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20th - 21st Centuries Colonial, Postcolonial and Transnational Culture

Teaching literature in the age of Trump and Brexit: some reflections

At a protest march against Brexit in London. Photo © Wikimedia Commons

by Sinéad Murphy and Diya Gupta, PhD researchers, Departments of Comparative Literature and English

“Teachers and students produce, reinforce, recreate, resist, and transform ideas about race, gender, and difference in the classroom.” – Chandra Talpade Mohanty, ‘On Race and Voice: Challenges for Liberal Education in the 1990s’, 1989

“Provoking students to think, really think, is one of the reasons we have universities in the first place.”  – Stefan Collini, Guardian opinion piece ‘Brexit witch-hunt against universities reveals the right’s paranoid thinking’, 31 October 2017

In 2016, Oxford Dictionaries selected ‘post-truth’ as its international word of the year. This November, Collins Dictionary chose the term ‘fake news’ as word of the year for 2017 from a shortlist featuring ‘echo chamber’, ‘antifa’, and ‘Corbynmania’. The head of language content at Collins explained that “much of this year’s list is definitely politically charged, but with a new president in the US and a snap election in the UK, it is perhaps no surprise that politics continues to electrify the language.”

At a protest against Trump's presidency. Photo © Wikimedia Commons.
At a protest against Trump’s presidency. Photo © Wikimedia Commons.

It is clear that the swing to the far-right in the US and the UK has come to dominate the basic language through which we understand our political reality. The urgency that these developments lend to current research in literature and language – and across the humanities broadly – was the subject of a meeting of the King’s research cluster ‘Colonial, Postcolonial and Transnational Cultures’ earlier this year.

Comprising academic staff and postgraduate researchers from the English and Comparative Literature Departments, this cluster is organised around three overarching themes: the ‘coloniality’ of language; spatiality and geographies; and the ways in which violence, brutality, atrocity or torture might condition our research projects.

What does it mean, to be ‘more political’…?

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Categories
19th Century Culture, Text and History Gender and Sexuality Visual and Material Culture

Famous writing desks, southern hospitality and monuments to lost lives: King’s visits UNC

Original Stagville homes for slaves: a history of lost lives that American society continues to struggle with. Photo credit: Charlotte Taylor-Suppe, 2017.

by Amy Murat and Charlotte Taylor-Suppe

In a time of Trump, Brexit and increasing separatist ideology, we three intrepid King’s travellers – Dr Emrys Jones, Charlotte and I -crossed the pond. And not without incident in the shape of an unexpected night stranded in NYC. Somewhat weary and dishevelled, we finally met with our partners from the University of North Carolina in a communal spirit of defiance. Our mission was twofold: firstly to foster collaboration between our two institutions strengthening a long tradition of friendship; secondly, to take part in a wide range of research activities, including a renowned conference run by the British Women Writers Association (BWWA), which UNC were hosting this year.

The conference theme of ‘Generations’ struck me as particularly apt for our trip. Not only did it reflect the historic and continued links between our two universities and nations, but also the sense of boundless generative creativity amongst different peoples across both time and place…

The conference saw a host of different cohorts of researchers coming together from various fields, and this same diversity was reflected in the historic lives of the many women writers under discussion. We heard some wonderful keynotes, including a talk from Andrew Stauffer on flowers and Victorian female reader reception as well as a fascinating joint speech from leading Elizabeth Barrett Browning scholars Marjorie Stone and Beverly Taylor on the “collaborative energies” of women writers.

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Categories
19th Century Contemporary Culture, Text and History Literature, Medicine and Science

Metaphor in Literature and Science #bslswinter2017

Ideas that take root. Image: Wikimedia Commons.

#bslswinter2017

by James Rakoczi, PhD Candidate, Department of English 

There is a gravity to this situation. He has broken my heart. We are waging a war on cancer. Our closest neighbour is Andromeda. Synapses permit neurons to communicate with each other.

Warning: this post is ripe to bursting with metaphors.

Thomas Kuhn argued that you don’t see something until ‘you have the right metaphor to perceive it’ (The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962). How then might we perceive the literary and scientific dimensions of the metaphor in itself?

Metaphor negotiates across the ‘two cultures’ of science and humanities at the university. Does the metaphor stay the same in its transmission/translation or does it transform, transgress, transcend? Are metaphors necessarily rooted within a particular historical context or can productive analogies between literary and scientific texts across disparate historical periods be discovered? Can we (should we?) read a neurological metaphor into a text which pre-dates neurology? Should we (can we?) read a scientific metaphor aimed at pedagogical elucidation like we might a poetical metaphor: an immanent stitch of image which nevertheless troubles and growths beyond itself (by our invention or its design)?

On Saturday 4th November 2017, the Centre for Humanities and Health and the English Department will host the British Society of Literature and Science’s (BSLS) annual winter symposium. The symposium will be an opportunity for many of us to try our hand at solving these questions, or asking even more.

Wiki commons Varsha_ys
A message from one synapse to another. Image: Wikimedia Commons.
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Categories
19th Century Colonial, Postcolonial and Transnational Culture Culture, Text and History

On Teaching (and Learning)

by Ian Henderson, Director of the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies and Senior Lecturer in Australian and Victorian literature. This post was first published on The MCAS Director’s Blog.

Ordinarily September arrives like a high-speed gear change with the clutch still half engaged. The teeth-shearing rasp ratchets across British academe as we shift from August’s intensely imagined worlds of more-or-less cloistered research and writing into the induction circus of Welcome Week.

Most of us brush off last year’s complaints about teaching for threadbare repartee in student-filled hallways, while concealing the thrill of it all. Teaching is the lifeblood of most academics, after all; in reality it’s harder to stop us doing it, shut us up.

This year is a little different for me (re the gear-change, not the shutting up). The nature of my role in directing the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies means I was chipping away at College business throughout summer. That kept me in the habit of coming into King’s rather than going to the library or writing at home.

But more to the point, teaching itself came to occupy the place of a research-project ‘question’ during this summer’s ‘research period’: intensely scrutinised, carried about with me in myriad different places (half way around the world, as it turned out), looked at from many sides, held up as a lens and a foil for whatever print matter fell before my eyes.

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Categories
20th - 21st Centuries Contemporary Life writing, Creative writing and Performance Literature, Medicine and Science

The Poetics and Politics of Alzheimer’s Disease Life-Writing

by Martina Zimmermann, honorary Associate Professor in Pharmacology at Goethe University Frankfurt, with an MA in Literature and Medicine and a second PhD in Health Humanities at King’s College London.

I am a pharmaceutical scientist by training who specialised in neuropharmacology. For over 15 years, my research interests have been the molecular mechanisms that cause the death of brain cells in conditions like Alzheimer’s disease. While pursuing, and later supervising, laboratory based experimental projects, I more and more often wondered how patients actually experience the condition which I only knew from studies in cell culture and other disease models. The methodologies, models and approaches I used were unsuited to answering this question.

Still, Alzheimer’s patients would not write…

I began looking for patient accounts about a decade ago. At the time, I found only just over a dozen of books published in English, and one diary in French. I was astonished that there were so few, especially because I felt that the popular press had long preferred Alzheimer’s disease to any other subject in its health and wellbeing pages. Also, patients usually have five to ten years between diagnosis and death, and, at the time of clinically perceivable onset, can continue to articulate themselves proficiently in writing, as well as retaining figurative language. Still, Alzheimer’s patients would not write.

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