Author: Chloe

Fractured Images / Broken Words
Postgraduate Conference
The Department of English and Creative Writing,
Lancaster University
June 12th, 2010

Image courtesy of Christine Dawson

FRACTURED IMAGES / BROKEN WORDS
Lancaster University, Saturday June 12th 2010

Keynote Speaker #1:
Professor Terry Eagleton, Distinguished Professor of Literature, Lancaster University
Professor Terry Eagleton joined the Department in 2008. He has written around fifty books and is himself the subject of at least two monographs, is one of the world's leading literary critics and, according to The Independent in 2007, 'the man who succeeded F. R. Leavis as Britain's most influential academic critic.' Prior to his move to Lancaster, Terry Eagleton was John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature at the University of Manchester (2001-2008) and before that Thomas Warton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford (1992-2001). Professor Eagleton is a Fellow of both the British Academy and the English Association, and has held visiting appointments at such universities as Cornell, Duke, Iowa, Melbourne, Notre Dame, Trinity College Dublin, and Yale.
Eagleton obtained his PhD at Cambridge where he was a student of the famous left-wing literary critic Raymond Williams. He then became a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, the youngest fellow since the eighteenth century, before moving to Wadham College, Oxford in 1968. At this early point in his career Eagleton was a Victorianist but he was always drawn to write on a wide range of periods - among his first books were Shakespeare and Society (1967) and Exiles and Emigrés: Studies in Modern Literature (1970). It was, though, his more theoretical work as a Marxist critic, in such books as Criticism and Ideology (1976), which really established him as a leading figure within literary studies.
In the 1980s, Eagleton engaged extensively with the various tides of continental thought that were impacting upon English Literature and he did so most famously in his book Literary Theory (1983) which remains to this day an academic best-seller. Eagleton's specifically Marxist take on literary theory is evident throughout this book and clearly informs, in the early 1990s, his continuing work on ideology, most famously The Ideology of the Aesthetic (1990), and his critique of the postmodern turn in cultural theory, witness The Illusions of Postmodernism (1996).
Alongside his theoretical and critical work, Eagleton was, at this time, also developing a creative dimension to his work; this led to the well-reviewed novel Saints and Scholars (1987), several widely-performed plays such as Saint Oscar (1989), the screen-play for Derek Jarman's film Wittgenstein (1993), and indeed a best-selling memoir, The Gatekeeper (2001). Well to the fore in much of this creative work is Eagleton's Irish ancestry and his keen interest in the political history of Ireland, an interest which is also evident in such critical work as Heathcliff and the Great Hunger (1995) and Crazy John and the Bishop (1998).
Eagleton's Irishness connects with a Catholicism which is evident not only in very early books like The New Left Church (1966) but also such recent works as Sweet Violence (2003), Holy Terror (2005), and Trouble with Strangers (2008). These books have played a part in Eagleton's development as a public intellectual, a role he takes on most obviously in The Meaning of Life (2007). He remains, however, more than ever concerned with the meaning of literature, and even (if you will) the words on the page - hence, The English Novel (2004) and How to Read a Poem (2008).

1a Re-Drawing the Text
Chair: Dr. George Green, Lecturer in Creative Writing, Lancaster University
Joan Ormrod (Senior Lecturer in Film and Media, Department of Media, Manchester Metropolitan University)
Joan Ormrod is a senior lecturer in Film and Media at Manchester Metropolitan University Department of Media. Her principal research interests are in comics and subcultures. She has published papers on subcultures in film, sub-cultural rhetoric and recently co-edited a book on adventure spots (On the Edge: Representing Adventure Sports, Leisure Studies Association). She also co-edits the forthcoming Routledge Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics.
Email: J.Ormrod@mmu.ac.uk
A Heap of Broken Images: Countersong and Readership in T.S. Elliot and Martin Rowson’s The Waste Land
Parody, according to Leavis, is regarded as a debased, parasitic form, a low art burlesque which subjects ‘classical’ texts to ridicule. This stance reaffirms notions of a high and low cultural distinction. However in the socio-historic context of postmodern, carnivalesque culture it is a stance that is increasingly challenged through two main issues; implied readership and the high/low culture debate. Harries (2000) asserts that the parody text ‘recontextualises’ its source through textual, pragmatic and socio-cultural stances thus producing a ‘new’ text which relies on the reception of its readers. Hutcheon (1985) argues that contemporary parodic discourse is more complex than a mere bowdlerisation of classic texts and can involve both bowdlerisation or pastiche. She locates the cultural obsession with ‘originality’ with the Romantics and their emphasis on Authorship. However, as Bakhtin argues, texts are constructed in response to other texts and no text can claim to be entirely original. Parody is double-voiced, ‘a recreation and a creation making criticism into a kind of active exploration of the form’; its ideological agenda is to provide a countersong to a text. (Hutcheon 1988: 51) Parody, therefore is an extension and reflection of the parodied text and as reliant on the implied reader as on the implied author (Chatman 1978: 151; Hutcheon 1985:12).
In comics burlesque or a bowdlerization can be identified in Marvel’s Not Brand Ecch or Mad. The hard boiled detective narrative is pastiched in Wagner and Grant’s The Bogie Man. A more sophisticated parody is found in Rowson’s adaptation of T.S Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ (1922). A particular problem associated with the adaptation of Eliot’s poem to a comic is in the lack of a cohesive narrative structure. Intertextuality is used to illustrate Modernist themes such as alienation, fragmentary identity, and the futility of urban existence. The form of the poem reflects this fragmentation and is likened to a ‘heap of broken images’. (Aiken 1967) Eliot suggested the futility of attempting to garner any meaning from the poem, nevertheless he loosely structured it around Grail legend and borrowed ideas from fertility myths and their ritual implications.
Rowson renders the poem into a modern quest through hard boiled detective narrative. The hard boiled detective genre was likened to a modern Grail narrative structure by Auden (1962) but Rowson demonstrates the possibilities of sequential art in his narrative technique. As a political cartoonist Rowson is used to producing narratives rendered in a single panel and he uses a sophisticated single and sequential panel storytelling structure akin to Hogarth’s single panel narrative techniques which build to a sequential meta narrative. The analysis, like McHale’s analysis of Rowson’s ‘The Waste Land’, raises issues of the interplay between ‘elite and popular genres in the modernist period and since’. (McHale 2002) However, the paper focuses on Hutcheon’s notion of the ‘countersong’ and Bakhtin’s ‘many voiced’ carnivalesque narrative within the poem and the graphic novel. Recognition of these ‘many voices’ and intertextual allusions invokes pleasures for the implied reader. Reader pleasures, it is argued, are multiplied when both high and low cultural allusions are recognised.
Tamryn Bennett (PhD candidate, Faculty of English, Media and Performing Arts, University of New South Wales)
Tamryn Bennett is a poet whose practice orbits around collaboration with visual artists. Her current PhD project is 'Comics Poetry' created in collaboration with visual artists Skye O'Shea, Jackie Cavallaro and Tamara Elkins. Her other projects
have included ‘The Seventeen Summers of Heidiko Jones’, 'The Black Rabbit' exhibition, 'Electric Dreaming' exhibition and ekphrastic responses to the artworks of Joan Meats. Her poetry has been shortlisted for The John Marsden Prize and appeared in Five Bells. Tamryn also works for The Red Room Company.
Email: tamryn@redroomcompany.org
Towards Comics Poetry
Comics criticism frequently borrows analytical lenses from prose, film and visual art theory. The focus on sequential art and word/image interactions within this existing scholarship is often narratological. As such, current comics debates orbit the supposed struggle for supremacy between art forms that, in my opinion, lead to misconceptions of representational rivalry between text and image and disintegration of a shared semiotic sphere.
Until now, no in-depth comics scholarship has employed poetic devices as a means of overcoming this representational fracture and understand how the visual and verbal interact to enhance meaning in this medium. This poetic lens informs the concept I identify as ‘comics poetry’. The term encompasses the process of combining comics and poetry in creative practice as well as critical investigation.
This paper begins by comparatively analysing poetic devices of (segmentivity, countermeasure and metaphor) with the hybridised visual language of comics (speech balloons, panels, frames and gutters). By demonstrating this fusion, rather than friction, the perceived rivalry of word and image is rendered unproductive and largely irrelevant to understanding comics where the visual and verbal complement each other rather than compete.
My examination is exampled by recent experiments in ‘comics poetry’ from Warren Craghead, Tom Neely, John Hankiewicz and Anders Nilsen. Comics scholarship is characterised by the closeness of creators and critics. Increased awareness of interdisciplinary dialogue contextualised within these works reveals the need for re-interpretation of representational rivalry. Exposure of these previously ignored creative and collaborative processes involved in ‘comics poetry’ further illuminated the importance of re-conceiving comics theory to ensure its relevance to contemporary practice.
Moving beyond essentialist word/image arguments enables interpretation, imagination and meaning to inhabit the visual/verbal ‘gaps’ of comics. This evolution has significant implications for the development of interdisciplinary dialogue not only within ‘comics poetry’ but the future of comics, poetry and visual culture itself.
Gema Pizarro (MA Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths, University of London)
I took my undergraduate degree at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, spending a year at Boston University, where I attended Bonnie Costello’s course Modern Poetry and The Visual Arts. It was thanks to this course that my interest in ekphrastic poetry began.
My main area of interest is then contemporary American poetry, particularly in its relationship to the visual arts. At the moment, I am about to start researching for my dissertation, which will be about Language poetry and its radical re-thinking of the poetic both from an aesthetic and from a socio-cultural perspective. I am also concerned about the role of literature and criticism within history as a social and cultural product.
Email: pollitichic@hotmail.com
‘As though to protect what it advertises’(1) : Eckphrasis in Contemporary American Poetry
The ekphrastic movement in poetry can be trace back to its very origins. The sister arts share an ancestry as old as the shield of Achilles, but it was only in the twentieth century that this relationship came to be fully articulated in poems that inflected all the possibilities of seeing ‘with the mind’s eye’. These articulations came to be of particular importance and fruitfulness in American poetry, where the modernist triad formed by Wallace Stevens, Williams Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore all produced an important body of poetry and prose related to and informed by the visual experience of a work of art. These works, however, are inscribed within the zeitgeist of High Modernism, and their focus is therefore primarily the formal and structural potentialities of the creation of meaning through and within ekphrasis, heavily influenced by the new artistic movements of the earlier twentieth century. In this respect, it is significant that Charles Altieri chooses abstraction as the basis for his analysis of American modernist poetry in his extraordinary book Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry. (2)

1a Re-Drawing the Text continued
In the passage to postmodernism, there remains a significant production of visual poetry in the works of Robert Lowell, John Ashbery, Jorie Graham and many others. These poets’ appropriation of the visual, however, differs in many aspects from their modernist predecessors – for instance, many poets chose to turn their gaze to older paintings, rather than contemporary ones. It could be argued that these new ekphrastic inflections illustrate the passage to a conception of the construction of subjectivity, the aesthetic experience and its role in a larger cultural milieu, which can be crucial in the understanding of the postmodern world, where much cultural representation happens in the space of interaction between text and images.
1 from John Ashbery ‘Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror’ in The New York Poets, An Anthology ed. Mark Ford, Carcanet Press, Manchester 2004 pg 81
2 Charles Altieri: Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American Poetry, Cambridge University Press, 1989.

