Author Archives: B Merritt

True Crime Fictions

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This post was contributed by Dr Joseph Brooker, from Birkbeck’s Department of English and Humanities. Read the original blog post on the Centre for Contemporary Literature’s website. Here, Dr Brooker reports from True Crime Fictions – a one-day, interdisciplinary conference held at Birkbeck investigating the growing corpus of hybrid fictions working with accounts of true crimes and their increasing interest to literary, legal and criminological scholars.

In Absolute Power (1997) Clint Eastwood plays a burglar who laconically states: ‘I love true crime’. I always found it entertaining that Eastwood’s next film as an actor was called True Crime (1999). These were fictions referring to a genre of non-fictional narrative, which capitalises on a public appetite for details of crimes that have really taken place. The critic Mark Seltzer has written a major work on the genre, describing it as ‘crime fact that looks like crime fiction’. But what about ‘true crime fiction’? What does that look like?

Northern Crimes: the Moors Murderers and the Yorkshire Ripper

Birkbeck creative writing lecturer Mark Blacklock's true crime fiction novel, "I'm Jack"

Birkbeck creative writing lecturer Mark Blacklock’s true crime fiction novel, “I’m Jack”

Het Phillips (Birmingham) started the conference with a discussion of materiality in true crime, drawing in a wide range of references, mentioning crime writing from the Moors Murders to David Peace. What most struck me was her emphasis on detail as a textual feature of crime writing. Detail might be a literary relative of the detective’s ‘evidence’; reading could be forensic attitude. Phillips referred not just to Roland Barthes’ account of detail in ‘The Reality Effect’, but even, strikingly, to Hugh Kenner’s discussion of material details in Joyce’s Ulysses.

Martin King’s (Manchester Metropolitan) approach was oriented to social science and media studies. His focus was particularly on David Peace’s Nineteen Seventy-Four and the TV dramatization Red Riding, and on the versions of masculinity explored in both. King suggested that Peace cannot be wholly separated from a more prurient representation of gruesome crime. What Mark Blacklock called ‘culture industry questions’ – where is a fiction situated, who is the audience, whom does it benefit, is there profit to be made? – come into play.

Helen Pleasance (York St John) closed this panel with a paper given from a creative writing background, in which creative non-fiction and memoir were key genres. She revealed a personal connection to the investigation of the Moors Murders, via her father who was a probation officer in Greater Manchester at the time. This had deterred her from engaging with the history of that crime – yet she has ultimately been unable to avoid it, and spoke of ‘what it means to know too much about Myra Hindley’. Pleasance criticized Jean Rafferty’s award-winning novel Myra, Beyond Saddleworth (2012) but found much more virtue in David Constantine’s story ‘Ashton and Elaine’ which she described at length. Constantine’s story, it emerged, addresses the murders obliquely and looks to find a way beyond them for the region.

The panel not only highlighted the particular role of the North in crime writing, but also suggested that two cases in particular have dominated the modern history of ‘Northern crime’: the Moors Murderers and the Yorkshire Ripper. Of the two, it seems to me that the former has had the deepest hold over public imagination and has been more prone to mythologization – as was indicated, for instance, by the connections that various quotations drew between the Moors Murders and Wuthering Heights.

True Crime in the United States

The second panel shifted our attention over the Atlantic. David McWilliam (Keele) described the ‘activist ethics’ of author Sarah Burns’ work on the ‘central park five’, a case of wrongful conviction. McWilliam’s presentation opened issues of race, representation and incarceration in the United States. These were also pertinent to the presentation by historian Roger Panetta (Fordham University, New York), who is undertaking a history of Sing Sing Prison. His work took us back to the nineteenth century, as he outlined his aim to better describe the prison’s inmates, ‘retracing the lifelines knotted in one cell’. Adam Gearey (Birkbeck) discussed a work by the former Weatherman activist Bill Ayres, taking ‘true crime’ into the realm of what could be called ‘domestic terrorism’ or home-grown revolutionary activity in the counterculture era. Gearey’s emphasis was not so much literary, legal or political as philosophical, drawing on Aristotle to emphasize ideas of virtue and self-fulfilment, and suggesting that bad rhetoric indicates bad ethical action.

