Categories
Colonial, Postcolonial and Transnational Culture Contemporary

Experience: Working with Bahati Books

by Ralitsa Chorbadzhiyska. Ralitsa is an undergraduate student in the English Department in her third year, with research interests in Modernism and Contemporary culture. Ralitsa worked as an editorial and marketing intern at Bahati Books this summer as part of King’s Internship Summer Scheme. She also has a personal blog where she writes about books, music and art.

Ever since applying for university I knew I wanted to study English literature and use my degree to become involved with publishing. But I never knew which role would suit me best – an editor, an agent, a person in marketing or sales. I applied for my internship with Bahati Books before going into my third year as I figured that the best way to find what part of publishing intrigues me the most was to learn from experience.

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Instagram-friendly promotion for ‘WIne and Water’, by Hannah Onoguwe. Photo by Ralitsa Chorbadzhiyska.
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Categories
Life writing, Creative writing and Performance

Swallow (early draft)

Books to inspire you: Nadia's recommended reading.

Nadia Saward graduated from King’s College London with a BA in English Language and Literature. One of her poems was shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize in 2016. She is about to start an MA in Creative Writing Poetry at Royal Holloway, University of London.

*

Swallow

The red dirt of the pyramids
was still under my wing, when I found
a town with roofs like small mountains
and a crying prince.

And a crying prince
with September- blue eyes, only wished
for blindness. I gave it to him.
A sapphire for your son, a ruby for your mother.

A sapphire for your son, a ruby for your mother,
goes my song. I drop jewels down
coughing chimneys- in the morning
they will think the stars have fallen.

They will think the stars have fallen,
and thank their gods.
I nestle in the hollow between your legs,
and wait for night to come.

And wait for night to come,
to visit the woman at the window,
time scars her face. Hands whittled to bone.
I coat her skin with gold.

I coat her skin with gold,
let it gather, light as snow
on the sill, until all she sees is
the sun’s widening mouth.

The sun’s widening mouth
brings me no warmth.
Cold feathers my throat.
In the morning they will find me,
a beggar at his feet.

*

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Categories
18th Century Culture, Text and History

Dissertation stories: Don Quixote to cross-stitch

William Burgess and Felicity H-Mackie of the MA 18th Century Studies course organised a conference in conjunction with the Centre for Enlightenment Studies, as an opportunity for 18th Century MA researchers from King’s and Queen Mary to discuss the first stages of their dissertations with students and staff. They share with us here their dissertation research journeys.

A Rake's Progress (plate 8) 1735-63 William Hogarth 1697-1764 Transferred from the reference collection 1973 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T01794
A Rake’s Progress (plate 8) 1735-63 William Hogarth 1697-1764 Transferred from the reference collection 1973 http://www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T01794

by William Burgess, MA 18th Century Studies

Like all good research journeys, my dissertation started with the discovery of a quotation that upended everything I thought I knew about literature.

Following my BA graduation, I spent the summer reading Samuel Johnson’s 1759 novel Rasselas. Aside from getting a lot of stick from my friends (most of whom were taking it easy with some crime fiction or re-reading Harry Potter) reading the novel revealed some unsettling complications to my idea of what literature means.

“If we speak with rigorous exactness, no human mind is in its right state. There is no man whose imagination does not sometimes predominate over his reason, who can regulate his attention wholly by his will […] all power of fancy over reason is a degree of insanity.”

Samuel Johnson is telling us that everyone, to some degree, is a bit ‘insane’. Not only that, but – as he goes on to insist – the act of writing fiction is by definition slightly mad.

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Categories
Book Review Culture, Text and History Literature, Medicine and Science

Book Review: Balint Matters

by Neil Vickers, Reader in English Literature & Medical Humanities

Balint Matters
Cover image from ‘Balint Matters: Psychosomatics and the Art of Assessment’ by Jonathan Sklar (London: Karnac, 2017)

Michael Balint is mentioned in medical humanities circles as a revered ancestor, much as one might talk about William Empson as a significant figure in the history of English literary criticism. Everyone knows they’re important but surprisingly few people read either writer today or even know why they should. (An important exception is Josie Billington’s superb Is Literature Healthy? – reviewed here – which devotes a chapter to Balint.)

Empson did theory before Theory, and Balint did narrative medicine before Narrative Medicine. Both men were at least as interesting as what came after them, and yet both have become unduly sepia-tinted with the passage of time. Part of the reason for this fading in Balint’s case has to do with the fact that his clinical examples are firmly rooted in the sociological reality of the 1940s and 50s. The world Balint describes is hidebound by class. As a psychoanalytically-minded medical humanist, I occasionally press a copy of Balint’s classic, The Doctor, the Patient and the Illness (1957) on MSc students, but always with the caveat about his antiquated case material. ‘Someone should update it,’ I whisper, as they saunter out of the room.

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Categories
Book Review Contemporary Culture, Text and History Literature, Medicine and Science

Book Review: Martino Sclavi’s ‘The Finch in My Brain’

by James Rakoczi, PhD researcher, Department of English

The cover image of Martino Scalvi’s ‘The Finch in My Brain’

Reading Martino Sclavi’s The Finch in My Brain (Hodder & Stoughton, 2017) took longer than expected. I found myself slowing down, re-reading passages, trying to work out how the text relates to itself, to its images, and to the people in Sclavi’s life.

My copy of the text is now defaced by marginalia, doodled over in an inky green.

Page 308, for example, tells me to re-read p. 215. I turn that page, and p. 216 directs me to p. 268, and so on. My copy has gone a bit rhizome: an ecology of self-citation…

In early 2011, living in LA, Italian film producer Martino Sclavi was experiencing bad headaches. He thought it was the coffee, or the stresses of script-writing to deadline. In fact, it was a grade 4 glioblastoma – an extremely severe brain tumour. During a script-reading, Sclavi became increasingly delirious. Driven to a hospital by a friend, Sclavi recalls how his friend’s words ‘stopped having a meaning for me… just sound with no information. A rhythm with no shape’ (p. 43). This loss of ‘meaning’ but retention of ‘shape’ characterised not only Sclavi’s immediate crisis but presaged the direction his life would take.

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