Books by Joseph Darlington
Christine Brooke-Rose and Post-War Literature, 2021
This book utilizes archive research, interviews and historical analysis to present a comprehensiv... more This book utilizes archive research, interviews and historical analysis to present a comprehensive overview of the works of Christine Brooke-Rose. A writer well-known for her idiosyncratic and experimental approaches to the novel form; this work traces her development from her early years as a social satirist, through her space-aged experimentalism in the 1960s, to her later poststructuralism and interest in digital computing and genetics. The book gives an overview of her writing and intellectual career with new archival research that places Brooke-Rose’s work in the context of the historically important events in which she was a participant: Bletchley Park codebreaking in the Second World War, the events in Paris during May 1968, the dawning of the internet and the rise of poststructuralism. Joseph Darlington begins with Brooke-Rose’s first novels written in the late 1950s of social satire, studies her experimental phase of writing and finally illuminates her unique approach to autobiography, arguing for reevaluating this interdisciplinary author and her contribution to poststructuralism, life writing and post-war literature.
This file includes the book's Introduction. The book is available here: https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030759056
The Experimentalists, 2021
The Experimentalists is a collective biography, capturing the life and times of the British exper... more The Experimentalists is a collective biography, capturing the life and times of the British experimental writers of the swinging 1960s. A decade of research, including as-yet unopened archives and interviews with the writers' colleagues, is brought together to produce a comprehensive history of this ill-starred group of renegade writers. Whether the bolshie B.S. Johnson, the globetrotting Ann Quin, the cerebral Christine Brooke-Rose, or the omnipresent Anthony Burgess, these writers each brought their own unique contributions to literature at a time uniquely open to their iconoclastic message. The journey connects historical moments from Bletchley Park, to Paris May '68, to terrorist groups of the 1970s. A tale of love, loss, friendship and a shared vision, this book is a fascinating insight into a bold, provocative and influential group of writers whose collective story has gone untold, until now.
Included is the book's introduction. The book is available here: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/experimentalists-9781350244405/
My first monograph is due for release on June 30th.
This book discusses British novels published... more My first monograph is due for release on June 30th.
This book discusses British novels published during the 1970s which feature terrorists either as main characters or a major plot points. The focus on terrorism’s literary depiction provides insight into the politics of the decade. The book analyses texts from Gerald Seymour, Anthony Burgess, V.S. Naipaul, Graham Greene, Doris Lessing, B.S. Johnson, Tom Sharpe, and Eric Ambler, among others, in order to engage with the IRA, the end of Empire, counterculture and environmentalism. The book provides a brief history of terrorism as a concept and tactic before discussing British literature’s relationship with terrorism. It presents a “standard terrorist morphology” by which to analyse terrorist narratives along with other insights into the British post-war imagination, writing and extremism.
Peer-Reviewed Papers by Joseph Darlington
Clio: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History, 2024
Laurence Sterne’s priesthood has often gone underappreciated in studies of his work. When it’s re... more Laurence Sterne’s priesthood has often gone underappreciated in studies of his work. When it’s referenced at all, it’s often to paint him as a bad priest or else a part-time preacher and part-time writer. This article argues for a rediscovery of Sterne’s theology, reading both his Sermons and Tristram Shandy through the lens of the eighteenth-century Latitudinarian movement. Latitudinarianism was an Anglican “broad church” movement that aimed to patch over theological divides through a renewed emphasis on fellow-feeling, trusting the emotions and laughing at rigid dogma. After extrapolating Sterne’s particular brand of Latitudinarianism through a reading of his Sermons, this article goes on to find the same religious roots underlying the scholarly comedy of Tristram Shandy.
This paper analyses Patricia Lockwood’s poetry in relation to its transformative poetics. Through... more This paper analyses Patricia Lockwood’s poetry in relation to its transformative poetics. Through a close study of her work, in particular her two collections Balloon Pop Outlaw Black (2012) and Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals (2014), her poetry is shown to integrate digital, subcultural discourse, within modes of expression common to Victorian nonsense poetry. Her poetics are shown to resolve themselves in a neo-Catholic semiotics of the sacred symbol. Words, in Lockwood’s poetry, are potent actors in their own right.
The paper begins with an overview of Lockwood’s poetic methods and traces this style back to the “Weird Twitter” phenomenon of 2011. The second section goes on to read Lockwood’s best known poem, “Rape Joke” through these complex pragmatics; analysing its use of humour as a confessional method. In the final section, Lockwood’s relationship to Catholicism, described in her memoir Priestdaddy (2017), is shown as a key instigator of Lockwood’s poetics.
This paper will argue that 3D digital animation, unlike its 2D and stop-motion counterparts, curr... more This paper will argue that 3D digital animation, unlike its 2D and stop-motion counterparts, currently lacks recognisable self-reflexive aesthetic devices through which the trace of animators’ labour can be made visible. It will open with a brief history of how animation has previously shown its workings; from the pencil-wielding hand of Émile Cohl to the opening seconds of South Park, plus the intentional and unintentional smears and multiples visible on animation cells. These devices will then be discussed in relation to Marx’s analysis of the commodity in Capital Vol. 1, and how the process of fetishisation is momentarily disrupted by imperfections in the object which have been caused by production errors. These faults reconnect the object to its producer through the trace of (imperfect) labour which remains visible on the surface. In animation, similar (albeit consciously made) ‘errors’ connect the perceptive viewer directly to the work of 2D or stop-motion animators. This paper will argue the need for an equivalent to emerge in 3D digital animation, as well as highlighting some contemporary animators testing and subverting the limits of 3D and sketching some possible ways these might encourage further formal innovations.
Paper published in the journal Information, Communication and Society as part of the Work and Play Special Edition. Link here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2018.1476571?scroll=top&needAccess=true
Christine Brooke-Rose published two ostensibly autobiographical works; the quasi-fictionalised “a... more Christine Brooke-Rose published two ostensibly autobiographical works; the quasi-fictionalised “antibiography” Remake and Life: End of which takes a philosophical rather than narrative form. Utilising correspondence and other personal documents, this paper concerns the notable life events which Brooke-Rose left unaddressed in her writing (war work, illness, marriage breakdown, poststructuralist feuding), the reasons for these excisions and what such a process reveals about the act of transcribing life. It is argued that Brooke-Rose’s approach to autobiography reflects in microcosm her deep concern for writing as both individual trace and transhuman memory; a sublime form made ridiculous by its everyday limitations.
Christine Brooke-Rose’s 1966 novel, Such, represents a genuine attempt to bridge the gap between ... more Christine Brooke-Rose’s 1966 novel, Such, represents a genuine attempt to bridge the gap between the two cultures of literature and science by wedding the experimental formal innovation of the nouveau romanciers with a cosmological understanding of the universe cutting-edge at the time of composition. This paper traces the author’s conceptual journey to publication and the original techniques of approach by which she mediated and merged literary theory and empirical science. It traces the semiological function of “science” in post-war Britain as a background to the concept “experimental” literature before discussing the influence of the francophone literary movement and finally, how Brooke-Rose’s archives demonstrate the working through of continental theory and scientific practice.
Peer-reviewed research paper which appears in the Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 40, No. 2, Winter 2017.
Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange and Kubrick’s adaptation have garnered a reputation for extr... more Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange and Kubrick’s adaptation have garnered a reputation for extreme violence, appearing regularly on lists of ‘banned’ works and being implicated in ‘copycat crimes’. This paper traces the development of this reputation. Both film and book were very warmly received on first appearance, the first public ‘outrage’ being manufactured by British tabloids two years after the film’s release. The paper goes on to use the theory of the ‘folk devil’ to reassess the text itself and ends by investigating how the moral panic had a positive effect by stopping the torture of prisoners in California.
