Café
Conversations on Literature, Culture, and Language
November 2012 to May 2013
Run by staff and students in LDC, AMS, and LCS at the University of East Anglia.
All cafés take place at 2 pm in the White Lion Café at 19-21
White Lion Street in Norwich.
The events are free and open to the public.
19 November
Can Writing be Taught?
Professor Andrew Cowan
UEA pioneered the teaching of creative writing as a
university subject in 1970, and for the next 25 years it remained almost the
only university to offer an MA in creative writing, despite the enormous
success of some of its alumni, such as Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro. In the last 15 years, however, the subject
has really caught on, until there is barely a university anywhere that doesn't
offer creative writing in some form. And
yet still the question is asked, Can writing be taught? Andrew Cowan is a graduate of the UEA MA,
where he was taught by Malcolm Bradbury and Angela Carter. He is now the Director of the UEA programme. And he is asking the same question.
28 November
Through the Looking-Glass: The Origins and Afterlife of
Nonsense Literature
Dr Thomas Karshan
What is a snark? what is a boojum? must they be something,
or nothing? where do they come from? and do we need to know, if we are to enjoy
and appreciate nonsense literature? This café conversation will explore
nonsense literature, especially through Lewis Carroll’s “Jabberwocky”, saying a
little about its origins, and exploring the philosophical issues around sense
and nonsense with which Carroll was concerned. We’ll think together about why
all great literature, and not just nonsense, needs to invent its own words, and
we’ll look a little at a passage of Joyce’s Finnegans
Wake, much influenced by Carroll’s Alice,
which is only invented words. And then we’ll have a go at inventing our own
words - and ask if in doing so we have invented, if only for a moment, our own
new world.
5 December
God Loveth Adverbs
Philip Wilson
Why does God love adverbs? And why does Stephen King hate
them? And what does this tell us about literature? This session explores the
contention that literature is about showing, not telling, and investigates ways
that writers approach their task and the difference between literature and
genre fiction.
14 December
Politicomics
Alex Valente
Just how political can comics be? Can they (or have they) be used for
propaganda purposes? We will discuss the ideological messages that the
comics medium can convey. The texts we will look at range from the most
explicit (e.g. Palestine, by Joe Sacco, or V for Vendetta, by
Alan Moore and David Lloyd) to those that hide their political agendas a little
deeper.
16 January
American
Ghost Towns
Dr
Malcolm McLaughlin
All across the United States there are eerily abandoned
towns - where tumbleweeds roll along empty Main Streets, where only the shells
of buildings remain. These so-called ghost towns are familiar cultural
references and seem to say something about the other side of the American
Dream. Some are former mining settlements, which boomed and declined with equal rapidity. Some are towns that were left
stranded when interstate highways cut through the land in the 1950s, and passed
them by. But, since the 1970s, some of America's once-famous cities have been
equally stricken by depopulation: when factories packed up and left town, so
did the people. Even "Motor City" Detroit has been shrinking. What
can we learn about America from looking at its historical ghost towns and
modern-day shrinking cities? And how have the people who remain been working to
reinvent their cities and make them liveable for the twenty-first century?
30 January
“Bearing Witness”: Seen but not Witnessed
Dr Rachael Mclennan and Dr Rebecca Fraser
This cafe will reflect on how we talk about and understand
traumatic experiences that we have not borne direct witness to. It will consider
to what extent representations, both visual and scholarly, of traumatic events
distort or assist in understanding such experiences. Dr Rachael Mclennan and Dr
Rebecca Fraser will be drawing on their own research concerning the Holocaust
in American literature and culture and slavery in the United States
respectively as case studies for further exploration of these issues.
6 February
The Pleasures and Politics of Historical Fiction
Dr Hilary Emmett
This café will engage the problem of how to balance our
pleasure in reading historical fiction with some of the ethical issues that
arise in rewriting the past to entertain audiences of the present.
Possible novels for consideration include historical fictions that are closely
aligned to verifiable historical events (such as Hilary Mantel’s recent Booker
Prize-winning blockbusters in comparison with more controversial re-imaginings
of history like Kathryn Stockett’s The Help) as well as novels that seek to
tell forgotten, repressed or traumatic stories such as Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer
Prize-winning Beloved or Caryl Philips’ The Nature of Blood.
18 February
Meet the Pastons: An Introduction to Norwich’s Best Known
Medieval Family
Elizabeth
McDonald
Norwich’s medieval past can simultaneously seem a palpable
and enigmatic part of our city’s history: we are surrounded by stunning
examples of medieval architecture but imagining or understanding who used these
buildings can be challenging. Thankfully the Paston family left us numerous
letters, written between 1425-1495, in which we get a vibrant glimpse of what
life in Norwich was like for a wealthy (but socially insecure) family. These
letters provide a rich tapestry of personalities: surprisingly strong, willful,
female characters; respectable men of the Law; feckless sons and problematic
daughters. We find the family concerned
with castle defenses, “keeping up with the joneses,” life at court, and poorly
made love matches. We will look at some of these letters and come face-to-face
with life in Medieval Norwich.