1b Multimodal Reality
Chair: Stephen Curtis, PhD Candidate, Department of English and Creative Writing, Lancaster University
Anna Martin (PhD Candidate, Media, Film and Cultural Studies, Lancaster University)
My current research involves looking at online fan cultures and fan production, with a particular focus on Real Person Fanfiction in investigating the star/fan relationship at our present cultural moment.
Email: a.martin4@lancaster.ac.uk
Lord of the Rings and the Popularisation of Real Person Fanfiction
“[Lord of the] Rings was made over a stretch of years in which new technologies were having a huge impact on the ways in which films are made and marketed and in the types of ancillary products tied to them. […] Not just as a film trilogy but as a larger phenomenon, Rings reveals a great deal about the changes going on in Hollywood in this transitional era of globalization and new media.” - Kristin Thompson, The Frodo Franchise.
DVD extras, such as movie commentaries, gag reels, behind-the-scenes peeks and production documentaries, have allowed fans unprecedented access to the production of a movie or TV show and to the stars themselves. This level of access brings a far greater perception of intimacy with the star; it could be argued that fans now feel closer to the “real person” behind the star façade.
The producers of Lord of the Rings communicated with fans to an unprecedented degree during filming of the movies. They produced masses of behind-the-scenes material as extras on the theatrical release and Extended Edition DVDs. Director and actor commentaries provided fans with intimate details of the experience of the entire cast and crew working together making the movies. In communicating with fans, LOTR producers exploited new media to a degree beyond any other movie production at the time.
Incorporating Henry Jenkins’ theories of convergence culture and Richard Dyer’s star theory, as well as notions of textual polysemy and John Fiske’s “producerly” media text, this paper will explore the relationship between film and fanfiction, with particular attention to the growth of Real Person Fanfiction over the last ten years.
Jennifer W. Lo (MA in Early Modern Literature, textual criticism, and digital humanities, King’s College, London)
I am an MA student at King's College London studying Early Modern Literature, textual criticism, and digital humanities. As a member of online fan communities, I am interested in the development of ideas of anti-oppression in the communicative, creative, and analytical mechanisms of self-maintained subculture reader groups.
Email: jennifer.lo@kcl.ac.uk
Appropriation of Commercial Media Images and Vigilante Iconology
This paper investigates the significance of commercial media-created images re-interpreted by viewers, readers or fans. In online communities, icons are small images that serve as personal identifiers, as indicators of emotion, and as statements of affiliation with various media sources or fan-communities. Fan-community icons, specifically those using media images, can be highly meta-textual and can be part of a micro-commentary on the media source and/or the fan community’s analysis thereof. This commentary combines media-controlled images and fan-inscribed text to create meanings that frequently and purposely run counter to the narratives and implications of the source image. A commercial media work’s “canon” truths are re-signified, faults or omissions are uncovered and redressed, and minute details are highlighted and/or celebrated. The inherent difficulty in analyzing such subculture creative works on the Internet is due to the unquantifiable nature of both time and movement, so that originators and transmitters of each mutation of idea or icon cannot be certainly ascertained.
The act of creating counter-canon meaning using fan-made icons is a self-conscious act of appropriation among those who regard themselves as a community of subversive viewers or readers within a larger fan base The recent Star Trek film (2009) and the re-imagining and re-imaging of the characters spawned an exploration of gender, race, subversion and adaptation in discussion, fan-created fiction and icons. Not only did icons reflect the re-make of the source media, but they also re-interpreted the television series and the long-standing relationship between fan-community and the Star Trek franchise. The appropriation and re-signification of commercial media images in the digital age would therefore seem to suggest new modes of iconography and creative iconoclasm.
Natalie Hamilton (University of Alberta)
Natalie’s research interests include visual aspects of postmodern prose; magical realism; possible worlds theory; postmodernism.
Email: natalie.hamilton@ualberta.ca
Textual Cinema and Cinematic Text: Identifying Film Influences in the Visual Aspects of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves
The interplay of word and image is integral to the exploration of the uncanny in Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel, House of Leaves. Danielewski conflates word and image by using film language and grammar in two capacities within the textual medium of the book. One may look at the manner in which the author narrates content intended to be visual, and one may examine the visual aspects of the text as a physical artefact.
Danielewski utilizes a ‘textual cinema’ that translates into prose not only the *story* of the film that is the focus of the novel, but the *discourse* of it as well. He incorporates language usually reserved for film theory and criticism into the narrative of the novel. In this way, he represents in print what would normally be left out of film novelizations - that is, the manner in which the story is presented visually. The reader is then able to construct an impression of the film’s visual aspects that incorporates a consideration of form as well as content. Danielewski also creates a ‘cinematic text’ that applies the typographical equivalents of film techniques to the printed word in order to manipulate the reader’s experience of the story. The layout and typography of the novel integrate visual elements that are comparable to film speed, camera angle, shot composition, and the moving camera, as well as concrete text that creates visual images on the page for the reader. These elements contribute to the visual impact of the textual medium. I intend to examine the way in which Danielewski uses language to present the visual discourse of cinema in prose, and to explore the manner in which the visual aspects of the typographical presentation contribute to a deeper understanding of House of Leaves.

1c Role-Modelling
Chair: Dr. Andrew Tate, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, Lancaster University
Hannah Field (PhD Candidate, Faculty of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford)
Hannah’s research interests include children’s literature, especially moveable and toy books; book history; the material object in literature.
Email: hannah.field@some.ox.ac.uk
Exemplified in a Series of Dresses: Narrative, Format, and the Nineteenth-Century Paper Doll Book
Between 1809 and 1830 the publishers and print-sellers S. and J. Fuller produced a number of moveable paper doll books, innovative items for children that the firm billed as ‘those esteemed and much admired JUVENILE BOOKS, with Figures which dress and undress’. Each paper doll set, packaged in a small slip-case, consisted of a black-and-white storybook containing the moral history of a young person, a number of coloured cut-out images printed separately on card, showing costumes, and a single coloured cardboard head. The head was manually moved from costume to costume at set moments in the story by the reader: the costumes had small tabs at back, into which the ‘stem’ of the head was inserted to produce a complete paper doll figure that acted as a standalone illustration to the accompanying story. This paper will consider the implications of the paper doll book, which was sold as a single entity but composed of multiple formal elements: storybook, figures, and head. How do these interlocking but separate – perhaps disparate – components interact? The idea that the paper doll book’s mixture of written, visual, and material properties represents a unique instance of ‘form effecting meaning’ (to recall D.F. McKenzie) will be examined with reference to examples from the Opie Collection at the Bodleian Library.
George Murgatroyd (PhD Candidate, Department of English and Creative Writing, Lancaster University)
In 2007 I completed an MA in Literary Research : The portrayal of African Americans in the works of Eugene O'Neill and Carl Van Vechten during the Harlem Renaissance, and the impact these representations had on the Renaissance.
I am now working on a Ph.D thesis which analyses both the depiction of race in fictional work emanating from New York from 1914 until 1929 and the intra and interracial literary relationships that the authors of this work had with each other. Archival work is central to my thesis. In September 2008 I researched various archives at Princeton and Yale universities and in September 2009 I visited the Newberry Library in Chicago, where I studied the archives of Sherwood Anderson. In May 2010 I will have travelled to the University of Pennsylvania to research the Waldo Frank Papers and also examine the Carl Van Vechten Papers in New York.
Email: g.murgatroyd@lancaster.ac.uk
Asterix and Obelix All at Sea? A New Interpretation of the Racial and Cultural Stereotypes in Goscinny and Uderzo’ s Asterix series
You know me, I've got nothing against foreigners. Some of my best friends are foreigners. But these particular foreigners aren't from this village! – Geriatrix
Some fifty years since the diminutive, moustachioed Gaul first appeared in print, the Asterix comic books are as popular as ever and have sold over 325 million books, in 107 languages. This paper begins with a very clear engagement with the issues of broken words and fractured images by discussing the growing concern that, since the death of the writer René Goscinny in 1977, the illustrator Albert Uderzo’s attempts to write the text of Asterix have seriously damaged the status of the books. As Anne-Claire Norot has put it ‘Goscinny's death was a turning point. After that, the language, the jokes, the subtlety - it was all gone. Before that, it was art, now it is just for children.’
With this debate in mind, I turn to the co-authored Asterix books and summarize the ongoing accusations that the comics expound racist and xenophobic stereotypes, which have deemed the images fractured by stereotypes and text broken by racism. Given the volume of books sold, most of which are to young children, I propose that such allegations are important to analyse. Through discussion of various of the racial characters – from Baba the Namibian Pirate to the Egyptian scribe Krukhut - and cultural expositions – including the portrayal of the British – I argue that the ubiquitous visual stereotyping in Asterix is firstly, obviously self-aware and ironic, and secondly is destabilized and inverted by Uderzo’s astute, humorous text. I then turn to focus on cultural difference, which is represented in every Asterix book. I contend that despite Obelix’s repeated assertion that foreigners are ‘mad’, the over-arching theme of Asterix is the acceptance and respect of other cultures. This combination of tongue-in-cheek imagery and perspicacious text ultimately rescues Asterix from the allegation of offensive racial and cultural characterisation.
Freyja Peters (PhD Candidate, Department of English and Creative Writing, Lancaster University)
Freyja Peters is a second-year PhD student at Lancaster University. Her PhD work is focused upon an exploration of identity as portrayed in a selection of contemporary graphic novels. Particularly, she is interested in depictions of masculinity and ethnicity in these works, considered in conjunction with theories on the representation of physical and other spaces. Her research considers these factors both in relation to each other and to the unique form of the graphic novel.
Email: f.peters@lancaster.ac.uk
Sunlight in an Empty Room: Shades of Edward Hopper in the Graphic Novels of Chris Ware and Daniel Clowes
Edward Hopper has often been assigned the role of iconographer of early twentieth-century America: his paintings synonymous with the country’s attempts to self-define during a tumultuous half-century of war, paranoia, civil rights turmoil, rapid urbanization and Fordist boom and Depression-era bust. Hopper’s critical eye makes its implications through nuance; elucidating America’s endemic social uncertainty and disenfranchisement not through chaos but through downturned glances, averted gazes, or – most often – through a lone figure in an empty space.
Surveying the twentieth century from its tail end, the work of graphic novelists Chris Ware and Daniel Clowes reveals an American which, whilst shaped by (superficially) different fears and preoccupations, is aesthetically synchronous with that of Hopper. This, it will be argued, is most in evidence in the representation of private and public-private spaces: Hopper’s diners, bedrooms, porches, offices and street corners find their millennial reproduction in Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, and Clowes’s David Boring and Ghost World. Within, the occupants wear the constant, impassive visages favoured by Hopper, awash with the light of the sun, of neon, or of the TV screen.
The motionless, yet emotive, still of Clowes and Ware’s panels mirrors Hopper's paintings: at once both intimating the viewer with the scene (enticing with its promises of silence and calm), yet simultaneously preserving a critical distance. The gaze is always that of the voyeur, the watcher forbidden to enter the room, but also, perhaps, the envious onlooker warned away by an admonishing glance. The ultimate aim of this paper is to consider the implications of these parallels, particularly in terms of conceiving a twentieth-century American aesthetic. Key will be the question of what may be inferred by Hopper, Clowes and Ware’s insistence upon the privileging of spaces, and of moments, which are at once ephemeral and perpetual, static yet uncontainable.

