Renowned Author Caryl Phillips Lecture and Workshop at Northumbria

Clare Elliott

On Tuesday 26th May colleagues in American Studies and English welcomed the critically-acclaimed author Caryl Phillips to the University. Phillips is one of the most highly acclaimed novelists and essayist of his generation. His numerous works of fiction and non-fiction include The Lost Child (2015), Colour Me English (2011), Dancing in the Dark (2005), The Atlantic Sound (2000) and Crossing the River (1994) He was awarded the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for his novel, A Distant Shore (2003) and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Crossing the River. His many other awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

Phillips' lecture for staff and students.

The University held two main events that day. The first was a Creative Practice and Critical Engagement Workshop which was attended by literature and creative writing students. This was an inspiring event where Phillips answered questions about his novel Crossing the River. After a long interview with Dr Clare Elliott, Phillips engaged with several students in discussion about this text and his other work. We talked about how Phillips’s fiction and non-fiction deals with the Black Diaspora and notices a tension between a sense of homelessness and an African belonging that is often experienced by his diasporan characters. We discussed issues of class and race and how Phillips connects the two in his writing and we talked about gender, place and identity, and reimagining histories of migration. In the latter half of the workshop creative writing students were asked to write a short piece with these themes in mind. The exercise was fruitful and the author gave a full critique of each short story. In the evening we had the pleasure of hearing from Phillips again as he read from his new novel The Lost Child. This was a public event where the audience heard Phillips in conversation with Professor Brian Ward and Dr Clare Elliott. We talked about The Lost Child as a response to Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights; themes of education, class and race in the novel as well as music and literature more broadly. The day was full, enriching and thoroughly enjoyed by all!

In Search of the Lost Child: In Conversation with Caryl Phillips

Caryl Phillips, Writer

When: 6.30pm, Tuesday, 26 May 2015.
Where: Lecture Theatre 002, Business and Law Building, City Campus East, Northumbria University, Newcastle.
Refreshments and a book signing will be available from 5.45pm. 

Free admission, Register for the event
 
SYNOPSIS
Caryl Phillips will read from his latest novel, The Lost Child, in which he re-imagines the origins of one of English literature’s most iconic characters: Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff.

After the reading, Caryl will discuss the inspiration behind his new book and talk about some of the major preoccupations of his fiction and non-fiction, in a conversation led by Dr Clare Elliott and Professor Brian Ward of Northumbria University’s Humanities Department.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Caryl Phillips is one of the most highly acclaimed novelists and essayist of his generation. His numerous fictional and non-fiction works include Dancing in the Dark, Colour Me English, Crossing the River and The Atlantic Sound.

He was awarded the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize for his novel, A Distant Shore and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for Crossing the River. His many other awards include the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.

Alison Garden, Early Career Visiting Scholar to Give Talk on "Black and Irish Atlantics"

Alison Garden is the Early Career Visiting Scholar in American Studies at Northumbria University for 2015. 

Alison's PhD thesis, funded by the AHRC, explored the fiction of the contemporary author Colum McCann. Alison is currently teaching Scottish literature at the University of Edinburgh and English literature, film, and critical theory at the University of Stirling. In 2015, she will take up a Postdoctoral Fellowship at University College Dublin, funded by the Leverhulme Trust.

Next week at Northumbria Alison will be deliver a paper, based on her larger work, “Black and Irish Atlantics: Reading Seamus Heaney in Kwame Dawes and Natasha Trethewey,” at 5:30pm on Tuesday 17 March, Lipman 033.

My Sabbatical in Brief

Julie Taylor

While on sabbatical last semester I had the opportunity to complete one research project and begin another.

Jean Toomer, courtesy of the Beinecke,
Library, Yale University.

Modernism and Affect, which will be published by Edinburgh UP later in 2015, brings together essays by scholars working across several disciplines within modernist studies. Reconsidering modernism’s complex relationship with questions of emotion, feeling, and embodiment after theory’s ‘affective turn’, the collection encompasses work on literature, architecture, philosophy, dance, visual art, and design. In the introduction I outline some of the key works and concepts within the humanities’ recent engagement with affect, and chart modernism’s troubled relationship to matters affective. My own chapter contribution to the book considers the Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer’s critical deployment of a racist stereotype that links African American subjectivity to extreme emotional expressiveness.

The sabbatical also gave me time to explore my new research project.  It is an examination of the pedagogical dimensions of American modernism, taking up the implications of Hugh Kenner’s famous claim that the modernists were ‘poets at the blackboard’. My key questions revolve around the points of contact between experiments in writing and experiments in education in the early twentieth century, which included theories and projects as diverse as Bauhaus, Montessori, Deweyism, and psychoanalytic approaches to learning. My research has so far centered on the literary innovator and theorist, modernist mentor, and occasional lecturer, Gertrude Stein. Stein expressed scepticism about certain educational innovations she encountered (such as the ‘Great Books’ scheme at Chicago University), but her work guides us towards a reading practice that challenges many traditional ideas about pedagogy. Recently, I have become fascinated by Stein’s writing for children, including her 1939 book, The World is Round, written on the invitation of the successful children’s author, would-be modernist, and member of New York’s Bank Street Experimental School, Margaret Wise Brown. Stein’s work invites us to ask important questions about the relationship between modernism, children’s literature, and theories of learning at the beginning of the twentieth century.