critique, Modern Fiction Studies, and
the PMLA. She is co-editor, with Derek Attridge, of the collection Theory after ‘Theory’, forthcoming
from Routledge in 2011.

Maite Escudero-Alías
The Institutionalization of Queer Theory: Where Have All the Lesbians Gone?

In 1989, under the title of Postmodernism and Feminism: Where Have All the Women Gone? Patricia
Waugh pointed out the ambivalent relationship of feminism and postmodernism. Indeed,
postmodernism’s ontological disruption of the subject was perceived as deleterious not only by most
feminist women but also by those excluded by the dominant culture for reasons of class, gender, race
or sexuality. This was so because the advent of postmodernism deconstructed and jeopardised the
very potential site of minority identity configurations. Simultaneously, however, it was in the 1990s that
queer theory first emerged and expanded in the academia, thus reaching its golden peak in terms of
marketability, visibility and globalization. Twenty years later, my contribution traces a parallel line of
thought between the academic overshadowing of feminism in favour of postmodernism and the rise
and institutionalization of queer theory in the 21st century to the detriment of (non-white) lesbian
feminism. As will be argued, most theorisations on queer discourses, fascinated by the Butlerian
mantra of “gender performativity”, paradoxically ignore the relevant role that works of non-white and
lesbian feminists have played in its genesis and praxis. Besides denouncing queer theory’s pervading
global amnesia, the present paper will explore to what extent the marketability of queer theory affects
contemporary fiction by lesbian and queer authors.

Maite Escudero-Alías lectures in the Department of English and German Studies at the University of
Zaragoza, Spain, where she obtained her PhD. Her research interests centre on the field of trauma
studies, feminist criticism and queer theory. She has published widely on the representation of identity
categories such as gender, sex, sexuality and race in cultural manifestations and in contemporary
narratives in English.

Chris Ewers
Cormac McCarthy and the end of The Road

In modern culture, roads are all surface, almost invisible. The American word blacktop is a particularly
apt one, the ‘black’ suggesting the invisibility, the ‘top’ the surface nature of the road. In Cormac
McCarthy’s novel The Road (2006) the blacktop is brought back into focus by being defamiliarized,
covered by a continual drift of ash.
The novel presents an apocalyptic vision of the end of human civilization, and this is mainly
seen in terms of the automotive failure of modern society. The expectations of road travel are also
subverted. Rather than a meeting place, an avenue of connection, the road is mostly an empty, barren
space. When the father and his son do meet other people on the road, their first reaction is to hide.
Similarly, houses are no longer domestic, safe places, but rather sites of danger and adventure.
However, the father still directs his route using a road-map, following the old networks as if he
still cannot let the old world end. He patterns their journey as a type of quest – to move south, to reach
the sea. When he reaches a point where the road ends, his journey is at an end too. The boy finds a

15
new future, in the deep glens, places untouched by roads. It is, seemingly, the end of the road, a
reversal of centuries of work creating trackways, freeways and blacktops.
Yet the narrative structure is also a form of road. It is a journey narrative, relying on change of
scene to alter the action, just as a road alters the landscape as one moves through it. Like a road, the
narrative continually moves forward. Postmodern novels like to use classic narrative forms and subvert
them. However, The Road seems to suggest that even when a new world is imagined, old narrative
patterns and reader expectations are so ingrained that, like the father, we find it almost impossible to
leave the road.

I am a second-year PhD student at King's, working on the way road systems influence the novel. I
work as a journalist for a national newspaper,

Kerstin Fest
Ship-Brothers: Constructions of Identities in Amitav Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008)

In his latest novel, the first of a future trilogy, Amitav Ghosh tells the story of a ship, her crew and her
passengers. The Ibis, a former slaving ship, takes indentured labourers from the Indian subcontinent
to Mauritius. On board the reader encounters a kaleidoscope of characters from all walks of life, as
diverse in their religious beliefs as they are in their ethnic origin or motives for being on the ship. They
all have in common that they have left their old identities, mostly dictated by others and heavily
influenced by social and cultural norms, behind and are now in the position to fashion new identities.
While on their journey they become jahaj-bhais, ship-brothers.
In this paper I will explore how these inventions are negotiated and managed by the novel's
characters. I will argue that in Sea of Poppies Amitav Ghosh develops an almost utopian vision of self-
fashioning. Personal identity is no longer presented as a mere off-shot of a bigger cultural system, the
individual is not a branch on a family-tree but rather a complex assembly of identity-stories, which
while fed from a shared canon of motifs is still very much the product of the subject's own decisions
and creativity. To explore these notions I will draw on theories of Deleuze and Guattari, Michel de
Certeau and Michel Foucault. I will also argue that one of the most central elements in Ghosh's
treatment of identity is a notable shift from group to individual identity as the straightforward narrative
of national and ethnic belonging is abandoned in favour of a hybrid, complex and rhizomatic corpus of
stories.

Kerstin Fest is a lecturer at the German Department at University College Cork. Her research interests
are theories of identities, feminism and gender theory, and Comparative Literature. Her book of
modernism and feminine identity was published by Braumüller in 2009.

Fuh Shyh-Jen
Identity Formation and Interracial Violence in American Son

Brian Ascalon Roley’s 2001 novel American Son, winner of the 2003 Association for Asian American
Studies Prose Book Award, is a coming-of-age story set at South Santa Monica, California in 1993,
when the aftermath of 1992 Los Angles Riot has just begun taking effects on the multi-racial/multi-
ethnic U.S. With its realistic and moving portrait of the painful experience of coloured immigrants from
the young adolescent’s perspective, this novel not only sharply exposes the problem of identity
formation for the racial minority in a white-dominant society, the difficulty of which might result in
violence and conflict as vividly depicted in the novel, but also foregrounds the complex interracial and
interethnic relationships in the increasingly multiculturalized U.S. society in the era of globalization.
This paper wants to address the problems of identity formation and interracial violence in the US
society which this novel explores with view to the US colonial and postcolonial practices on the world
stage. While the pain and longing the biracial Filipino American brothers experienced are commonly
shared by racial minorities in the US, Tomas’s and Gabe’s difficult struggle for identity and belonging
as young immigrants particularly reveal these problems as embedded in US imperialistic aggression,
given the distinctive history of the Philippine-American relations which shapes the form of modern
Filipino diasporas as San Juan, Campomanes and other Filipino scholars have pointed out. This paper
seeks to demonstrate that, through a conventional realistic coming-of-age story which carefully
registers the presence of diverse ethnicities in the US society propelled by global capitalism, Brian
Roley’s debut novel American Son not only successfully articulates the immigrant experience of

16
alienation as an ethnic other, but also boldly ventures a powerful critique of US imperialism---either in
the form of colonial annexation in the past or that of the on-going neocolonial/capitalist globalization---
as having constituted the domestic interracial violence and conflict which hampers the pursuit of
freedom and equality.

Fuh Shyh-jen received her Ph.D in Comparative Literature from University of Wisconsin—Madison,
and is Associate Professor of the English Department at National Dong Hwa University. She has been
working on modern poetry and contemporary theories, particularly the ethical/religious themes in late
Derrida. Recently she starts turning attention to diaspora studies and Filipino American literature,
attempting to further explore the Derridean themes of hospitality, justice, and cosmopolitics through
analysis of concrete cultural productions. She has published several essays on Derrida and some
modern poets. A recent result of her research on Filipino American literature is “’Carlos’s ‘ American
Dream---the Inscription of ‘Self’ in Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart.” She is also translator
(into Chinese) of Hazard Adams’s Four Lectures on the History of Criticism and Theory in the West
and Harold Bloom’s How to Read and Why.

Kinga Földváry
The Inheritance of Loss – The Themes of Absence and Acceptance
in Five Booker Prize Winning Novels

Borrowing the title of Kiran Desai’s novel, the winner of the 2006 Man Booker Prize, my paper is going
to argue that the common ground in 21st century writing appears to be no more than acceptance, and
mainly the acceptance of inevitable loss. Looking at the winners of the Booker Prize in the past five
years, it is easy to notice that contemporary fiction does not offer more than a resigned attitude to loss,
lost hope and any belief in redemption, and it does not even wish to deny that the universe as we have
come to know it is either coming to an end or it has already gone, but we have not even been notified.
This apparently over-generalised attitude still seems to be helpful when trying to find trends or
patterns, especially as we can see how the presence of loss is always accompanied by the lack of
several other themes that we used to expect from our readings, such as a sense of triumph, victory or
gain, or the notion that struggle, pain or suffering actually lead us somewhere –anywhere – and in
general, that history is following an intelligible pattern, linear or circular, that we could try to make
sense of. At the same time, contemporary writing borrows heavily from the work of earlier periods,
both in form and in content, therefore it is also worth looking at the way the presentation of loss has
become our inheritance from our predecessors.

Kinga Földváry is senior lecturer in the Department of English Studies at Pázmány Péter Catholic
University, Piliscsaba, Hungary. Her main research interests include Shakespearean tragedy (she
defended her PhD dissertation in 2005, on questions of identity in Hamlet and King Lear), problems of
genre in film adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays, Tudor social affairs, and also twentieth-century
British literature.

Wolfgang Funk
Beyond Postmodernism – Exorcising the Present in Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black

According to Fay Weldon’s review in the Guardian, Hilary Mantel – in her 2005 novel Beyond Black –
has “taken that ethereal halfway house between heaven and hell, between the living and the dead,
and nailed it on the page”. In my paper I will read this eerie territory between life and death which the
novel explores as a space in which a possible re-configuration or even overcoming of contemporary
postmodern notions is being investigated.
The novel is haunted on every page. Not only by ghosts from the other side, who constantly
hang about in the life of the protagonist, Alison Hart, a travelling medium, but – I would argue – there
are also ghosts of a more philosophical ilk, spectres in the Derridean sense, which epitomize the mute
traces of supposedly outmoded configurations of thinking and experience, which – or so the novel
suggests – are by no means quite as dead as we might expect and still walk abroad in our midst.
What I want to do in my paper is interpret Alison’s internal struggle between reason and
irrationality as a metaphor for the condition of the project of postmodernism in general, which I see as
a constant passage between ‘solid’ and ‘liquid’ states (to use Zygmunt Bauman’s very plausible
terminology). I will raise the question if revenants of seemingly obsolete beliefs (as invoked by Mantel)

17
might not have the potential to overcome this division and integrate the irrational with the rational, the
enlightened with the romantic.
As the theoretical framework of my considerations I will use Derrida’s notion of ‘hauntology’
(as set in Spectres of Marx) and Linda Hutcheon’s study on the link between postmodernism and
nostalgia, as I see a nostalgic streak not only as one of the driving forces in this particular novel but
also in many manifestation of contemporary thought, which – I will argue – is in search of certainty in
the metaphysical, an attitude, which I see as embodied perfectly in the character of Alison Hart.

Wolfgang Funk (*1978) studied English, German, History and Transnational Competence at the
University in Regensburg, and graduated with an M.A. and a Teacher’s Diploma in 2005. From 2006-
2008 he taught Gender Studies and English Literature at Regensburg. Since 2008 he has been
working as a research assistant at Leibniz University Hanover while at the same time working on his
Ph.D. thesis with the working title “Discourses of Authenticity in Contemporary Metafiction”. He has
published articles on contemporary British drama and fiction, among others on Bryony Lavery (2007),
Jasper Fforde, Matthew Kneale and Martin McDonagh (forthcoming).

Greg Garrard
Ian McEwan’s Next Novel: Solar, Climate Change and Biocultural Interactionism

In an essay recently published in Contempory Literature (‘Ian McEwan’s Next Novel’, 50: 4 Winter
2009), I attempted (a little more than half-seriously) to predict the form of Ian McEwan’s next novel on
the basis of the trajectory of his development as an author thus far. On one hand, climate change
poses especial difficulties for the novelist: its enormous temporal and geographical scale; the
diffuseness of effective moral agency; and the risks of scientific and moral didacticism. On the other, it
is an issue of immense contemporary interest and significance that cries out for response from artists
and writers. Ian McEwan’s reponse is of interest thanks to his popularity and prominence, but also
because of the way his ideas have changed over three decades: his early novels seem to have been
shaped in part by assumptions about human nature drawn from psychoanalysis and anti-essentialist
feminism, while the novels published since Black Dogs have been, to varying degrees, committed to a
biocultural view of human nature influenced by evolutionary biology and scientific psychology. Now
that Solar is in print, I can evaluate my success as a literary prophet, and speculate as to the future of
scientifically-responsible developments in literary theory generally, and in ecocriticism in particular.

Dr Greg Garrard is a Senior Teaching Fellow at Bath Spa University. He is the author of Ecocriticism
(Routledge 2004), chair of the UK Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment
(www.asle.org.uk), and managing editor of Green Letters: Studies in Ecocriticism (www.green-
letters.org.uk).

Lisa Gaughan
‘Carnival against Capitalism’: The changing face of Satire on Stage and Screen

This paper sets out to explore and establish the concept of ‘travesty’ as the distinct form of satirical
praxis in the 21st Century in relation to contemporary political comedy. Using the framework of the
theorist Gerard Genette and the works of arguably Britain’s greatest living satirist Alistair Beaton, such
as Feelgood, A Very Social Secretary and The Trial of Tony Blair, it will seek to clarify that travesty is
distinct from its related comedic forms, parody, pastiche etc and is of particular relevance in defining
contemporary political comedy in the current climate. The fact that travesty has all but disappeared
from contemporary theories of satire/parody etc is largely related to the idea that this praxis operates
fleetingly and in specific historic timeframes, as more of a ‘fashion’ rather than a specific genre.
Travesty first appears during the 17th Century associated with the notion of the Burlesque Travestie,
and reappears again in the 18th and 19th centuries when importantly for this study it becomes
associated with the travestying of dramatic texts. It goes onto consider the current ‘fashion’ for acting
‘real’ politicians, how the actor within this context, makes the transformation from actor to ‘real’
individual. Genette establishes two clear categories of transformation that a text can undertake in the
movement from one established ‘source text’ to another. These categories he posits are clearly
divided into ‘transformation’ and ‘imitation’. The paper establishes that the current portrayals of Tony
Blair, David Blunkett etc, can be established as examples of the praxis of travesty which sits in
Genette’s transformational category, and are distinct from the category of imitation, in that there is no

18
attempt at a ‘perfect imitation’ but that the previous imprints of characters these actors have played
become subconsciously a referential in the newly ‘transformed’ characters in these texts.

Lisa is Lecturer in Drama at the University of Lincoln and is currently undertaking a PhD at the
University of Hull in the political comedy of New Labour. She is especially interested in comedy theory
and comedy forms, in particular Stand-Up Comedy as well as contemporary readings of Shakespeare.
Lisa previously worked as an actor and is interested in devised work. In particular she has worked with
Lincoln based company Converse Theatre on projects that use drama to explore issues of mental
health, including projects at the Peter Hodgkinson Centre at Lincoln Hospital, Being Here (2000) and a
touring devised project, Do You Mind (2004).

