Exploding The Canon - Conference

Sorry it's been so long between posts. What with Xmas and the thesis it's been a little busy around here the last couple of months. However, this hasn't stopped me from agreeing to be one of this year's organisers for Stirling University's English Studies dept postgrad conference. This year the topic is 'Exploding the Canon' and it looks set to be a really great weekend (24th-25th May, 2008). We have two great plenaries, Darryl Jones and Bill Marshall, and we have another of our famous conference ceilidhs planned for the Saturday evening. Do check out the CFP and seriously consider submitting an abstract if you're a postgrad or at the start of an academic career.

Call For Papers
In the past three decades, the canon of “great literature” and “great art” has expanded, shifted and changed. No longer primarily a list of privileged, white men, the 21st century -canon has carved out spaces for women, gay, lesbian, working-class, postcolonial, and multicultural writers and artists. Even though the hegemony of canonicity is being dismantled by the inclusion of minor or subaltern discourses, the study of the “most important” or “most representative” works continues to anchor academic investigations of literatures and art. Yet what gets privileged and how, or, alternatively, what remains silent (or is silenced) in scholarly study? How do the choices made by educational, publishing and research institutions both maintain and deconstruct the canon? In what way are selection processes influenced by the cultural and socio-political context at a given time? And in which ways can academic research re-align and problematise the critical treatment of the canon?

This conference aims to foster discussion and understanding of canonicity in scholarly settings. While its overall focus is literary, we welcome contributions from a breadth of research areas including, but not limited to

• Book History and Textual Culture
• Modern Languages and Translation
• Publishing Studies
• Film and Media Studies
• Religious Studies
• Medieval Studies
• The Gothic
• Queer and Feminist Studies
• Popular culture
• Subaltern historiography
• Postcolonial Studies

Papers that present problems and questions rather than absolute conclusions are welcome. We are looking for submissions from fellow postgraduate students and academics at the start of their careers. Please send abstracts of 250-300 words for a 20 minute presentation plus brief biographical details to Amy Palko, Kerstin Pfeiffer, and Brian Rock at explodingthecanon@stir.ac.uk by Friday 21st March, 2008.
Deadline for conference registration, whether presenting a paper or attending, is Friday 25th April, 2008.

Also, our website is now up and running and you can find that here. Any questions, do get in touch. Hope to hear from you!

Global Gothic Symposium - Stirling

I've just had another paper accepted for a conference. This one is, as the title of the post suggests, the Global Gothic symposium at the University of Stirling on the 1st December, 2007. I'm going to be giving a paper looking at tv series Lars Von Trier's Riget and Stephen King's Kingdom Hospital. I've been meaning to do something on Kingdom Hospital for a while now, so this paper will give me that opportunity. Anyway, here's the abstract. As always, comments, thoughts and suggestions are all very welcome.

Authority and Authenticity in Lars Von Trier’s Riget and Stephen King’s Kingdom Hospital
As Jerrold Hogle theorises, the tradition of the gothic is suspended in the hyperreal through its foundation in the counterfeit. It is the contention of this paper, that this key concept of gothic theory can bring us closer to an understanding of the adaptation processes which occur when gothic texts are transplanted from one culture to another. Their reinterpretation through repetition augments concerns surrounding issues of authority and authenticity, resulting in either articulation or effacement. To illustrate this, I shall be focussing on the Danish television series Riget, written and directed by Lars Von Trier, and its adaptation by Stephen King, as the American television series Kingdom Hospital. Riget, first shown in 1994, was the last project of Von Trier’s prior to the creation of the Dogma 95 manifesto in which Lars Von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg stress that ‘by using new technology anyone at anytime can wash the last grains of truth away in the deadly embrace of sensation’. In Riget, Von Trier begins the move towards some of the more extreme views expressed in the manifesto, and as such the series resides within the liminal space created through the juxtapostion of authorship and anonymity; authenticity and artifice. This is contrasted by the overt declaration of authority displayed in Kingdom Hospital as seen through frequent references to Stephen King’s textual fecundity, as well as the introduction of a supplementary narrative which bears a striking similarity to King’s near-death experience caused by his accident in 1999.
This paper seeks to explore both Danish and American approaches to the similar material, in order to discern the appropriations and re-appropriations of the gothic, and their influence on the representations of authority and authenticity.

Gothic Imagination Blog

Just to let you all know, that I have started as one of the main bloggers for the new Gothic Imagination website at the University of Stirling. This is a really exciting project, and I urge you to go over and check it out. It has just launched today to coincide with Halloween, so it is still relatively new, but I think it's really promising, so subscribe to the feed, and you will receive regular updates on all things gothic.

Madrid

What a wonderful city Madrid is! I returned home from the 5th Conference of the Book, which was held there, on Tuesday evening, having delivered my paper on Stephen King's e-book The Plant. I think the paper was well received, and certainly, it was well attended. Some of the best things about attending conferences, I think, is the people you meet and the conversations which are begun. I really do find that these events recharge and renew my own research, and fill me with enthusiasm. For those of you who are unsure as to the themes of the conference that I attended, here is a great clip from You Tube which addresses some of the concerns in both an accessible and entertaining way. In fact, it would also be a great clip to introduce ideas of the material text and textual culture in teaching.