2a The Visible Word
Chair:
Aidan McCardle (Birkbeck College, University of London)
I am currently completing my research at Birkbeck College, University of London on contemporary poetry and poetics. I work as part of the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre (CPRC) there, on the web journals PORES and READINGS, amongst other things. I am a Co-Editor of Veer Books as well as being a member of the poetry collective London Under Construction. My background is in art, particularly painting.

2a The Visible Word continued
The final chapter of my thesis is exploring Action as Presence or Presence in Action in the poetry of Frank O’Hara through for example comparisons of ‘Duration as sites of exchange’ between his work and that of the sculptor Richard Long. The language needed to negotiate O’Hara’s poems in this way has been developed through consideration of the work of other contemporary poets such as Barry MacSweeney, Ulli Freer, Maggie O’Sullivan, Stephen Mooney and Maurice Scully. In an essay that I have had included in The Salt Companion to Lee Harwood I consider how the dissolving of habitual relations to syntax leave the viewer/reader negotiating the poem through sensory and spatial tensions similar to being in front of a painting. I examine the role of listening as vector in the fluctuating social and political language of DCLP by Stephen Mooney and the shifting non definitive locus needed to read work such as Ulli Freer’s Burner on the Buff.
Email: redochre.aodan@gmail.com
‘The Word and The Feather’ and ‘Meld’
In 2002, the contemporary poet Maggie O'Sullivan had some of her work described as “poetry with illustrations” by an academic journal which was publishing an edition on Arakawa/Gins and which had sought a response from her. It was a complete misreading of the role of the visual in her work, and demonstrated a lack of understanding of the responsibilities of 'reading' in contemporary poetry. With reference to this work, which has subsequently been published as All Origins Are Lonely, several key questions arise as to the gap between, and the difficulties in reading and interpretation of, the visual and the textual in poetry.
If reading has intrinsic to its qualities some substance of the writing, and the writing is, as in one instance in this text, a feather - an image, electric blue, of a large flamboyant feather - where, then, is the reader located, and how is he or she stimulated by the confrontation with these particular confusions.
I would contend that the visual negotiates words but not using words. The narrative here, the negotiation here is of material. There is a foregrounding of the senses, sight and thus the flesh in this confrontation. I envisage this as something more than the modernist relation to the graphic word on the page. I will examine the renegotiation of the relationship of the reader to the word. Language as action in the work of Maggie O’Sullivan encompasses the experience of the visual or sensory and denies the habitual return to dominance of the word as a singularly semantic purveyor of meaning.
Colin Herd (PhD Candidate, English Literature, University of Edinburgh
I am researching the work of the American poet Charles Bernstein, in contexts other than those suggested in traditional readings of the language poetry project. Most notably, I am interested in the relation of Bernstein's work to that of the American Pragmatists.
Email: c.j.herd@sms.ed.ac.uk
‘Things are solid; we stumble, unglue, recombine’: Collage, Collaboration and the Materiality of Text in the Visual Work of Charles Bernstein.
My paper concerns visual elements in the work of the American language-poet Charles Bernstein. In the short essay ‘Book as Architecture’, Bernstein writes:
‘I prefer to imagine poems as spatializations and interiorizations- blueprints of a world I live near to but am yet to occupy fully. Building impossible spaces in which to roam, unhinged from the contingent necessities of durability, poems and the books they make eclipse stasis in their insatiable desire to dwell inside the pleats and folds of language’ (My Way 56-57).
Throughout his career, Bernstein has sporadically created ‘visual poetry’. One of the earliest of these is the series ‘Veil’ in which ‘fields of solid language’ are generated by over-typing on a typewriter. He has also collaborated with a number of visual artists to produce works that interrogate and inhabit the unstable margin between image and text. Most notable among these collaborations are the books illustrated and designed by Bernstein’s wife, the artist Susan Bee. By reading the intersections of text and image in Bernstein’s work through the lens of the writings of Gilles Deleuze on ‘the fold’, I suggest that ideas of the Baroque are an appropriate theoretical context in which to read Bernstein’s visual poems. I extend my discussion to include works by Bernstein that are not overtly visual. By doing so I intend to emphasize the importance of visual elements in Bernstein’s poetics, showing that his poems primarily operate spatially rather than temporally. I end by suggesting comparisons with the writings and structures of Arakawa and Madeline Gins, suggesting that Bernstein’s ‘pleats and folds’ of intertextuality, collage and collaboration operate analogously, ‘as a means of re-routing, reversing and, in effect, negating time’ (Sites of Reversible Destiny 99).
Dr. Mandy Bloomfield (School of Humanities, University of Southampton)
Email: ar.bloomfield@soton.ac.uk
Faultlines of the Visible Word
Visual poetry – poetry which uses typography, layout, or the visual qualities of words – has a long history. But there is a notable lack of critical frameworks or vocabularies for the interpretation of this kind of language art. This paper will propose that this is partly because visual poetry makes use of two modes of representation – verbal and visual – which aesthetic theory has positioned as distinct, or even opposed. To borrow the words of Charles Bernstein, ‘What is the relation of the visual to the verbal? Are they not separate realms – races – each with their own civilization?’ Engaging with the thinking of some prominent participants in the debate about the relations between poetry and visual art, including G. E. Lessing, Clement Greenberg and Michel Foucault, I will trace the history of this discourse of ‘separate realms’. I will argue that the discursive split between verbal and visual arts is predicated on a division between meaning and materiality, interpretation and experience, cognition and intuition. To investigate this split, then, is to engage with much wider questions about which aspects of a text are privileged and which are deligitimated, which dimensions ‘speak’ to us meaningfully and which are rendered mute. This paper will finally suggest some ways in which contemporary writers, such as Susan Howe and Kamau Brathwaite, use verbal-visual tensions productively in their work. Such writers investigate the capacities of visual language and the material page to articulate history’s silences, gaps, and suppressed presences: to read history otherwise.

2b Screening Gender
Chair: Stephen Curtis
Gauri Bhure (Professor – English Literature, History – Mahindra United World College of India)
Email: gbhure@muwci.net
Gender Subtexts embedded in Narratives of Nation in Mainstream Contemporary Indian Cinema
Rang De Basanti (2006), Chak De India (2007) and Sarkar Raj (2008) were three of the most popular and critically acclaimed movies in the last three years*. Through a critical discourse analysis this paper attempts to unpack the gender subtexts embedded in narratives of nation in mainstream Indian cinema in contemporary India. Globalization and modernity are simultaneously embraced and resisted. The shifting social landscape in urban India towards a western conception of progress and individualism threaten the existing status quo and patriarchal order of the nation. Grounding the analysis in theories that establish how gender is used to construct the nation, I build an argument for the ways in which anxieties related to the nation are projected on to the site of gender. By effective containment of gender negotiations, pressures related to modernity and globalization are subsumed within the narrative of the nation. I also look at the ways in which gender simultaneously creates boundaries between and traverses the realms of public and private spheres.