Appearing in: Cambridge Quarterly (2016) 45 (2): 119-134.
doi: 10.1093/camqtly/bfw004
This article unpacks the relationship between literary depictions of 9/11 and contemporary ideali... more This article unpacks the relationship between literary depictions of 9/11 and contemporary idealism regarding the potential of the Internet through their elaboration in Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge (2013). It suggests that the concerns of postmodern writers and theorists came to dominate interpretations of 9/11 (practiced most successfully by Don DeLillo in Falling Man) and, in doing so, severed its connection to deeper historical trajectories. At the heart of the postmodernist fallacy is the same privileging of discourse over materiality typified by utopian conceptions of the Internet. In Bleeding Edge, this utopia takes the form of DeepArcher: a “Deep Web” paradise infiltrated by suspicious forces during the 9/11 attacks. The intermingling of espionage, the tech industry, and the response to 9/11 in Pynchon’s novel foregrounds the ambiguities of digital modernity in a way yet to be recognized by most writers and theorists of the contemporary.
Textual Practice, Sept 2015, DOI: 10.1080/0950236X.2015.1084367
This paper stages a reengagement with Lessing's 1962 masterpiece The Golden Notebook using the th... more This paper stages a reengagement with Lessing's 1962 masterpiece The Golden Notebook using the theory of historical reason outlined in Andrew Gibson's 2011 work Intermittency. Considering Lessing's text as a literature of the "non-event" - writing that expresses an experience of time without radical historical rupture - foregrounds questions of authenticity explored within the novel. Without temporal access to historical truth, how do Lessing's characters negotiate politics, identity, writing and the Self? The paper also considers the potential of literature to initiate events as well as reflect upon them, as arguably occurred within 1960s women's liberation movements through works such as Lessing's.
Journal of European Studies, Vol. 45, No.1
Funded by a 2013 Harry Ransom Centre Dissertation Fellowship, this paper presents entirely new bi... more Funded by a 2013 Harry Ransom Centre Dissertation Fellowship, this paper presents entirely new biographical research into the experimental writer Christine Brooke-Rose's experiences between 1968 and 1975. Her decision to leave a culturally conservative Britain for a lecturing position at the post-May '68 University of Vincennes places the militantly apolitical Brooke-Rose in the midst of a radical insurgency. The influence that this experience has upon the composition of 1975's novel "Thru" is examined, as well as the novel's critical failure which ended Brooke-Rose's fiction career for 9 years.
This paper focuses upon the catchphrase form as a means of approaching comedy’s social function b... more This paper focuses upon the catchphrase form as a means of approaching comedy’s social function beyond its initial humorous effects. The fairly recent historical appearance of the catchphrase as a recognisable entity and target of derision is unpacked, and various aspects of its signification considered in light of pre-existing theories of comedy. As a counterargument to some of these theories, the paper then goes on to consider catchphrases as serving a similar role to proverbs and sayings by providing a mutually recognisable cultural shorthand for larger ideas, concepts, characters and stereotypes. By tracing a line of development historically, a popular signifying function is witnessed emerging from folk traditions and being mediated through writers of the Middle Ages such as Chaucer, before finding full expression in the industrial revolution both in print and treading the boards of the music hall stage. The forward march of ‘mass’ media, along with its incumbent homogenising and centralising tendencies, positions the catchphrase in a similar position to that of the proverb in primarily oral cultures. From this investigation, the paper concludes that the catchphrase represents a modern popular embodiment of a form of knowing revelling in the already known. This aligns catchphrases with a pre-Enlightenment sensibility which may contribute to their perception amongst intellectual audiences as populist and ‘lowbrow’.
Issue 1 of BSJ: The B.S. Johnson Journal
B.S. Johnson is currently undergoing a considerable resurgence in academic interest in the twenty... more B.S. Johnson is currently undergoing a considerable resurgence in academic interest in the twenty-first century. Using new archive research made possible by the British Library's acquisition of the Johnson archive, this paper traces a history of Johnson's personal struggles with class identity on his journey into the world of experimental literature. The struggle to reconcile avant-garde practice with working class authenticity is seen to present a new approach to considering one of Johnson's major concerns: "truth" in fiction.
Book Chapters by Joseph Darlington
Critical Perspectives on Max Porter. David Rudrum, Paweł Wojtas and Wojciech Drąg, eds. London: Routledge, 2024., 2024
This paper uses Porter’s 2021 novella The Death of Francis Bacon to explore Porter’s ambiguous re... more This paper uses Porter’s 2021 novella The Death of Francis Bacon to explore Porter’s ambiguous relationship with the written word. Bacon’s entire oeuvre, as the critic John Berger points out, is an attempt to breach the subjectivity of others through visually pummelling, mangling and bruising the flesh. Yet, in spite of Bacon’s deep intimacy with flesh, he never succeeds in capturing human emotion. His creatures are tortured, but never really in pain. Porter explores this alienation in his depiction of the painter’s last days. From the callous nun at his bedside to memories of violent sex with his former lover, Porter shows Bacon a prisoner of his own carnality.
The paper will set Porter’s depiction of Bacon against his own approach to the written word. Porter’s sparse texts, dramatic use of negative space, and use of visual (often art-theoretical) metaphor, reveal a writer desperate to wring maximum signification from his word choices. Yet, like Bacon, we are left wondering whether Porter’s percussive textuality, his insistence on constant maximum impact, ultimately blunts his writing, leaving the emotive, the subjective, untouched. These ambiguities are explored in the use of visual metaphor in Grief is a Thing with Feathers and Lanny, before finally returning to The Death of Francis Bacon, where we ask whether, as with Francis Bacon’s art, Max Porter’s brutal poetics – an affectless art of affect – might be the key to understanding this writer’s battles with the page.
This chapter engages with Anthony Burgess’ novel M/F (published in 1970 following his expatriatio... more This chapter engages with Anthony Burgess’ novel M/F (published in 1970 following his expatriation in 1968) using Levi-Strauss’ concept of the culinary triangle to unpack the writer’s symbolic engagement with national cultures. The novel’s structure is made up of a series of increasingly complex puzzles and riddles which once solved, as suggested by Levi-Strauss’ theory, lead to an incestuous union between the main character, Miles Faber, and his sister. In order to fully understand these puzzles the paper concentrates upon culinary signifiers and constructs a triangle America-France-Britain which, read through Burgess’ own works, opinions and prejudices regarding these nations in both a synchronic fashion and then diachronically, can be seen to reflect his changing attitudes to both national cultures and languages. M/F is identified as the key turning point in Burgess’ oeuvre as it develops from an anglocentric perspective to that of an international writer.
Book Chapter published in: Marc Jeannin (Ed.). Anthony Burgess and France. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2017.
in B.S. Johnson and Post-War Literature: Possibilities of the Avant Garde. Martin Ryle and Julia Jordan, eds. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.
Published in 1973, B.S. Johnson's "Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry" is a mini-masterpiece of bl... more Published in 1973, B.S. Johnson's "Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry" is a mini-masterpiece of black comedy, existential despair and terrorism. Through a mix of historical research and access to the British Library's Johnson archive, this paper presents a sustained analysis of how the 1971 Industrial Relations Act, the British terror group The Angry Brigade and a friendship with fellow experimental writer Alan Burns all came to influence the writing of the novel. I ask what effect, if any, these historical references have upon the creation of humour out of mass destruction.
Festschrift Volume 1: Christine Brooke-Rose. G.N. Forester and M.J. Nicholls, eds. London: Verbivoracious Press, 2014.
Taking as a starting point Spolton‘s 1963 article "The Secondary School in Post-War Fiction", thi... more Taking as a starting point Spolton‘s 1963 article "The Secondary School in Post-War Fiction", this paper seeks to unpack potential reasons for the post-war boom in school-based novels by focusing on two novels in particular, BS Johnson‘s Albert Angelo and Anthony Burgess‘ The Worm and The Ring. Identifying key political and economic factors surrounding education such as the 1944 Education Act and increased state funding, it is possible to outline the historical situation from which these novels arise. This background can then be traced through the authors‘ own biographies and the contemporary educational policies, into the works themselves.
By utilising an Althussarian approach, it can be seen how the changes occurring within the historical situation result in corresponding ideological tensions that, in turn, inform the narrative tensions existent within these novels. As writers, Johnson and Burgess were expressing the concerns that they felt as teachers. Whether it be the future of "democracy" and "civilisation", the "inhuman" teachers whose role it is to enforce such things, or the "savage" children needing to be brought into line – these novels provide a multitude of perspectives on the nature of schooling relevant both historically and contemporarily.
Reviews by Joseph Darlington
A review of Trebor Scholz's "Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers are Disrupting the Digital Eco... more A review of Trebor Scholz's "Uberworked and Underpaid: How Workers are Disrupting the Digital Economy". New York: Polity Press, 2016 which appeared in New Formations 91.
Link here: https://www.lwbooks.co.uk/new-formations/91/reviews
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Books by Joseph Darlington
This file includes the book's Introduction. The book is available here: https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030759056
Included is the book's introduction. The book is available here: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/experimentalists-9781350244405/
This book discusses British novels published during the 1970s which feature terrorists either as main characters or a major plot points. The focus on terrorism’s literary depiction provides insight into the politics of the decade. The book analyses texts from Gerald Seymour, Anthony Burgess, V.S. Naipaul, Graham Greene, Doris Lessing, B.S. Johnson, Tom Sharpe, and Eric Ambler, among others, in order to engage with the IRA, the end of Empire, counterculture and environmentalism. The book provides a brief history of terrorism as a concept and tactic before discussing British literature’s relationship with terrorism. It presents a “standard terrorist morphology” by which to analyse terrorist narratives along with other insights into the British post-war imagination, writing and extremism.
Peer-Reviewed Papers by Joseph Darlington
The paper begins with an overview of Lockwood’s poetic methods and traces this style back to the “Weird Twitter” phenomenon of 2011. The second section goes on to read Lockwood’s best known poem, “Rape Joke” through these complex pragmatics; analysing its use of humour as a confessional method. In the final section, Lockwood’s relationship to Catholicism, described in her memoir Priestdaddy (2017), is shown as a key instigator of Lockwood’s poetics.
Paper published in the journal Information, Communication and Society as part of the Work and Play Special Edition. Link here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2018.1476571?scroll=top&needAccess=true
Peer-reviewed research paper which appears in the Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 40, No. 2, Winter 2017.
Appearing in: Cambridge Quarterly (2016) 45 (2): 119-134.
doi: 10.1093/camqtly/bfw004
Book Chapters by Joseph Darlington
The paper will set Porter’s depiction of Bacon against his own approach to the written word. Porter’s sparse texts, dramatic use of negative space, and use of visual (often art-theoretical) metaphor, reveal a writer desperate to wring maximum signification from his word choices. Yet, like Bacon, we are left wondering whether Porter’s percussive textuality, his insistence on constant maximum impact, ultimately blunts his writing, leaving the emotive, the subjective, untouched. These ambiguities are explored in the use of visual metaphor in Grief is a Thing with Feathers and Lanny, before finally returning to The Death of Francis Bacon, where we ask whether, as with Francis Bacon’s art, Max Porter’s brutal poetics – an affectless art of affect – might be the key to understanding this writer’s battles with the page.
Book Chapter published in: Marc Jeannin (Ed.). Anthony Burgess and France. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2017.
By utilising an Althussarian approach, it can be seen how the changes occurring within the historical situation result in corresponding ideological tensions that, in turn, inform the narrative tensions existent within these novels. As writers, Johnson and Burgess were expressing the concerns that they felt as teachers. Whether it be the future of "democracy" and "civilisation", the "inhuman" teachers whose role it is to enforce such things, or the "savage" children needing to be brought into line – these novels provide a multitude of perspectives on the nature of schooling relevant both historically and contemporarily.
Reviews by Joseph Darlington
Link here: https://www.lwbooks.co.uk/new-formations/91/reviews
This file includes the book's Introduction. The book is available here: https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/9783030759056
Included is the book's introduction. The book is available here: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/experimentalists-9781350244405/
This book discusses British novels published during the 1970s which feature terrorists either as main characters or a major plot points. The focus on terrorism’s literary depiction provides insight into the politics of the decade. The book analyses texts from Gerald Seymour, Anthony Burgess, V.S. Naipaul, Graham Greene, Doris Lessing, B.S. Johnson, Tom Sharpe, and Eric Ambler, among others, in order to engage with the IRA, the end of Empire, counterculture and environmentalism. The book provides a brief history of terrorism as a concept and tactic before discussing British literature’s relationship with terrorism. It presents a “standard terrorist morphology” by which to analyse terrorist narratives along with other insights into the British post-war imagination, writing and extremism.