Thanks to all those involved in the organisation of the conference, in particular Philip and Tamsyn of Common Grounds. I'm already looking forward to next year's!

5th International Conference of the Book - Abstract

I first attended an International Conference of the Book last year in Boston, and I enjoyed it immensely. It sparked off so many new interests and lines of enquiry for me, and left me feeling completely enthused about future research. Earlier on this year I had the opportunity to become the blogger for the Journal of the Book (affiliated to the conference), and I have now been posting to their blog for the last 6 months. This year's conference is being held in Madrid, a city I have never had the pleasure to visit before, and it takes place in a month's time. My paper this year is on Stephen King's The Plant and I have included my abstract at the end of this post for anyone who is interested. It was such a great conference last year, that I am so looking forward to attending this one!

Concerning E-Books: Addressing Form and Content in Stephen King's The Plant
'[I] take an amateur's slightly crazed pleasure in the business side of what I do. I like to goof widdit, do a little media cross-pollination and envelope pushing.' Stephen King, Everything's Eventual (2002)
Stephen King has experimented widely with the material form of the text; he has published a serial novel, a pop-up book, many limited editions and, most recently, a series of comic books. However, the experiment, which attracted the most media attention, was the publication of his e-books. In 2000, King was approached by Scribner to provide a short story which could be published as an e-book. King complied by offering them 'Riding the Bullet' (2000), and the project went on to become phenomenally successful. He followed this first venture into e-publishing with a serially published novel, The Plant (2000), which he made available for download from his official website. Unlike Scribner's publication of 'Riding the Bullet', King chose to rely upon an honour system rather than encryption to protect his financial interest, and this, along with his decision to self-publish, caused a media storm. King's recurrent complaint throughout both e-publications was that the form had taken precedence over the content; he feared that no-one was reading the fiction. In this paper, I intend to re-evaluate King's e-publishing experiment, with an emphasis on The Plant, and I shall be weighting my analysis equally on both form and content in order to redress the balance. By exploring the text as a whole, I hope to show that the content is relevant to an understanding of the business decisions that were made, and that in analysing the form of the text, to the exclusion of the content, the bigger picture remains unobtainable.

Teaching Conference in Brighton

It's been a week now since I returned from giving my paper at the Teaching Contemporary Women's Writing in the 21st Century conference at Brighton Uni, and I just wanted to write a short post about how I got on. I have to say that I got such a lot out of being there. I met so many lovely people, and I learned so much from the other speakers. I think my paper went well, although the first clip I wanted to show wouldn't play. My second clip played just fine, though, and that was the one that I particularly wanted everyone to see. I actually gave the paper again to the Teaching Assistants in our dept at Stirling, and we decided, in the discussion following the paper, that we would establish a Yahoo group which we could use to store links to digital media to use as teaching aids. I personally think this is a great idea, as there is so much rubbish on You Tube that surely if we were all on the look out for clips which we could use with this semester's texts, we're bound to significantly reduce the time we're spending as individuals sourcing materials. All in all, I have found the process of writing, delivering and discussing my first teaching paper really helpful. It's been a great experience, which I hope to repeat at some point in the future. Huge thanks to Gina and Lana for all their hard work in pulling off a really great day! Also I had a lovely time in Brighton, and I've posted up a few photos that I took here and here.
If you attended either readings of my paper and are looking for the 'Teaching With You Tube' post which accompanied it, you can find it here.

Teaching With You Tube

This Saturday, I will be giving my paper at the University of Brighton's conference 'Teaching Contemporary Women's Writing in the 21st Century'. This is the blog post which accompanies the presentation, which focuses on the incorporation of You Tube clips in university teaching.

The clips which form a part of the presentation are as follows:



These are the full versions of the clips which I show parts of during the presentation.

The other two clips, which I mention, are the two Lord of the Rings montages:



Finding clips for teaching can sometimes be a bit of a challenge, but if you make sure your search criteria is focussed and you make use of functions such as 'Related' clips and 'More From This User', you should ultimately find something you can utilise in class. I would also like to say, be flexible; look at the clips you find, and ask yourself if you can use them. If you rigidly stick to a set idea of what you want to use, you may never find it, as it may not exist. Keep your options open!

To download and embed the clips you find into your presentation you will require the application Tube Sock, which you can download from here. This application will not only allow you to download You Tube clips, but will also convert the file to an MPEG4 file, which can be viewed using iTunes. If you are using Keynote, the presentation software in iWork, you will then be able to embed this clip easily into your presentation. If, however, you are using Powerpoint, you may wish to burn the clips onto a dvd. My recommendation would be, use Keynote! It's far superior to Powerpoint and results in a much more polished presentation.

I'd just like to finish off by reiterating the point I express in my presentation that, I believe the possibilities for the use of You Tube as an educational tool are only just beginning to be realised and that, in the future, I believe it could play a much more important role. I would love to hear feedback on either the post or the presentation, so feel free to add a comment!