9 West NewsRoad from the Faculty of English Now we are in control Volume 16 I Winter 2016

s I write this, in the continuously deposited, and that I have changing. The Faculty at present vivid azure of the South inadvertently revealed its existence and hosts one such project, Crossroads of of France, daunted by whereabouts – ‘Oh, haven’t you seen it Knowledge, whose Principal Investigator the prospect of taking under the floor of the Council Room in is Dr Subha Mukerjee and whose team over as Chair of the the Old Schools?’ Chest there is not, but of researchers occupy a well-situated Faculty Board from the distribution of funds that find their corner office on the second floor of our Amy predecessor Steve Connor, I find it way into the School we are a member Faculty building. Such grants are not difficult to ignore the fear and – alas – of – the School of Arts and Humanities suited to every project and much of the expectation that the UK tertiary sector is – is determined by the resources of the extraordinary research that takes place about to be hit by a tsunami. Everyone University as a whole. We do not get in our Faculty and indeed in the School I have encountered on my vacation, our hands on the many millions our of Arts and Humanities is carried out by most especially the French locals in our colleagues might raise in grants for imaginative, energetic and very talented holiday village, has wondered what on Engineering projects – anyone interested solo researchers. This is very unlikely to earth the UK population was thinking in setting up an interdisciplinary English- change, but as the university sector in the when it voted to leave the European Engineering project should write to me UK tries to adapt to a changing political Union. I suppose that many readers of immediately, perhaps ‘the language of and economic environment it will have our Faculty Newsletter might imagine surface tension’? – but the Resource little choice but to seek funding from that, given the nature of our subject and Allocation Model (the formula the outside agencies. If we are cut off from its requirement that, grosso modo, one University uses for distributing funds European Union resources it will leave a be native level competent in the English across all sectors of our activity) does very large hole in our balance sheet. language, Brexit will have little impact on mean that the Faculty’s resources are It is not simply a matter of funding, the Faculty’s work. So one might think deeply dependent on the University’s. of cash. Once again, although the that things will carry on as normal, as if So it sharpens the mind to think that academic and intellectual profile of there ever is a normal. It is true that we between 2007 and 2014 the University disciplines is very far from identical, it is do not teach many undergraduates from of Cambridge received €424M, nevertheless the case that my colleagues, other European countries – at the time of approximately 24% of its entire research like others across the University, have writing about 10% of the full cohort – funding, under the EU’s Framework colleagues outside 9 West Road or indeed but at postgraduate level this rises to just Programme 7. Indeed its annual inflow Cambridge. We might not be technically under 25%. of funds in the form of grants from EU engaged in a collaborative research However, once one stands back and sources is at least €45M. The University project, funded by the grand agencies surveys the larger context in which our is incredibly successful in winning which foster such types of research, but work, teaching and research take place, European Research Council grants – in we certainly have connections to other the storm clouds begin to gather rather fact it is more successful than any other researchers and research groups. The more perplexingly. The Faculty, in HEI in Europe. Not only in the UK, University has calculated that somewhere common with all the other Faculties and but in Europe. By November of last in the region of 100,000 collaborative Departments in the University, receives year, this totalled one hundred and fifty links have been established between resources – most significantly in terms five European Research Council grants, researchers in the UK and those in other of monetary value in the form of salaries or 22% of all grants awarded. Under European Union countries. Twenty-three paid to our establishment, including of another European Union initiative, per cent of academic staff come from course administrative staff – that are called Horizon 2020, the University of other European Union countries and complexly accounted for and distributed Cambridge received the highest amount 27% of our post-doctoral researchers by the central administration. We still of EU funding of any HEI; as of February also come from outside the UK. It is not, rather quaintly refer to this financial 2016 this amounted to £98,543, 527. of course, simply a matter of research resource as ‘the chest’. Whenever I Although the arts and humanities staff. The University of Cambridge is say this I want to retract it in case I are less practised in, and have far less a very large corporation that employs have given the impression that there is experience with, grant applications very many people as administrators indeed some wonderful, jewel-bedecked of the type overseen by the European and support staff. And the University medieval vessel into which gold coins are Research Council, this is rapidly is a major employer in the region and Contents