Graphic Art and True Crime

Harriet Earle (Birkbeck) could not be present on the day but her paper was read out. Earle’s discussion of comic book art offered tools for formal analysis, with the comics My Friend Dahmer (2012) and Green River Killer (2011) her particular examples. David Platten’s (Leeds) presentation was on the fiction (written and graphic) of French communist author Didier Daeninckx. Platten showed how Daeninckx had returned repeatedly to the incident of state brutality on 17 October 1961, when Algerian protesters were murdered by police.

Ethical Issues in True Crime Writing

In the final two sessions we moved from criticism towards creative practice. Professor Martin Eve chaired a panel of authors who had written about true crime. Mark Blacklock spoke of his novel I’m Jack (2015), which fictionalizes the Wearside hoax that diverted police attention from the Yorkshire Ripper investigation. Andrew Hankinson is the author of You Could Do Something Amazing With Your Life [You Are Raoul Moat] (2016), a narrative based on extensive study of the Geordie killer’s statements and actions. And Daragh Carville spoke of his authorship of a forthcoming BBC drama about the Shankill Butchers of Belfast. The intensity of the material struck me. Author events and interviews often stay at a genial, genteel level; but here, I gradually realized that all three authors had engaged with deeply disturbing and violent material, sometimes in forensic detail. This in turn raised ethical issues – who has the right to write true crime? What about the feelings of the victims’ families? Can you be sued for libel? – which were aired in discussion.

Another point that connected the three was an emphasis on place. Hankinson’s Geordie background connected him to the Moat case. Blacklock talked of his Sunderland background as his crucial motivation, even of his novel as an ‘exorcism’ for his home town. And Daragh Carville spoke of his love for ‘that weird city’, Belfast: a little like Helen Pleasance in her initial avoidance of the Moors Murders, he had avoided the Troubles all his writing life, but here at last he found himself confronting it directly. This intense concern with place – specifically with towns and cities – in turn made me wonder how large a city would need to be to transcend the effects of a particular crime. Sunderland, for instance, is a city of 175,000. Would London, at nearer 8 million, be too large to be haunted by one individual’s actions? True, Jack the Ripper and the Krays are notorious London criminals, but they are also very closely associated with the specific area of the East End. Perhaps the last crime to feel ‘London-wide’ in its effects was the 7/7 bombings: a murder case belonging to that special category called terrorism.

True Crime and Memoir

©Line Kallmayer

©Line Kallmayer

The day closed with a presentation from Line Kallmayer, a visual artist from Denmark who is currently resident in Italy after several artistic residencies in different countries, notably the United States. She described the case of the serial killer Dennis Lynn Rader, who was caught in Wichita, Kansas in 2005. Kallmeyer gave us a narrative of Rader’s life and crimes, but it was intertwined with an account of her own travels in Kansas investigating the case. True crime was mixed with memoir. But it was also a profoundly visual presentation, as Kallmayer’s text was accompanied by a sequence of many photographs that she had taken on her travels. The effect was extraordinary. The academic format of the day was now incorporating a work of art, which accordingly asked for a different response. The quality of Kallmayer’s writing was matched by her immaculate reading and the intriguingly uncertain, Sebaldian status of her images. I already thought that we had witnessed a day of high quality work, but Kallmayer closed it by taking it to a different place, and making us listen and watch differently.

What could the future hold for the study of true crime? Is there more discussion or publication ahead? I hope that this conference has started the conversation in a way that delegates will find helpful as they continue their research on true crime fictions.

This conference was generously supported by the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities

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Embarrassing Bodies

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This post was contributed by Dr Emma Curry, an ISSF Wellcome Postdoctoral Fellow in Birkbeck’s Department of English and Humanities, who organised the Embarrassing Bodies conference on  17 June 2016.