2b Screening Gender continued
Thus, seemingly unconventional (yet very popular) movies continue to maintain an idealized vision for national and cultural identity and reiterate these dominant discourses related to gender and nation and recreate them in the filmic imagination.
*For the purpose of the presentation, I will use the movie Rang De Basanti as the focus.
Rang De Basanti – Paint it Saffron (color of national flag)
Chak De India! – Go For It India!
Kornelia Taborska (PhD Candidate, University of Adam Mickiewicz)
Kornelia’s research interests include Film adaptations, Shakespeare on screen, Popular culture and the media, Elizabethan theatre and Postcolonial Shakespeare
Email: ktaborska@ifa.amu.edu.pl
Image in the service of women: Branagh’s treatment of female characters in his adaptations of Shakespeare’s comedies
This paper examines the treatment of Shakespearean women in Kenneth Branagh’s adaptations of Much Ado About Nothing, Love’s Labour’s Lost and As You Like It. Since the status of female characters in Shakespeare is never set and the debate includes anti- to pro-feministic approaches, it gives way to various appropriations and interpretations. Taking into consideration the fact that it is cinema which has a tremendous effect on shaping pop-cultural identity, it is worth to have a closer look how it treats Shakespearean heroines preparing them to be received by the modern audience. Kenneth Branagh is widely known for popularising the Bard during the last two decades and inviting a larger audience to experience Shakespeare’s plays on screen. It is therefore interesting to examine how he approaches the Shakespearean text and how he presents the female characters, as often his manipulation with the camera unearths shades of meanings and emphasises information about these characters which can be derived from their lines, or, on the contrary, sacrifices the words to convey the images serving his modern interpretations. This analysis allows to examine the impact the present status of women has on moulding of those characters out of the original text and their readability in today’s society.
Gosia Drewniok (PhD Candidate, Department of Linguistics and English Language & Department of English and Creative Writing, Lancaster University)
My PhD is interdisciplinary and so are my research interests, mainly stylistic analysis, literary analysis, film/TV studies and the study of popular culture. My research focuses on the language of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, with special reference to the characterisation of main villains: vampires. I'm also looking at how the language of the series contributes to its Gothic character.
Email: m.drewniok@lancaster.ac.uk
“You’re strong. I’m Stronger. You have no idea what you’re dealing with”: Vampires, Masculinity and Language in Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a hugely popular TV series, aired from 1997 till 2003, running for 7 seasons. Language is one of its most distinctive features. It has been extensively explored by scholars from many disciplines, including Karen Eileen Overbey and Lahney Preston-Matto (2002), Michael Adams (2003), Jesse Saba Kirchner (2006) and others in the whole special issue of Slayage: The Journal of the Whedon Studies Association devoted to Buffy language (Slayage 20), as well as Susan Mandala (2007). To date, however, no-one has explored how vampires in the series are linguistically constructed.
The long running nature of the series means that the writers are able to develop an extremely wide variety of vampire types. There are background vampires and there are more prominent ones; there are conventional vampires, embracing a figure we know from the 19th-century Gothic novel; more contemporary ones, as well as ‘good’ vampires, who have a soul and do not kill. It is clear then that to construct a vampire in Buffy the Vampire Slayer one needs more than just a black Bela Lugosi cape. The vampires in the show are constructed through acting, clothes, props, but also through language.
In this paper I will explore the relationship between masculinity and the language the vampires in Buffy the Vampire Slayer use. The show aimed to abolish the stereotype vampire and to propose a new incarnation of this creature, but to do that, it had to depict such a vampire first. The vampires at the beginning of the series embrace the macho monster and it is achieved also through the way they speak.

2c Fractured Bodies
Chair: Xavier Aldana-Reyes, PhD Candidate, Department of English and Creative Writing, Lancaster University
Lucy Perry (PhD Candidate, Department of English and Creative Writing, Lancaster University)
The working title of my PhD thesis is 'Pathologies of Ageing and the Paradox of Death in Modern and Contemporary Prose'. In this thesis I am researching the influences that changing medical and sociological/demographic treatments of senility have on 'postmodern', literary discourses of ageing. In particular, I am interested in the challenges that old age now presents to language and the textualising of old age, set against a medical/cultural history that has transformed senescence from part of the natural lifecourse, to the neurological research of Alois Alzheimer which symbolically exposed and recast it as a curable pathology in post-1911, to the developing populist medical/cosmetic possibility of an elliptical leapfrogging of senescence post-1970s, to more contemporary research which has hybridised fiction and medicine in the discourse of agelessness, of a future cure to ageing and related pathologies -toward an ageless, transhumanist utopia, one might say.
Email: l.perry@lancaster.ac.uk
Medics, Mechanics and Techno-Priests: Old Age and Alternative Embodiment in Modern and Contemporary Prose
This paper explores the influences of changing medical and sociological/demographic treatments of senility have on ‘postmodern’, literary discourses of ageing. The progressive medical, cosmetic and consumerist drive to abolish the appearance and even physiology of ageing has challenged deterministic or fatalist narratives of old age and any conventional, or ‘canonical’, allusions to fixity and finitude. The dynamics of the mature identity are increasingly associated with liminality, hybridity, and fecundity as the boundaries between youth and senescence, fiction and medicine become metaphysically illusory. By extension, the life course is symbolically becoming less linear and more recapitulative with an asymptotic relation to death –to the point where not only the task of ‘tensing’ the individual is increasingly compromised, but where the very notion of death becomes a paradox. As more contemporary novelists are responding to the ambivalence of the mature identity, it is evident that a new ‘postmodern’ discourse of ageing is emerging and requires definition within the literary canon, particularly with regards to stylistic, syntactic and narratological changes therein. It is the reality of ageing that challenges the language of fiction, and in a postmodern spin on Pound’s dictum ‘make it new’, I will be arguing that old age requires a new vocabulary, and constitutes a site of continuing change and ambivalence, in contemporary literature.

2c Fractured Bodies continued
Chloe Buckley (MRes, Literary Research, Lancaster University)
I hold a BA in English Literature from Lancaster University and have now returned to the department to study part time for an MA in literary research. My thesis topic focuses on the ‘portal narrative’ form of young adult fantasy, considering why it is such a popular contemporary narrative form. I am interested in the liminal properties of the portal between worlds, making use of Lacanian and Freudian theories to understand the appeal of the borderland between fantasy and reality. My other research interests include picture books for very young readers and the influence of the gothic in literature for teens and children. My paper entitled ‘Neil Gaiman’s New Mother: How Coraline translates conservative Victorian Fantasy’ is forthcoming in the journal, Peer English.
Email: c.buckley@lancaster.ac.uk
The Trouble with (M)Other: Heroes, Mothers and Lacan in the Adolescent Fiction of Philip Pullman and Neil Gaiman
Clearly, the figure of the mother in children’s literature is varied and complex: ‘a biological, psychological, spiritual, economic, social and cultural construct which eludes full description.’ (Rollins and West, 1999) Certainly, in the adolescent ‘portal narratives’ produced by Neil Gaiman and Philip Pullman, images of the mother defy easy definition and cannot easily be fixed into place by one, simple unifying theory. Nonetheless, a psychoanalytical reading of the mother helps to illuminate some of the ways in which mothers function both within the hero story and within children’s texts more generally, thus furthering our understanding of how we conceive of mother-child relationship in a wider context. From my reading, it will become clear that ‘portal narratives’ inherit much from the hero meta-narrative in their construction of the mother and of mother-child / mother-hero relationships. But it is also clear that portal narratives interact in a much wider way with Freudian and Lacanian notions of the mother, and, in some ways, use their awareness of psychoanalytical theory to create complex and deliberately more ambiguous relationships than those found in the typical hero narrative. Yet, simultaneously, we might also read the deliberate inclusion of psychoanalytical narratives of maturity as another layer of myth, which can also function to ‘normalise’ certain constructions of mother / child relationships. The hero meta-myth may be in the process of being replaced with a psychic myth, one that could just as easily be read as having an ideological function. Mothers are an uncanny source of dislocation and fragmentation for the hero subjects of these texts, whose adventures through the ‘portal’ function as an analogy to the developmental struggle of the individual subject struggling to obtain an identity.

2d Spaces
Chair: Dr. Arthur Bradley, Senior Lecturer in Literary and Cultural Studies, Lancaster University
Dr. Geoff Matthews (Lincoln School of Architecture, University of Lincoln)
Geoff Matthews is leader of the MA programme in Design for Exhibition & Museums and a member of the Cultural Contexts Research Group in the Centre for Sustainable Architecture and Environments at Lincoln School of Architecture, University of Lincoln. He holds a Ph.D. in Management Systems and Sciences from the University of Hull and is a Fellow of the Chartered Society of Designers, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Research interests include exhibition language, museum design organization, and sustainable exhibition design. Related papers include: ‘Pop Goes the Weasel: Styles of Creative input to Museum Exhibitions’ (The Go Between, University of Glamorgan/National Museum of Wales, 2009), ‘The Play’s the Thing’ (Sensory Urbanism, Strathclyde University, 2008), ‘Friendly Chimeras: The Evolution of Critical Creative Practice in Exhibition Design’ (The Role of the Humanities in Design Creativity, University of Lincoln, 2007), and ‘Writing Design’ (Research by Design, Delft University, 2002).
Email: gmatthews@lincoln.ac.uk
Prometheus Revisited: The National Cold War Exhibition and the ‘self-understanding of an age’
Ostensibly history is about the past; reflexively it tells us even more about present sensibilities and concerns. This proposition provides the starting point for the paper, which revolves around a case study of the National Cold War Exhibition (RAF Museum, Cosford). Exhibition can be read as multi-modal text. The interpretive challenge lies in its seductive selectiveness and the illusory depth of spectacle. Exhibition may be formally discontinuous, but reading a history exhibition in the light of the exhibition making process can be revealing on a number of levels. Neal Potter was the creative force behind the project. He was responsible for the narrative structure, its spatial-conceptual representation, the scenography, the exhibit design and the visual language of exhibition graphics.
The paper addresses the question of where the narrative constructed by the exhibition making project sits culturally. Content is present, but it also signals the absence of and stands in for what is not present. Content is orchestrated and choreographed as a minimal resource, and is required to perform in concert with the participant visitor. Through engagement in the symbolic economy and with (syn)aesthetic possibilities content evokes, rather better than recounts, collective memory. Consequently it points toward but does not fully articulate a history.
The evidence available includes the exhibition itself, a documentary archive of the exhibition making project, interview transcripts and a number of published exhibition reviews. The methodology adopts a pragmatic approach to an evolving method of critical biography coupled with a postmodern semiotics. This enables linkages to be forged in interpretation between the experiential and the cultural, and conclusions to embrace speculation on the communicability of a ‘self-understanding of an age’ and the contemporary function of myth.
Erkan Ali (PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology, Lancaster University)
I am a second year PhD student, currently working on a project which considers precisely the role of text and photography in constructions of 'otherness', and specifically the construction of experience from the perspective of the 'other' within, as opposed to the exoticised 'Otherness' associated with anthropology. With an emphasis on not just thinking sociologically but also photographically, and with reference to a number of case studies, the project is concerned with representing otherness in modernity from various standpoints, referring to: gender, ethnicity, poverty, homelessness and transience.
Email: e.ali@lancaster.ac.uk
The ‘colour of pity’: Benjamin and Delahaye in Russia
With an emphasis on the uncanny but also the concept of presentiment, this paper considers an unlikely meeting point between a writer (Walter Benjamin) and a photographer (Luc Delahaye) in Russia. Reading Benjamin’s melancholic Moscow Diary (1927) against Delahaye’s photographic essay Winterreise (2000), the chapter emphasises the ways in which photographs may be contextualised by text and the ways in which, in return, photographs can amplify and specify a text.
Taking its inspiration from the cycle of twenty-four songs by Franz Schubert, with which it shares its name, Winterreise (literally, ‘Winter Journey’) has been described as a ‘melancholy road story’ which exposes the social depravity of Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. And despite the seventy-year gap separating their respective visits, the observations made by Benjamin and Delahaye are freakish in their similarity: improbably vibrant colours, red rags, and the ‘fearful blue sky’ at night, the figure of the rag picker, the brilliant white snow and its effects on the senses, posters and billboards depicting images of paradise, and so on. What we find is a physiognomy of Russia which seems to have hardly changed since the early twentieth century; and these motifs are almost compensatory, making up for a bleak and featureless landscape which is otherwise devoid of colour.
But this is only one level of comparison. The photographs of Delahaye mimic the writing style of Benjamin at the same time as they give his essay on ‘Moscow’ living colour. It has been said about Benjamin’s writing that it creeps up on the reader in a ghostly fashion when one’s back is turned (Richter, 2002); and it has also been noted that Benjamin’s writing is itself haunted by a kind of presentiment (Shelton, 2007). As if in homage to Benjamin, the photographs are heavy and burdensome; there is a sense of claustrophobia and foreboding about them.