Olga Glebova
Transcending the limits of the genre: the post-millennial novels of J.M. Coetzee

The paper focuses on J.M. Coetzee’s post-millennial novels Elizabeth Costello (2003), Slow Man
(2005) and Diary of a Bad Year (2007) which are marked by experimentation and avoidance of
straightforward narrative. In particular, the paper aims to discuss how Coetzee’s generic innovations
problematise the very notion of genre and reveal the writer’s views on the status of the novel today.
Coetzee’s recent fiction is coloured by what Kathleen Fitzpatrick (2006) calls ‘the anxiety of
obsolescence’: a contemporary writer’s intellectual uncertainty about the novelistic form resulting from
the pressure for newness. Coetzee’s post-millennial novels present a set of concerns strikingly similar
to those formulated by John Barth in ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’ (1967). Coetzee manifestly
expresses his scepticism about the novelistic genre which has over-used its devices and turned them
into banal clichés. However, while Barth, trying to seek ways out of exhaustion, proposes the playful
use of irony, parody and pastiche, Coetzee’s solution to the problem of how to write a novel in the age
of its ‘obsolescence’ is increasingly intense self-reflexivity, representation of contemporary ontological,
epistemological and ethical uncertainties about the novel, as well as generic game playing aimed at
transcending the limits of the genre. This seems to be the agenda of Coetzee’s post-millennial fiction:
Slow Man conflates fictional and metafictional modes, sets up and defeats readers’ expectations of
‘lucid’ realist narrative, in order to expose the limits of the novelistic form; whereas both Elizabeth
Costello and Diary of a Bad Year mix generic conventions of fiction and non-fiction transgressing
generic borders and producing highly ambiguous hybrid works. Moreover, Coetzee’s texts create a
kind of textual-metatextual space in which meanings are iterated and integrated; in consequence, an
auto-intertext is generated which disrupts the borders of individual novels. Significantly, Coetzee’s self-
conscious use of metafictional strategies also serves as a means for the consideration of ethical
dilemmas involved in the writing activity and allows him to continue his engagement with the Platonic
ideas concerning the dangers of fiction and the ethical responsibilities of a writer – the issues Coetzee
addressed in his earlier writings (e.g. The Master of Petersburg 1994).

Dr Olga Glebova is Head of the English Department at the Jan Dlugosz University of Czestochowa
(Poland) where she teaches history of British and American literature and conducts BA seminars. Her
research interests include contemporary English language novel and literary theory, especially
narratology, postmodern theory, author theories and the historical development of authorship,
adaptation and appropriation. She has published extensively on these issues and participated in
numerous international conferences both in Poland and abroad. She has co-edited two books and
edited an international collection of essays on the recent English language novel (The Novel in English
at the Start of the Twenty- First Century: Recontextualising the Tradition, Czestochowa: Wydawnictwo
AJD, 2009). She is currently working on a book dealing with the theory and practice of literary
appropriation.

Trevor R Griffiths
Ugly rumours: spooks snogging Ken in extremis. Never so good; Howard Brenton’s decade

Howard Brenton remains one of British theatre’s most provocative playwrights after four decades of
consistently innovative and challenging work. In the last decade he has reinvented himself for new
generations of theatergoers and for a wider television audience through his work on Spooks.
The aim of this paper is to explore his exceptionally interesting body of work since just before
the millennium up to his recent play about Harold Macmillan’s career. Brenton has always been an
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active social and socialist dramatist prepared to work in whatever medium and in whatever venue
offered him the chance to explore his trenchant insights most effectively. Sometimes shunned by the
establishment, particularly after the controversy generated by Mary Whitehouse’s attack on The
Romans In Britain, Brenton has enjoyed recently enjoyed a series of successes in major venues that
reaffirm his importance as one of our leading dramatists,. These successes are both rooted in his past
practice and set out in new directions that ensure that he remains one of our most challenging and
innovative writers.
The main works covered will be Ugly Rumours. Tricycle Theatre 1998, with Tariq Ali,
Collateral Damage, Tricycle 1999, with Tariq Ali, and Andy De la Tour, Snogging Ken, Almeida 2000,
with Tariq Ali and Andy de la Tour , Kit’s Play, RADA 2000, Spooks (13 episodes), television 2002-5,
Paul, Cottesloe, 2005, In Extremis, Globe 2006, Never So Good, Lyttleton 2008

Trevor R Griffiths first met Howard Brenton when they served on the board of Foco Novo Theatre
Company. At Trevor’s invitation, Howard work-shopped his play One Once with students at the
University of North London where Trevor was Professor of Theatre Studies. Trevor has published
extensively on aspects of contemporary and Early Modern Theatre and is currently Visiting Professor
in Humanities at the Universities of Exeter and Hertfordshire

Sarah Grochala
Not Breaking the Rules: The politics of non-transgression in Mike Bartlett’s Contractions

There is a commonly held belief within British theatre that the way for a playwright to challenge the so-
called universal rules of playwriting is to break them. Noel Grieg encourages emerging playwrights
with the classic dictum that ‘rules are there to be broken’, while David Edgar states that ‘playwrights
acknowledge both that there are legitimate formal expectations, but that they have the right – cussedly
– to defy them.’ But what if breaking the rules of dramatic structure has become a rule in itself and so
now constitutes a normative as opposed to a subversive act?
This paper will explore the idea of transgression in Mike Bartlett’s 2008 play Contractions. It
will demonstrate how a range of different notions about transgression are inscribed not only in play’s
content, but also at the level of its dramatic structure. It will draw on Žižek’s suggestion that the most
effective way to challenge a hegemonic system in a post-ideological society is through an over-
identification with it. Following Žižek, it will show how Bartlett’s strict adherence to the so-called
universal rules of playwriting exposes the capitalist basis of their formal politics. Consequently, it will
demonstrate how Bartlett’s play can be read as a critique of late capitalist society, which it posits offers
us the illusion of the ability to transgress, whilst at the same time restricting the freedom of the
individual to act as they choose within the private sphere.

Sarah Grochala is a PhD student at Queen Mary University of London. Her research is an
investigation into the use of alternative dramaturgies in contemporary British playwriting. She holds an
MPhil in Playwriting Studies from Birmingham and a MA in English Language and Literature from
Oxford. She has worked extensively in British theatre. As an actress, she played the lead role in Novel
Theatre’s West End production of Little Women. She has worked as a dramaturge for the Brighton
Festival and is the literary director of the theatre company Widsith. She is however best known as a
playwright. Her plays include S-27 (Oberon 2009) which was shortlisted for the King’s Cross Award in
2007 and won the Amnesty International UK/iceandfire Protect the Human Playwriting Competition in
the same year.

Miriam Esther Saskia Halfmann

“[W]e must build a different world” – A Dialogue of Past and Presence
in Steven Sater and Duncan Sheik’s Spring Awakening

After Spring Awakening’s much-anticipated premiere in 2006, TIME editor Richard Zoglin applauded it
“[t]he boldest, most contemporary play on Broadway.” At first sight, this seems odd, given that the
musical is based on Frank Wedekind’s controversial play The Awakening of Spring: A Tragedy of
Childhood (1891), written over a hundred years ago. Yet Wedekind’s central theme, teenage anxieties,
appears to be more heatedly discussed today than ever. In an age of youngsters going on shooting
sprees, the search for reasons is dominating the media and leaves older and younger generations
alike agonizing over the disastrous status quo. Besides, the fact that the play and the musical were

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both composed at turns of the centuries positions them within the context of fin de siècle art which has
come to imply decadence but also a hope for a better world. Wedekind’s contemporary Robert Musil,
for example, (in)famously portrayed the pubertal struggles of teenagers against the background of an
authoritarian society in The Confusions of Young Törless (1906), and director Michael Haneke recently
created a big stir with his award-winning movie The White Ribbon (2009), showing what kids can be
capable of when confronted with domestic violence and psychological atrocity. In Spring Awakening,
the rebel Melchior Gabor grabs his mike and rocks “money is their idol,/ And nothing is okay unless it’s
scripted in their Bible” (Spring Awakening: A New Musical 21), voicing the flaws of the adult world, but
he is still able to envision a better life, saying “I have now seen, Wendla, how this contemptible
bourgeois society works–how everything we touch is turned to dirt. In the end, we have only each
other–we must build a different world” (ibid. 79).
This paper is going to address strategies of transferring narratives into a contemporary context
and genre. Moreover, it will focus on the present-day portrayal of the ‘generation gap’ while trying to
highlight the particular effect of an intertwining of past and presence – a dialogue that enables Spring
Awakening to be one of the most up to date musicals as well as the “cult hit in the making” (Charles
Spencer, Telegraph, London) it might already be.

Miriam Esther Saskia Halfmann, M.A., born 1984, studied American Studies, Musicology, and
Comparative Literature at Bonn University, Germany and Aalborg University, Denmark. 2009: M.A.,
thesis: “‘The bastards are making it up!’ - Forms of New Journalism in Norman Mailer’s The Armies of
the Night and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood” (to be published in 2010). Since 2009 PhD, advisor:
Prof. Dr. Marion Gymnich, Bonn University, PhD project “Representations of the Journalist in 20th-
century North American Fiction” (working title). Research interests: (literary) journalism studies,
(horror) film studies, representations of disease and emotion in literature and media, questions of
transdisciplinarity, 20th/ 21st-century American literature and culture, literary and cultural theory.

Ann Heilmann
Neo-Victorian Metafictional Games: The Prestige, The Illusionist, Affinity

This paper is concerned with the self-referential and metafictional strategies of contemporary neo-
Victorianism, which often, implicitly or explicitly, directs our attention to conjuring tricks: like the
audience of a stage magician we know from the start that it's all an act, but judge the quality of the
performance by its ability to deceive and mystify us. The textual and filmic strategies of misdirection
and the mise-en-scène of an illusion can also be related to Jean Baudrillard's postmodernist concept
of simulation and hyperreality. Neo-Victorian fiction and film adapts Baudrillard by engaging us in a
game of hide and seek, in which the deceptions in which the characters ensnare each other conceal
even as they reveal the textual and visual deceits practised on reader and spectator, creating third-
order simulations which aim to trick and then spectacularly undeceive us in our desire to capture the
'reality' of the Victorian worlds created.
My paper draws on Michael Mangan's discussion (in Performing Dark Arts, 2007) of the
'performative writing' of illusionists and Baudrillard's concept of 'simulation and simulacra' in order to
examine two recent neo-Victorian films, Christopher Nolan's The Prestige (2006, adapted from
Christopher Priest's eponymous novel of 1995), and Neil Burger's The Illusionist (2006, based on
Steven Millhauser's 1990 story 'Eisenheim the Illusionist'), in comparison with Sarah Waters's Affinity
(1999). These texts and films, I contend, present the neo-Victorian conjuring trick as a play in three
acts: misdirection (the pledge of authenticity made towards the audience), the magic turn (the surprise,
such as the disappearance of an object or a person), and the 'prestige', in stage magic the illusion
itself, in neo-Victorianism the revelation of the trick.

Ann Heilmann is Professor of English at the University of Hull, where she directs the Centre for
Victorian Studies. The author of Neo-Victorianism: The Victorians in the 21st Century (2010, with Mark
Llewellyn), New Woman Strategies (2004) and New Woman Fiction (2000), she has (co)edited a
critical edition of George Moore, four anthologies, and three essay collections, most recently
Metafiction and Metahistory in Contemporary Women's Writing (2007, with Mark Llewellyn). She is the
general editor of Routledge's History of Feminism and Pickering and Chatto's Gender and Genre
series.

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Rupert Hildyard
‘“the dark machinery of savage grace”: Poetic Language and the Body’

What does poetry, notoriously the least popular of literary forms, have to offer to the 21st century? In
particular, does it speak to a very obvious human responsibility in the 21st century, the reconstruction
of our relationship to the ‘more-than-human’ world in which we live? Much 20th century thought has
been based on the premise that language is what divides us from other animals and is what constructs
the symbolic realm in which most of our living takes place. But poetry has often invoked the natural
world and it has frequently been suggested that poetry offers a unique connection to nature. This
paper uses the work of two consciously ‘ecological’ writers, the philosopher David Abram and the poet
John Burnside, to think about the relationship of poetry to the body, and about what makes poetic
language different from other uses of language.
Abram’s The Spell of the Sensuous elaborates an explanation for the violent dislocation of
modern culture from what he calls ‘the more-than-human world’. He argues that there is a continuity
between human communication and the semiotics of nature, and that language is a profoundly bodily
phenomenon. His ideas have a paricular relevance to long-standing debates about the nature of
poetry. In turn John Burnside’s characteristic preoccupation with the spiritual can be seen as an
attempt to register “our insertion into a world that continually exceeds our grasp in every direction”. His
poem ‘De Humani Corporis Fabrica’ (from The Good Neighbour 2005) explores what Abram calls “the
uncanniness of this physical form”. To an extent Burnside’s poem illustrates, supports and replicates
Abram’s thesis that but I argue that it also interestingly comments on, critiques and complicates
Abram’s ideas, extending our understanding of how poetry has the capacity “to continually remind the
reading body of its inherence in a more-than-human field of meanings”.

Rupert Hildyard is Principal Lecturer in English at the University of Lincoln. His doctoral research was
on modernism and the short story and he has published on 20th century cultural history and, in the
21st century field, on John Lanchester’s novel Mr Phillips. His research interests are in ecocriticism and
21st century writing.

Jennifer Hodgson
“Such a Thing as Avant Garde Has Ceased to Exist”: The Hidden Legacies of British
Experimental Writing

The contemporary ethical and political dilemmas of Anglo-American liberals (multiculturalism,

globalisation, questions about human flourishing), have reignited debates about the forms and function
of fiction. Mid-century anxieties about the situation of the novel – which tended to set up an opposition
between a detached, obscure and aloof experimentalism and a liberal and more humane, indigenous
tradition of realist fiction – have re-emerged. Contemporary critical accounts and the present-day
literary press seem content to rehearse the old realist-experimentalist dichotomy and find the former
lacking – in popular success; in a tenable ideology – and dismiss it to a marginal space that might be
regarded as the academic lacuna. Whilst mid-century writers such as Muriel Spark, J.G. Ballard and
Iris Murdoch have come to prominence as key figures in shaping the terms of such critical dialogues,
literary historians have positioned the more neglected British experimental novelists of the mid-century
period – Christine Brooke-Rose, Brigid Brophy, B.S. Johnson, Alan Burns, Thomas Hinde, Rayner
Heppenstall, Giles Gordon and Ann Quin, amongst others – as an adjunct to debates surrounding the
post-war re-emergence of realism, failing to engage with its complex and often hidden legacies.
The focus of my paper will be a re-evaluation of the mid-century British experimental tendency,
proposing a literary genealogy that offers a timely opportunity to reshape canonical perceptions of the
late 20th-century novel. Often minored through accusations of aesthetic failure, I propose that these
novels both assert the vitality of the novel form and explore its limits. I intend to show how, by
modifying and developing the achievements of modernism, whilst self-consciously warning against the
easy consolations of postmodernism, these novels speculate on an alternative history for the
development of the novel into the 21st century.

Jennifer Hodgson is a PhD candidate at Durham University researching the British avant garde and
the experimental novel at mid-century.

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Emily Horton
‘Everything you ever dreamed’: Post-9/11 Trauma in Ali Smith’s The Accidental

Commenting on the disruptive effect of 9/11 and the Iraq War on contemporary society and fiction,
Philip Tew notes an important shift in modern values away from ‘individual [...] solipsistic identities’
prominent in the 1980s and 90s to ones based on historical consciousness and community. He
explains, ‘[By contrast to] “trauma-culture” fiction [of the pre-millennium, which] explores obsessively
individual identity and a sense of one’s fractious personal history [...] the traumatological responds
[instead] to concrete and collective fears, exploring a notion of their radical threat to both the individual
and one’s sense of collectivity.’ Developing this idea critically, this essay explores its special
significance in relation to Ali Smith’s 2005 novel The Accidental, which by borrowing and transforming
Paolo Pasolini’s motif of the angel/demon intruder, offers an innovative reinterpretation of
contemporary trauma and ethics.
Like Pasolini, Smith is concerned with the insincerity and complacency of modern consumer
society, which while in some ways radicalised by contemporary history, continues to display middle-
class ideologies, including gender conformity, class prejudice, sexual repression, and media
obsession. Through its exploration of the Smart family’s dysfunctional situation, the novel represents
a modernised version of Pasolini’s Marxist critique, the characters’ consumer insecurities exemplifying
bourgeois society’s disorder. Nevertheless, as Lucy Hughes-Hallett notes, Smith’s interpretation of this
‘archetypal fable’ is at once ‘less mystical than Pasolini’s’ and ‘funnier’: she introduces complex, multi-
dimensional characters, defined by post-millennial humour and angst, whose dilemmas go beyond
Pasolini’s anarchic Marxism to comment on the loss of modern community and the need for social re-
connection following 9/11. Developing ideas resonant in trauma theory, including work by Julia
Kristeva, Shoshana Felman and Cathy Caruth, this essay sees the novel as a departure from
postmodern relativism, which through its critical ethics offers a new postmillennial social paradigm,
based on authenticity, confrontation and community in place of individualism and difference.