We live in a particularly self-conscious age. In recent years, the rising popularity of the ‘selfie’ has signalled our increased interest in curating our own image. This renewed self-attention means that moments where we fail to live up to our perfected public image have also become heightened: the popularity of the hashtags ‘#awkward’ and ‘#fail’ on Twitter and other sites indicate our need to highlight and process our moments of social misconduct, or the embarrassing slips we witness in others.

Embarrassing Bodies

‘Mr Mac’, unknown author (1886) © Aviva

Like many aspects of modern life, this preoccupation with the particularities of ‘awkward’ behaviour is one which found itself accelerated in the nineteenth century. The Oxford English Dictionary records John Stuart Mill’s use of ‘self-conscious’ in 1834 as the first deployment of the term in its modern sense, whilst ‘embarrassment’ comes a little earlier, in the latter part of the eighteenth century. With individuals moving in ever-larger social circles and the potential for bodily faux pas heightened, ideas of ‘embarrassment’ began to attract growing attention from writers and artists of the period. This can be witnessed in such diverse instances as Charles Darwin’s work on the physiology of embarrassed bodily responses like blushing; the emerging definition of the ‘self’ and ideas of ‘self-consciousness’ in early formations of Victorian psychology; and the scenes of comic humiliation in the writing of Charles Dickens, where characters are forever tripping or slipping or saying the wrong thing.

On 17 June, over 50 researchers and members of the public came together to explore some of these instances of nineteenth-century embarrassment, and to think about the ways in which this particular emotion continues to shape our relationships to our sense of self, to our bodies, and to each other. 

Embarrassed Victorians

The conference opened with a keynote talk from Paul White (Cambridge), who considered how embarrassment spreads across nineteenth-century discourse, surfacing in literary and scientific texts. He described embarrassment as enjoyably ‘readable’, and considered how writers of the period position the embarrassed bodies of their characters as intriguing social texts. This talk was followed by Philippa Lewis’s (Bristol) fascinating discussion of the emotion in a European context, in which she considered the medicalization of shyness in France in the latter part of the nineteenth century. By exploring shyness as a literary device and as a matter of public health, Philippa traced the curious tension between the individual and the social in the expression of this particular emotion, a question we returned to throughout the day.

The next panel focused upon embarrassment’s relationship to nineteenth-century science. Alison Moulds (Oxford) delivered a fascinating discussion of the doctor/patient relationship in the nineteenth century, considering the ways in which male doctors became acutely aware of and embarrassed by their own bodies when dealing with female patients’ ailments. This was followed by Ryan Sweet (Exeter), who made us giggle with comic depictions of animals stealing wigs, whilst sensitively exploring the Victorians’ complex and conflicting responses to the problems of the ageing and prostheticized body. Rosie White (Royal Holloway) then took us through the embarrassing aspects of being a naturalist in the nineteenth century, describing the snobbery from other scientists, the need to use discrete measuring tools when out and about, and the embarrassment of being caught ‘with all your implements about you’.

Self-Consciousness in Literature and Art

Following lunch (which thankfully didn’t seem to involve any awkward silences), we returned fortified to our second panel, which explored the complexities of self-consciousness as represented in literary texts. Amelia Worsley (Amherst College) began by turning to the early part of the nineteenth century to analyse the ‘poetics of awkwardness’, in the work of Wordsworth and other Romantic poets. During this period autobiographical poetry became a useful space for self-reflection. Mike Davis (UWE) then moved to the work of George Meredith, considering the fascinating overlap between evolutionary theory and early forms of psychology in the later part of the century, and the ways in which Meredith’s representation of individual will and emotional intelligence might challenge some of Darwin’s formations. This paper was followed by Hao Li (Toronto), who charted the subtle, shifting overlaps between constructions of consciousness, self-consciousness, and self-awareness in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray. Finally, Royce Mahawatte (Central St Martins) considered the literary handling of embarrassment in the writing of R. J. Culverwell, a doctor who wrote on men’s sexual health. Royce gave a fascinating exploration of the curiously Gothic construction of the male body in Culverwell’s work, and considered the ways in which embarrassing topics seem to attract and indeed encourage narrative during this period.