Now we are in control Peter de Bolla 1

Shelley in the Alps Ross Wilson 3

Shakespeare in Swahililand Edward Wilson-Lee 4

Digital Knowledge Flueron Hazel Wilkinson 6 Introducing the Concept Lab Ewan Jones 6

Samuel Beckett’s Letters Publishing the Letters Linda Bree 8 A Correspondent Steven Connor 9

Read Any Good Books Lately? Faculty Recommendations 10

The Faculty Library and Twitter Libby Tilley 11

Athena SWAN contributor to its immediate locale. university is collegiate. Many of the Nicolette Zeaman 12 Universities UK, for example, calculate deep connections that are made while that EU students generate £247.5M for studying at Cambridge, at whatever Faculty People 13 our regional economy. level, are created through the collegiate Cambridge English Let us also consider what a ‘hard system. These connections are far from Trudi Tate 18 Brexit’ might mean for our students. merely social, as hardly needs pointing When I took my degree here in out: they are often significant with Literature and Creative Writing at ICE Cambridge no one dreamt of spending respect to the developing intellectual Jenny Bavidge 19 journeys of the kind we do our best as time away from the comfort and You Say 20 support of the Whim on Trinity Street teachers to feed, encourage, disturb and – does anyone remember their extensive learn from. They are often significant menu of wicked ‘Irish’ coffees? How in respect to the knowledge base we, disturbing would that be? But to my as citizens of the world, construct and great delight our current generation curate. They open our eyes to that of students has access to schemes that world. Our compulsory paper in Part enable them to explore teaching and II of the Tripos, the Tragedy paper, does learning, not to mention culture and many things – stimulates, frustrates, life-enhancing experiences, in our annoys – but it would be impossible neighbouring European countries. In to make much sense of its intellectual the UK as whole over 200,000 UK content from the perspective of a mono- If you have any comments or cultural and inwardly facing society or students have taken advantage of the suggestions, or if you know of polis. You will not get a better grade exchange programme called Erasmus. anyone who might like to receive this in Tripos by befriending someone from, newsletter and is not on our mailing And we here, in windy East Anglia, say, Italy, but you may well understand list, please contact: have been privileged to be challenged better and continue to think about what and amazed by students whose degrees it means to be a citizen of the world for Newsletter Editor are most likely to be conferred by the rest of your life. Let us hope that Faculty of English Universities in other European Union these musings are the product of too 9 West Road countries. Once again to place our much time in the sun. Cambridge CB3 9DP Faculty’s work in the broader context of the University, although our own [email protected] students do not number many from outside the UK, the University as whole admits 16% of undergraduates from We are considering whether to Peter de Bolla distribute the newsletter by email in other European Union countries. In the Chair of the Faculty future, so do make sure we have your postgraduate sector that figure is 17%. Professor of Cultural History and Aesthetics current address. As all reading this newsletter know, our Fellow of King’s College