Dr Emily Horton is a visiting lecturer in English Literature at the University of Westminster and Brunel
University. Her research interests include contemporary British and American fiction, focusing
especially on social concerns and representations of trauma and marginality. She recently completed
her PhD at the University of Nottingham, which explores the post-consensus fictions of Graham Swift,
Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro. She is currently editing and submitting for publication chapters from
this thesis.

Ursula Hurley
Borderlands: mapping the ground between fiction, essay and autobiography
- a writer gets productively lost

According to Lee Gutkind, creative non-fiction is 'becoming the most important and popular genre in
the literary world today.' And yet the term itself is heavy with tension and intriguing contradiction. This
genre is defined, 'non-fiction', by what it isn't. But if it isn't fiction, then what is it? Vila-Matas writes of 'a
stimulating tendency of the contemporary novel... that opens new ground in between essay, fiction
and autobiography....' This tendency, and whether texts which demonstrate it can usefully still be
called novels, is the area that my paper seeks to explore. With reference to hybrid texts including
James Frey's embellished memoir A Million Little Pieces, Bret Easton Ellis' self-impersonation in Lunar
Park, and Penelope Lively's act of literary confabulation in Making It Up, I shall attempt to map
developments in these borderlands. In doing so, I shall draw on insights gained into processes and
products during the completion of my own experimental text, which seeks to explore the nexus of
fiction/biography/autobiography both in terms of the individual writer negotiating the matrix of self and
other, real and imagined, fiction and 'fact', and in terms of the author in a wider social context and
historical setting.

Ursula Hurley works in poetry, creative non-fiction and experimental prose fiction. She has recently
published her first poetry collection, Tree, with Erbacce Press http://erbacce-press.com/#/ursula-
hurley/4535837556, and her first novel is forthcoming. She was shortlisted for the Impress Prize for
New Writers 2008 (creative non-fiction), and the Gloom Cupboard International Poetry Prize. She has
delivered workshops for the Writer’s Handbook LIVE and for The Times Literature Festival,
Cheltenham.

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David James
A Renaissance for the Crystalline Novel

What has happened to epic? How have twenty-first-century writers sought to reconcile this
experimentally grandiose genre with their attention to the minute facets of domestic life? This article
discusses the ways in which we might think transnationally about the changing structure of epic,
focusing on the resurgence of novels from English, postcolonial, North American and Asian-American
innovators that demonstrate a sense of formal economy when addressing the ramifications of world-
historical events. James argues that the miniaturized epic is born out of an impulse to occupy two
contrasting levels of narrative scale: to evoke, thematically, the international radius of depicted events,
but to do so in a structurally and discursively contracted manner. Scaled-down in this way, the post-
Millennial epic can be located somewhere between what Mark Gurl, in his recent The Program Era
(2009), calls the “high cultural pluralism” of Philip Roth’s and Toni Morrison’s work (foregrounding as
these figures often do the demands of engaging with ethnic and cultural difference in formally
innovative ways), and a more economical mode of “lower-middle-class modernism” which, as McGurl
observes, “often takes the form of the minimalist short story” when dramatizing the effects of socio-
economic uncertainty and displacement.
By considering works such as Roth’s Everyman (2006) and Indignation (2008), Ian McEwan’s
On Chesil Beach (2007), Caryl Phillips’s In the Falling Snow (2009), and Marilynne Robinson’s Home
(2008), this paper seeks to undercut the naturalization of modern epic’s European heritage by
exploring how these inter-generational novels exemplify both the genre’s formal adaptability and its
recent transcultural relocations. With this overarching aim in mind, this discussion traces the
implications of epic’s structural miniaturization in the past decade by reassessing the pertinence of Iris
Murdoch’s distinction (in “Against Dryness” from 1961) between the “journalistic” and “crystalline”
novel. I argue that the resurgence of crystalline fiction does not simply reveal prominent writers’
renewed preferences for cutting-back or relinquishing the big novel of ideas; rather, it shows their
commitment to rearticulating philosophically or politically expansive narratives through a scrupulously
proportioned, if not miniaturist, sense of design.

David James is Lecturer in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Literature in the School of English
Studies at the University of Nottingham. His work on the critical intersections between stylistics and
cultural geography is represented in Contemporary British Fiction and the Artistry of Space (2008),
and in his more recent co-edited collection, New Versions of Pastoral: Post-Romantic, Modern, and
Contemporary Responses to the Tradition (2009). He is currently completing a monograph exploring
the formal redevelopment of modernist aesthetics by recent American, British, and postcolonial
writers, while editing a book of essays entitled Legacies of Modernism: Historicizing Contemporary
Fiction. He will be guest-editing a special issue of Contemporary Literature on ‘Post-Millennial
Commitments’ to be published in Winter 2012.

Ingrid Jendrzejewski
Science and Theatre: Bridging the 'Two Cultures' on the Twenty-first Century Stage?

In the year 2000, theatre critic Carol Rocamora stated that 'science is becoming the hottest topic in
theatre today, so much so that it’s identifiable as a millennial phenomenon on the English-speaking
stage' (Scientific Dramaturgy, The Nation - 5 June 2000). Not only has the number of so-called
'science plays' exploded in the past decade, but we are now beginning to see a significantly richer
variety of treatments of science and the scientist in the theatre.
In this paper, I would like to present an overview of how science and scientists have
traditionally been depicted on the stage and look at how these treatments are being developed and
subverted in the twenty-first century. I will examine some of the current trends in what some identify as
the genre of science plays, including the postdramatic science theatre identified by Shepherd-Barr and
Liliane Campos, as well as the emergence of the commemorative science play, a sub-genre of the
science play which has proliferated in response to specific celebratory events like 2005's 'Einstein
Year' and 2009's year-long celebration of Charles Darwin's life and work. My aim is to provide a useful
context for examining the extent to which contemporary theatre is bridging the gap between CP
Snow's 'two cultures'.

Ingrid has a background in both the arts and the sciences; after receiving a BA in English Literature
and a BFA in Creative Writing from the University of Evansville, she received a BS and MSci in Natural

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Science (Physics) from the University of Cambridge. Ingrid co-founded Top Quark Productions, an
amateur theatre group dedicated to science-related theatre, and she her current research interests
focus around intersections between science and the stage.

Russell Jones
Happy Robots: Technologies and Utopias in Edwin Morgan’s Science Fiction Poetry

Ever hopeful, Edwin Morgan’s science fiction poems explore humanity’s ability to progress and survive
through its understanding of science and technology. Morgan utilises everything that Sci-fi can throw
at us, from talking particles to a Christmas card-writing computer, in order to explore human nature
and our hopes for the future.
This paper will compare the documenting properties of 20th and 21st century technologies in
his Instamatic Poems and From the Video Box collections, which focus on the nature of capturing
news and events, with the speculative qualities and possible future technologies in his science fiction
poems. It will uncover what constitutes “utopia” for Morgan, technology’s part in its creation and why
Morgan seems so opposed to the ubiquitous doomsday scenarios of much popular modern science
fiction.
The promotional uses of 21st century technology for Morgan’s work will be considered as we
examine a recent comic of his poem The First Men on Mercury (by metaphrog), hear a sample from a
song which is available online (produced by Morgan and Edinburgh-based band, Idlewild) and view a
clip from Dan Warren’s short film version of Morgan’s poem In Sobieski’s Shield.

Russell Jones (b.1984) is a poet and researcher currently based in Edinburgh. His work has won
recognition in several poetry competitions including the Grierson Verse Prize (2007), the Bridport Prize
(2007, 2008, 2009) the Eric Gregory Award (2007) and a number of national competitions. Recently,
his article, ‘Computer Error: Voices and Translations in Edwin Morgan’s Science Fiction Poetry’ was
published in Edinburgh University’s postgraduate journal, Forum, and he has presented papers on the
interactions of science and poetry at Edinburgh University and the Scottish Poetry Library (Edinburgh).
His collection of science fiction poems, ‘The Last Refuge’ was also published by Forest Press in 2009.
Jones is currently researching ‘The Science Fiction Poetry of Edwin Morgan’ at Edinburgh University.

Susie Karpasitis
Bypassing the flashback – towards new ways of representing
trauma in 21st century fiction

Trauma theory is amongst the hugely significantly theoretical trends of the new millennium exploding
onto the theoretical arena post 2001. Despite the long history of traumatic testimonies and narratives
throughout literature, it was the late twentieth and early twenty first century theories of Kaplan, Caruth,
Hartman and Herman which fore-grounded trauma as a distinct theoretical area of analysis. Yet in
spite of being a relatively new phenomenon the representations and interpretations of trauma have
undergone significant changes during the last decade.
This paper examines the changing nature of traumatic representation in the first decade of the
twenty first century, examining the transformation of illustrations of trauma from beginning to end of
the noughties, focusing on three texts: Patrick Magrath’s Trauma, Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time
Travellers Wife, and Jonathan Saffran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Furthermore it
proposes that as understanding of the nature of trauma becomes more widespread, infiltrating
mainstream media and pop-culture as well as literature, traumatic narratives have begun to distance
themselves from the traditional areas of recovered memory and symptomology – including the allusion
to the features of traumatic illnesses such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and dissociative
conditions. It is no longer viable for traumatic narrative to rely solely on habitual depictions of trauma
such as the flashback, the recurring nightmare traumatic dream sequences and intrusive imagery.
Accordingly in order to compliment the swift and multifarious changes to the perception of the
constitution of trauma, novelists are representing trauma through less overt and conventional
methods. These include changing time sequencing, altering conventional conceptions of reality,
experimental syntax and grammar and, in some cases, through the creation of links between trauma
and less identifiable mental illnesses. Similarly trauma theorists are resisting clichés and obvious
analysis of trauma, looking instead towards understated traumatic intimations and reader responses to

25
trauma. The texts to be analysed are all examples of writing which are currently expanding the
margins of traumatic narrative, setting the standards which will propel trauma into the next decade.

Susan Karpasitis is currently in her second year of doctoral research. Her PhD examines
representations of trauma in literature from the Theban plays to the early noughties. She is a part time
lecturer at the University of Lincoln.

Adam Kelly
Twenty-First-Century American Fiction and the New Sincerity

Americans born between the late 1950s and the early 1970s were the first to come to maturity in what
K. Anthony Appiah has termed the “post-optimism” period, a time when radical emancipatory politics
and egalitarian social hope began to resemble relics from an increasingly distant past. In this paper, I
argue that what has emerged in twenty-first-century fiction by writers of this generation is a sensibility
best described as a “New Sincerity.” In his landmark study Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), Lionel
Trilling argued that Western culture from the Renaissance on had been dominated by the ideal of
sincerity, defined as “a congruence of avowal and actual feeling” practised with “a public end in view.”
In the twentieth century, however, sincerity was superseded by the goal of authenticity, a commitment
to exploring private selfhood which characterised the Modernist writers and those who followed in their
wake.
The post-baby-boom generation of writers currently in the ascendant on the American literary
scene – including Michael Chabon, Junot Diaz, Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen,
Richard Powers, Dana Spiotta, Colson Whitehead and the late David Foster Wallace – display in their
fiction a renewed commitment to an ethics of sincere communication over against authentic
expression. But the sincerity of contemporary fiction cannot be understood in traditional terms. It
responds to a contemporary situation marked by the proliferation of new media and advertising, the
problematic status of theory, and the exhaustion of postmodernist aesthetics, a situation in which
notions of authenticity and sincerity have come under severe pressure. Nonetheless, I argue in this
paper that the impossibility of maintaining a traditional understanding of sincerity becomes for these
writers an enabling feature in conceiving new ethical, political and aesthetic approaches to creating art
for the twenty-first century.

Adam Kelly is a PhD Candidate and IRCHSS Government of Ireland Scholar at University College
Dublin, where he is currently completing a dissertation entitled “Moments of Decision in Contemporary
American Fiction.” He teaches courses on American modernism, post-war and contemporary
American fiction, and critical theory, and his articles have appeared or are forthcoming in the journals
Critique, Philip Roth Studies, Irish Journal of American Studies, and Phrasis, and in the collection
Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays.

Judy Kendall
Painting poetry with gaps - the experience of a writer

We are, in various combinations, critics, poets and novelists who teach at Salford University and who
write on the innovative or experimental edge of our genres. This panel will be an attempt to contribute
to investigations into what’s happening now by tracing a common concern with emergent forms and
genres, both in our own work, and the work of our contemporaries. Judy Kendall, an award-winning
poet and short fiction writer specialising in visual and digital text, will discuss space, rhythm and visual
text, composition and performance.

Dr Judy Kendall has published two collections of poetry with Cinnamon Press, The Drier The Brighter
in 2007 and Joy Change in 2010. She is also published extensively as a poet, short fiction writer and
digital poet and collaborates with artists, musicians and composers. In addition, she is editor of
Carcanet's Edward Thomas's Poets and writes extensively on Edward Thomas. Her critical
monograph Out in the Dark: Edward Thomas's composing processes is due to be published by
University of Wales Press in 2011. Currently in charge of the English and Creative Writing degree at
Salford University, she was an English lecturer at Kanazawa University in Japan for seven years and
has written several articles on Japanese aesthetics, which has influenced her own poetry.

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Alan Kirby
The Inheritors: Theorizing Culture in the Wake of Postmodernism

In this paper, rather than evaluate the evidence for the much-discussed contemporary retreat of
postmodernism, I consider a number of competing theories that have recently been put forth to
describe culture in its wake. Raoul Eshelman’s performatism sees contemporary culture, exemplified
by Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, as “[forcing] us, at least for the time being, to take the beautiful attitude of a
believer rather than the skeptical attitude of a continually frustrated seeker of truth… Performatist
aesthetics… bring back beauty, good, wholeness and a whole slew of other metaphysical
propositions, but only under very special, singular conditions that a text forces us to accept on its own
terms”. Gilles Lipovetsky’s hypermodernity describes contemporary society as the maximization of
modernity, and as the successor to Lyotard’s postmodernity: “The climate of epilogue is being followed
by the awareness of a headlong rush forwards, of unbridled modernization”. Today, modernity’s values
of limitless individualism, emancipation from oppressive duties and structuring principles, and the
pursuit of personal autonomy have become controlling social realities. Nicolas Bourriaud’s
altermodern, the guiding idea behind an exhibition of contemporary art that he curated at Tate Britain
in 2009, and valorizes a “new globalised perception” deriving from travel, migration, creolisation, and a
“new universalism... based on translations, subtitling and generalized dubbing”. My own
digimodernism highlights the ongoing impact of computerization on both notions of textuality and the
wider cultural landscape. Restructuring practices of authorship, publication, and reception, most
obviously through Web 2.0, digitization has also revolutionized the aesthetics, form, and economics of
existing modes such as film, television, and the book. Like performatism, digimodernism lays claim to
the position of cultural dominant after postmodernism. However compelling these and other accounts
of culture and society in postmodernism’s wake may be, they offer insight into the various directions
st
the humanities are taking in the 21 century.

Alan Kirby holds a PhD in 20th-century British fiction from the University of Exeter. His most recent
monograph is Digimodernism (Continuum, 2009), an interdisciplinary study of cultural developments in
the wake of postmodernism. He has also published articles on Stephen Poliakoff, John Fowles and
James Joyce. He lives and works in Oxford.