27 February
Telling it Well? Mourning
Autobiography
Dr Rachael McLennan
This cafe attempts to account for
the popularity of autobiographies of illness and grief. These might be
understood as a subgenre of the ‘misery memoir’, which has been especially successful
since the 1990s. With reference to Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) and Blue Nights (2011), Dr Rachael McLennan will consider the following
questions: what pleasures and risks do such autobiographical projects present
for writers and readers? How might autobiographies of grief, in particular,
challenge traditional definitions and understandings of autobiography?
6 March
Introduction to Translation
Dr B.J. Epstein
What is involved in translating a piece of writing from one
language to another? Why is translation one of the most fascinating and
important careers? Why does translation matter?
After a general background to what translation is, we will practice a
short translation/adaptation exercise together, either into another language or
from English to English. Then we will discuss the joys and challenges of
translation.
13 March
Who Do You Think You Are and
Should You Care? Genealogy and the Pitfalls of Family History
Dr Rebecca Fraser
With the explosion of accessible
material tracing one’s own family history through genealogical sites such as
ancestry.com everybody can be an amateur historian. Yet, what is we dig back
into our own histories and discover things about our ancestors that we find
uncomfortable, disturbing, or even damaging to our own sense of self and who we
are? This cafe will reflect on the very real value of genealogical research but
also consider the limitations of the resources available and the possibility
that we might not always like what we find. Dr Rebecca Fraser will be drawing
on her own research concerning tracing the life story of Sarah Hicks Williams,
a relatively unknown woman, living in nineteenth century America.
21 March
Norfolk Noir
Henry Sutton
I'll
be talking about my new novel My Criminal World, which is being published by
Harvill Secker on 2 April 2013. The
novel addresses issues of violence and entertainment, genre writing and
so-called literary writing and what makes popular fiction work. It is also effectively
set in Norwich/Norfolk, and it/my talk will look at aspects of provincialism,
and what I'd like to call Norfolk Noir.
2 April
Proving
Beauty
Dr
Ross Wilson
We
can prove that the chemical properties of water are H2O; we can prove that the
earth orbits the sun; but can we prove that an object is beautiful? This
conversation will discussion this question by working, in particular, with a
number of poems that may or may not be 'beautiful'.
17 April
Writers, Interviews
and Journalism, with Henry James
Dr Kate Campbell
It’s easy to take
interviews for granted although they are central to modern life. Most of us
will have had job interviews and we will at times have read interviews with
famous writers and other celebrities. The kind of interviews that we know in
journalism have been around for considerably less than two hundred years. After
glancing at their history, this conversation explores some of the issues that
interviews by writers and with writers raise, with discussion of two or three
interviews, including the response of a famous writer, Henry James, in a rare
interview that might have been a hoax.
26 April
What’s the Point of Holocaust Poetry?
Professor Jean Boase-Beier
We will look at a poem about the Holocaust by Rose
Auslaender and ask why she and others chose to put their experiences of the
Holocaust into poetry. How does it make us feel? Can we relate to things that
happened so long ago and in another place?
1 May
Here Be Monsters
Dr Jacob Huntley
Vampires and zombies stalk the contemporary cultural
landscape, more prevalent and popular than ever before. What is it that makes
these modern representations of monstrosity such a pervasive force – and what
do they mean? Monstrosity has always provided a valuable way of expressing
fears or taboos, providing symbolic representation for what is unknown or
misunderstood, or as a way of designating Otherness. Whether they are social
metaphors – such as Romero’s shopping mall zombies – or figurations of
unconscious forces – such as, incubi, Lamia or Mr Hyde – these demonstrative presences
are all around us.
8 May
Can Machines
Translate?
Dr Jo Drugan
This cafe builds on BJ Epstein's event on 6 March (but
attendance at that session is not a prerequisite). How far can machines carry
out the ‘fascinating and important’ task of translation? Even before modern
computers were invented, authors such as H.G. Wells and popular science fiction
such as Star Trek had imagined ‘Universal Translators’, enabling communication
across all languages. Do recent advances such as Google Translate and
smartphones bring these technologies within our grasp? What are their uses and
limits? Feel free to try out free translation apps online or on your phone
before the cafe.
15 May
The Writing of Disaster
Dr Wendy McMahon
It has been said that disaster shuts down language, renders
words meaningless and art inadequate, for how can we describe or depict the
indescribable, put words to suffering and trauma when it is so total? This café
considers the role of the writer and writing in a decade marked in America by
9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. The café will pose questions such as, what kind of
cultural representation of disaster is possible, or, indeed, necessary? What
role do ethics play in the writing of disaster? What can words really achieve
in light of such trauma? It is hoped, by the end of the café, that we will have
worked some way towards answering these types of questions, and considered the
place of culture in national healing narratives.
