Category Archives: Humanities and Social Sciences

‘Spectacle and the Sublime: Romantic Visuality and Contemporary Exhibition Culture’

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This post was contributed by Luisa Calè, Course Director of MA Romantic Studies

The Birkbeck Eighteenth-Century Research Group and the Nineteenth-Century Forum welcomed Tate Curator Martin Myrone, who inaugurated Arts Week in the Birkbeck Cinema to discuss Spectacle and the Sublime in Romantic period exhibition culture and the curatorial work involved in recreating its spectacular possibilities today.

Locating Romantic pictures involves confronting the physical sites and practices of an emerging exhibition culture. Representations of the Royal Academy Exhibitions in 1787 and in the Microcosm of London in 1808 show us crowded interiors in which pictures hanging wall to wall and floor to ceiling required spectacular effects in order to stand out against their neighbours.

Henry Fuseli’s The Nightmare, exhibited in 1782, shows the sensational ingredients that turned Fuseli into the painter of the sublime and the supernatural. The exhibition Gothic Nightmares (2006) recreated the gothic pleasures that Fuseli’s supernatural activated amid a range of visual spectacles, including the moving image spectacle of the phantasmagoria. From sensational tales of terror to visual entertainments that pioneered the moving image, exemplified in a dark room at the heart of the exhibition, where Mervyn Heard reconstructed the haunting effects of the phantasmagoria from historic slides animated with contemporary technology.

Romantic moving images are also central to the light and sound show Tate Britain commissioned for the exhibition of John Martin: Apocalypse (2011-12). Martin’s religious sublime comes alive in this installation of the triptych: The Plains of Heaven , The Last Judgement, and The Great Day of his Wrath start moving illuminated by a play of projected lights punctuated by music and voice-over scripted with words taken from the Bible, the exhibition pamphlet and contemporary reviews. This contemporary animation recreates the sensational appeal of the pictures’ tour across England and the United States in the 1850s and 1860s.

Click for a Curatorial Walk Through the Exhibition, and Martin’s discussion of The Apocalyptic Sublime in the Age of Spectacle.

The perils of swearing in a foreign language

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This post was contributed by Matt Davis, a postgraduate student in Applied Linguistics at Birkbeck. He tweets about language at @word_jazz.

As every Birkbeck student knows, 6.30pm on Friday night is not the best time to listen to an academic lecture. But if there is any serious sociolinguistic discussion that’s going to keep members of the public from their weekends, it’s one about swearing.

Jean-Marc Dewaele is a Professor of Bilingualism at Birkbeck. A Belgian polyglot, he knows a thing or two about the subject. He has spoken academically about the experience of bringing up his daughter in north London to be trilingual (fluent in French, Flemish and English). He is also winner of an annual award for the rudest title of an academic article (unrepeatable here, but more soberly subtitled ‘Language preferences for swearing among maximally proficient multilinguals’).

Closing the School of Social Sciences, History and Philosophy’s series of events (‘To seek, to find, to live’) his lecture was about how speakers of a foreign language (what academics call ‘L2’) understand, experience and use taboo words in that language, and how it differs to how they swear in their first language (‘L1’).

Prof Dewaele described research, using lie detector technology, that shows we are uniformly less sensitive to the swear words we hear in our second language. He presented the results of his own survey of a number of proficient L2 speakers of English. In one question, they were asked to rank common English swear words according to what they thought was their relative level of power. This ranking was then compared to that by a group of native English speakers. Interestingly, L2 speakers of English tended to over-state the taboo of more benign words (like ‘idiot’), and under-state the taboo of some more powerful ones.

Prof Dewaele also introduced the idea of ‘sociopragmatic competence’ in a second language. This incorporates the idea that although it’s easy to learn a dictionary definition of a word – even taboo words – it takes experience to understand the various cultural values placed on that word by a society, and therefore where and when (if it all!) using it is appropriate.

