Category Archives: Humanities and Social Sciences

Man Booker at Birkbeck – Kazuo Ishiguro

Leave a reply

This post was provided by Emma Curry, a PhD student in the Department of English and Humanities, working on Dickens’s representations of objects and body parts.

Last year’s inaugural Man Booker event at Birkbeck was an entertaining and fascinating evening, and this year’s discussion between Prof. Russell Celyn Jones and Kazuo Ishiguro (or ‘Ish’ as he was happy to be referred to) continued that high standard. The talk was warm, witty and wide-ranging: Ishiguro spoke at length on his connections with Japan, his writing practices, his use of different voices within his novels, his interest in both individual and collective memory, and the place of art in an exploration of what it means to be human.

As someone with an interest in the process of novel-to-screen adaptations, it was particularly fascinating to hear Ishiguro talk about the film versions of The Remains of the Day and Never Let Me Go. He amusingly revealed that whilst he is credited as ‘executive producer’ on Never Let Me Go, he has very little idea what this title actually means! It was also interesting to hear in this part of the discussion about the process of writerly exchange: whilst Ishiguro writes screenplays, he prefers not to adapt his own work: instead the screenwriter for Never Let Me Go was Alex Garland, who in turn is himself an author, having written the novel (but not the screenplay) The Beach. Whilst some writers dislike the film adaptations of their work, Ishiguro praised what he called the ‘natural’ alliance between the novel and the cinema, suggesting that it was an important connection to both cement and develop in an age of somewhat formulaic, brainless blockbusters.

The discussion was followed by questions from the audience, all of which Ishiguro answered generously and thoughtfully. All in all, the evening was highly enjoyable and a fascinating exploration of a writer’s motivations and inspirations. It uncovered fresh approaches to Never Let Me Go, as well as providing some encouraging suggestions and amusing thoughts on the creation of fiction in general. I look forward to reading much more of Ishiguro’s work!

Transitions Comica symposium

Leave a reply

This post was contributed by Tony Venezia, a PhD student in Birkbeck’s Department of English and Humanities.

This Saturday (November 3) saw the return of the Transitions Comica symposium to Birkbeck.  This is the third time the college has hosted the symposium, currently the only regular academic comics conference in London.  The event always attracts a broad audience of students, teachers, artists, and people just interested in coming along. 

Transitions has always been supported by the generosity of the School of Arts, and this year was co-sponsored by the Film Department at the University of East Anglia.  In addition, the conference is promoted as part of Comica, the annual international London-wide comics festival organised by journalist/broadcaster Paul Gravett.  Over eighty people – delegates and speakers – registered, with attendees coming from all over the UK, as well as Israel and Italy.  One enterprising speaker, undeterred by Hurricane Sandy, even managed to make the trip from New York to deliver a paper.

The symposium opened with a fascinating joint keynote address from Dr. Chris Murray (Dundee) and Dr. Julia Round (Bournemouth), the general editors of the academic journal Studies in Comics.  Once again, Dr. Roger Sabin (University of the Arts, London) acted as respondent to the papers.  The range of papers is a testament to the multi-disciplinary appeal of the comics form.  Speakers came from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, including; English Literature, Media and Cultural Studies, Film Studies, Social Science, Chemistry, Education, Cultural Geography, Modern Languages, Law, and Japanese Studies.  The day concluded with a discursive roundtable discussion on the future for comics studies to which the author gladly contributed.  Some delegates made their way to Foyles for a special one off event with American cartoonist Robert Crumb in the evening.

The event has already generated online reviews and there is a Storify archive.

Given the undoubted continuing success of Transitions, it is hoped that the event will continue to be hosted at Birkbeck.

Special thanks should go to this year’s organisers: Ed Clough (UEA), Hallvard Haug (Birkbeck), and Nina Mickwitz (UEA) for all their hard work.

After Leveson

Leave a reply

This post was contributed by James Brown, from Birkbeck’s Department of External Relations, who attended the event ‘After Leveson. What sort of press regulation?‘ on Saturday 20 October 2012.

With one very big media scandal dominating the news agenda, you might be forgiven for forgetting another one currently rumbling away in the background. But the Leveson Enquiry into Culture, Practice and Ethics of the Press is due to publish its findings before Christmas, so Saturday was good timing for Birkbeck’s Centre for the Study of British Politics and Public Life to hold a panel discussion on what the Enquiry has told us – so far.

It’s easy to forget the sheer scale of the Leveson Enquiry: in its eight months of hearings, it took testimonies from 474 witnesses from 135 different organisations, generating over 6,000 pages of evidence. Against this backdrop, it’s easy to see why first panellist, Lance Price, felt that the Enquiry has a “pretty thankless task” in making some sense of the information acquired, and wondered whether the process had been sufficiently well-defined to reach a conclusion. Price has had a pretty good vantage point from which to view how the press and politicians work together. For three years, from 1998–2001, he worked as media advisor to Tony Blair’s government, and later referred to Rupert Murdoch as “the 24th member of the cabinet. On many major decisions his views were taken into account.”

He speculated as to whether the some of the Enquiry’s participants, let alone the public, might be confused by the wealth of information disclosed: “One minute we’re hearing about the ‘industrial level’ of phone hacking … about the fact that the Prime Minister was riding horses with Rebekah Brooks … the next whether it’s in the public interest to know that some of our movie stars once slept with prostitutes … and consider whether Prime Ministers were so scared of the media that even when they were in office, they were unable to challenge it.” By way of illustration, Price recounted a speech about the Tony Blair had given in his last days as Prime Minister, in which he said: “Today’s media, more than ever before, hunts in a pack. In these modes it is like a feral beast, just tearing people and reputations to bits.”

Lance Price said of Blair’s speech that “at the point at which he really had nothing left to lose, he pulled his punches … he later confessed that he hadn’t said all the things he’d thought about saying … he said nothing whatsoever about News International, didn’t mention the Sun or the Times. Instead he focused on the Independent, probably the least guilty of the sorts of things he was talking about.”

Second panelist, Joan Smith, also had a personal insight into the ethics of the press, having been a victim of phone hacking whilst being married to then Labour minister Denis McShane. In January this year, after receiving an apology and compensation from News International, she wrote:

“It’s easy to joke about phone hacking and think it’s of little consequence. Some people assume that the silent listeners had to sit through dozens of mundane messages about picking up dry-cleaning, but my experience and that of other victims suggests it was much more serious than that. One of the reasons I was so angry was the sickening realisation that strangers had listened to my voicemails in the aftermath of a private tragedy.”

In Saturday’s session, she continued this theme, iterating that, while many people equate the Leveson Enquiry with celebrities having their phones hacked, in many more cases it was less famous people who were at the wrong end of journalists’ sharp practices. Smith recounted the story of Paul Dadge, who was at the centre of one of the most enduring images of the July 7 bombings. A former fire-fighter, he found himself one train behind the bombed carriages caught up at Edgware Road. Once evacuated from the train, he volunteered his triage skills, and was photographed having applied a necessarily rudimentary face-mask to a woman who’d received severe facial burns. His phone was hacked shortly afterwards, for which he successfully sued News International.

Smith said, “People like him never expected to be in the public eye – weren’t  actually in the public eye except for in a horrific terrorist attack that got them dragged into this … What we discovered through the Leveson process was that there was this other kind of journalism where people who don’t really want to be in the media find themselves thrust into the eye of the storm … And when they seek redress, when what’s printed about them in newspapers is fanciful or untrue, the system of regulation doesn’t work.”

The final speaker was Dr Evan Harris, advisor to Hacked Off, the campaign for free and accountable media, who set out what kind of legislation he believes is necessary to balance the freedom the media needs to do its job with the accountability it needs to be held to. He pointed out that hacking is already illegal but that “criminal law is an extremely clumsy way of dealing with people’s behaviour … The fact that there is a legal sanction attached to something does not really discourage you, it’s the likelihood of getting caught.”