Embarrassing Bodies

‘Hush!’, James Tissot (1875)

We next turned to visual representations of embarrassment. Stephanie O’Rourke (St Andrews) opened the discussion with a beautifully detailed examination of French artist James Tissot’s paintings ‘Hush!’ and ‘Too Early’. She drew attention to the blank spaces surrounding the embarrassed individuals in Tissot’s work, describing them as charged focuses for the ‘conspicuous awkwardness’ of the scenes depicted. Her paper was followed by Eva Kenny (Princeton), who delivered an intriguing exploration of Darwin’s representation of blushing in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, and his attempts to define the limits of embarrassment in physiological terms. David Russell (Oxford) considered ‘Embarrassing Ruskin’, describing the many and various ways in which the art critic John Ruskin was considered to be an embarrassing man by his contemporaries. David highlighted how embarrassment might in fact be a useful imaginative force in Ruskin’s writing, with uncomfortable experiences used to shape his art criticism and to link intellectual and physical experiences.

Awkward Academics

For our final discussion panel we returned to the present day, to think about the ways that embarrassment shapes modern life, particularly within universities. Joe Moran (Liverpool John Moores) discussed his experiences as a shy academic, and explored the various senses in which research can reward these inclinations towards introversion and reflection. Francis O’Gorman (Leeds) described his propensity for worrying, and considered how academia can encourage but also allow individuals to work through some of these modern neuroses. Both Joe and Francis also considered the positive potential of shyness and worrying to act as counterbalances to certain aspects of academic life, suggesting that they might provide an important challenge to recent professional trends for extended working hours, increased commercialisation, and the need to create a public portfolio. It was refreshing and heartening to hear two such distinguished academics speak so openly about their personal relationship to their work in this discussion, and to the everyday, embodied processes of teaching and research.

In the run-up to the conference, participants had contributed their embarrassing academic moments on Twitter, and as the Q&A session progressed it became comfortingly clear that imagined hierarchies, fear of saying the wrong thing, and a hyper bodily self-awareness when teaching or presenting were experiences common to everyone, no matter how senior their position. Amidst ever-increasing workloads and the intellectual pressures of modern academic life, it was suggested that acknowledging and nurturing our ‘embarrassing’ bodies is now becoming more important than ever.

Following the discussion, the delegates retired to a well-earned wine reception, where no doubt more embarrassing moments were shared (or indeed created!). I would like to thank all of the speakers, delegates, and everyone who contributed to the discussion on Twitter for helping to shape such a fascinating and thought-provoking day, and the Wellcome Trust for their generous funding of this event. I hope we can share our embarrassing moments again in the future, and continue to make light of rather than fear the ‘awkwardness’ that poor Ruskin’s friends found so excruciating.

This event was in association with Birkbeck’s Centre for Nineteenth-Century Studies and was funded by a Wellcome Trust/Birkbeck ISSF Grant.

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Advice for aspiring professors and managers

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This post was contributed  by Bryony Merritt from Birkbeck’s Department of External Relations.

For those looking to take the next step in their careers, learning about the experiences of those already in the roles we aspire to can be both encouraging and enlightening.

TRIGGER‘s latest event enabled staff from across Birkbeck and other Bloomsbury colleges to hear first-hand from four women (Sarah Winmill, Director of IT for Professional Services, UCL; Sarah Hart, Professor of Mathematics, Birbkeck; Simona Immarino, Professor of Economic Geography and Head of Department, LSE; Eleanor Mongey, Head of Student Servcies, Birkbeck) who have achieved professional succes as academics, professional services staff and academic managers.

Dr Belinda Brooks-Gordon, Assistant Dean for Equalities in Birkbeck’s School of Science, chaired the panel and began by asking the four women about their idea of what success looks like, mentors they’d had, and what advice they would give to their younger selves.