The paper begins with an overview of Lockwood’s poetic methods and traces this style back to the “Weird Twitter” phenomenon of 2011. The second section goes on to read Lockwood’s best known poem, “Rape Joke” through these complex pragmatics; analysing its use of humour as a confessional method. In the final section, Lockwood’s relationship to Catholicism, described in her memoir Priestdaddy (2017), is shown as a key instigator of Lockwood’s poetics.
Paper published in the journal Information, Communication and Society as part of the Work and Play Special Edition. Link here: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2018.1476571?scroll=top&needAccess=true
Peer-reviewed research paper which appears in the Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 40, No. 2, Winter 2017.
Appearing in: Cambridge Quarterly (2016) 45 (2): 119-134.
doi: 10.1093/camqtly/bfw004
The paper will set Porter’s depiction of Bacon against his own approach to the written word. Porter’s sparse texts, dramatic use of negative space, and use of visual (often art-theoretical) metaphor, reveal a writer desperate to wring maximum signification from his word choices. Yet, like Bacon, we are left wondering whether Porter’s percussive textuality, his insistence on constant maximum impact, ultimately blunts his writing, leaving the emotive, the subjective, untouched. These ambiguities are explored in the use of visual metaphor in Grief is a Thing with Feathers and Lanny, before finally returning to The Death of Francis Bacon, where we ask whether, as with Francis Bacon’s art, Max Porter’s brutal poetics – an affectless art of affect – might be the key to understanding this writer’s battles with the page.
Book Chapter published in: Marc Jeannin (Ed.). Anthony Burgess and France. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2017.
By utilising an Althussarian approach, it can be seen how the changes occurring within the historical situation result in corresponding ideological tensions that, in turn, inform the narrative tensions existent within these novels. As writers, Johnson and Burgess were expressing the concerns that they felt as teachers. Whether it be the future of "democracy" and "civilisation", the "inhuman" teachers whose role it is to enforce such things, or the "savage" children needing to be brought into line – these novels provide a multitude of perspectives on the nature of schooling relevant both historically and contemporarily.
Link here: https://www.lwbooks.co.uk/new-formations/91/reviews
Link to the publication here: http://www.lulu.com/shop/ed-darlington-hooper-seddon-tew-zouaoui/bsj-the-bs-johnson-journal-2/paperback/product-22374374.html
The full issue (Vol. 21, No. 9), can be found here: https://www.tandfonline.com/toc/rics20/21/9?nav=tocList
The theme of this issue is "The Issue with Truth"
Available from Lulu here: http://www.lulu.com/shop/ed-darlington-hooper-seddon-tew-zouaoui/bsj-the-bs-johnson-journal-2/paperback/product-22374374.html
Available here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/BSJ-Hooper-Seddon-Zouaoui-Darlington/dp/1326003704/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1443446039&sr=1-1&keywords=bsj
- from the blurb.
Books Contents:
"Introduction: Encountering Extremity and Excess"
Joseph Darlington
"Post-Human Pop: From Simulation to Assimilation"
Daniel Cookney
"Larger than Life: Morbidity, Megapixels and the Digital Body"
Rob Gallagher
"Siding with the Pervert: Engaging with the Twisted Hero in Japanese Ero-guro Cinema"
Lydia Brammer
"Hysterical Poetics: Chatterton's Excessive Desire for a 'Real' World of Words"
Erin Whitcroft
"'The simplest of proficiencies - the ability to kill my fellow-men': Isaak Babel and Making Sense of Extremity"
Victoria O'Neill
"Countering Extremism in the Name of Security: Criminalising Alternative Politics"
Will Jackson
"Exodus: A Non-identity Art - Everyone is an Artist?"