But one of the problems in how Leveson’s report might be received could have been foretold in how the scandal was reported when it broke. Harris said: “if this scandal had happened in any other industry, particularly one that’s so important, that the first people, I’m pleased to say, that would have complained would have been the newspapers – saying it’s outrageous that the doctors, the lawyers, the politicians have covered this up … What we learned from the Leveson Enquiry is that the press won’t fairly report an enquiry into their own industry.”

In some ways, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by this, because we have been here before. Since World War II, Britain has seen three royal commissions on the press, plus two government inquiries. As Professor Roy Greenslade wrote earlier this year: “On all five occasions, publishers and editors made no attempt to disguise their resentment at the poking of official noses into their affairs. Similarly, by marching behind the banner of press freedom, they resisted, or watered down, each recommendation for regulatory reform.”

And as Lance Price went on to document, the relationship between politicians and the press has always been a complex one. In 1953, Winston Churchill had a stroke  which was hidden from public view when officials persuaded compliant newspaper editors that it wasn’t ‘in the public interest’ for them to know the severity of Churchill’s illness.

Weird Council: the writing of China Miéville

2 Replies

This post was written by Mark Blacklock, a postgraduate student in Birkbeck’s Department of English and Humanities. He also blogs at kulchermulcher.wordpress.com.

The Weird Council conference will take place at Birkbeck on 15 September 2012.

China Miéville is many things: a master teratologist, creator of arguably the finest monsters since H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu slithered through the pages of fiction; a Trotskyite and left-political theorist; a professor; a self-confessed geek and drum’n’bass-head. Most significantly, though, he’s one of the few novelists changing the future of the novel.

Since an issue of the SF journal Extrapolation was devoted to his work in 2009, Miéville has won the Hugo Award twice for novels that have had enormous fun with the elastic category of genre – so much so that mainstream critics have more than once mentioned his name in conjunction with the starriest of literary prizes, the Man Booker. From the scholarly sidelines, what is most exciting about this is that the novels in question – The City and The City (2010) and Embassytown (2012) – were complex narrative explorations of interstitial space and the intricacies of linguistic signification respectively. These aren’t the kinds of ideas that often win literary prizes in love with realism, lyricism and character. Miéville isn’t one of those writers.

His recent address to the Edinburgh book festival gives a good indication of the sort of writer he is. Steeped in canon-warping and lightly worn erudition, it considered not only ‘What is literature, and what do we want from it?’ but possible futures for the novel. He declared his ‘anguished optimis[m]’ for the survival of the form, aiming a well-judged swipe at the impressively advanced practitioners of what Zadie Smith terms ‘lyrical realism’ who so fear change in the market that has so well fed them that they also fear innovation, particularly as represented by ‘the dead hand of Modernism’. Miéville’s appreciation of the possibilities of the crowd-remixed and re-edited novel will surely not have provided much succour to such types, but from this perspective it makes for tremendously exciting reading. We are still waiting for the Plunderphonic of fiction, but when a piece of literature to match John Oswald’s brilliantly ground-breaking album of sample-based serialism emerges, it sure will be fun.

At the risk of simply compiling a bibliography of his recent work, of similar interest is Miéville’s web-essay dealing with last summer’s riots, ‘London’s Overthrow’, published in abridged form in the New York Times Magazine earlier this year. Here, Miéville’s political ideology informed a hybrid essay – not quite journalism, not quite psychogeography, not quite fiction, but something combining all three – to offer a more sympathetic consideration of the socio-political climate than could be found in most sources.

What was originally planned as a one-day symposium last year grew rapidly to two days, the opportunity to misread the author’s work in his presence too great for scholarly enthusiasts to pass up. The ideas in which Miéville works – weird fiction, monsters, left politics, hybridity,  space – will be considered by twenty six speakers, before the author himself takes the stage for a Q&A and reading. Those of us trying to conceal our fandom beneath the formalities of academic presentation, like meddlesome transdimensional tentacular outcroppings beneath long macs, probably won’t admit to looking forward to that session most of all.