All entries for May 2009

Arts Faculty Postgraduate Seminar Series – week 7

Charlotte Mathieson : 31 May 2009 12:45 |  Tags: English Event PhD Seminar Series |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Arts Faculty Postgraduate Seminar Series – Week 5

Charlotte Mathieson : 18 May 2009 08:11 |  Tags: English PhD Seminar Series |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Arts Faculty Postgraduate Seminar Series – Term 3

The Arts Faculty Postgraduate Seminar Series will be holding three events this term. The first seminar is this Wednesday (week 3) at 5.30pm in the Graduate Space.

Papers will start at 5.30pm, lasting approximately 20 minutes each with questions between each, followed by discussion and time to socialise over refreshments at the end - wine, soft drinks, and nibbles are provided.

All Arts Faculty Postgraduate students are welcome to attend.

For further enquiries, please contact one of the organisers:

Adam Putz: a.putz@warwick.ac.uk

Arina Lungu: a.n.lungu@warwick.ac.uk

Charlotte Mathieson: c.e.mathieson@warwick.ac.uk

Jeanine Tuschling: j.tuschling@warwick.ac.uk

Details of the Term 3 programme are as follows:

WEEK 3 – Wednesday 6^th May

Anthony Bounds (Department of History): West Indian Independence and Decolonisation in the 20^th Century

Clea Rivalta (Department of Italian Studies): “The representation of Fascism in post-war Italy: the case of Alberto Moravia"

Chair:            Arina Lungu (English Department)  

WEEK 5 – Wednesday 20^th May

Dom Holdaway (Department of Italian Studies): “Uomini e no: Recomposing Masculinities in the films of Paolo Sorrentino”

Serena Bassi (Department of Italian Studies): "Rewriting texts and constructing cultures for the market: an exploration of the commercial success of Gomorrah Italy's other mafia in the UK".

Chair:             Mariarita Martino (Department of Italian Studies)

WEEK 7 – Wednesday 3^rd June

Ji Won Chung (Department of English): “Late-Victorian Beauty and the Female Body”

La Tasha Brown (Centre for Translation & Comparative Cultural Studies): "The Black Caribbean Diasporic Urban Experience, 1970-1980."

Chair:             Jeanine Tuschling (Department of German Studies)

Charlotte Mathieson : 04 May 2009 21:49 |  Tags: English PhD Seminar Series |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Update: April

It seems I managed to go the whole of April without writing on my blog, although I've not been writing so much this year I think that's the first time a whole month has passed by without anything at all! It's mostly because I've been hard at work over the Easter holidays; the end of term 2 saw a couple of my biggest commitments of this year come to a close- the conference, and teaching (the module I taught on only has essays due this term, no seminars to prepare). So the "vacation" meant getting down to some hard work on Chapter 4, which is taking Chapter 3's concern with walking journeys into the context of European spaces. This involved a lot more preliminary research than I'd anticipated: as soon as I began to think about this new spatial context of Europe, a lot of questions were prompted regarding the relationship between Britain and Europe in the nineteenth century and what this meant for British representations of European spaces. How did Europe feature in the Victorian spatial imagination: how was it conceived of and represented? What meanings and discourses were attached to European spaces? What did it represent ideologically, as an imagined space; and how was it represented and constructed as a textual space in travel literature of the day? Why is Europe chosen as a location in these novels, and how do the novels contend and intersect with these discourses and meanings surrounding Europe?

All these questions have lead to some interesting research, although there are still a lot of gaps remaining in my reading as I've been trying to limit the focus more on the specifics of the novels I'm studying and how European spatiality is represented there; and more specifically, how the body figures as the site through which spatiality is negotiated. As in previous chapters, Charlotte Bronte's Villette and Charles Dickens' Little Dorrit have been particularly central to my analysis- I keep coming back to these two novels but they really do have so much to say!- and I've also been looking at Bronte's The Professor and Dickens' Dombey and Son and David Copperfield. I've been reading a bit more Braddon on the side as well (Aurora Floyd and moving on to John Marchmont's Legacy this week) and I'm generally trying to keep an eye out for any novels that include journeys to the continent- if anyone reading this has read any mid-Victorian novels (c.late 1840s - mid-1860s) that detail European travel then I am always looking to find more (particularly more obscure authors) so please leave a comment! (It's the first question I now ask my friends and family when they mention having read a Victorian novel- "were there any journeys in it?"!)

So, chapter 4 is taking a considerable amount of time but I think it'll shape up nicely and I now have a quiet-ish term 3 ahead to bring together my ideas into something more coherent. I've also just found out that my proposal has been accepted for the Literary London 2009 Conferencein July. I'm very much looking forward to attending, the theme this year is "Urban Geographies" and it'll be interesting to spend a couple of days hearing papers on this topic that aren't solely Victorianist in focus, but that have in common the focus on London's spatiality. I'm also really excited that I'll get to write the paper I proposed, which is titled  "Traversing the City: Embodied Transit Spaces in Charlotte Brontë’s Villette". I've recently updated my eportfolioand my conferences page now includes abstracts of papers I've presented, so I'll be putting up this latest one shortly.  

Charlotte Mathieson : 04 May 2009 09:38 |  Tags: Conferences English PhD Victorians |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem