Introduction
My
name is Eleanor and I am a third year PhD student at the University of
Manchester. My research looks at queer sexuality in Samuel Beckett’s work
during the 1960s. You might know Samuel Beckett as the playwright who wrote Waiting for Godot, but did you know he
was also a novelist, poet, screenwriter, director for both television and film
and a short prose writer? My work focuses on the 1960s in particular because
Beckett’s work during this period begins to change into something much more minimal
(the scenery is often a plain white space, bodies nondescript and their actions
often simply breathing and sweating) and, simultaneously, much more gender-fluid.
Here I am giving a paper at the 4th Annual Beckett Society conference in Mexico City.In
Depth
At
school, my favourite subjects were English Literature, Religious Studies and
Art & Design. I never got on very well with Mathematics or any of the
sciences, although now, surprisingly, I find that I am using theories from
these disciplines in my work as well! My undergraduate degree was in English
Literature at the University of Sussex, and I did a Master's in Comparative
Literature at Queen Mary’s, University of London, which allowed me to study a
broader range of literature in other languages and in translation—as well as
translation theory—and to make more comparisons between subjects, such as
comparing literature with music, art and performance.[1]
This has helped a great deal with my current studies, as Beckett wrote in both
English and French, and did a lot of self-translation, as well as working in
aural and visual mediums.
My
current research brings queer theory to an area of Beckett Studies to which it
is absolutely crucial, while simultaneously allowing this research to reflect
back upon the current state of Sexuality Studies.[2]
The theoretical work that my thesis has opened up is different from what I had
imagined when I started my PhD, but in an exciting way! The journey you take
when you study literature can be unpredictable and messy and that’s what I love
about it. Often, you will find that literary criticism has been subject to
compulsory heterosexuality. This term was coined by groundbreaking feminist
scholar Adrienne Rich to explain how society expects, assumes and reinforces
heterosexuality as dominant. At its most basic, my work seeks to undo this.
I
also work as a Teaching Assistant, which has been an extremely rewarding role
and has taught me a great deal. When I graduate, I would like to continue to
teach at university level. I work as a Widening Participation Fellow, I am a
tutor on the MAP programme, I undertake Research Assistant work, and I am the administrator
of the Beckett Society. On top of this, I also have a part-time job as a
customer service assistant at an art supplies company. When you do a PhD
part-time, you have to keep a very strict calendar, and be very aware of your
limits.
Samuel BeckettGoing
Further…
The
reason that I fell in love with studying literature was theory. Theory is a
broad category, which encompasses all sorts of ideas, from feminism and Marxism
to deconstruction and psychoanalysis. Some people don’t see theory as very
valuable because it doesn’t have a material output, like a science subject
might. However, studying literature is important because it examines the bedrock
of our lives: not just language itself, but narrative and how it is
constructed. In studying literature, you are also able to examine the
narratives of productivity that are fed to us by society and find better ways
of ascribing value and importance.
A rainbow printed onto the road in the Castro District, San Francisco, ready for Pride celebrations.
[1] Translation theory asks at how best
to translate a text – can one translate for both sense and feel? How to make up for the importance of sound and rhythm?
How to make up for small but significant differences in meaning and account for
cultural context? It has been suggested, for example, that the translation of
poetry is impossible.
[2] Queer theory is a broad category of
theorizing that foregrounds sexuality and gender, reading texts through a lens
that is often denied us in critical theory. Eve Sedgwick, one of the most
famous queer theorists, suggests ‘it's about how you can't understand
relations between men and women unless you understand the relationship between
people of the same gender, including the possibility of a sexual relationship
between them.' This is why it is so crucial that queer theory be brought to
Beckett Studies, as this has so far been neglected in scholarship.
Introduction
Hey, I’m Stevie, a first year PhD
student in English and American Studies at the University of Manchester, and I
study comics! More specifically, I study George Herriman’s Krazy Kat (1913-1944), an American comic strip that loosely follows the daily lives of
Krazy Kat, Ignatz Mouse (with whom Krazy is in love) and Offissa Pupp (who is
in love with Krazy!) as they unfold against the fantastical desertscape of
‘Coconino County’. Krazy wasn’t very
popular among most readers, but it drew praise from artists, writers, and
intellectuals, including the poet e. e. cummings, the critic Gilbert Seldes,
and, purportedly, Pablo Picasso, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein, among
others! As a result, a number of scholars have linked Krazy to the field of modernism, an early twentieth century art
movement that sought to respond to the rapidly-changing modern world. My work
focuses on deeply contextualising the strip’s production, content, distribution,
and reception to ask where, in the vast field of American modernist production
and culture, it is most usefully historicised.
In Depth…
Deciding what to study at
university was tricky because I was torn between English literature, sociology,
and creative writing. Ultimately, I chose the BA American Literature with
Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, which gave me quite a lot of
freedom with choosing modules and meant I could combine interdisciplinary
American Studies classes with writing workshops. It also gave me the opportunity
to spend a year at Occidental College in Los Angeles, where I encountered my
first Krazy strip through a brilliant
class on comics and graphic literature. In final year, I wrote my dissertation
on Krazy and took a fantastic body
culture studies module - both left me knowing I wanted to study further, but I
spent a few years working to save money and to decide exactly what course I
wanted to do – more American studies, something more focused, something to do
with my work in education? In September 2017, I joined the MA Gender, Sexuality
and Culture at the University of Manchester, a course that indulged my interest
in gender and body studies from a philosophical/conceptual perspective, but
also let me choose a range of modules from postcolonial literature to
transnational radical subcultures. Knowing I wasn’t through with Krazy Kat, I also took a class on
modernist studies to help me prepare a PhD proposal, and used my MA
dissertation on frontier manhood in ‘Buffalo Bill’s Wild West’ to hone skills
and touch on areas of knowledge that I’ll use going forwards: using digital
archives and special collections, and learning more about transatlantic
entertainment and the cultural meanings of the American West. For me, the most
enjoyable thing about the PhD is having the time and freedom to follow my
curiosity, which has taken me through digital archives of 1920s Vanity Fair magazines, over 100-year-old
maps of Arizona, and into poetry, short stories, art, and comics I’ve never
encountered before. There is a huge amount of fascinating work going on in both
comics studies and modernist studies that is seeking to draw attention to the
myriad things we can learn about history through popular culture; I hope that
my work can play a small part in bringing these exciting fields into
conversation with one another. In the meantime, what an honour to read and
write about Krazy for work!
Going Further…
In Print
Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics is an educational
and entertaining introduction to the history and grammar of comics...written as
a comic!
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Understanding-Comics-Invisible-Scott-McCloud/dp/006097625X
If you want to know more about
George Herriman, Krazy Kat, or the
American newspaper comic industry in the early c20, check out Michael
Tisserand’s brilliant biography Krazy: A
Life in Black and White.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Krazy-George-Herriman-Black-White/dp/0061733008/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1548416074&sr=1-1
Online
Comics
Grid and ImageTexT are online,
open-access journals of comics studies.
https://www.comicsgrid.com/
http://imagetext.english.ufl.edu/
The
Modernist Review is the British Association for Modernist Studies’ (BAMS,
for short!) postgraduate blog, featuring wide-ranging articles written in an
accessible way.
https://modernistreviewcouk.wordpress.com/
The John Rylands Library has a Special Collections blog
where you can read more about the research the collections are being used for.
I’ve linked below to the main blog, and to a post I wrote about using their
‘Buffalo Bill Scrapbook’ for my MA dissertation.
https://rylandscollections.wordpress.com/
https://rylandscollections.wordpress.com/2018/10/26/from-wild-west-to-west-end-buffalo-bill-scrapbook-and-performances-of-frontier-manhood/
Introduction
My name’s Christina and I’m studying
for a PhD in English and American literature at the University of Manchester.
Although I’m an English student, I didn’t arrive here through studying the
subject as an undergraduate. Whilst studying for A-Levels, I signed up for a creative
writing course at a Leeds FE college – which only confirmed I had no talent for
creative writing. I’m still very glad I took the class because I met another
student who spoke about the Cultural Studies degree she was enrolled on at Leeds
University.