Keynote Speaker #2:
Andy Diggle
Andy is a British comic-book writer, currently under exclusive contract to Marvel Comics. Formerly he was the editor of influential British anthology comic 2000AD, for which he won an Eagle Award for Favourite Comics Editor. He has since been nominated for an Eisner Award (for THE LOSERS) and a British Fantasy Award (for HELLBLAZER). In both 2009 and 2010 he was listed as one of SFX magazine's Hot 50 most influential people in science fiction. The big-screen adaptation of my action-thriller series THE LOSERS, starring Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Zoe Saldana, Chris Evans, Idris Elba and Jason Patric, was released in April 2010. He is currently writing DAREDEVIL and SHADOWLAND for Marvel, along with various comic-to-film projects.
His publications include Adam Strange, Batman, Bionic Commando, Gamekeeper, Green Arrow: Year One, Hawkeye, Hellblazer, Judge Dredd vs. Aliens, Lady Constantine, Lenny Zero | Mega-City Undercover, The Losers, Silent Dragon, Snow/Tiger, Swamp Thing and Thunderbolts.
www.andydiggle.com

3a Thinking in Pictures
Chair: Professor John Schad, Professor of Modern Literature, Lancaster University
Gina Wall (PhD Researcher, Photography and Philosophy, University of Dundee)
For me, the practice of photographing the landscape amounts to a re-inscription of this marked surface. Rewriting the land in photographs is preceded by reading the land: a particular way of looking. Reconfiguring the act of looking as a form of reading, and thinking the land as text, suggests an alternative to the idea of the landscape as a view, a picture of nature seen from a privileged viewpoint. Photographic practice is seemingly over laden with the dynamics of viewing, but if we are to think of photography as an inscriptive practice, and the camera as a machine for writing, an entirely different dynamic emerges. The ties that bind landscape to the notion of picture are gently loosened. The cultural practices which inscribe the land are legion, however I have chosen to work in relation to certain social spaces associate with work, leisure, and travel. The places have recently directed he camera towards moorland, park, road. The loci of certain cultural practices have become the place(s) of my photographic practice. Indeed, one cultural practice overwrites another, accreting the trace of a new activity. Alongside photographing the land I have read and written around different accounts of writing. This reflective/generative process has become a space between theory and practice, an example of Donald Schön’s ‘reflective practicum.’ And in this space I find that both the practice and the practitioner are also rewritten.
Email: g.walll@dundee.ac.uk
Towards Photogrammatology: Thinking Photography as Writing
In this paper I intend to explore the notion of photography as a practice of writing, a photogrammatology. Photography, taken to be a form of writing, not only produces photographic texts, but in turn opens a space of practice. Practice-as-writing is a space in which the possibility of meaning opens. Thus meaningful photographs are not full of meaning i.e. replete with the ‘full plenitude’ of meaning; rather the photographic sign is an opening for meaning in and through its relation with other signs. The photograph does not presence the subject, indeed it resists representation, and, in so doing, distends and spaces the sign, delaying and deferring its presence, facilitating a chain of signification which can never be closed. This is critical for photographic practice insofar as a body of photographic work becomes meaningful by way of the play difference between and within images. Photographic texts carry the trace of otherness within them.
To think of the photograph in terms of trace implies the play of substance/insubstance within the photographic itself. The subject-in-the-photograph is no thing, a shadow bound in the image: imprinted in the granular ground of the photographic materials. The photograph as physis in différance is the subtle interplay between thing and no thing, substance and shadow. It is the production of absence and presence, the eternal delay of the subject: the play of difference in which the photograph has no origin. To track the spoor of the photograph is futile, for it leads to no place, no one.
This paper will also investigate, in words and images, the notion that photographic writing (after Barthes’s theory of the text) is productivity. I write from the perspective of the practitioner who is held in the text. However, photogrammatology is a space in which both the practitioner and the viewer are immersed.
Alex Wilkinson (PhD Candidate, Department of History, Lancaster University)
My current working title is: 'Reality: Dada, Surrealism and Social Theory, c. 1915-1984'. I am interested in investigating the influence (conscious or otherwise) of the Dada and Surrealist art movements on how (largely French) social theorists have approached the question of reality constructions. In doing so I hope to give a self-reflecting narrative on history. When originally proposed the thesis centralised photography. While this has moved to the periphery, it is still an interest.
Email: a.wilkinson2@lancaster.ac.uk
Wittgenstein and Photography: Implications for History
For Wittgenstein, so it has been claimed, a perfectly working language allows for the collapse of the sign into the signifier. In another fashion you could suggest that the real always adheres, and language becomes but a complex system of scientific labelling of objects that dominates their ‘force and signification’ (to employ Derrida). I would like to suggest a different reading of the Tractatus which is only in some ways original (much of the above view has been contested, of course), suggesting it be read in the tradition of satire in the style of Voltaire’s Candide. I would suggest Wittgenstein’s famous last sentence, ‘What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence’, is the last in a constructive narrative of self-criticism of post-war realist constructions; that, as Lee Miller once said after World War II, ‘the facts just weren’t that sensible’. Photography similarly stands in place of the real, but itself has one unique feature as Roland Barthes so penetratingly argued, ‘it establishes not a consciousness of the being-there of the thing (which any copy could provoke) but an awareness of its having-been-there.’ This would bring me on to the latter half of the paper, a discussion of what the implications for historical writing are if language just stands in place of the real? Like photography, it claims to be speaking for / mirroring events which undeniably have occurred, yet, like any aspect of art it does as much to create its events, as it does chronicle them.

3a Thinking in Pictures continued
Jonathan Shaw (PhD Candidate, Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmith’s College, London)
Jonathan Shaw is an Mphil/PhD candidate in the Department of Visual Cultures, Goldsmith's College, London, and Visiting Tutor on the department's BA and MA courses. His research concerns the role of passivity in viewing contemporary art works and the possible radicalisation of passivity as strategy using the work of Antonin Artaud. He is a founding editor of Rattle, a journal concerned with artistic, theoretical and fictional meetings of text and image - Issue One forthcoming in March 2010.
Email: vcp01js@gold.ac.uk
A Philosophical Task: To Be Contemporaries of Grant Morrison
The title of this paper is adapted from chapter IV of Alain Badiou's Handbook of Inaesthetics. For Badiou, the task for philosophy is set by the poetry of Fernando Pessoa in which Badiou identifies the coextension of the transcendent idealism of Plato (which is pitched against Capitalism's mandate
to 'live without ideas') and the inversion/rejection of Plato which he names the condition of modern philosophy since Nietzsche. It is this coextension which philosophy has yet to embody:
“To be worthy of Pessoa would mean accepting the coextension of the sensible and the Idea but conceding nothing to the transcendence of the One. To think that there is nothing but multiple singularities but not to draw from that tenet anything that would resemble empiricism.” (p. 44 Badiou, Alain A Philosophical Task: To Be Contemporaries of Fernando Pessoa)
It is my contention that such an ontology is also to be found in the political structures of the groups of protagonists in the DC/Vertigo comic books of Grant Morrison, notably his Doom Patrols and Seven Soldiers of Victory, and most exceptionally The Invisibles. Morrison's group-as-protagonist demonstrates a way of thinking the multiple in which the individuals maintain both a singular agency and commit themselves to the totality of the group, whilst blocking any primacy of one over the other.
I shall discuss this structure with reference to the crucial role of the comic book format – for example, the refusal of any primacy of image over text or vice versa - in the elaboration of Morrison's ontology and conclude with a discussion of the implicit assertion that the comic book could, and should, be raised to equal standing with poetry as a resource and precedent for philosophical and political thought.