Prof Dewaele is an engaging speaker and the talk was delivered with much humour as well as insight (sniggering among the audience was certainly not discouraged!) The talk was followed by a lively Q&A, where many people described their own experience in the subject. An American, now living in London, described how he had unwittingly caused great offence to a British family thanks to the greater emotional power of the expression ‘taking the piss’ in the UK. A lexicographer from the University of Portsmouth spoke about the nuances of writing taboo words into the dictionary.

So was it a better place to be than the pub? As a linguistics student, I certainly thought so but the test was whether my partner had found it interesting. A Canadian and native speaker of (North American) English, her mother tongue is actually Mandarin, but she has lived in UK for 6 years. She told me that she had enjoyed it too.

And did the findings of Prof Dewaele’s research fit her experience? I thought it through for a moment and realized I knew the answer: she never swears. As we had learned, when it comes to cursing in someone else’s language, it’s much safer that way.

The Birkbeck Medieval and Renaissance Studies Summer School: On the River

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This post was contributed by Jackie Watson, a third year PhD student in English at Birkbeck.

A rare opportunity to relish learning…

I’m convinced there is nothing so quirky, and at the same time so profoundly intellectual, as the Birkbeck Medieval and Renaissance Summer School (BMRSS).  It is a showcase of academic expertise – with papers, this year on The River, from leading academics.  But what makes it special is how it encourages people from a range of backgrounds, different ages and academic levels, to meet and share their excitement in medieval and early modern literature, history and art. This year’s group is ‘typical’, people doing courses at BA, MA and PhD level, in different disciplines, from lots of different places in the UK and beyond: all talking animatedly about ideas raised by the conference, but also about their academic aspirations, and possibilities for future learning and research. It’s an encouraging environment, and highly unusual in today’s short-sighted, outcome-driven HE system…

Nothing, perhaps, shows how unusual it is more than the programme.  Such is the ambition of the summer school to provide different learning experiences to a wide variety of students, that it’s incredibly difficult to organise…  Most conferences take place in one building – with, at most, the need to move from one room to another: nothing so lacking in ambition for the BMRSS! Sessions on maps at the British Library, a group going to Shakespeare’s Globe, and another touring the city to find evidence of its lost rivers…  Greenwich Maritime Museum, Renaissance Print-making and modern river poetry…  With options at every turn, no-one’s summer school is like anyone else’s!  It’s ambitious, unusual, and very quirky…

Take the search for lost rivers…

For a variety of reasons, some of us turned down the opportunity to see Macbeth.  Seen it already, perhaps, or just about to… but all of us were very excited to ramble around London finding evidence of all those rivers whose names we’d heard so often – now, usually, underground and unseen.

Beginning in Islington with the creation of the New River and a statue of the man responsible (Hugh Myddelton) we wound our way, water-like, downhill to the Thames…  For three hours…  And at every turn we were nearly so distracted and fascinated by what we found that we risked not reaching the Globe to meet the others.

Consider the fascination of a hole in the road…

In his morning paper on Spenser and Jonson’s contributions to river poetry, Adam Smyth had (just in passing, you understand) mentioned the fact that you can, if you lie in the middle of a particular London street and listen at a grate, hear the rushing waters of the Fleet beneath.  A mildly interesting, and quite an innocent remark to make, if slightly tangential to Jonson’s account of the river’s detritus…  However, to such a group as this, such an inconsequential comment is a challenge; find the road, practically lie in it, and listen to the watery voice of the past.

Lea, Fleet, Walbrook, Quaggy, Tyburn etc. were soundly commemorated by the walk.