Cultural Studies taught me the
importance of analysing popular culture and that television, popular music and
cinema, as well as literature, are valid subjects for sustained academic
enquiry. It was at university that I first began to enjoy academic work. I went
on to complete an MA in Cultural and Critical Theory in the same department. By
2015, my research interests took me to contemporary American literature and I
began a PhD on the post-apocalypse (or ‘the end of the world’ through war and
other horrors) in contemporary American fiction. Fiction about ‘end-times’ interests
me because it confirms our worst nightmares. Representations of
post-apocalyptic survival tell us about our hopes for the future – an idea which
is particularly important following contemporary upheavals in American politics
and the beginning of the ‘Trump era’.
In-depth
In my thesis, currently titled,
‘The Post-Apocalypse in Contemporary North American after the 2008 Global
Financial Crisis’, I look at how the post-apocalypse – as an imagined world
existing after a destructive catastrophe or event – has become a popular
literary landscape for mainstream American authors. The post-apocalypse
categorises a growing number of novels, including Cormac McCarthy’s The Road (2006), Colson Whitehead’s Zone One (2011) and Emily St John
Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014). I
argue that, through this post-apocalyptic trend which includes zombie films
like Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later
(2002) as well as literary novels, authors are grappling with changing ideas of
‘risk’ and ‘danger’, especially after the twenty-first-century events like
September 11th 2001 and the financial crisis. Contemporary scholars
are speculating on how these events, and similar crises, are changing our
perceptions of ‘risk’ and danger after the millennium. Companies and
governments are allocating and spending increased budgets on security. Defence
is increasingly about the web and cyber-security as it is about national
defence and borders. The prospect of terror attacks permeates the modern life
of British and American cities. A famous sociologist called Ulrich Beck argues
that risk is becoming an increasingly prominent feature of everyday life – so
much so that, in the twenty-first-century, he claims that we are living in a
‘risk society’, where risk is near-permanent feature of most of public, whether
at school or at work, and private life.
My thesis argues that the
post-apocalyptic trend in contemporary fiction represents a literary and cultural
effort to envisage a future whether the continual prospect of risk has been
suddenly – and without warning – cut off by disaster. Uniquely, in the
twenty-first-century, the post-apocalypse becomes a disaster-filled and yet
still risk-free landscape. According to scholars like Beck, risk is a threat
which is managed by our complex democracies, technology and media. After the
apocalypse, these institutions have been removed or obliterated. Survivors
which are the focus of novels like The
Road are reduced to scavenging, and yet they live in a world in which the
almost mundane sense of constant risk is replaced by immediate danger. I argue
that these post-apocalyptic novels are crucial for interrogating public
perceptions of risk in the twenty-first-century, and unease with the
risk-management culture which has followed 9/11. The contemporary post-apocalyptic
genre, therefore, is more than an outlet for releasing the effects of global
climate change and other contemporary fears. The post-apocalypse places
responsibility for safety and security back in the hands of survivors, and ultimately
registers public anxieties about how the abstract prospect of ‘risk’ is
changing how people live and act in the twenty-first-century.
Going Further
’31 Essential Science Fiction
Terms and Where They Came From’, iO9, https://io9.gizmodo.com/31-essential-science-fiction-terms-and-where-they-came-1594794250
A debate about the popularity of contemporary
post-apocalyptic novels between two literature scholars in the literary
magazine Public Books: Ursula Heise, ‘What’s the Matter with
Dystopia?’ http://www.publicbooks.org/whats-the-matter-with-dystopia/ &
Andrew Hoberek, ‘The Post-Apocalyptic Present’,
http://www.publicbooks.org/the-post-apocalyptic-present/
‘Will 2017 be 1984?’, Alluvium Journal, https://www.alluvium-journal.org/2017/05/31/will-2017-be-1984/
. Caroline Edwards and Ben Worthy revisit George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) in light of political events of 2017.
‘Zombie Preparedness: Graphic
Novel’. Zombie graphic novel released by the Center for Disease Control and
Prevention educating readers about ‘emergency preparedness’ https://www.cdc.gov/phpr/zombie/novel.htm
Science-fiction authors Ursula Le
Guin and Margaret Atwood discuss the category of ‘speculative fiction’ https://literary-arts.org/archive/ursula-le-guin-margaret-atwood/