Joy Knight
‘The Road – Apocalyptic parable’

In a time of mounting concerns over climate change and the impending environmental crisis that will
entail from this, it is easy to understand why Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road has received so
much interest, from both the general public and the critics. The Road has been hailed as a 21st century
classic, a successfully powerful warning to humanity, implicitly if indefinably environmentalist. This
paper argues that it may be a classic but of a more reactionary kind, one that harks back to well
established ideologies that may be comforting to some readers but offer no useful guidance to 21st
century environmental crisis. I argue that at least three ideological traditions can be exhumed from the
text. Firstly The Road clearly fits into the classic patterns of mainstream American fiction uncovered
fifty years ago by Leslie Fiedler in Love & Death in the American Novel. Secondly, utilising concepts
from a range of theorists, including Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva and John Gray, I will demonstrate
that far from being an environmentalist text the novel is profoundly Christian in its themes and tropes,
which is to say it takes human goodness and spiritual transcendence as its primary values, qualities
that are hardly compatible with environmental ethics. Finally, what gives the text its energy and
fascination is not responsibility to the earth but the internal contradictions of meat-eating and human
abuse of animals, the most glaring silence in the text.

Joy Knight graduated form the University of Lincoln with First Class Honours in English and is
currently a postgraduate student at the University. Joy’s main areas of interest are animals, nature and
the environment and sexuality, gender and the body.

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Jaroslav Kušnír
Crossing Generic and Identity Boundaries in Paul Auster’s Invisible (2008)

In many of his novels, Paul Auster has often dealt with a problematic status of an individual and his
inability to express and record reality through language and thus also with the relationship between
human consciousness, a language, and external, physical reality. He develops these themes in his
most recent novels such as Travels in the Scriptorium (2006), Dark Man (2008), and Invisible (2009),
but in these novels he also deals with the problematic existence of an individual in a contemporary
world and the construction of her/his identity through language. Auster’s novel Invisible is loosely
reminiscent of the buildungsroman and love story narrative conventions, but in this novel Auster alters
and undermines narrative strategies of these genres. By developing metaphors of growing, love and
invisibility, he also deals with physical, emotional and fictional identities of an individual living. In my
paper I will analyze Auster’s use of postmodern and other narrative strategies (metafiction,
intertextuality, postmodern parody) and their role not only in the problematization of the literary
representation of characters’ physical and emotional identities, but also in the author’s depiction of a
relationship between physical and mental emotions. I will point out the way Auster depicts love not
only as a physical fact metaphorically equal with sexual pleasure, but also as an emotional feeling
close to spirituality and thus, at the same time, the feeling comparable to feelings evoked by the
process of writing and storytelling which stimulate imagination. I will also emphasize the way the
feelings evoking emotionality represent a wish of an individual living in a contemporary world to
achieve emotional authenticity which has to struggle with the unreliability of language and other sign
systems which mediate human experience and memory.

Jaroslav Kušnír is the associate professor at the Department of English Language and Literature,
Faculty of Humanities and Natural Sciences, the University of Prešov at Prešov, Slovakia. His
research fields are 20th century American, mostly postmodern literature, Australian literature, British
postmodern literature, critical reception of British, Australian and American literature in Slovakia, and
literary theory and criticism. He is the author of the following books: Poetika americkej postmodernej
prózy (Richard Brautigan and Donald Barthelme)[Poetics of American Postmodern Fiction]. Prešov,
Slovakia: Impreso, 2001; American Fiction: Modernism-Postmodernism, Popular Culture, and
Metafiction. Stuttgart, Germany: Ibidem, 2005; Australian Literature in Contexts. Banská Bystrica,
Slovakia: Trian, 2003.

Louise LePage
Contemporary Drama’s Cyborg Characters: Being Post/human in the 21st Century

Many posthuman theorists have it that we’ve all become, or are fast becoming, cyborgs. But what
does this strange term mean? Does it have credence in the real world? Can we find any evidence of
such posthuman being in the treatment of character in 21st century drama?
I will argue that the cyborg is both real and metaphorically important and that in a study of
character it can function to reveal the politics of what it means to be and to behave as a post/human in
the contemporary world.
The remarkable work of Tim Crouch importantly explores such questions of being in today’s
world, a world whose traditional borders between there and here, real and surreal or virtual, mind and
body, hero and villain, man and woman, and so forth, sometimes become confused and confusing.
Such boundary ‘play’ is profoundly serious play for it signals some of the problems we now face as
post/human beings at the same time as Crouch’s work represents or conceives possible new maps,
roles, and responsibilities by which we might live. This is politically important drama and the cyborg
provides one important tropic key to unlocking it.

Louise LePage is a PhD student and visiting lecturer at Royal Holloway, University of London. She has
published in academic journals and has worked as a freelance theatre critic for Irish Theatre
Magazine. Her thesis is a study of character from the Renaissance to the present day, proposing that
for as long as we have been human we have been also been posthuman.

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Mark Llewellyn
Neo-Victorian Moments: Culture, Continuity and Critique

Beginning with a discussion of recent scientific research into the relationship between social cohesion,
community morality and the novel as form in relation to the Victorian Realist fictional mode, this paper
explores a series of aesthetic questions about neo-Victorianism and the potential textual and cultural
instabilities inherent in some of the (a)historical strategies employed in recent, post-millennium texts.
argue that it is precisely those textual and cultural encounters with the Victorian that highlight their
ambiguous relationship to the facts of the nineteenth century, that provide the most subtle and
interrogatory understanding of the function of neo-Victorianism at the present time. For example,
Michael Cox’s The Meaning of Night (2006) begins with an introductory note from the ‘Professor of
Post-Authentic Victorian Fiction’ at the University of Cambridge, and the text is littered with ‘scholarly’
footnotes which seem to function as and provide signals of ‘authenticity’ to the narrative. D. J. Taylor’s
Kept: A Victorian Mystery (2006) on the other hand blurs the nature of historical fiction and historical
fact by intertwining characters created by the author, characters ‘borrowed’ from Victorian texts, and
real writers from the period. What both novels demonstrate in different ways is the process of historical
research that goes into the creation of neo-Victorian narratives, but at the same time they openly
underline the nature of their textual modes of Questioning the nature of neo-Victorianism in its various
forms (pastiche, adaptation, rewriting/revision, appropriation), this paper develops more general
arguments about the relationship between neo-Victorianism and other forms of historical fiction, and
plays with the concept of ‘history’ in both its Victorian and neo-Victorian theorisations. Perhaps most
revealingly it traces the ‘neo-Victorian moment’ in texts that do not explicitly locate themselves in the
nineteenth century but nevertheless allude to and interact with the Victorian literary tradition, including
recent works by Ian McEwan and Zadie Smith.

Mark Llewellyn is Senior Lecturer in English and Director of Postgraduate Research for Humanities
and Social Sciences at the University of Liverpool. Editor of the Journal of Gender Studies and
Consultant Editor to Neo-Victorian Studies, Mark has published widely on late-Victorian literature and
is currently completing a monograph entitled Incest in English Culture, 1835-1908.

Dean Lockwood
David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet and Tokyo Trilogy: The Crime Novel as ‘Occult History’

This paper focuses on the crime writing of British novelist, David Peace, who’s Red Riding Quartet
(1999-2002) and Tokyo Trilogy (2007-ongoing) foreground claustrophobic urban spaces of trauma and
dislocation. The Quartet and the Trilogy both deal with memories of hell, with times out of joint – in the
former, with sex crimes in Leeds in the liminal period between the industrial and the post-industrial,
and, in the latter, devastated, criminalized Tokyo in the wake of Japan’s defeat in WW2. In both, a
diabolical, vortical inheritance of corrupting, intoxicating and maddening forces is foregrounded. In
their form, they revolve around the terse, compulsively repetitious and incantatory interior monologues
of key characters as a kind of extended scream. Peace thinks of his writing as ‘occult history’, and
indeed it is a kind of sorcerous genealogy, doubling and disrupting memory with conjurations of the
ghosts of suffering unredeemed, finding portals into the past through the cultic, power of affect, of
music, for example (post-punk lyrics, in the case of the Red Riding books).
Other new crime writing, as in James Ellroy’s ‘neo-noir’, conducts a kind of occult history, but
in the main this tends to revel in a reassuring myth, a new kind of certainty in corruption and the
brutality of fact. It is complicit with ‘capitalist realism’ and the ironic distance permitted by an impotent
acceptance that there is really no alternative. Peace is different. I will draw upon an early, overlooked
essay by Gilles Deleuze (‘The Philosophy of Crime Novels’, 1966), and a Deleuzian/Nietzschean
perspective on history in terms of the ‘powers of the false’ as opposed to ‘truth-telling’, in order to
argue that Peace’s writing deploys the crime genre as a mask, a ruse, a simulacrum in order to
establish itself and discover a space for something new, some possibility of the future as otherwise, as
escape from hell. In the current crisis of neoliberalism, we occupy a liminal space in which creative
writers can connect up with past occluded intervals in order to rescue lost difference.

I am senior lecturer in media theory in the School of Media at Lincoln University, co-ordinating and
teaching a range of modules on undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. I have recently
published/am publishing journal articles and chapters in edited collections in the areas of digital

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culture, new trends in horror cinema, and post-punk music culture. I have a longstanding interest in
crime writing and horror fiction.

Caroline Lusin
‘Quite Literally, I Am Beyond Myself’:
Fictional Life-Writing in the 21st Century Novel in English

For British, Irish and New English literature, the new millennium seems to have begun with a paradox:
Having moved into the 21st century, the contemporary novel in English appears to be particularly
fascinated with exploring the past. Within the last decade, hybrid forms of fictional life-writing have
proliferated, be it fictional diaries (Zoë Heller, Notes on a Scandal, 2003; M.J. Hyland, Carry Me Down,
2006), fictional confessions (A.L. Kennedy, Paradise, 2004; John Banville, The Sea, 2005; Graham
Swift, Tomorrow, 2007) or fictional autobiographies (C.K. Stead, The Secret History of Modernism,
2001; J.M. Coetzee, Youth, 2002; James Robertson, The Testament of Gideon Mack, 2006). Yet,
instead of the former, playfully postmodernist experiments with historiographical metafiction, authors
now tend to foreground epistemological issues as they characterize modernist literature, tackling
questions such as the nature of memory, identity, knowledge, truth, and ultimately, death.
Focusing on two Irish examples and one English – Anne Enright’s The Gathering (2007),
Sebastian Barry’s The Secret Scripture (2008) and Georgina Harding’s The Spy Game (2009), this
paper explores the forms and functions of fictional autobiography as a prominent mode of the
contemporary novel in English. These authors deal with the topics named above in different ways, with
Barry, for instance, juxtaposing the stories of two narrators, and Harding’s narrator trying to
complement the facts known to her with fiction. Still, for the first-person narrators of all three novels,
delving into the past turns out to be a vital, if problematic means of keeping track and trying to make
sense of themselves, their present and other people. On closer inspection, then, these contemporary
novels are actually less about the past, than rooted very much in the here and now.

Caroline Lusin is Assistant Professor (‘Akademische Mitarbeiterin’) at the English Department of the
University of Heidelberg, Germany. She received her PhD with a study on Virginia Woolf and Anton
Chekhov. Her main research interests are modernism, the contemporary British novel, (auto)biography
and intertextuality. Currently she is working on a study on Anglo-Indian life-writing from 1818 to the
present.

Lea Heiberg Madsen

Reframing the Female Figure: Neo-Victorian Revision of Medicine and Female Corporality

This paper explores neo-Victorian revisions of the role of nineteenth-century medicine in the definition,
classification, and socio-cultural perception of the female body. It focuses on a number of recent re-
workings of the Victorian experience of “disease”, “illness” and “deformity” as a result of the fast
emerging and highly influential medical-scientific discourse, which pervaded all spheres of nineteenth-
century culture. The medical discourse became intertwined with Victorian popular culture, reinforcing
the perception of the female body as “unstable”, “abnormal”, and “monstrous”, leading not only to
public exhibitions of so-called freakish figures, but also to horrifying experiments with and operations
on “deviant” women. As we witness in Belinda Starling’s The Journal of Dora Damage (2006),
nineteenth-century medical “progress” allowed “the most eminent, radical and life-changing, nay,
epoch-changing, physician[s]”(236) to carry out bromide treatments and clitoridectomies, in order to
cure female “maladies”. The neo-Victorian novel gives voice to the silenced and marginalized
Victorians—among others, to the “abnormal” women—and reveals how the translation of medical into
cultural worked as yet another tactic to impose social control over the outsiders. In its re-presentation
of nineteenth-century medicine, it re-constructs the self-same discourse that pathologised women and
defined their bodies as “abnormal”, for, then, to subvert it and its construction of the “monstrous”
female. However, as a dialogue between present and past, the neo-Victorian mode enables revision
on various levels. As critics have argued, it is a “hybrid space” embracing not only the Victorians’ but
also our own culture. Thus, the issue of medicine and female corporality in the neo-Victorian text may,
then, serve a double purpose. In contesting nineteenth-century constructions of the “monstrous”
female, it simultaneously questions the influence of today’s medical-scientific discourse on popular
perceptions of our bodies, beauty and health—asking whether the female body, in the twenty-first

30
century, is truly free of its power, or whether medicine remains, as the Victorians believed, an
unquestionable science.

Lea Heiberg Madsen is a PhD candidate. She holds a BA in English Philology and an MA in English
Studies & Multilingual and Intercultural Communication from the University of Malaga. She wrote her
Master’s Thesis, titled: “The Double Liberation of the Silenced: Neo-Victorian Same-Sex Relationships
and the Erotics of Domination in Sarah Waters’s Tipping the Velvet and Affinity” in 2009. Under the
supervision of Dr. Rosario Arias Doblas, Lea is currently working on her doctoral thesis, titled:
“Medicine and the Female Gothic in Neo-Victorian Fiction”.

Mikaela Maftei
Fundamental Truth or Deliberate Lie?: The uneasy balance of fiction and truth

“I lie in order to tell a more significant truth.” - John Cheever

This presentation will consider the notion of ‘a more significant truth’ in fiction, examining the ways in
which fictionalized elements appear in works purporting to be ‘truth’. The acceptability of this practice
will be discussed, especially within a 21st century academic context, as well as the notion that an
underlying, fundamental truth can be transferred through combined fictional and non-fictional
elements. The problematization of inserting un-researchable fact within ‘true stories’ will be
considered, as well as the recent outcry against this practice as compared to a historical context of
past examples. Recent and somewhat sensational cases of truth and fiction comingling too closely for
readers and scholars in works classified as one or the other have forced a closer look at how exactly
we determine what constitutes a true story, while emerging genres (misery memoir, etc.) beg the
question of when we started caring so much about drawing that distinction in the first place. In
particular, the presentation will consider James Frey’s 2003 A Million Little Pieces and the ensuing
drama following its publication and classification (and re-classification), as well as the JT LeRoy case.
Frey’s text will be considered in the light of his public (written and verbal) claims, both before
and after the ‘discovery’ of fictionalized elements within his text, and the extraordinary public reaction
this provoked. LeRoy attracted a strong fanbase, including a number of celebrity supporters, for his
small body of work concerning his life as a teenage prostitute and drug user. Laura Albert was
eventually exposed the creator of the invented LeRoy persona and in 2007 ordered to pay reparations
for signing legal papers in LeRoy’s ‘name’.

Micaela Maftei is pursuing a Creative Writing PhD at the University of Glasgow.

Micaela Maftei and Laura Tansley

Greater than the Sum of its Parts – Creative Non-Fiction in Academia

In June 2010 Determining Form: Creative Non-Fiction Journeys, a creative writing conference held at
the University of Glasgow, will attempt to gather knowledge on the intersection of creative non-fiction
writing and academia. Attempting to draw together British and international academic creative writing
communities, the conference seeks to interrogate established modes of writing and question the
distinction between truth and fiction, as well as identifying the ways and places in which they meet.
The conference will establish new understandings of the inter-dependency of academic rigour and
creative practice.
Our presentation will draw together the prevalent issues raised by the papers given, exposing
current oppositions and junctions between pedagogical practice and creative expressions. Creative
non-fiction has found a place under the umbrella of the Creative Writing course, which in itself is a
relatively new discipline, and our critical examination of its potential as a way of challenging traditional
thesis construction is particularly appropriate for a venue discussing 21st century writing. Often split
into opposing departments of critical theory discussion and prose or poetry workshops, the successful
development of the Creative Writing course depends on a pedagogy that can confidently emerge from
an interlinking of these two, formally separated elements.
As creative writing researchers, practitioners and educators we have gained an understanding
of the necessity of fulfilling a role that encompasses all of these aspects within an academic context. In
the same way that fiction and non-fiction come together to create a unique form of expression, so must
creativity and criticality be understood to be interdependent in the interests of effective, cutting-edge
university teaching.