On to Clerkenwell (only one of the wells we passed), and St John’s Priory museum – the joyous ShaLT project app (from recent research into Shakespeare’s London Theatres involving an interactive map showing early modern sites in London), allowed us to find the site of the Elizabethan Revels Office.  We had to tear ourselves away, and on to Smithfield (past the site of the inn/brothel owned by George Wilkins, co-writer of Pericles) and St Bart’s museum (Hogarth paintings), diverting slightly to George Frederick Watts’ memorial to heroic self-sacrifice at Postman’s Park (many of whom seemedto be victims of the waterways we were interested in)…

And that was only one afternoon of the three days… Such an opportunity for learning is unforgettable, and, unfortunately, rare in today’s educational climate. Long may the quirky BMRSS continue to buck the trend!

Waste, Luxury and Excess

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

The final round-table of the Surplus symposium at Birkbeck looked at examples of waste, luxury and excess in London and New York.

Simon Choat (Kingston) began by exploring ideas about capitalism, excess and transgressions. He argued that the way we focus on capitalism often reduces everything to commoditisation. He identified excessive acts of transgression as a way to break out from the constraints of capitalism, noting that a riot is in itself an act of transgression that can’t be recuperated by capitalism, as it can’t be harnessed to the profit motive. The threat to capitalism posed by riots is what led to such an authoritarian backlash after the UK riots of 2011, he argues, but due to the disorganised nature of a riot they cannot be used as an ongoing challenge to capitalism. He posited that if capitalism is going to die it will be through its own excesses, as it is itself transgressive and constantly breaking down limitations.

Joel McKim (Birkbeck) explored with the audience the significance of Freshkills Landfill site in Staten Island. This 22,000 acre site is one of the only man-made structures visible from space, yet remains largely invisible to the majority of New Yorkers, whose rubbish it contains. The site was closed in March 2001, and then briefly reopened in September of that year to house the debris from the Twin Towers, including human remains. The site is now being landscaped to provide a public park and wetlands. A memorial was quickly incorporated into the designs following 9/11. However, this has left New York with no landfill site and no incinerators, so the city now transfers its waste to sorting stations in the poorest areas of the city, before shipping it to poorer states in the south under a largely privatised system. Joel described the park project as ‘redemptive’ – a way for New York to “overcome the limitations of our over-consuming society and change our garbage into parks”.

The project is designed to ‘immunise’ the site against its past, but Joel reminded us that the risk of leakage remains. Leachate and methane gas could break through the engineering of the landscapers, and New York now ‘leaks’ its rubbish into other, poorer states.

Joel then moved on to look at digital waste, the fastest growing waste stream in the developed world. Eighty per cent of digital waste goes to be recycled and ends up in the developed world where it is stripped for valuable metals, while simultaneously exposing the workers to dangerous levels of harmful materials such as mercury. Companies use their multinationality to evade legal restraints and create a “network of invisibility”. Currently these digital products have a structure of obsolescence built into them but Joel said that the notion of Extended Producer Responsiblitity (EPR) is now gaining traction, with the idea that producers need to be responsible from the creation to the destruction of these items, rather than passing responsibility onto consumers.

Emma M. Jones (Queen Mary’s) rounded up the day by looking at a very local issue: the paradox of London’s high-quality, reliable water supply, in contrast to the difficulty of accessing water in public spaces and the thriving bottled water industry in the city. Emma’s forthcoming book, Parched City, is a history of the water industry in London. She explained that she used drinking water as a lens to look at what she sees as an inherently political issue. Although we don’t require vast quantities of drinking water to survive, when we are forced to spend £1.60 to access 500ml, the issue of access becomes very pertinent.

Anna says that there was no significant bottled water industry in London until 1983, when the UK’s first and only water strike took place for one month, disrupting water supplies in Manchester and London and opening the gate for the bottled water industry. Anna showed a picture of an advertisement for Schweppes Abbey Well water: the official water of the Olympic Games 2012, and highlighted a further paradox – that the Thames Water treatment facility is less than one mile away from the Olympic Park and could easily have met the water needs of all the visitors.

The panel brought to an end a day of wide-ranging and pertinent debates about how globally, nationally and locally we are all tied into cultures of excess, and raised many questions about how we can and should respond to this.

Listen to the podcast of this round-table.