3c Re/Sounding Words
Chair:
Matthew MacKisack (PhD Researcher, Visual Arts, Goldsmith’s College, University of London)
Matthew is an artist and doctoral candidate (4th year, part-time) in the Visual Arts department of Goldsmiths College, University of London. His research interests include: contemporary artistic practice and the inheritances of ‘conceptual’ art, phenomenology as a critical tool, theorizations of the imagination and technology in continental thought.
Email: mmackisack@googlemail.com.
Visual Glossolalia
This paper considers the visuality of sound and the spoken word as a ‘spectatorial’ effect of radio and glossolalia as the counter of that effect. A historical trajectory for poetic images or theoria is described, from ekphrasis, through Romantic literature and into modernist radio drama, and back into the literary, with the visual arts as analagon. We examine and contrast Richard Hughes's Danger and Antonin Artaud’s To Have Done with the Judgment of God for their differing attitudes to mental imagery and representation, and pay particular attention to the fate of mental imagery as it moves between the literary and acoustic in Samuel Beckett’s works for radio. We go on to suggest that radio’s strategies of evocation are inherited and made self-conscious in work by recent conceptual artists, for example Tacita Dean.
We find that the trajectory marked out for mental imagery within sonic and visual arts finds its correlates in Heideggarian phenomenology. The analysis is made within this frame – and through the lens of Paul Ricoeur’s assertion that ‘the ultimate role of the image is not only to ... hallucinate thought in some way, but [also] to place us in a state of non-engagement with regard to perception. [...] In this state we ... try new ideas, new values, new ways of being-in-the-world.’
The phenomenon of glossolalia – speech as senseless sound – moves in and out of the 20th century avant-garde’s acoustic strategies, and with it, the rejection and embrace of the word’s spectatorial effect, its capacity to ‘form a world’. The paper concludes by asking what that inheritance entails for contemporary artistic practice where ‘sense making’ is at stake.
Tatjana Ljujić (PhD Candidate, Faculty of English, University of Cambridge)
I hold MA in Comparative and Theoretical Literature from Utrecht University and MPhil in Screen Media and Cultures from the University of Cambridge. My PhD thesis deals with the dynamic between immediacy and inter-medial reference (to literature and painting) in moving image art. My research interests include: contemporary artistic practice and the inheritances of ‘conceptual’ art, phenomenology as a critical tool, theorizations of the imagination and technology in continental thought.
Email: Email: tl279@cam.ac.uk
Unheard Words and Visceral Images in Tarkovsky’s Mirror
This paper will address the immediacy effect of Arsenii Tarkovsky’s voice-over poems in Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Mirror. In film theory, the issue of cinematic immediacy is often dealt with in solely visual terms and is commonly set in opposition to verbal expression. At once allusive and visceral, the films of Andrei Tarkovsky testify that cinema can incorporate literary language and still hold claim to immediacy. Andrei Tarkovsky often described his aesthetic ideal regarding film in terms of poetry. For film to be an art the filmmaker must become a poet of cinema. Yet, for Tarkovsky, the cinematic image exceeds poetry in its potential for immediacy in representation: whereas poetry ‘uses words to describe the world’, film ‘manifests itself to us directly; ‘I classify cinema … among the immediate art forms since [it needs] no mediating language’. (1)
Following Tarkovsky’s own writing, the existing criticism has largely concentrated on analysing poetry of his films (often expressed in terms of visual immediacy as analogous to poetic immediacy), rather than poetry in the films, thereby theorising the language of image, rather than the effect of word in (or over) the image. Compelling though these approaches often are, the question remains: if the filmmaker has managed to convey by means of cinematic image what the poet did with language, even exceed it by its claim to greater immediacy, why are Arsenii’s poems still present in the film as spoken words transposed onto the images? Would the immediate power of cinematic image not make the words superfluous? And would the overt intermedial quotation not disturb the film’s visual immediacy?
Tarkovsky’s films elude approaches that conceive of word and image in film in terms of either opposition or analogy. The approach I wish to propose will bear on the double logic of immediacy and intermediality in film.
(1) Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time (London: The Bodley Head, 1987), pp. 29, 62, 176 [emphasis in the original]

3c Re/Sounding Words Continued
Greg Thomas (PhD Candidate, English, University of Edinburgh)
I am a first year PhD English student at the University of Edinburgh. The working title of my research is ‘Culture in Conflict: The Moment of Concrete and the Development of Scottish Poetics’. My work is undertaken with the Scottish Poetry Library as an AHRC funded collaborative doctorate. It is primarily focused around the concrete poetry of Ian Hamilton Finlay and Edwin Morgan, and relies on studying the excellent collection of these and other concrete poets’ work held at the Scottish Poetry Library.
I have always been interested in literature which emphasises its extra-semantic qualities, or operates at the threshold of other mediums. Concrete and sound poetry are two of my most enduring interests, as is experimental modernist prose. In the academic year 2008-09, whilst completing the Culture and Criticism MPhil at Cambridge University under the supervision of Dr. Drew Milne, I developed these interests through a thesis exploring musical patterning in Samuel Beckett’s Worstward Ho by comparison with the compositions of Morton Feldman. I also wrote on the work of Bob Cobbing and Wyndham Lewis during that year, whilst as an undergraduate at Sussex University I became particularly interested in the futurist poetry of Vladimir Mayakovsky.
More recently I have given presentations on sound poetry at the Scottish Poetry Library, and am also helping them to archive and catalogue their Ian Hamilton Finlay holdings.
Email: G.C.Thomas@sms.ed.ac.uk
Infinite Kaku: Performances of Bob Cobbing
This paper will analyse the artistic practice of the London based poet-artist Bob Cobbing via an interpretation of his 1972 text 15 Shakespeare Kaku.
Cobbing, who died in 2002, was one of the most prolific British exponents of concrete poetry, a movement active across Europe and America between the 1950s and 80s, which enhanced and altered written language’s meaning by foregrounding its visual and material qualities. Concrete poets appropriated the experimental typography of modernist art and literature, intended to demystify language’s role in the construction of meaning, and advanced it to produce artworks which were not simply visually self-aware texts, but rather expressions of the territory between language and art.
Perhaps because of its restless oscillation between visual and linguistic communication, Cobbing’s work, which uses broken and densely overlaid fragments of text to create almost legible, almost figurative text-images, has not generated extensive critical interpretation as either writing or art. Moreover, as his published texts often served as scores for improvised vocal performances, they have sometimes been seen as bearing little value outside that context. Whilst supporters of his work have often valued its recalcitrance to academic engagement as evidence of its transgressive value, it is also an obstacle for those who might want to approach it afresh. Such an engagement could enrich many areas of discussion around contemporary interdisciplinary art.
I thus hope to closely analyse one Cobbing text, 15 Shakespeare Kaku, a collection of fractured text constructions which verge particularly tendentiously on the boundaries of linguistic and visual sense. I will not attempt to recuperate the work as either literature or art, but neither will I analyse it solely as an affront to critical sensibility. I will instead approach it as a composed object, invested with enough coherence to direct interpretative engagement, whilst exposing the limits of that coherence to invite an individual “performance” of it as language, music, or performance art. In so doing, I will argue that Cobbing advanced a prescient model of multimedia artistic practice prefiguring much current experimental art in Britain, from free music to hypermedia poetry to improvised performance.

4a COMunICation
Chair: Chloe Buckley, MRES Student, Department of English and Creative Writing, Lancaster University
Hannah Miodrag (PhD Candidate, School of English, University of Leicester)
I am a third year (part time) PhD candidate at Leicester university. My research focuses on Anglophone comics criticism, its recent rise and continuing search for legitimacy, particularly in comparison to the more widely respected Francophone field. This paper stems directly from my interest in the way critics conceive of the dual nature of the comics form in relation to literature, and the way that their desire to promote the efficacy of visual narrative can sometimes lead to an overstatement of its importance within this mixed form.
Email: ht53@le.ac.uk
The Nature of the Hybrid Text
Comics ‘hybridity’ is fiercely debated but, whether for or against this label, critics invoke similar terms when justifying their opposition or accord: words such as ‘weave’, ‘blending’, and ‘integration’ recur, but this “fuzzy terminology”, according to French critic Arnoud Rommens, “suggests its own conceptual inadequacy” (1). This paper looks at the nature of the word-image relationship across a range of examples, and examines precisely how comics combine linguistic and visual signs.
Firstly, I reject the spurious suggestion that word and image ‘fuse’ or synthesise, showing how something can be gained from the play off between the two within the panel. Picture and caption are distinct but each influences the way the other is read, and their combined effect is greater than the sum of their parts. Where illustrated books juxtapose word and image, in comics the two are interdependent, deployed in concert; but this interdependence presupposes two distinct, separable elements. Secondly, this paper argues that, when comics draw linguistic signs, it is not true that “text reads as an image” (2). Rather, this represents a radical exploitation of words’ graphic potential. Conventional literature suppresses words’ visual form through standardised presentation, but in comics the materialisation (parole) of the abstract word (from the langue) draws language and the visual into collusion, though again the two do not melt imperceptibly into each other. Finally, briefly, comics’ visual art and textual content will be examined in and of themselves: each offers a rich, though necessarily incomplete, seam for analysis, often neglected in the drive to view their combination as an inseparable fusion. The ways words and images are brought to bear on each other is of crucial interest to scholars of this mixed medium, and this threefold take on comics’ ‘hybridity’ shows that word and image are distinct entities but, in comics, are rendered utterly co-dependent.
(1) Arnoud Rommens, review of The Language of Comics in Image & Narrative.
(6) Will Eisner, Comics and Sequential Art.