Rory Harron
"Critical Intimacy: Lowry's Seascapes and the Art of Ekphrasis"
Patrick Wright
"Manifest Destiny, Violence and Transcendence: An Artist's Statement"
Marc Bosward
Reproductions of artworks by Marc Bosward included with full-colour inserts. 216 pages.
Appears in BSJ: The B.S. Johnson Journal, Issue 2. Available here: http://www.lulu.com/shop/ed-darlington-hooper-seddon-tew-zouaoui/bsj-the-bs-johnson-journal-2/paperback/product-22374374.html
The event took place at Sommerville College, Oxford, June 26th 2015.
Link here: http://www.verbivoraciouspress.org/festschrifts/volume-three-the-syllabus/
http://www.verbivoraciouspress.org/the-dear-deceit/
This paper analyses two works of creative non-fiction: Daniela Cascella’s Singed (2017) and Steve Hanson and Richard Barrett’s The Acts (2018). Both were written in response to house fires that destroyed the authors’ worldly possessions. They work through the traumas, the shock, and the moments of surprising elation that follow in the aftermath of losing everything. To be momentarily freed from the library, its compulsive hoarding and its abiding sense of incompletion, fills both writers with a sense of dizzying detachment. For Cascella, it’s a chance to build herself anew. For Hanson, a chance to see the world afresh. Yet, with dizziness comes nausea, and both use a succession of experimental methods to try and recreate these unpleasant effects, from the loss of words to the loss of identity itself.
By touching on the theories of collecting put forward by Freud and Derrida, Borges and Benjamin, this paper argues, through Hanson and Cascella, for a renewed appreciation of the ephemerality of cultural objects. Fire as a drastic cure for archive fever, on the one hand, and, on the other, the value of the written word as a physical object persisting (precariously) through time. It will also consider the persistence of writing in the face of destruction and the renewal of meaning that this might generate.
This paper was delivered in a shorter version at the Anthony Burgess Centenary Conference held at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester, July 2017.
Link to Prezi: https://prezi.com/x1bqi-5io-7w/red-rag/
Presented at Work and Play: An Interdisciplinary Conference, held at Futureworks Media School, 6th July 2016.
Presented at EBSN Conference at the Wonder Inn, Manchester June 2016.
Burns’ publisher, John Calder, was also responsible for the British publications of the populariser of cut-ups, William Burroughs. It was at the first Edinburgh literary festival, launched by Calder in 1961, that Burroughs first explained his technique to a mass audience. The ensuing controversy dominated the conference and the debate continued for over a year in the letters pages of the Times Literary Supplement. Over the course of the 1960s Burroughs became a countercultural icon in Britain, appearing on the cover of The Beatle’s Sgt. Pepper’s album among other hip spaces. Seduced, a number of British writers attempted their own versions of the cut-up technique only to produce sub-par imitations of Burroughs. Burroughs’ influence tore apart the old complacencies of British literary style, but threatened to simply replace it with his own quintessentially American voice. It is in this context that we must read Burns’ social realist (anti)novel of manners.
Although Burns claimed to have invented the cut-up technique independently of Burroughs, this paper argues that, directly inspired or not, Burns’ novel stands as the most sophisticated reconciliation of Burroughs’ controversial technique with the concerns of British radical literary politics to have been created in the wake of the cut-up’s infamy.
Given as part of the Ragged Project programme, this public lecture aims to translate the research conducted for my PhD thesis into a narrative form suitable for an audience of the general public.
It will be seen that the choice of Levi-Strauss’ The Scope of Anthropology as a guiding text in the writing of M/F represents the culmination of Burgess’ attempt to think the international outside of the framework of the British Empire. The complex and multilingual riddles encoded in the text invoke national stereotypes in increasingly contradictory ways, straining the bounds of the culinary triangle Burgess appears to foreground. Shrouded in the language of myth, Burgess is at once recognising fundamental national differences while rooting these differences in cultural practice; a liberatory shift away from the racial determinism of colonial discourse.