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Micaela Maftei and Laura Tansley are both pursuing Creative Writing PhDs at the University of
Glasgow.

María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro

"This is my Opa. Do you remember him killing the Jews?":

Rachel Seiffert's "Micha" and the Transgenerational Haunting of a Silenced Past

The attempt to identify a distinct "trauma novel" can be regarded as a relatively recent critical task.
Thus, Anne Whitehead refers to the title phrase of her work Trauma Fiction (2004) as signalling the
recent journey of the concept of trauma from medical and scientific discourse to the field of literary
studies (p. 4). Being the Holocaust a crucial locus of trauma, Holocaust fictions (however
controversial) have proliferated in the last decades, thus becoming a main branch within the trauma
novel genre. Survivor trauma, the task of bearing witness, and the intergenerational transmission of
victim trauma figure prominent among the subjects dealt with in literary works and critical studies in the
field. In this paper, I will focus on the other side of Holocaust trauma, namely, that of the perpetrators,
and, more specifically, on the effects that the silencing of the family past has on perpetrators'
descendants. It is in this context that I will analyse Rachel Seiffert's "Micha", one of the three novella-
length stories that make up The Dark Room (2001). "Micha" shows that, as is the case with survivors'
descendants, the silenced past returns as a haunting presence in the families of Nazi perpetrators and
accomplices. The title protagonist of Seiffert's story tries to exorcise this lingering phantom of the past
as he strives to recuperate an absent memory concerning his grandfather's involvement in the Nazi
genocide. But can the past be fully known? Can one come to terms with the fact that one's much-loved
grandfather was also a murderer? Is then the need to know about the past paradoxically mixed with an
urge to deny it? I will try to answer these questions by discussing Seiffert's plot and the import of her
stylistic choices when it comes to depicting the plight of a young German forced to re-adjust his
identity to a traumatic heritage of guilt and shame.

María Jesús Martínez-Alfaro is Senior Lecturer at the Department of English and German Philology of the
University of Zaragoza (Spain). She is the author of Text and Intertexts in Charles Palliser's The
Quincunx (Ann Arbor, UMI, 1996) and she co-edited, with Dr Ramón Plo, a volume of collected essays
entitled Beyond Borders: Re-defining Generic and Ontological Boundaries (C. Winter: Heidelberg,
2000). Her research focuses on postmodernist fiction in general and, more specifically, on such issues
as metafiction, parody, intertextuality, detective fiction, trauma and ethics in relation to the novels of
Martin Amis, John Fowles, Peter Ackroyd, Art Spiegelman, Jane Yolen, Barry Unsworth, Paul Auster
and Charles Palliser, among others. She has published several articles on the aforementioned authors
and subjects, both in Spanish and in international journals such as Twentieth-Century Literature,
Journal of Narrative Tehcnique, Symbolism, Journal of the Short Story in English (JSSE)/Les Cahiers
de la Nouvelle, Miscelánea, Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, and others. At present, she is
one of the members of an excellence research team led by Prof. Susana Onega and currently working
on trauma and ethics in contemporary fiction written in English [http://cne.literatureresearch.net/].

John McKay
But the condemned spoke with many voices: James Kelman’s ‘Translated’ Accounts

My paper will explore how the Deleuzian concepts of major and minor literature are used to allow
Scottish writing and criticism find its place within the twenty-first century literature. I will focus on
James Kelman’s novel Translated Accounts published in 2001; a text that I feel exemplifies these
Deleuzian themes. I will begin showing how critics have adopted Deleuzian models as a means of
rejuvenating Scottish literature, specifically taking Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature as a reference
point for the discussion that follows. Through a close reading of the preface to Translated Accounts I
will look its relationship with James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner
and how Kelman’ work fits into the larger Scottish tradition. This will lead into a more general
discussion about Kelman’s use of dialect in other works. I will examine how the decision to write
Translated Accounts in standard English allows Kelman to subvert the status of English as a major
language as he defamiliarizes the reader. In effect, he has written a novel that reads more like a minor
literature and thus his use of English appears like a foreign tongue. My paper takes its impetus from

32
existing Scottish criticism while drawing upon international theories in order to show that when
Deleuzian concepts are applied to Scottish writing it is able to emerge as a literature in its own right.

I am a final year PhD student at Birkbeck College where I am researching the use of dialect in
contemporary Scottish literature.

Aisling McKeown
Ireland's Eyes: Literary Reflections of the Migrant in 21st Century Ireland

This paper will explore the representation of the migrant in twenty-first century Irish literature. While
many contemporary writers continue to locate their work in the past, there are a number of writers who
choose to engage with the diversity of contemporary Ireland. They explore the sense of dislocation
and alienation inherent in the migrant condition and the identity crisis suffered as a consequence.
Through an analysis of the novel Open-Handed (2008) by Chris Binchy and the theatrical piece
Stories of a Yellow Town (2009) by The Gombeens, this paper will examine the extent to which
immigrant characters are relocated from the margins to the centre of these works and consequently
rendered recognisable and familiar rather than strange and other. Using a postcolonial theoretical
framework, it will assess the writers’ treatment of the themes of identity and place from the perspective
of both the migrant and the Irish characters. It will illustrate how regular interaction between both sets
of characters leads to a demystification of difference and a recognition of commonality.
Edward Said advocates the creation of a literature which is informed by elements from outside
the sphere of a country’s existing literature. My paper will show how, in doing just this, the featured
writers are broadening the concept of what it is to be an Irish writer in the twenty-first century.

Aisling McKeown is a first year English Literature PhD student at the University of Westminster under
the supervision of Dr. Monica Germana. She completed an MA in Twentieth Century Literature at
Kingston University in 2008. Her dissertation was on the subject of national identity in Irish fiction from
1987-2007. Her research interests are in literary representations of cultural and social environments,
diasporic narratives and life writing.

Laurent Mellet
Surviving conspiracy and chaos: Nigel Farndale’s new politics of accidental fiction

With A Sympathetic Hanging (2000) and The Blasphemer (2010), columnist Nigel Farndale’s debut
fiction opened and marks the end of the literary decade with ethical and aesthetic networks on issues
such as political or historical conspiracy and intimate chaos. Both striking plots rest on a number of
motifs the copresence of which reads quite contemporary. Caught between politics beyond their reach
or in which they find themselves involved, and deceitful or deceived intimacy, Farndale’s lost
characters endeavour to survive through complex forms of social or love Darwinism. In The
Blasphemer religion and terror, faith and guardian angels, become to Farndale new modern elements
between the world and the self. Equally post-millennial is the acute significance of the challenge to
survive: plots teem with accidents, and past as present characters do or do not manage to survive the
chaos of the world and the havoc it wrought in their individual lives. Farndale’s most modern touch
might be deciphered in his accidental⎯i.e. both totally fortuitous and “based on accidents”⎯narrative
and writing, relying as they are on the unexpected and misleading random, with a view to mixing styles
and established genres. The ultimate modernity in the novels lies in the way Farndale deals with
historical time, as influential and accidental as his more contemporary events. Yet in spite of such
enduring postmodern features, his fiction eventually thinks anew the nature of today’s English writing,
in the new politics and aesthetics of survival built up by its interplay with genres.

I am a Senior Lecturer in XXth-century British Literature at the University of Burgundy (Bourgogne) in

Dijon, where I teach literature and film. My PhD thesis in English studies was entitled The Eye and the
Voice in the Novels of E. M. Forster and their Film Adaptations by James Ivory (Université de la
Sorbonne Nouvelle, Paris). I also graduated in film studies. I have written several papers on E. M.
Forster and James Ivory, Kazuo Ishiguro, Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan, Jonathan Coe, and film
aesthetics. My major research interests include contemporary British fiction, literature and politics,
phenomenology, film adaptations of XXth-century novels.

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Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe
English Biographical Plays about Famous Artists: the 21st Century

Since the late 1970s, more than 300 biographical plays about famous artists (composers, fine artists,
poets, actors etc.) were written and staged in the United Kingdom. In my book Biographical Plays
about Famous Artists (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2005) I analysed the range of these plays,
arguing that the dramatists often place the main artist character(s) in an adverse situation, inward
(e.g., mental illness) or outward (a personal enemy, or an anonymous power, such as war). Against
the background of such adverse forces, the artist characters tend come across as flawed human
beings. At the same time, most plays take care to provide good insights into the artists’ genius and
their artistic integrity in the face of the adversity. The book also addressed the question why there
have been so many biographical plays about famous artists over the past 30 years, providing answers
in the context of theatre history and developments across academic disciplines and society as a
whole. The material in the book represents the state of research in the early years of new millennium.
The conference paper charts the development since then, bringing it to the very present.

Daniel Meyer-Dinkgräfe studied English and Philosophy at the Universität Düsseldorf, Germany. In
1994 he obtained his Ph.D. at the Department of Drama, Theatre and Media Arts, Royal Holloway,
University of London. From 1994 to 2007, he was a Lecturer and Senior Lecturer in the Department of
Theatre, Film and Television Studies, University of Wales Aberystwyth. Since October 2007 he has
been Professor of Drama at the Lincoln School of Performing Arts, University of Lincoln. He has
numerous publications on the topic of Theatre and Consciousness to his credit, including Theatre and
Consciousness: Explanatory Scope and Future Potential (Intellect, 2005) and is founding editor of the
peer-reviewed web-journal Consciousness, Literature and the Arts and the book series of the same
title with Rodopi.

Florian Niedlich

Finding ‘the Right Kind of Attention’:

Dystopia and Transcendence in John Burnside’s Glister

This paper will investigate the discursive configuration, particularly the presence and intersection of a
dystopian discourse on the one hand and a Romantic discourse on the other, in John Burnside’s latest
novel Glister (2008). The text will be read as a post-apocalyptic narrative portraying a dystopian world
of man-made destruction. The depicted community is characterized by stasis and stagnation, despair
and hopelessness, and, above all, a profound sense of apathy and paralysis. Again and again, the text
dwells on the acute lethargy and helplessness of the people in the face of the (big business) powers
that be.
This dystopian discourse, however, is ultimately weakened by another, which locates hope and
liberation in a transcendent realm beyond history. As will be shown, the text repeatedly subscribes to
an ideology clearly derived from Romantic roots that sees beauty in the mundane, discarded and
overlooked and posits this beauty as intrinsically meaningful and thus consoling. There is, the novel
suggests, a hidden principle behind the obvious, which, however, can only be recognized if one finds
“the right kind of attention to pay it” (John Burnside, Glister, London: Vintage, 2009, p. 64). The old,
derelict chemical plant that gives the novel its title can be read as a symbol of this double-sidedness:
on the one hand an abandoned ruin in a post-industrial age, yet on the other a place of beauty that
grants access to a mysterious, transcendental realm. As the analysis will make clear, this aspect is
further underlined by the form of the narrative, whose multiperspectivity illustrates that, depending on
one’s point of view – or, for that matter, the kind of attention paid to things –, alternative horizons of
meaning may present themselves.
Finally, drawing on the Nietzschean notion of ‘metaphysical solace’, it will be shown that what the
novel puts forward as remedy for the disappointments of political and historical reality are rare,
epiphanic moments of transcendence in which the principium individuationis is temporarily suspended
and the subject, experiencing the unity, totality and continuity of all being, is for a short time released
from the burden of personal judgment and sense-making. Thus, the novel ultimately champions a kind
of Romantic holism whose ideal is an escape not only from the seemingly uncontrollable forces of
history, but from ideology, language and identity itself.
It will be argued that this neo-spiritual dimension of the text can be considered as representative of
a ‘post-secular’ tendency in much contemporary writing in English.

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Florian Niedlich studied English Cultural Studies, American Studies and Philosophy at the University of
Würzburg, Germany, from which he received his M.A. in early 2009. He currently teaches English
Literature and Cultural Studies in Würzburg and is working on his doctoral dissertation. His research
interests include Postcolonial Studies, contemporary English and American literature, literary theory,
popular culture, and representations and theories of excess.

Mark O'Connell
J.M. Coetzee and Roberto Bolaño: Vicarious Memoir in Summertime
and The Savage Detectives

In Summertime, J.M. Coetzee creates an opaque portrait of his younger self through the fictionalised
testimonies of those who were close to him. In Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, numerous
members of a literary movement known as visceral realism narrate their experiences of the period. A
young poet named Belano and his friend Lima, through representation as peripheral figures in each of
these short narratives, emerge as central figures of the novel as a whole. As such, Coetzee and
Bolaño approach the intersection of fiction and memoir from similarly oblique angles.
This paper explores two central issues: the radical ingenuity of this approach — which I refer to as
Vicarious Memoir — and the fascinating similarities in both authors’ use of it. What emerges from this
reading of Summertime alongside The Savage Detectives is the prospect, suggested by both works,
for a new synthesis of the memoir and novel forms. The writing self, in these works, is not the sole and
direct focus of the writing; the authors create indirect self-portraits, rather, by building a chorus of other
voices who speak primarily of themselves and only secondarily of the authors. As Bolaño put it in an
interview not long before his death, “every work, including the epic, is in some way autobiographical. In
the Iliad we consider the destiny of two alliances, of a city, of two armies, but we also consider the
destiny of Achilles and Priam and Hector, and all these characters, these individual voices, reflect the
voice, the solitude, of the author.” The proposed paper explores this concern with authorial self-
reflection and multiple voices in the work of two of the most innovative and influential figures in modern
fiction.

Mark O’Connell is a PhD student in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin. He has recently
completed his doctoral thesis, “Narcissism in the Novels of John Banville”, and is the recipient of an
IRCHSS Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship.

Daniel O’Gorman
‘The journey creates us. We become the frontiers we cross’:
Stepping Across Lines in Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown

“The question of death is also the question of life, panditji, and the question of how to live is also the
question of love. That is the question you have to go on answering, to which there is no answer except
in the going on.” In this passage, the haunting final aporia of Beckett’s The Unnamable – ‘I can’t go on,
I’ll go on’ – makes itself heard not just across the literal borderlines of intercontinental space, but also
(as in the original text) across the metaphysical frontier that divides the world of life from the (non-
)world of death: the borderlines and frontiers in Shalimar the Clown exist not only between individual
selves, but also within them.
This paper will argue that while hyphenated identities have always been central to Rushdie’s
fiction, the angle from which the theme is explored sets Shalimar the Clown apart from the author’s
previous novels. Although the conceptual deconstruction of borderlines was once represented as a
means towards a form of existential freedom in the guise of ‘Character vs destiny: a free-style bout’,
recent events have led Rushdie to acknowledge that, in an early twenty-first century world of global
(and globalised) terror, such distinctions are now a great deal more difficult to make. In a decade in
which religious and political extremists have learned to gain relative credibility through the exploitation
of postmodern tropes (be it, for instance, Islamist fundamentalists espousing cultural relativism, or the
BNP adopting the bastardised rhetoric of an oppressed minority group), Rushdie shows that it has
become impossible to dismiss terms such as ‘hybridity’ and ‘textuality’ as mere academic jargon. What
results is a radical and impassioned reaffirmation of the need to break free from the homogeneous,
sectarian patterns of thought that allow ideas of absolute difference and rigid borders to be
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conceptualised in the first place. By doing so, the novel aids in the construction of a liberating
‘counternarrative’ to the discourses of otherness that, whether intentionally or not, exacerbate the
fragmentation of humanity along sectarian borderlines in the post-9/11 world.