Being true to their values, bringing the best out of people and being seen as a role model were all cited as markers of success for the panel. Eleanor Mongey reflected that earlier in her career path she had measured success by promotions or securing a permanent contract, but feels now that her focus at that time was too narrow and she failed to recognise other types of achievement.

All of the women could identify individuals who had contributed to their professional journeys, whether as supportive managers or through mentoring. Professor Hart (who was one of only five female mathematics professors under 40 in the UK when she was made a professor two years ago) said that nearly all her promotions had come as a result of a manager suggesting she apply for the post. Now, as managers, the panelists recognised that they have a responsibility to identify talent within their teams and to encourage and reward it.

Failure was also a theme in the discussion, but in a surprisingly positive way. Learning to accept failure was seen as important, as was creating an environment where is is safe to fail, so that staff feel empowered to be creative and push their own boundaries.

An audience member asked the panel to identify one policy that would have helped them earlier in their careers. Professor Immarino was emphatic: we need culture change. The other panelists’ examples certainly fitted in with with this assertion. Sarah Winmill said that it is beholden on all of us to work our hours and only our hours, and not to put meetings in the first/last hour of the day so that those with caring responsibilities can attend. Professor Immarino said that academic promotions should rely less on metrics as women are substantially penalised on citations and impact metrics. Professor Hart said that workload modelling was an important tool to demonstrate where women are spending their time and ensure that they had time for research and weren’t carrying a disproportionate percentage of teaching and administrative work. The fact that the need for culture change extends beyond the workplace was also clear, with discussions on the fact that women often carry a significant ‘mental burden‘ related to domestic duties.

The event was encouraging in that these women have been able to achieve success despite the barriers that they identified and because it is clear that there is a body of women at senior levels within universities who are acting as role models and providing practical and moral support for the women who aspire to follow in their footsteps.

Further information

  • TRIGGER
  • Birkbeck Astrea – network for women in professional services roles
  • Athena SWAN at Birkbeck
  • WHEN – speeding up equality in the workplaceProfessor Sarah Hart was recently filmed speaking about her career path and why she chose a career in STEM

Avatar Activism: Limits and Possibilities

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This post was contributed by Thomas Travers, a PhD student in Birkbeck’s Department of English and Humanities. He tweets at @TWLTravers

Avatar ActivismCrystal Bartolovich (University of Syracuse) opened her lecture last Wednesday (June 15th) at the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities with a screening of the narratively condensed trailer for James Cameron’s Avatar. This abridged version of the film, in turn, formed the key reference point around which her presentation on the limits and possibilities of ‘Avatar Activism’ revolved.

Coined by American media theorist Henry Jenkins, ‘Avatar Activism’ describes a strategy whereby social justice movements appropriate images from popular culture and put them into service for struggles in the real world. Jenkins first proposed the term in response to a filmed re-enactment of Cameron’s blockbuster movie in the occupied village of Bil’in. Appearing in the likeness of the embattled Na’vi, Palestinian and Israeli activists stunningly rewrote Avatar as an allegory for the ongoing dispossession experienced by Palestinians in the occupied territories. Opposed to an august Frankfurt School style dismissal of Avatar as industrial spectacle, Jenkins detects within its globally distributed imagery of green anti-imperialism the raw material for a democratic ‘participatory culture’. Participation here refers to the dramatic re-contextualisation, or well-nigh hacking or glitching of the Hollywood cultural form, a tactic that enables oppressed people to re-narrate their struggles through the libidinal apparatus of the culture industry, shocking audiences into a heightened awareness of injustice. Affective and emotional investment in the symbolic realm inexorably leads, in Jenkin’s argument, to progress in the material world.