4a COMunICation continued
Valentina Polcini (PhD Candidate, Italian, University of Exeter)
I was Graduate Teaching Assistant at the University of Exeter from 2006 to 2009 and currently I am completing a PhD in Italian on the topic: ‘Dino Buzzati and Anglophone Culture. The Re-use of Visual and Narrative Sources in Dino Buzzati’s Fantastic Fiction’. My research interests cover the following areas: science fiction, fantastic literature, the theories and practices of intertextuality, intermedia translations (particularly literature and visual arts), comparative literature (mainly English and Italian).
Email: Valentina.Polcini@exeter.ac.uk
Orpheus and Eurydice in Comic Strips: Images, Words... and Music in Dino Buzzati’s Graphic Novel Poema a fumetti
Poema a fumetti was published in 1969, towards the end of Dino Buzzati’s career. Not unexpectedly, therefore, it represents the convergence point of the Italian artist’s two main areas of interest: fiction and visual arts. What surprises instead is the highly experimental quality of this book, which can be regarded as a graphic novel ante litteram, especially because in Italy at that time comic strips were far from being deemed an artistic form.
My paper will focus not only on the novelty of Poema a fumetti and its controversial reception in Italy but also, and above all, on its fusion of artistic media. As regards its intertextual dimension, Poema a fumetti is an updated version of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, in which the pop singer Orfi descends into an imaginary Milanese underworld in order to bring his girlfriend Eura back from death. From the viewpoint of intermediality, further investigation into the book’s combination of images and words will reveal some interesting features. On the one hand, Buzzati’s comic-strip images are derived from various sources, such as photographs, his own drawings, paintings by other artists, film shots, erotic comics. On the other hand, words can be divided into three groups: comic-strip words, which are presented either as enclosed in balloons or as captions; the narrative prose of descriptive passages; and musical words, that is to say, the illustrated lyrics of the songs Orfi has to sing for the dead in order to be reunited with Eura.
The overlap of intertextual and intermedial levels makes of Poema a fumetti a pioneering example of graphic novel, which deserves more critical attention than it has been given so far.
Ana Makuc (PhD Candidate, Women’s Studies, Lancaster University)
I am a 1st year PhD student at Lancaster University, doing an interdisciplinary research about the problematization of gender in cyberpunk science fiction literature. I am interested in gender and literature, post-structuralism, psychoanalysis, and the intersections of science, technology and society. The piece on graphic novels is a part of my MA thesis, which I completed at Lancaster University in 2008.
The Representation of the Female Self in Graphic Autobiographies through the Dynamics of Words and Pictures
Abstract: This piece deals with the representation of the female self in graphic autobiographies through the dynamics of words and pictures, and with its similarities with and differences from the inscription of the male graphic autobiographical self, according to feminist autobiographical theories of subject-hood. To this end, it compares four graphic autobiographies: namely, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Joe Sacco’s Palestine, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006).
Whereas women’s autobiographical self is supposed to be relational, collective, split, fluid, multiple, displaced, embodied and marginal, men seemingly represent themselves as distanced, appropriative of others, autonomous, heroic and exceptional. Women appear to be more interested in the personal, domestic and private, while men are considered to be more concerned with the political, public and professional. At the structural level, women’s autobiographies are acclaimed to be more fragmented, with frequent gaps, silences, ambiguities, humour and uncertainties in the story, whilst men’s autobiographies are said to be written in a self-assertive, linear and progressive manner. The main argument of the article is that both female-authored texts display more stereotypically feminine characteristics than both male-authored texts, and that both male-authored texts portray more features that are traditionally associated with the masculine than both female-authored texts. This argument is developed through sections one to four, which explore, respectively, how private or public, how relational or individualistic, how fragmented or unified and how marginal or normative the subjects of the graphic autobiographies are.

4b Negotiating Words
Chair: Dr. Graham Mort, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, Lancaster University
Mariya Ustymenko (PhD Candidate, Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies, University of Essex)
Mariya’s research interests include stylistics, women writing, American modernism, art and mass culture, independent film and music industries, dada and the avant-garde, postmodernism, post-postmodernism, work of art and its reception, twentieth century poetry and the visual arts.
Email: mustym@essex.ac.uk
Silent and Decorated Spaces – Poetry Beyond Word
Working on my research paper on American women poets spanning the era from Emily Dickinson to contemporary New York poet Patti Smith, I gradually became aware of the fact that literary scholarship throughout the twentieth century generally and in the prevailing majority of cases tends to view written literary text as its primary target. Quite often issues arising from the contextual representation of the authors’ texts are relegated to the sphere of publishing concerns, with publishers frequently held responsible for the inadequate representation of the authors’ materials due, for example, to such reasons as technical limitations or cost concerns. With the advance of new technologies and the growing availability of on-line electronic archives these issues seem to be approaching their logical end, with ‘un-edited’ primary materials becoming available to broader audiences of literary scholars worldwide. But do these ‘electronic revolutions’ really affect the way literary scholars approach contemporary authors whose work only starts to attract academic interest today? Do the slight deviations of the pen, peculiarities of punctuation as well as other extra-textual aspects contained within as well as beyond the page remain privilege of the well-researched authors of the canon? How are we affected by the prior knowledge we have about the author as one coming primarily from the sphere of literature or the sphere of art when we approach the work produced by these authors? What artistic content suffers most among many materials that fall in between the cracks in literary scholarship and history of art? Looking at the examples taken from the works of Emily Dickinson, Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven and Barbara Guest for the purpose of case-study I would like to provide ground for further discussion on approaches to be taken when dealing with multimedia works.

4b Negotiating Words continued
Lila Matsumoto (PhD Candidate, English Literature, University of Edinburgh)
Lila’s research interests include modern and contemporary Scottish literature, Modern American literature, theories of regionalism and nationalism, transatlantic studies, periodical studies and visual culture.
Email: L.Matsumoto@sms.ed.ac.uk
A Pagination of Curiosities: Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Poor.Old.Tired.Horse
Ian Hamilton Finlay’s eclectic little magazine Poor.Old.Tired.Horse ran from 1962 to 1967, and according to Edwin Morgan ‘undoubtedly succeeded in its aim of opening Scotland out to new names and new ideas.’ The magazine published a wide range of international poetry as well as art and photography within a visually striking and ever-changing format, and was an important vehicle for Concrete poetry in Britain. One of the most intriguing aspects of the magazine is the way in which it presents the text as both linguistic creation and visual object. This was accomplished through the meticulous assemblage of the poems within the visual/physical unity of the magazine: often the poems are presented as an (continuous) illustration or rendered by a typographical style unique to the issue. In this paper, which will be accompanied by projections of the works in question, I will explore the ways in which Poor.Old.Tired.Horse presents various possibilities for engaging with the printed word. What new meanings are generated by considering the poem’s text in relation to its material representation, and further, as an element of an assembled visual-literary collage? Morgan wrote that the often abstruse connections the readers were asked to make between the pieces were ‘partly the connections within Finlay’s own unformulated and formative view of the art world.’ I will speculate in this paper that Poor.Old.Tired.Horse, via its conscious construction as an object of textual and visual bricolage, broke new ground and informed new directions in both literature and art in the 1960s.
Russell Jones (PhD Candidate, English Literature Department, University of Edinburgh)
Russell is a PhD Research Student with Edinburgh University’s English Literature Department. His current research is on “The Science Fiction Poetry of Edwin Morgan” and his academic interests include creative writing, modern British poetry and poetics and form.
Email: r.jones-5@sms.ed.ac.uk, russ_jones2k@hotmail.com
Off Concrete Stars: Edwin Morgan, Science Fiction and Concrete Poetry
From a computer’s first Christmas card to the Loch Ness monster’s song, from a chaffinch map of Scotland to an off-concrete Scots fantasia, Edwin Morgan leans on the fantastical literary end of concrete poetry.
This paper will examine Edwin Morgan’s concrete and off-concrete poetry, considering the earthly and other worldly imaginative power it allows Morgan as a poet. It will argue that Morgan’s verse finds itself on the literary end of concrete art, placing a greater urgency on the linguistic elements of concrete poetry than that of many of his peers.
The paper will place Morgan as a true experimenter amongst concrete power houses such as Eugine Gomringer and Ian Hamilton Finlay as it considers the implications of his use of narrative in a genre which we might describe as a “narrative vacuum”. It will also demonstrate Morgan’s breadth and willingness to combine genres such as sound poetry and colour poetry with his concrete work as both an imaginative process and a practical publishing tool.
Finally, it will consider the idea that concrete poetry offers its writers a new voice which does not rely on absolute linguistic interpretation, whilst highlighting the relevance of this concept Morgan, whose own voice has been repeatedly altered and repressed due to his (until recently, illegal) homosexuality.

4c Visual Translation
Chair: Dr. Kamilla Elliott, Senior Lecturer in English Literature, Lancaster University
Alex Newhouse (PhD Candidate, University of York)
Alex is currently in the final year of his PhD on Dickens and silent film. His research interests include : silent film history; Dickens studies; the relationship between literature and silent film; popular culture in the early twentieth century; and the development of cinema technology.
Email: ajn504@york.ac.uk
Nordisks’s Our Mutual Friend (1921)
Between 1921 and 1924 four lavish Dickens adaptations were produced by the Danish company Nordisk Film. Vor Fælles Ven (Our Mutual Friend) (1921); Store Forventinger (Great Expectations) (1922); David Copperfield (1922) and Lille Dorrit (1924) were made at a time of crisis for Nordisk, and were an ambitious attempt to reverse the ailing fortunes of the company. (1) Critical attention to these films has been limited. Ebbe Neergaard briskly dismisses them as adaptations that betray the “commonplace notion of Dickens as primarily a children’s author!” (2) More detailed criticism appeared in 2001, in the third part of Graham Petrie’s trio of Dickensian articles on silent Dickens adaptations, wherein an eight-page section of the article focused on the Nordisk films. (3) Petrie details the adaptations’ apparent flaws and references their mixed critical responses. And in doing so, he describes rather than explains their more unusual features.
These films deserve rescuing from such summary judgement. With particular focus on Nordisk’s Our Mutual Friend I intend to demonstrate that these flagship productions – especially their peculiarities – shed light on the divided status of Dickens’s literature in the silent cinema industry. On the one hand, adaptations of Dickens’s work exploited the prestige of the author and strove to attain artistic legitimacy; but on the other, there was a competing drive by filmmakers to use Dickens’s status as a hugely popular author to market these adaptations to as wide an audience as possible.
Our Mutual Friend, and the three Nordisk films that followed it illustrate this dichotomy of popularity and prestige in a variety of ways, such as the company’s scriptwriting processes and choices of filmmaking techniques. By the conclusion of my presentation I hope to have shown that these films’ more unusual features are still symptomatic of more widely held attitudes to Dickens in the silent film industry.
Copies of these films can be found at the Danish Film Institute Archive. They can be seen by prior arrangement. Though some are incomplete, this is still the best available collection of these films. The British Film Institute has a copy of David Copperfield, but it is missing reels three and four (of eight).
Neergaard, Hollywood Quarterly, Vol.4, No. 3, (Spring 1950), p.221
See Petrie, Graham, ‘Silent Film Adaptations of Charles Dickens, Part 3’, The Dickensian, No. 455, Vol.97 (Winter 2001) pp.203-210