Access to the Brooke-Rose archive at the Harry Ransom Centre, Texas, has provided unique insights into the process of research behind the novel. Brooke-Rose’s journals contain notes from numerous lectures on quantum theory, astronomy and the science behind the space race. In her essays of the period, Brooke-Rose demanded an equal level of commitment to scientific understanding from her fellow novelists. At one point she even suggested that, should everyday language not change to reflect the post-Einstein world of relativity, “we would not be equipped to survive the evolutionary process”. To prevent this, Such suggests we treat our minds like a map of the universe. Brooke-Rose later went on to regret this moon-eyed, space aged thinking, yet the novel remains a fascinating example of Sixties positivism.
Until now, knowledge of Brooke-Rose’s experiences during May ’68 has been limited to a couple of dismissive pages published in her 1996 “anti-biography” novel Remake. However, with access to the Harry Ransom Centre’s considerable Brooke-Rose archive in September of this year, a far more detailed and nuanced interrogation of her experiences is set to emerge. The enthusiasm, commitment and eventual disillusion and cynicism involved in witnessing a revolutionary moment from beginning to end is traced through her journalism, theoretical essays and her most experimental novel, 1975’s Thru. In many ways the moment can be read as the point at which her forward-looking “experimental” writing transforms into ironic and distanced “postmodern” writing. In this sense, Brooke-Rose is sharing the experiences of the whole ’68 generation – their revolutionary ideals betrayed and their profitable ideas recuperated into late capitalism."""
The way in which the idea of the nation is conveyed in Burgess’ work is thus of great interest. National identities seem defined by Burgess as tiny (sometimes uncannily so) deviations from a set of norms shared the world over. Notions of “cities”, “countries” and “cultures” are reduced to associations of ideas within daily routine. This is sometimes taken to mythical extremes as, for example, the appearance of an American always precedes violence. Similarly, it often leaves Burgess willfully ignorant of the political - as his naïve holiday to St Petersburg at the height of the cold war demonstrates.
Whether the conclusions Burgess draws from his experiences are insightful or not, his novelistic output undoubtedly provides an interesting insight into the twentieth-century as viewed between borders.
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With a conservative government in power whose Industrial Relations Act slashed trade unions’ right to strike, the atmosphere of Britain in 1973 was combative politically and tense economically. My argument is that under such conditions the excesses of the terrorist mindset become relatable and, distanced by the devices of the comedic novel, the portrayal of terrorist acts provides a sense of catharsis for the powerless reader. The hyperbolic frustrations vented in classic slapstick comedies are here expressed through the machine-gun, the spray can, and the bomb. Importantly, these novels also imply that the reader hold certain sympathies in common with the terrorists’ cause – an implication perhaps unimaginable today.
Published a full decade after A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Cohen’s sociological study of the Mods and Rockers phenomenon, Folk Devils and Moral Panics, identifies a recurrent pattern by which social outrage explodes certain relatively minor incidents into national “moral panics”. These incidents are not the root of these national panics, according to Cohen, but rather it is series of social prejudices that find their incarnation in an imagined version of the incidents, and thus respond accordingly. The trans-historical qualities of the “moral panic” can readily be seen in A Clockwork Orange: from the invented fashion and nadsat-slang of the droogs, readily comparable with any youth subculture, to the Augustinian and Pelagian political parties that represent a timeless conservative/liberal divide. A Clockwork Orange is almost a blueprint for the “folk devils” and “moral crusaders” described in Cohen’s book.
However, I would argue that it is through this defamiliarisation that Burgess’ novel moves beyond a reactionary sense of “panic”, and into the realms of cathartic art. By enlisting the youth’s “feral underclass” alongside Catholic theology, the novel cuts to the quick of human nature itself – giving voice to the devils. Concluding my paper with a short narratological analysis, I argue that Alex can very much be viewed as the Jungian archetype of a trickster spirit who, read against the writer character, follows a typical pattern of thesis/antithesis/synthesis, or rather a theological cycle of transgression/persecution/redemption.
As an apotheosis of “moral panic”, is it any wonder that A Clockwork Orange resulted in causing one itself?"