I am a second year PhD student in the English Department at Royal Holloway, University of London.
My thesis is on Memory, History, and Postmodernity in the Post-9/11 Novel.

Emily Orley
The point of place-writing: a new genre for the 21st century?

I propose to describe, define and trace the genealogy of the genre of place-writing, an interdisciplinary
method of being in, engaging with and re-telling specific sites. As a method of making particular places
come to life in writing and as performance, it draws the reader’s attention to the here and now as much
as the then and then that it describes. It is a genre or practice that is becoming increasingly prolific,
and finds its roots in cultural theory, anthropology, art criticism, architectural theory, travel writing and
psychogeography. I suggest that it offers a way of negotiating the distinct roles of critic and practitioner
by juxtaposing creative modes of writing alongside more traditional academic forms. At the same time,
it opens up a creative and ethical frame with which to view ideas of place as well as particular places.
Cultural geographer Doreen Massey defines place as an ‘unfixed, contested and multiple’
(Space, Place and Gender, 1994) event that cannot be neatly contained in time or space. I will argue
that although documenting places in writing may seem to fix them, in fact the opposite is true. By
writing a place, it is kept fluid and changeable. Indeed, each time an individual writes an account of
their experience of passing through a specific site, and each time another individual reads this
account, a new, remembered and imagined site is created. By drawing on the examples of Walter
Benjamin, Clifford Geertz, Mieke Bal, Iain Sinclair and Jane Rendell, I will demonstrate that place-
writing, although perhaps not a new genre, is one that should be considered anew, in its own right,
with important implications for writers, artists and scholars working now.

Dr Emily Orley is a practitioner-researcher and lecturer in Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies at
Roehampton University. She engages with and reflects on performance and live art, installation,
scenography and place-writing. Her article ‘Getting at and into place: writing as practice and research’
appeared in the latest issue of the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice. For more information, please
visit her website: www.emilyorley.com

Catherine Parry
Negotiating the Human/Non-human Divide: Or, How to get away with Murder

Humans believe that their self-conscious intelligence and evolutionary primacy entitles the individual to
life and freedom from suffering, but this is not a right extended to other life-forms (and indeed not
necessarily to all humans). This paper asks whether the conventions which patrol the boundary
between humans and what they believe they can legitimately consume are supportable, and examines
two literary alternative worlds which problematise this conceptual lacuna.
In the twenty-first century science has made realisable ambitions and nightmares previously
only possible in literature; human clones and genetically engineered humanoid organisms do not
currently exist, but the potential for them does, and the recent novels Never Let Me Go by Kazuo
Ishiguro, and Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, explore the ethics of cloning and genetic engineering,
ideas of what constitutes human status, and the rules by which that status can be awarded. An
ecocritical reading of the beings in these novels can approach the issue of humanity from the opposite
direction to examine the artificial constructs by which humans create their separateness from other
animals via the mystifications inhering in the possession of a soul. The idea of ‘soul’ as a conventional
concept implicated in religious and philosophical attempts to define human uniqueness is interrogated,
as is the way in which ‘soul’ is employed to justify differing levels of moral consideration and legitimise
treating those organisms deemed as not in possession of a soul as value-defined objects, rather than
self-defining individuals. In this ecocritical analysis Derrida’s notions of ‘the murder of the face’ and the
animal offer a forum in which to discuss how humans imagine their distinctiveness as a species, and
how they legitimise the appropriation, use and abuse of the non-human world.

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Catherine Parry has recently completed an MA in English at the University of Lincoln, and graduated
with a BA (Hons) English at the same institution in 2008. During Master’s studies she took modules on
contemporary literature, ecocriticism and utopian and dystopian literature. She will be beginning a PhD
in January 2010 in which she will be researching the representation of weather in English literature.

Lucy Perry
Medics, Mechanics and Techno-Priests:
Textualising Old Age and the Paradox of Death in 21st Century Prose

In this paper I am researching the influences that changing medical and sociological/demographic
treatments of senility have on ‘postmodern’, literary discourses of ageing. In particular, I am interested
in the challenges that old age now presents to language and the textualising of old age, set against a
medical/cultural history that has transformed senescence from part of the natural lifecourse, to the
neurological research of Alois Alzheimer which symbolically exposed and recast it as a curable
pathology in post-1911, to the developing populist medical/cosmetic possibility of an elliptical
leapfrogging of senescence post-1970s, to more contemporary research which has hybridised fiction
and medicine in a discourse of agelessness, of a future cure to ageing and related pathologies –
toward an ageless, transhumanist utopia.
The progressive medical, cosmetic and consumerist drive to abolish the appearance and
even physiology of ageing has challenged and displaced deterministic or fatalist narratives of old age
and any conventional, or ‘canonical’, allusions to fixity and finitude. The dynamics of the mature
identity are increasingly associated with liminality, fecundity, and perpetual transformation, and by
extension, the lifecourse is symbolically becoming less linear and more recapitulative with an
asymptotic relation to death –to the point, I argue, where not only the task of ‘tensing’ the individual is
increasingly compromised, but where the very notion of death becomes a paradox. As more and more
post-2000 novelists are responding to the vertiginous ambivalence of the mature identity in
contemporary culture, it is increasingly evident that a new ‘postmodern’ discourse of ageing is
emerging and requires definition within the literary canon, particularly with regards to stylistic, syntactic
and narratological changes therein. In a postmodern spin on Pound’s dictum ‘make it new’, I will be
st
arguing that old age requires, and will come to constitute, a new vocabulary in 21 century literature in
response to the progressive deconstruction of cultural, medical and demographic discourses –and
boundaries –of gerontology.

I am a second year of my PhD student from Lancaster University, dividing my time between research,
teaching, and attending conferences both around the UK and abroad. I am currently writing my fourth
chapter ‘The Edification of the Future Ones: Transhumanism, (Anti)Anthropocentrism and the Techno-
Resurrection’

Lin Pettersson
“The Private Rooms and Public Haunts”:
Theatrical Acts and the City of London in Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White

This paper undertakes the examination of the representation of London as a stage in Michel Faber’s
The Crimson Petal and the White (2002). Faber regresses to nineteenth-century London to tell the
story of the prostitute Sugar and her ascendance on the social scale. The recurrence of the Victorian
period has proliferated in contemporary literature for the last two decades. Generally labelled as neo-
Victorian fiction, this new genre re-imagines the nineteenth century to revise the past and comment on
the present. The neo-Victorian genre enables authors to give voice to the unheard, as in Faber’s case
a prostitute, and to give an alternative testimony of the Victorian society. This society was marked by
double standards and morals which forced people to suppress part of their personality in order to live
up to established social norms.
Faber’s theatrical representation of London reflects the double lives of the Victorians and their
different behaviour in the private and public spheres. The interpretation of London as a stage shows
how the Victorians enacted the given roles but at the same time found ways to act out their hidden
desires. Faber envisions the double lives of the Victorian Londoners and how they are enforced to put
on masks to live up to the established norms. In The Crimson Petal and the White, the city becomes a
huge stage set where the Londoners live under the tone of theatricality imposed on them by Victorian
social norms. Sugar puts on different masks as she performs the roles of prostitute, mistress,

37
governess and caretaker to fulfil the expected behaviour by the people around her. As Sugar moves
around the city and among different social classes she becomes a flâneuse, a female variant of the
urban stroller. Thereby, she accesses spaces normally unavailable to Victorian women.

I took a B.A. in English Studies at the University of Málaga (Spain) in 2008. At the moment I am taking
a M.A. in English studies. I have recently been given a research grant to take Ph.D. at the University of
Málaga. My field of research is neo-Victorian literature under the supervision of Dr. Rosario Arias.

Jenna Pitchford
Women Writing Iraq: War Narratives in the Twenty-first Century

The Iraq War (2003-2009) signals a distinct shift in the way that Western women write about war; for
the first time, they write not from the home front or as nurses, but rather, they document their
experiences of firing at the enemy, raiding Iraqi homes, and actively participating in interrogations.
Kayla Williams’ memoir, Love My Rifle (2006), constructs a vivid account of her experiences in the
combat zone and illustrates the complexity of being identified as both a woman and a soldier, thus
adding a new dimension to the traditional war narrative.
Developments in communication technologies have also enabled previously silenced voices,
such as a young Iraqi woman known only as Riverbend, to disseminate their experiences of conflict
through previously unavailable media such as weblogs (or blogs). Riverbend’s narrative, Baghdad
Burning (2003-2007), takes on a more familiar feel in that it documents her experiences of wartime
occupation. Her blog challenges common Western perceptions about Iraqi culture by highlighting the
fact that pre-occupation, many Iraqi women worked, wore western clothes and were accustomed to
American popular culture. She documents how, since the occupation, these liberties have been
gradually taken away.
This paper explores the ways in which the unique circumstances of the Iraq War have
impacted on the body of women’s war narratives that emerged from the conflict. This paper specifically
focuses on how two very different Iraq War narratives signal a shift in women’s war writing and offer
new perspectives on women’s experiences of conflict.

Jenna Pitchford’s research examines the changing face of contemporary conflict and its impact on
cultural identity. It specifically focuses on: trauma and the psychological effects of contemporary
warfare, women’s roles in the military, the refiguring of masculinity, the reshaping of national identity,
and perceptions of the ‘Other.’ Her current research also involves studies of new media forms
including blogspots and videogames. Jenna currently teaches English Literature at Nottingham Trent
University, as well as American Literature and American History at the University of Lincoln. She is
currently completing her doctoral research which focuses on how American identities are represented
in Persian Gulf War and Iraq War narratives.

Phil Redpath
Tough Shit, Erich Auerbach: Estrangement in the Novels of David Peace

This paper will explore the issue of realism in relation to the novels of David Peace, largely focussing
on his text Occupied City.
Realism, as an aesthetic construct and a philosophical concept has occupied the West since
Plato and found some major theorisers and proponents in literary studies in the 20th century. From
Auerbach and Husserl to the present day, realism has never been far away from academic discourses
linked to most significant theories. With the enormous popularity of historical-based fiction today,
realism as a mode of representation seems to have confirmed its dominant place as an aesthetic
category. This would seem to be the case with the fiction of David Peace, who conducts meticulous
research, incorporates journals, documents and other testimonies into his work and writes about
actual past events. However, this paper will argue the opposite is the case. Peace’s texts, in terms of
content and presentation, go out of their way to shatter the illusion of realism, often making content
impenetrable behind the aesthetic process of presentation. In Peace’s fiction, a military report can
read like poetry.
I will argue this does not simply add Peace to a long line of Postmodernist practitioners;
indeed, Peace seems to be writing against Postmodern inconclusiveness and pastiche: his genre is
the detective story and since it is historical already has closure implied within it. Instead, he is
collapsing the whole category of realism in fiction into a constructed space in which art and artfulness
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mediates the world to us and historical record turns into poetic effect. The experience of reading one
of his texts is of estrangement as the certain becomes uncertain and yet historical outcome still
remains fixed. Not Zizek or Baudrillard, but Wittgenstein is the true precursor of Peace who has turned
the novel into a new form by adapting everything that was old about it.

Dr Phil Redpath is a senior lecturer in English at the University of Lincoln. He has written books and
articles on nineteenth and twentieth century literature and has an interest in theory. He co-ordinates
the creative writing programmes at the University and has written three novels. His last collection of
poetry, Molly Bloom in Auschwitz, was published in January.

Jude Roberts
Crosshatching: Boundary Crossing in the Post-Millennial British Boom

This paper will consider the ways in which boundary crossing has begun to emerge as a central theme
in British fiction in the twenty-first century. A renewed interest in genre fiction in academia coincided
with what has come to be called the British Boom – an explosion of politically assertive science fiction
and fantasy writing. As part of this trend, new novels from established figures combine genre-blurring
with considerations of other boundaries, while their continued focus on social critique gives political
force to their boundary crossings. In 2009 both China Miéville and Iain (M) Banks released genre-
defying novels: Miéville’s The City and the City mixes fantasy and crime, while Banks’s Transition
combines science fiction and thriller. Both novels offer fierce critiques of post-industrial Capitalism, and
encourage the reader to question the political motivations which underlie the maintenance of
boundaries. In this paper, I will discuss the ways in which Miéville and Banks use the formal properties
of the genres in and across which they are working to reinforce the explicitly political content of their
novels. Miéville’s novel asks us to think through the politics of ‘unseeing’ those on the other side of
boundaries, political, economic and physical; while Banks’s novel, set between ‘the fall of the wall and
the fall of the towers’ is an extended discussion of the ways in which Solipsism and selfishness create
and maintain boundaries. Looking at generic as well as socio-political boundaries in these texts, I will
argue that both Banks and Miéville anticipate and provoke the disruption of defined limits to genres,
literatures, cities, states, universes and identities, and that this disruption characterises an emergent
focus in twenty-first century British fiction.

I am a second-year PhD student at University of Nottingham. My thesis is on theorisations of

subjectivity in Iain M. Banks's 'Culture' novels. I also have research interests in science fiction and
fantasy, critical and cultural theory, feminism and contemporary culture.

Iain Robinson
Down the Barrel of the Farmer’s Gun:
Utopia, Dystopia, and New Global Uncertainties in Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army

In the future society depicted by Sarah Hall in The Carhullan Army (2007) one can identify an
amplification of contemporary Britain, a dystopian portrayal of what it might become, fighting foreign
resource wars and introducing increasingly draconian legislation to control a deteriorating domestic
security situation, all set against a backdrop of escalating global warming. However, as the title
suggests, Hall’s novel is principally concerned with the feminist eco-topia of Carhullan farm, in the
remote hills of Cumbria, and the militaristic sect that is fostered there. The possibility of utopia, or
hope, in Hall’s brutal near future yields to fanaticism and violence, or violence as an ideology, in
response to the oppression offered by the state. Carhullan, “an example of environmental possibility,
of true domestic revival”, is transformed into a terrorist training camp, utopian dreaming giving way to
fanatical action “in the name of Sisterhood, or under the flag of anti-oppression”.
This paper seeks to demonstrate that Sarah Hall’s depiction of fundamentalism at Carhullan
farm is one that offers a response to a particular set of historical circumstances, those presented in
part by the global uncertainties created by terrorism and the military and political responses to terror. It
is a reaction to what Ruth Levitas summarizes as “a clash of utopias”, opposing visions of totality
unwilling to cede the possibility of alternate models, so that “the effect of the atrocity of 11th of
September and the military response to it has been to close down the space for hope”. Sarah Hall’s
depiction of fundamentalism in The Carhullan Army shows up the problems created when opposing

39
ideologies perpetrate violence on one another, creating a cycle of responses in which root causes are
forgotten and spaces for the material realisation of utopian dreaming are closed down.

Iain Robinson works as an Associate Tutor with the University of East Anglia. He completed a PhD in
Creative and Critical Writing at the University of East Anglia in 2008, for which he wrote a dystopian
novel, The Buyer, and an accompanying critical element examining recent dystopian fiction. His
research interests include utopian and dystopian literature, contemporary fiction, genre theory, and the
relationship between critical and creative writing. His teaching interests include creative writing, literary
theory, cultural theory, and textuality. In 2009, he was shortlisted for the Charles Pick Fellowship for
his novel in progress, The Museum of Lost Houses.