4c Visual Translation continued
Chiung-Ying Huang (PhD Candidate, English Department, University of Bristol)
I am a PhD candidate in the English Department at University of Bristol, working on Keats’s reception by painters and poets in the nineteenth century. My main research interest is the interconnection between visual art and literature in the nineteenth century.
Beyond Textual Space: Re-presenting the Femme Fatale in J.W. Waterhouse’s Painting
Anthony Hobson, an influential critic on Waterhouse, writes: ‘The Victorian compulsion to tell a story was inescapable, but although Waterhouse was clearly developing the ability to compose a satisfying picture, he had not yet acquired that combination of an appropriate setting with the pose and gesture of the figure which within a few years was to make him an outstanding illustrator of the legends.’ (1) Hobson’s remark on Waterhouse’s work suggests the artist’s departure from poetic work in translating a legendary story or textual work into a visual image. The question of how translation affects the original textual interpretation is even more intriguing in examining the presence of the femme fatale in Waterhouse’s work. Appearing through the images of mermaids, naiads, serpentine woman, or other half-animal and half-woman mythological figures, the femme fatale constitutes an important part of Waterhouse’s painting. Particularly, by basing his portrayal of fatal women upon some poetic moments in the works of Keats and Tennyson, Waterhouse demonstrates his passion for depicting distinctive female beauty and, to some extent, creates alternative meanings beyond the original textual space. In Waterhouse’s attempt to translate a textual material visually through the figure of the femme fatale, oftentimes his heroines appear less of a threatening and monstrous presence than a more self-contained and auto-erotic creature. This paper considers how the image of the femme fatale, understood as an attractive, seductive and disastrous woman in Greek mythology and some Romantic texts of male imagination, has been translated through the painter’s creative imagination in his depiction of female beauty, sexuality and erotic power.
(1) Anthony Hobson, J. W. Waterhouse (Oxford: Phaidon, 1989), p. 19.
Ekaterina Loy (MSc, IT University of Gothenburg, Sweden and Independent Translator, National Accreditation Authority for Translators and Interpreters, Australia)
Ekaterina’s research interests include Literature, Translation Theory and Practice, Cultural Studies, Ethnic and Multicultural Media .
Email: ekaterina.loy@gmail.com
Metamorphosis of Literature and Translation under the Influence of Digital Media
The presentation will describe research of the merging between two subjects: up-to-date literature tendencies and machine translation. Particular exploration of the interaction between the two of abovementioned disciplines is made on the basis of translation of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer.
Since the time computer was introduced to wide public, it has invaded all the spheres of life. Literature as a mirror of social interests started to change as well using thematic of new technologies, sometimes copying the methods of visual representation in new media, and sometimes even predicting the new technology to come. Over 50 years ago print novel has started to change its oblique significantly. Today we have a bright number of works exploiting possibilities of digital media while still being a print novel.
The idea of the project was to convey research in both remediation of print novel and adaptation of translation, graphic and other kinds of programs to make the adequate translation of those novels possible.
One of the suggestions for the improvement of translator’s work rooted from the project is the advice of collaboration between translator and graphic and programming professionals. The translator encounters not only text while the process of ergodic literature translation, but also graphic material. It takes unnecessary long to adapt it to translation without the help of the professionals. Hence it could be much more efficient to use the knowledge of the specialists in this sphere. The same suggestion is made by Alan Liu in his book The Laws of Cool, in which he suggests a coalition between the "cool" — designers, graphic artists, programmers, and other workers within the knowledge industry — and the traditional humanities. Ergodic literature, requiring diverse orientations and rewarding both contemporary and traditional perspectives, is exactly the reasonable subject for such collaboration.

Art Installation:
Christine Dawson, Biography
Born in Glasgow, I have spent most of my adult life in the City of Lancaster, U.K. Having developed as an artist over a number of years, I decided to formalise this and graduated with a First Class (Hons) Degree in Art Practice and Theory from Lancaster University in 2006.
Since graduating I have created two touring Photographic Art Exhibitions – "What Makes Me Laugh?" (WMML) and "Sweet Dreams" which both depict positive images of Muslims. WMML was my response to the backlash in the U.K. against Muslims after 7/7. I was granted an Arts Council Grant to research and develop SWEET DREAMS which was my response to racial attacks on women who wear the niqab at the height of the Veils Row in the U.K. in 2006. It exhibited in Liverpool, where it was supported by the Cornerstone Art Gallery as part of the City’s European City of Culture and Independent Biennial Celebrations.
I was offered an Art Residency by Lancaster University Chaplaincy Centre from October 2007 until March 2008 and created and end of Residency Exhibition entitled "Watching Walls". An installation from this exhibition was featured at Lancaster Town Hall in January 2008 as part of the City’s Holocaust Memorial Day. From October 2008 until March 2009 I was sponsored by the Chaplaincy and created an Installation entitled - FLOATING ENGLISH GARDEN to raise awareness about Bangladesh in relation to Global Warming I also created installations to commemorate the 7th Anniversary of Guantanamo "CUPS" and "EGGSHELLS REVISITED" - a work about Domestic Violence on request from the production team of "Vagina Monologues".
My art installation "Bauhaus Bricks" became part of the International Project "Bauhaus 90 Years/90 Days": http://bauhaus9090.org/2009/july/19
Presently I am working on a commission for the National Justice and Peace Network 2010 Annual Conference called "OUR DAILY BREAD". I am creating three installations using as my source of influence a book by Dr Ellen F.Davis called "Scripture, Culture, and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible". (Cambridge University Press 2009) I am also working on a body of work with the theme "Children and War".
www.christinedawsonart.co.uk

5.30 – 6.30	CHRISTINE DAWSON EXHIBITION, PROF. TERRY EAGLETON SIGNING & WINE RECEPTION	Foyer

4c	Visual Translation	County MR2
	Chair: Kamilla Elliott
Alex Newhouse	Nordisks’s Our Mutual Friend (1921)
Chiung Ying Huang	Beyond Textual Space: Re-presenting the Femme Fatale in J.W. Waterhouse’s Painting
Ekaterina Loy	Metamorphosis of Literature and Translation under Influence of Digital Media

4b	Negotiating Words	MR2/3
	Chair: Dr. Graham Mort
Mariya Ustymenko	Silent and Decorated Spaces – Poetry Beyond Word
Lila Matsumoto	A Pagination of Curiosities: Ian Hamilton’s Finlay’s Poor.Old.Tired.Horse.
Russell Jones	Off Concrete Stars: Edwin Morgan, Science Fiction and Concrete Poetry

4a	COMunICation	MR1
	Chair: Chloé Buckley
Hannah Miodrag	The Nature of the Hybrid Text
Valentina Polcini	Orpheus and Eurydice in Comic Strips: Images, Words... and Music in Dino Buzzati’s Graphic Novel Poema a fumetti
Ana Makuc	The Representation of the Female Self in Graphic Autobiographies through the Dynamics of Words and Pictures

4.15 – 5.30	SESSION 4

3.50 – 4.15	TEA & COFFEE	Foyer

3c	Re/Sounding Words	County MR2
	Chair: Xavier Aldana-Reyes
Matthew MacKisack	Visual Glossolalia
Tatjana Ljujic	Unheard Words and Visceral Images in Tarkovsky’s Mirror
Greg Thomas	Infinite Kaku: Performances of Bob Cobbing

3b	Andy Diggle Q&A (2.40-3.10)	MR2/3

3a	Thinking in Pictures	MR1
	Chair: Prof. John Schad
Gina Wall	Towards Photogrammatology: Thinking Photography as Writing
Alex Wilkinson	Wittgenstein and Photography: Implications for History
Jon Shaw	A Philosophical Task: To be Contemporaries of Grant Morrision

2.40 – 3.50	SESSION 3

1.45 – 2.30	ANDY DIGGLE	MR2/3

12.40 – 1.40	LUNCH	County MR1

2d	Spaces	County MR2
	Chair: Dr. Arthur Bradley
Geoff Matthews	Prometheus Revisited: The National Cold war Exhibition and the ‘self-understanding of an age’
Erkan Ali	The ‘colour of pity’: Benjamin and Delahaye in Russia

2c	Fractured Bodies	MR3
	Chair: Xavier Aldana-Reyes
Lucy Perry	Medics, Mechanics and Techno-Priests: Old Age and Alternative Embodiment in Modern and Contemporary Prose
Chloé Buckley	The Trouble with (M)Other: Heroes, Mothers and Lacan in the Fiction of Philip Pullman and Neil Gaiman

2b	Screening Gender	MR2
	Chair: Stephen Curtis
Gauri Bhure	Gender Subtexts embedded in Narratives of Nation in Mainstream Contemporary Indian Cinema
Kornelia Taborska	Image in the Service of Women: Branagh’s Treatment of Female Characters in his Adaptations of Shakespeare’s Comedies
Gosia Drewniok	'You're strong, I'm stronger. You have no idea what you're dealing with': / Vampires, masculinity and language in Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

2a	The Visible Word	MR1
	Chair: TBC
Aidan McCardle	‘The Word and the Feather’ and ‘Meld’
Colin Herd	‘Things are solid: we stumble, unglue, recombine’: Collage, Collaboration and the Materiality of Text in the Visual Work of Charles Bernstein
Mandy Bloomfield	Faultlines of the Visible Word

11.30 – 12.40	SESSION 2

11.10 – 11.30	TEA & COFFEE	Foyer

1c	Role-Modelling	County MR2
	Chair: Dr. Andrew Tate
Hannah Field	Exemplified in a Series of Dresses: Narrative, Format and the Nineteenth-Century Paper Doll Book
George Murgatroyd	Asterix and Obelix All at Sea? A New Interpretation of the Racial and Cultural Stereotypes in Goscinny and Uderzo’s Asterix series
Freyja Peters	Sunlight in an Empty Room: Shades of Edward Hopper in the Graphic Novels of Chris Ware and Daniel Clowes

1b	Multimodal Reality	MR2/3
	Chair: Stephen Curtis
Anna Martin	Lord of the Rings and the Popularisation of Real Person Fanfiction
Jennifer Lo	Appropriation of Commercial Media Images and Vigilante Iconology
Natalie Hamilton	Visual Aspects of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves

1a	Re-Drawing the Text	MR1
	Chair: Dr. George Green
Joan Ormrod	A Heap of Broken Images: Countersong and Readership in T.S. Elliot and Martin Rowson’s The Waste Land
Tamryn Bennett	Towards Comics Poetry
Gema Pizarro	‘As though to protect what it advertises’: Eckphrasis in Contemporary American Poetry

10.00 – 11.10	SESSION 1

09.00 –09.50	PROFESSOR TERRY EAGLETON	MR2/3

08.45 – 09.00	WELCOME	MR2/3

08.00 – 08.45	REGISTRATION	Foyer