Yet is it precisely the efficacy of this seamless transition from symbolic gratification to social intervention that Bartolovich wanted to complicate in her bracing account of contemporary climate politics. Situating Avatar within debates surrounding the Anthropocene, Bartolovich highlighted a damaging rift between a symbolic recognition of the imperative to drastically cut carbon emissions and the minimal purchase this recognition has had in actuality. In order to arrest the unsustainable levels of energy consumption in the gated communities of the global North, Bartolovich forecasted the necessary implementation of unpopular, top down, draconian measures. And it is on questions of cost, of consent, of sacrifice that she finds ‘Avatar Activism’ desperately inadequate.

Dialectic of Utopia and Ideology

Where others might have chastised Jenkin’s work as the ‘intellectualisation of amusement’, Bartolovich provided an immanent critique of his thesis and a salutary reminder as to how easily the utopian qualities of cultural texts can reverse into ideological reconciliation with the present. Avatar’s ecological consciousness is typically considered to reside in the successful opposition of the Na’vi to the technological degradation and exploitation of Nature. This antagonism, however, may not be as stark as it at first seems. Nature on Pandora is, in a sense, always already technology: for each weapon or communicational network the colonisers have, the Na’vi have an analogous one. The message, as Bartolovich points out, is clear; not only do the Na’vi want nothing, but that their harmonious relationship with an intensified nature amounts to a purer, superior form of life. As T.J. Clark has recently argued in a series of lectures presented at Birkbeck, the land of Cockaigne is the fantasy of a world already cooked, where the need for sweat, labour, and toil has been thoroughly abolished. What should alarm us about the inscription of such codes in Avatar is that they perpetuate a delusion that the North can shrink its carbon footprint without any serious alteration to its current levels of consumption. Utopian resistance cartwheels into ideological containment as the necessary sacrifices of any viable climate politics are massaged into something more palatable entirely. Avatar offers, in other words, a reassuring image of an improved nature that is already dormant in the present, repressing the inevitable deprivations and constraints that would accompany a concerted effort to avert the worst permutations of the Anthropocene.      

Disavowing Defeat 

Another challenge to the endorsement of Avatar develops out of the observation that the military hardware of the sky people is surprisingly outdated. Where one might expect the fully automated arsenal of drone, chemical, and biological weapons, Cameron mobilises tanks, infantry, and helicopters. Coupled with the astounding ability of the Na’vis’ arrows to penetrate armoured vehicles, Avatar recodes the indigenous encounter with empire—a history of decimation, massacre, and genocide—with triumphant resistance. This aesthetic sleight of hand simultaneously disavows the asymmetry of such conflicts and, in doing so, implies that the vanquished were defeated on account of their own failings. The Bil’in video concludes with the Na’vi protesters doubled up, choking on tear gas; a potent reminder of the lethal economy that the armed state apparatus deals in. Bartolovich pointedly adds that the pristine Eden of Pandora is itself a phantasmagoric revision of the slums and toxic landscapes that the precarious communities of late capitalism are likely to inhabit. There is, then, a significant discontinuity between the types of imaginary identification entertained by the symbolic text of Avatar and the impoverished and defeated reality of the global surplus population.

Possibilities?

Bartolovich convincingly demonstrated the inadequacy of Jenkin’s proposed ‘Avatar Activism’, highlighting its inability to overcome the gap between symbolic attitude and material action. Cameron’s movie offers a green politics shorn of sacrifice, the fantasy of a world already made that the consumer can occupy without detriment to their present lifestyle. Confronted with the dilemmas of climate catastrophe, Avatar conjures away the negative, presenting an altogether agreeable impression of a greener, less alienated form of consumption. What of the possibilities? Against the ‘naïve’ interpretation of the plight of the Bil’in protesters as commensurable with the Na’vi, Bartolovich contends that the video détourns Hollywood spectacle. Wrenched out of its universalising context, the activists expose the particularity of Cameron’s movie, render visible the human damage, loss, and defeat the film silences, making perceptible the material costs the film seeks to vanish. The Bil’in video captures the uncooked raw material of a world in which radical social change can only be achieved through the sacrifices of collective action.