Hilary Savory
Upon My Proper Patch of Soil:
A Phenomenological Investigation of Gardens, Gardening and the Gardener

The philosophy of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger presents the contemporary moment with a
coherent, holistic method for describing and explaining everyday cultural activities by making
connections to the wider intellectual, political, and cultural world. Phenomenology, as it connects to the
affective, somatic aspects of human existence, is a relevant means for exploring and articulating the
ways in which gardens and gardening retain their significance for twenty-first century critical thought.
The phenomenology of Edmund Husserl however, is purely theoretical, emphasising the practitioner
as a disengaged, disembodied observer, transcending the material world of the everyday. Martin
Heidegger’s ontological existentialism valorises the concrete, embodied life as it is experienced by the
person who is living it, surrounded by things, objects and other people, and submerged in projects and
plans for the future. It is therefore, a more appropriate way of expressing the ‘hands-on’ element of
gardening, in which the gardener is an embodied agent, rooted in the soil, among the plants and other
non-human entities encountered in the garden. His notion of ‘dwelling’ and his philosophy of the
primacy of the ready-to-hand, eschews the idea of ‘man’ as the centre of existence and meaning, and
can be appropriated by the gardener as a means of articulating the ways in which gardening
celebrates the existence of the non-human world as equivalent to that of Dasein. The three basic
modes of Dasein – care, place and authenticity – are pertinent to the ways in which the garden is
significant, literally and metaphorically, as a centre of felt value. Heidegger’s thoughts on ‘saving’ the
earth transcend disciplinary boundaries, and continue to have relevance for anyone with an interest in
humanity’s relationship to the environment.

Hilary Savory completed a Masters Degree at Lincoln University in November 2009 with a dissertation
on the phenomenology of gardens and gardening. She is contemplating starting a PhD later this year,
but having concluded that knowledge of the garden is in the hands rather than in the head, she is
currently enjoying a period of practical, as opposed to theoretical, gardening.

Angela Schwer
Forty Years On After Forty Years On: The History Boys and the Postmodern Schoolroom

Although prize committees have rewarded Alan Bennett’s 2005 play The History Boys for its nostalgic
look at liberal education, critics in general have trashed the film, pointing out its anachronisms,
predictability and stereotyped characters. In fact, they might read The History Boys quite differently if
they compared it to Bennett’s early radio play Forty Years On. What’s happened to education during
that nearly forty-year period? In fact, Bennett’s later play, despite being set in 1983, rewrites Forty
Years On for the new millennium.
The main vice of the crotchety headmaster of Albion House in Forty Years On seems to be
boring the boys with endless details of the privations of World War. His view of history is simply that
he’s done well to survive it, preserving what little he can of the class system extent before the war,
though not for long. His function in the school (and in the play) is to remind the boys of this fact. They
may not agree with him, but for him, success means perseverance through adversity.
On the other hand, as Rudge notes, in The History Boys, history is “just one f---ing thing after
another,” without any coherent, satisfying meaning. The Headmaster in The History Boys lacks
idealism altogether as does the play. Instead, he is determined, with Thatcher-like doggedness, to
improve his school’s reputation by hiring an exam spin doctor to prepare the sixth formers for

40
Oxbridge. This shallow motivation, the smoke and mirrors of the age of spin, is the main focus of
Bennett’s satire and a major way in which his latest play about education critiques the priorities of the
new Millennium.

Dr Angela Schwer, Professor of English at Fairmont State University in Fairmont, West Virginia, USA
has a PhD in English Literature from the University of Notre Dame. She teaches courses in 19th and
20th century British Literature, especially Victorian Literature, Twentieth Century British Literature and
Modern Drama. She is currently working on a book on liberal education for adults in the Working
Men’s College of London.

Katy Shaw
‘Dewsbury Noir’

This paper will suggest that David Peace’s Red Riding Quartet offers contemporary readers an
alternative crime fiction, a form of ‘Dewsbury Noir’. David Peace is a twenty first century author who
writes about twentieth century crime but, significantly, does not consider himself to be ‘a crime writer’.
His novels may concern crime, but offer more than a Yorkshire version of the James Ellroy series. The
paper will discuss how and why Peace possesses the framework, tropes and conventions of the genre
to articulate an alternative perspective through a recognized form. Offering the Red Riding Quartet as
an example of a socially conscious development of British crime fiction, its controversial and explicit
content will be analyzed as an anti-sanitisation approach to shifting definitions of crime in
contemporary society. The issue of how and why Peace uses his quartet to foreground the shared
humanity and morals of hunter and hunter – Ripper and police – will be explored through
representations of human redemption and salvation. An interest in moral degeneracy will be discussed
through shifting definitions of criminality and deviancy. Despite a pronounced desire to emphasize
their difference, the paper will argue that the similarities at the heart of these representations of
criminal and victim, accused and accuser, enforcer and deviant, effectively blur and challenge singular
notions of good and evil. As a result, the political role of the crime novel will be posited as a necessary
obligation rather than a personal gratification of the socially conscious contemporary British author.

Dr Katy Shaw is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Hastings and Literature
Director at Hastings Campus. Her research interests are profoundly inter-disciplinary, including
theoretical expertise on the specific field of the intersection between creative and factual writing during
the 1984-5 miners’ strike and a wealth of work on contemporary British author David Peace. She is
currently completing the first ever published studies on the author -a monograph David Peace: Texts
and Contexts (2010) and an edited collection Analysing David Peace (2011) - before beginning work
on Cultural Representations of the 1984-5 Miners' Strike (due 2012, CSP).

Sarah Sigal
The Disentanglement of Writing and Authorship
in New Collaborative Performance-Making in Britain

Writing for performance in Britain as a company-driven, collaborative practice has expanded to include
the contributions of other company members not designated as ‘writer’ or ‘dramaturg’. The increasing
diversity of approaches to collaborative composition has resulted in the influence of performers,
directors, choreographers and designers (as well as writers) on the performance text. As a result, this
practice has particular consequences for terms such as ‘writing’ and ‘authorship’ in British theatre
practice today. We can illuminate this tendency by redefining terms such as ‘writing’ and ‘author’ within
the context of new theatre-making, playwriting and dramaturgical practices. The illumination of the role
of the writer in collaborative theatre-making hinges upon the creation of a new definition of writing for
the theatre based on a specific series of historical and current theatrical practices; this paper will seek
to interrogate the development of the evolving process of collaborative theatre-making and the role of
composition within it.
As examples of as examples, we will look at the work of Filter Theatre and Frantic Assembly
and the ways in which they work with writers external to the established artistic directorship. We will
also examine how a narrative is constructed through a number of practices, using the writer as the
primary organizing force, and also how the vision of the production is shared between a writer and

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other creative collaborators. As a result, we will be able to observe the increasing importance of
editing and dramaturgy specifically in writing for performance in a collaborative context.

Sarah has a BA in English Literature and Theatre Arts from Gettysburg College and an MA in Writing
for Performance from Goldsmiths College, where she is a visiting lecturer and currently pursuing a
PhD in Drama. Sarah is a co-artistic director of the Talon Arts Theatre Company and a freelance
writer, director and dramaturg. Her most recent play Alice’s Adventures in the New World was
produced at the Old Red Lion Theatre by Fluff Productions, of which she is the current writer-in-
residence.

Eleanor Spencer
‘So bright in this fiction / forever becoming its end’:
Anne Stevenson on Poetry and the Poet in the 21st Century

Throughout her fifty year poetic career, the work of Anne Stevenson has again and again articulated
the question, ‘what happens now?’ She is acutely sensitive to the rapidly changing nature of culture
and society in the early 21st century, and to the changing demands made of poetry and of the poet.
Stevenson’s late poetry explores the question of what it is to be a poet, and in particular, what it is to
be a poet in the early twenty-first century and beyond. Stevenson engages intelligently with various
historical notions of poethood, in particular, the Romantic veneration of the ‘tortured artist’, the
culturally pervasive caricature from which she repeatedly distances herself. The Romantic notion of
the poet as conduit for the divine and master of an amenable medium is repeatedly contested in those
poems in which poet-figures vainly struggle with their unwieldy medium, and those ‘manifesto poems’
which assuredly advocate a recourse to the pre-eighteenth-century notion of the poet as a skilled
craftsman, artisan, or ‘maker’ of verse. Inextricably bound up with questions of what it is to be an artist
is the more fundamental question of ‘what is art?’ Whilst her work refutes the bohemian creed of ‘L'art
pour l'art’, she is vocal in her criticism of any art form that seems to function as propaganda for an ‘-
ism or an ‘-ology’. Her poetry is a sphere in which Stevenson is continuously conceiving of a new role
and remit for the contemporary artist, in which they will stand tall alongside the scientist, closing the
supposed gap between C.P. Snow’s ‘Two Cultures’, a concept that, especially in her late work, is
proven to be a simplistic false dichotomy. Through both her poetry and her prose, Stevenson shapes
and shares her vision of ‘the ideal poem of the next century’, as she questions how the poet might
either withstand, or adapt to, an increasingly mediatised world, an ever-evolving language, and
unabated pressure upon art to be socially or politically ‘functional’.

Eleanor Spencer is a doctoral researcher and teaching assistant at the University of Durham. Her
thesis explores the importance of inheritance, influence, and tradition in the poetry of Anne Stevenson.
Her research interests include twentieth-century British and American poetry; Anglo-American poetic
identity; literary synaesthesia; intertextual parody in the New Woman novels of the 1890s; and
bibliotherapy. She is the recipient of an AHRC Research Preparation Masters Award, and an AHRC
Doctoral Award. Eleanor is an accredited ‘Get Into Reading’ shared reading group facilitator, and is
currently Reader in Residence at HMP Low Newton.

Ulrike Tancke
‘Any explanation, as long as it was simple’:
Pat Barker’s Border Crossing (2001) as ‘traumatological’ fiction

Recent British fiction is preoccupied with violence, trauma and guilt, prompting critics to argue that a
‘traumatological’ aesthetic (Philip Tew) has come to replace the postmodern fascination with playful
hybridity and fragmentation. While the fictional exploration of these issues marks a decisive shift of
emphasis, the precise nature of this turn needs as yet to be fully appreciated and critically evaluated.
This paper traces these concerns and their implications in Pat Barker’s Border Crossing. The
novel narrates the relationship between Tom Seymour, a child psychologist, and Danny Miller, a
young man who has just been released from a young offenders’ institution, where he spent his
teenage years after being convicted, at the age of ten, of murdering an old lady. Obviously alluding to
the 1992 James Bulger case, the novel seems to latch on to such prominent contemporary concerns
as childhood trauma, the alleged ‘loss’ of childhood and the violence endemic among those on the
margins of a ‘broken’ society. However, as Tom revisits his own childhood memories and his
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professional role in Danny’s trial, Border Crossing explores a darker and even more disturbing truth:
rather than being easily assignable to clearly identifiable figures – the monstrous child killer, for
instance –, violence is a human capacity that we all share. Human behaviour all too often escapes
rational control and is dependent on accident or biological impulses, thus defying straightforward
explanatory patterns.
While the novel examines the way in which we are both appalled and oddly attracted by
figures like Danny, at a closer look, it refuses to buy in to easy projections and one-dimensional
patterns of signification. In so doing, it calls for a conceptualisation of the ‘traumatological’ that
examines trauma, violence and guilt as categories ‘right here’ rather than ‘out there’, to use Slavoj
Žižek’s words. Border Crossing exposes the uncomfortable truth that traumatic potential – for
individuals and society – lies uncomfortably close to home: in the arbitrariness and irrationality of
human behaviour and in the capacity for violence and brutality that we all share.

Ulrike Tancke is Junior Professor of English Literature in the Department of English and Linguistics at
Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz (Germany). She has previously taught at Lancaster University
(UK) and Universität Trier (Germany), where she was awarded a Ph.D. in English Literature in 2006.
She has published on early modern women’s writing and contemporary fiction; her book ‘Bethinke Thy
Selfe’ in Early Modern England: Writing Women’s Identities is forthcoming from Rodopi. Her current
research focuses on identity and its inflections with violence, trauma and guilt in contemporary British
fiction.

Laura Tansley
Listening to the Short Process: 21st Century Short-Shorts

Short-short fiction, (flash fiction, microfiction, sudden fiction – all are concerned with minimalism,
precision and impact), popularised in the 80s through anthologies and proliferated in the 90s by
internet publishing, has an unknown future as a genre. Much loved by some but commercially
unpopular, simultaneously liberated and confined by the web, in the first ten years of the 21st century
the short-short has had to consider its place in literature.
With its multiplicity of meanings and interminable interpretations, the short-short is accessible
and consumable; speeding past leaving us with a blur to re-consider. Its inherent oppositions, such as
hidden depths despite focus, a sense of completeness with a sense of suggestion, of inclusion with
exclusion, all contained in a form that questions boundaries and hierarchies, mean that the short-short
could be considered the embodiment of the 20th century trend for postmodern literature. As the interest
in the form grows, its history plotted and designations established the short-short loses the sense of
liberation it was trying achieve. As it becomes less amorphous, its potentiality is diminished and it
becomes static. The short-short must keep on evolving if it is to retain its power.
This presentation will consider those who have attempted to push the genre forward in the last
ten years and where the genre can go in the next ten years; authors who have scrutinised the borders
between prose poetry and the short-short, authors creating short-short story cycles and sequences,
authors of short-short écriture féminine, authors who manipulate the form and question its perimeter,
authors who are deconstructing the very page on which it appears, be it virtual or paper.

I am a third year Creative Writing PhD student at the English Literature department of the University of
Glasgow. My reserach interests include short-short forms, feminism in literature, deconstruction, genre
theory, gender theory, creative non-fiction and creative writing pedagogy. I gained my Masters in the
Teaching and Practice of Creative Writing at the University of Cardiff where I also completed my
undergraduate in English Literature and Cultural Criticism.

Yugin Teo
Remembrance and Testimony: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Work of Memory

Memory is an important theme in the novels of British writer Kazuo Ishiguro (1954-). It pervades all of
Ishiguro’s six novels to date, and has proved to be a hallmark of his writing and a theme that he
constantly returns to examine in his work. Memory is a growing interdisciplinary field in the humanities
in the twenty-first century, and Ishiguro’s fiction engages profoundly with this subject.
Ishiguro’s novels often feel like eulogies to his characters. There is poignancy found in the
narrative that depicts characters looking into their past and struggling with their distant memories.
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There is a sense of longing in the novels that is indicative of the protagonists’ desires to narrate certain
key aspects of their lives, often of lost childhoods. The work of memory found in his novels is indelibly
linked to issues concerning our humanity and the desire for wholeness. Part of this involves the
affirmation of the memory of people, places and events that we seem to have lost or forgotten. The
profound effects of the work of memory transform not only the characters in the novels, but the reader
as well. The sense of memory and loss in Ishiguro’s novels crosses boundaries between different
cultures (When We Were Orphans), between lived experience and prosthetic memories (Never Let Me
Go), and between individual and collective experiences (A Pale View of Hills; The Unconsoled).
This paper is supported by the work of the late French philosopher Paul Ricoeur (1913–2005)
on memory and forgetting. Ishiguro’s writing in the twenty-first century demonstrates a uniquely
profound and ethical work of memory, a work that is at once elegiac, cathartic and compassionate.

Yugin Teo is an Associate Tutor in the School of English at the University of Sussex, where he also
works as a research assistant on a number of projects in the School of Education and Social Work.
Yugin completed his doctorate in English Literature at Sussex in May 2009. His research interests are
in the representation of memory in literature and film, contemporary fiction (in particular, the work of
Kazuo Ishiguro), dystopian fiction and film, and the work of the late French philosopher Paul Ricoeur.

Fiona Tolan
“Painting While Rome Burns”:
Ethics and Aesthetics in Pat Barker’s Life Class and Zadie Smith’s On Beauty

This paper examines recent novels by Pat Barker and Zadie Smith, two of the most prominent
contemporary British women writers, in terms of what I identify as a turn to ethics in much twenty-first
century British writing. Both Barker’s Life Class (2007) and Smith’s On Beauty (2005) engage in a
debate on the value and purpose of art and beauty as the protagonists attempt to articulate their own
individual statements of moral purpose. In this paper, I suggest that Smith demonstrates a liberal
humanist belief in transcendent and transformative values, whereas Barker, in contrast, proves more
wary of inscribing this same confident vision of art’s moral worth. Nevertheless, I suggest that On
Beauty demonstrates a level of caution towards fully endorsing its strongly liberal humanist impulse,
whereas Barker’s novel, despite its instinctual disavowal of liberal humanism, also sustains a romantic
vision of transcendent nature that goes some way to disrupting the largely postmodern impulse of the
text. Ultimately, I demonstrate that Smith, despite her acknowledgement and exploration of the limits
of liberal humanism, concludes her novel with an image of art’s capacity to drive positive ethical
choices, whereas Barker’s final informing image is one of humanity cast adrift after the First World
War, unanchored by moral codes or liberal certainties.

Fiona Tolan is a Lecturer in English at Liverpool John Moores University, UK. Her main research
interests are in contemporary literature, particularly British and Canadian fiction, and the history of
second wave feminism. She is author of Margaret Atwood: Feminism and Fiction (Rodopi, 2007) and
co-editor of Writers Talk: Conversations With Contemporary British Novelists (Continuum, 2008). She
is also Associate Editor of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. Her current research is in on ethics in
contemporary fiction.

Adam Trexler
Literary Climates: Canon and Context in Global Warming Fiction

Academic accounts of contemporary literature are often focused on locating the ‘best’ authors or
reading a handful of literary texts about a particular issue. However, the realities of 21st century
publication may well make these practices outdated. Moreover, reading for elite critical discernment
sits problematically with the literary discipline’s focus on historical context, culture, and the recovery of
suppressed and popular texts. Taking the case of fiction about global warming, there is a temptation to
confine the discussion to authors like Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood, and Will Self. However,
such a selection takes a number of judgments for granted. Brand-name authors and literary imprints
distribute these texts as a fairly well-delimited commodity which can be grouped, reviewed and sold
through established channels, rather than being judged important by critics who have a longer
historical perspective. In the case of fiction about global warming, the ‘literary’ aspects of these novels
often work directly against serious, critical engagement with climate change and the need for broad
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cultural responses. On the other hand, the publishing world distributes other texts, including
adventure, science fiction, and young adult novels, many of which are more interesting in their
portraits of climate change. Clive Cussler’s Arctic Drift, Kim Stanley Robinson’s Science in the Capital
trilogy, and Saci Lloyd’s The Carbon Diaries fail pre-established norms of literary quality, but offer
serious, thoughtful, and imaginative responses to global warming. Accessing these texts requires new
strategies for searching, reading, and writing about literature, and proposals are made for each of
these areas. If such novels are read alongside the ‘literary’, it becomes possible to make more
complete and sophisticated arguments about popular responses to global warming, the changing
organization of British culture, and the renegotiation of literary quality in the contemporary world.

Dr. Adam Trexler is a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Exeter, where he is exploring
cultural adaptations to anthropogenic climate change. Before this, his work sought to articulate how
radical economic ideas shaped modernist innovation in Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot’s poetry. This
project formed the basis of his PhD at Queen Mary, University of London and is currently being
revised for a second monograph.

B. Anke Wagner
Rubbing up against the World: Poetic Language as Energy

To the question ‘what is poetry?’, Miroslav Holub answered: ‘Poetry is energy, it is an energy-storing
and an energy-releasing device’. Holub, the rational scientist, respected and revered the inexplicable
energy of poetry. Recent experimental psychology has begun to find that poetic devices in language
have cognitive processing consequences associated with enhanced memory and heightened
enjoyment. Science is beginning to support what we have perceived intuitively. This paper argues that
poetic language has an energy quality which can induce cultural shifts and altered relationships to the
environment.
In Derek Attridge’s definition of literature, he applies the term ‘otherness’ to the encounter with
the ways a work departs from the discourses of the society in which it is created and received. The
event of otherness can bring about a shift in the limitations of cultural understanding for both the writer
and the reader. It is argued here that, to an extent, the energy quality of poetic language lies in its
capacity to induce cultural shifts on every (re)reading, until the text has been culturally accommodated.
Amongst other contemporary philosophers, Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Žižek have
questioned the Western way of life where simulations and electronic ‘communication’ have replaced
social, bodily, and environmental ‘reality’. Estrangement from the social and natural world leaves us in
a state of non-being. It is suggested here that a sense of the ‘real’ – of (re)connection to an
environment – can be initiated by poetic language. Alice Oswald is a poet who is particularly
concerned with (re)connection to the natural world and with engaging with our environment, whatever
it is. In Dart (2002), she picks up on work as a potential powerline for language. In Weeds and Wild
Flowers (2009), she welds together plant and human to create an earthy, gritty ‘other’ which rubs up
well against the world. Energised, it invites the release of that which was not present in our cultural
discourse.

B. Anke Wagner is a graduate of the University of Lincoln with a BA in English, and is at present taking
an MA in English Studies. Her interests include the effects of poetic language in facilitating the
emergence of culturally excluded discourses, particularly in relation to work by Alice Oswald. Holding a
Diploma in Psychology, she is also interested in exploring cross-disciplinary approaches to language
and social interaction.

Lewis Ward
Trauma and the first-person plural:
Aleksandar Hemon’s “simultaneous” multiplication of narrative voices

Aleksandar Hemon writes of the trauma of exile, war and immigration. The protagonist of his early
stories, ‘Jozef Pronek,’ struggles, as Hemon did, to adapt to American life in the 1990s while his home
city of Sarajevo burns on the television news. While for Pronek this results in identity crisis, depression
and violence, for the author the experience has been professionally productive: “I relish the
multiplication of personalities that was its consequence. It’s a blessing in multiple disguises for a
writer” (Knight 97). This blessing is dramatised not just in the content of Hemon’s fiction but also in its
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subtle experiments of narrative voice, whereby the “multiplication of personalities” finds expression in
unsettling modulations of person and narration. The narrator of “Blind Jozef Pronek and Dead Souls”
(2000) is third-person except for brief moments when an unnamed “we” emerges to both watch and be
watched by the protagonist. In Nowhere Man (2002), the occasional first-person plural refers more
explicitly to two selves, one of which splits off at crucial moments to influence the action; this second,
semi-embodied figure even succeeds in touching the protagonist’s cheek. Richardson points out that
“we” narration “necessarily straddles the line between first and third person fiction, as a homodiegetic
character narrator discloses that which can only be known by an external heterodiegetic intelligence”
(60). Thus what is at stake is the extent to which the narrator is able to ‘take part’ in the narrative, and
it is this very ontological puzzle that is dramatised by Hemon’s narrators’ interventions in the text. In an
interview, Hemon talks of the “simultaneity” (Knight 98) of multiple identities and points of view, and
how literature’s purpose is to encompass this central enigma of experience. My paper will explore the
connection between this simultaneity and Hemon’s use of the first-person plural.

I am currently Associate Lecturer at the University of Plymouth, having previously taught at Exeter and
UWE (Bristol). I gained my PhD from Exeter in January 2009, in the field of contemporary literature.
My research interests include Holocaust literature, narrative theory and trauma studies. I am currently
working on two aspects of the contemporary novel: experiments with narrative time, and the figure of
the narrative persona. Authors I have worked on include W. G. Sebald, Jonathan Safran Foer, Philip
Roth, Nancy Huston and Aleksandar Hemon.

Claire Warden
“Not a minute’s silence but a lifetime of struggle”:
Edinburgh Theatre Workshop’s political carnivalesque

This paper will focus predominantly on Edinburgh Theatre Workshop’s 2006 production, Black Sun
Over Genoa, produced to coincide with the Gleneagles G8 conference and the Make Poverty History
March. Juxtaposing elements of carnival with serious political comment, declamation and film footage,
this production sought to expose the police brutality of the 2001 Genoa conference while making direct
comment on the 2006 event. It was a timely, community-based production from a company committed
to creating passionate, politically-engaged theatre.
Using this play as a starting point, this paper will examine the power and vibrancy of the 21st
Century political carnivalesque. Mikhail Bakhtin suggests that “laughter must liberate the gay truth of
the world from the veils of gloomy lies spun by the seriousness of fear, suffering and violence”
(Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World 174), that the carnival with all its joyous exuberance and innate
challenge to hierarchical status quo is actually a political act. Black Sun Over Genoa connects the
energetic ebullience of the carnival with the sombre explication of the events in Genoa leading to the
death of young protestor, Carlo Giuliani. It marks a modern carnivalesque statement of intent, an
attempt to both break down the “gloomy lies” and to create a spirit of community and political-
engagement.

Dr Claire Warden is a lecturer in drama at the University of Lincoln and has published recent articles
on the political folk movement and the plays of Ewan MacColl. She is currently writing a monograph
examining theatrical avant-gardism in Britain.

Mark West
"Zombies of the Interrogative Mood":
Contemporary Theory, Fiction and the Question of Questions

Three books published in 2009 pose important questions for contemporary literature. The first, Nicolas
Bourriaud's The Radicant, theorises a movement out of postmodernism into what he calls the
altermodern. In so-doing, he brings together various threads of recent cultural and literary theory that
describe an increased uncertainty and precariousness to contemporary life.
Padget Powell's The Interrogative Mood: A Novel? and William Walsh's Questionstruck: A
Collection of Question-Based Texts Derived from the Books of Calvin Trillin are both texts made
entirely out of questions. Might these texts, in organising themselves around the uncertainty of the
unanswered question, be responding to the enhanced precariousness Bourriaud describes or what
theorist and designer Benjamin Bratton has described as “our historical interstitial”?

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 Firstly this paper will map out the theoretical ground, linking Bourriaud's descriptions of
precariousness to recent theorisations of modernity (Bauman, Ulrich Beck, Manuel Castells, Michael
Hardt and Antonio Negri) and writings on global precarious labour. Secondly, the paper will read
Powell's and Walsh's texts through this theoretical lens. Bourriaud's book is notable for its formulation
of an aesthetics inextricably linked to twenty-first century socio-political realities. In searching for a
literature that reflects global precariousness, my paper will ask whether Bourriaud's formulation of a
contemporary non-fixed, multiple-rooted aesthetic is visible in the precarious form of these works:
does their construction through questions, by definition uncertain, create a perpetual precariousness,
reflecting at a formal level the uncertainty of contemporary life? It is intended that this paper both
continues critical analysis of contemporary theory and engages with the aims of the conference to
“contribute to the process by which the significant and innovative writers […] of the new millennium are
discovered and discussed”.

Mark is completing an MLitt in Modernities at the University of Glasgow, before starting a Ph.D. in
contemporary theory, fiction and theories of the avant-garde. His research interests are
interdisciplinary in nature, with a focus on the relationship between aesthetics and politics in the
debates about a new modernism/ity for and of the twenty-first century.

Daniel Weston
Re-evaluating the ‘wild’: new directions in nature writing

In 2008, ‘The New Nature Writing’ was the subject of a special issue of Granta magazine. The editorial
characterized contributions as ‘new ways of seeing’ nature from ‘writers who approached their subject
in heterodox and experimental ways.’ In his foreword to A Wilder Vein, a similar collection of new
literature of place published in 2009, Robert Macfarlane found that ‘over the past decade or so in
Britain and Ireland, a body of written work has emerged that has tried to generate a polytheistic
language for the wild: from wildness as a state of land to wildness as a state of mind.’ Whilst
respecting the diversity attested to in these observations, this paper aims to draw together themes and
techniques that characterise recent developments in the writing of landscape, nature and place. A
redefinition of terms has been fundamental to new directions taken: the notion of ‘wild’ has undergone
a shift away from a landscape untouched by human intervention, towards one in which human and
non-human influences enter into complex, fluid interactions. Contiguous with this modification, wild
places are no longer seen as spaces without history, but conversely as sites in which histories remain
traceable, even if partly overwritten by subsequent development. Scale has also undergone revision:
writers now attempt to situate wilderness within networks of influence emanating from beyond its
borders, whilst also accounting for their own situated perspectives. Navigating between critical
paradigms drawn from cultural geography and literary studies, new writing seeks to balance embodied
experience of place against a continued engagement with its historicity. Whilst Macfarlane has
championed the former, his own writing has not neglected the longer narrative of landscape. His text
The Wild Places (2007) will provide a case study in which to situate an analysis of negotiations taking
place in the last ten years.

Daniel Weston is writing a PhD on representations of landscape, space and place in contemporary
fiction at the University of Nottingham. He is a Postgraduate Teaching Fellow in the School of English
Studies at Nottingham. His article on Philip Larkin’s poetry will appear in Textual Practice later this
year.

Glyn White
Page Design, Ontology and Immersion,
reading Reif Larsen's The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet

We would like to propose a panel of three writers on the subject of emergent forms and genres in 21st
century writing. We are, in various combinations, critics, poets and novelists who teach at Salford
University and who write on the innovative or experimental edge of our genres. This panel will be an
attempt to contribute to investigations into what’s happening now by tracing a common concern with
emergent forms and genres, both in our own work, and the work of our contemporaries.
Glyn White, leading scholar on the use of the graphic surface in prose fiction, will explore page
design, ontology and immersion in a reading of Reif Larsen’s The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet.

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Glyn White is author of the monograph Reading the Graphic Surface: The Presence of the Book in
Prose Fiction (Manchester University Press), co-editor of Re-reading B. S. Johnson (Palgrave
Macmillan) and has written on Alasdair Gray, Christine Brooke-Rose and Mark Z. Danielewski
(forthcoming).

Kezia Whiting
The Ethics of Voice in Diary of a Bad Year

Ethics is often expressed as a response to the call of the other, but what does ethics have to do with a
call, or with a voice? The intersection of ethics and dialogue, the notion of responsibility as a response
to a voice, underlies much contemporary literature, and I will explore how it is articulated in J. M.
Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year (2007). Each page is laid out in three sections, and this seems to
delineate the voices in the novel, suggesting their independence from each other. Yet often these
voices appear in different sections, making the boundaries between characters, at least as they are
demarcated by Coetzee on the page, permeable. In reported dialogue in the text, characters
appropriate the other’s speech into their section. An excess, something more than what is said, is
acknowledged when characters recognise that the other means more than what they say. But this
excess is too quickly interpreted, assimilated, as characters assume they know what is meant in the
reticence or silence of the other. Through each of these failed assumptions, voice is shown to be
elusive, the excess in speech beyond signification, and it constitutes an unintelligible space. This
space demands a response that would fill it, and I will ask how it is possible to respond to an empty
call without filling this space, erasing its otherness in a kind of assumed empathy, which is also a
danger inherent in reading.

Kezia Whiting is completing a Master of Philosophy in Literature at the University of Queensland. Her
dissertation focuses on ethics and voice in J. M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year, Siri Hustvedt’s The
Sorrows of an American, and Ian McEwan’s Saturday.

José M. Yebra
Late-Victorian Homoeroticism Recast:
The Spectre of Henry James in Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty

During the first decade of the third millennium English literature has shown a remarkable interest in
revising canonical voices. This has been particularly so in the case of homo-erotic/sexual writing.
Thus, Alan Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty (2004), Colm Tóibín's The Master (2004) and Will Self's
Dorian. An Imitation (2002) recall gay icons, namely Henry James and Oscar Wilde. Some critics
consider this increasing concern with classic authors and their works as a proof of the problems of
articulation in contemporary literature. In my view, this contention is unfair and rather simplistic. The
rewriting of former texts and voices has always been a characteristic of literary production. Moreover,
artistic manifestations are possible thanks to the impelling effect of permanent crises of representation.
In this paper I intend to explore the re-articulation of Henry James' fiction and persona in Alan
Hollinghurst's The Line of Beauty, his last novel so far. In other words, I aim to examine why and how
the late-Victorian writer affects the discourse of a twenty-first-century gay novel. From a theoretical
point of view, I will make use of trauma theory in my analysis. Although far away from each other in
many respects, the homoerotic discourse of Henry James and the overtly gay one of Alan
Hollinghurst's fiction interact once and again. Briefly stated, The Line of Beauty finds a formula to
overcome the traumatic character of (dissident) desire and update it to the new cultural and political
scenario.

I am a lecturer in English at the University of Zaragoza. I have read my PhD on English literature
entitled "Identity and Intertextuality in Alan Hollinghurst's Novels". I have published and presented
papers on contemporary English literature, particularly Alan Hollinghurst. My main research interests
are English literature and culture, as well as gender and sexuality.

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