2 9 West Road Shelley in the Alps

A detail of the hotel visitors’ book recently acquired by the Wren Library

n an attempt to feign respectability, Shelley being reluctant, and Polidori subsequent visitors, including his distant illicit couples might sign themselves spraining his ankle.) The Shelley party’s relatives Sir John and Lady Shelley, found ‘Mr & Mrs Smith’. Those with trip to Chamonix, in the shadow of Mont it so. It was less offensive, no doubt, to I nothing to hide just put their name, Blanc, much visited by English tourists in the ‘indecent’ and ‘hysteric’ Victorian nationality, and destination. But when general and Romantic poets in particular, poet Algernon Charles Swinburne, poet and political agitator Percy Shelley was to be the genesis of his great poem of who saw the document in the Crewe made his inscription in the visitors’ book man and his place in the universe, ‘Mont collection later in the nineteenth century of a hotel in the vale of Chamonix during Blanc’. (Swinburne did, though, wince at the summer of 1816, he declared himself While touring in Chamonix and Shelley’s bad Greek). No-one knows ‘great lover of mankind’, ‘democrat’, its environs, Shelley repeatedly signed by whom, but the Shelley leaf had been and – most outrageous of all – ‘atheist’. himself ‘atheist’, an inscription seen removed from the visitors’ book by late He was on his way, moreover, to ‘L’Enfer’ by and shocking to a number of other summer 1825, three years after Shelley – Hell. Long kept in the Crewe family important Romantic-era figures. Lord had drowned in the Bay of Spezia, and collection, the Wren library has now Byron himself, no stranger to scandal, had been pasted into Shelley’s own copy acquired, with the rest of the Crewe claimed to have struck out one of of his poem The Revolt of Islam, which bequest, this important document Shelley’s inscriptions. There are grounds is now also in the keeping of the Wren, of Romantic self-representation and to think that this is Byronic hyperbole along with other first editions of Shelley’s scandal. and that it was Byron who in fact works, many of them extremely rare. Shelley, who five years earlier had underlined, rather than struck out, Shelley’s avowal of atheism, made in the been expelled from University College, Shelley’s name on the leaf now acquired shadow of Europe’s highest mountain, Oxford, for co-authoring ‘The Necessity by the Wren (it’s likely, though, that it represents a scandalous moment in the of Atheism’, was on an excursion in was Byron who furiously obliterated history of Romantic rebellion and the the Swiss alps with his wife Mary and Claire Claremont’s entry, just beneath developing rejection of established morals Claire Claremont, the lover of Lord Shelley’s). In any case, the document in and beliefs. Byron, whose child she was carrying. the Wren is certainly the most interesting Shelley and his companions had, in fact, of the atheistical inscriptions Shelley been staying with Byron and his doctor, made on his Alpine tour and the only John Polidori, on Lake Geneva. There one now extant. Shelley’s declaration is the party had engaged in ghost-story written in Greek and in the same form competitions – one product of these was as the lines of Homer’s epic poems. The Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein – sailing leaf on which it is written also includes expeditions, and heated arguments, a pious homily on the majesty of God, matching the increasingly tempestuous to which Shelley was in all likelihood weather. Polidori had in fact challenged scornfully responding. Ross Wilson Shelley to a duel having lost a sailing Shelley’s visitors’ book entry was Lecturer in Criticism race to him. (The duel never happened, meant to be offensive, and many Fellow of Trinity College

english.cam.ac.uk 3 Shakespeare in Swahililand

hen in the autumn of anti-colonial insurrectionaries and of millions of speakers. Meanwhile, 1948 the English students post-independence political leaders. Yet a thriving culture of Shakespeare at Makerere University while these student plays were pivotal in performance had grown up in Mombasa, W in Uganda staged a providing the young indigenous political not among white settlers or the Africans production of Shakespeare’s Julius class with opportunities for pan-tribal of the region but rather among the Caesar, the view from the (largely British) organization and public oratory, they Indians who had been brought over to faculty was that it had been something were far from the beginning or end of build the Uganda railway. By the 1910s, of a failure. Caesar’s death, after all, Shakespeare’s surprisingly central role Mombasa was seeing a dozen or more had been rather undignified, and had in East African culture and politics. separate Shakespeare productions each drawn laughter from the undergraduate If we leave to the side for a moment year, which in many years made it a audience. What the Faculty members did the thrilling - if somewhat doubtful - more concentrated centre of Shakespeare not at first realize was that the student claim that Richard II was staged on an performance than London’s West End. playing Caesar was simultaneously East India merchantman off the East These gloriously irreverent productions, organizing student protests against the African coast in 1609, Shakespeare’s every bit as liberal with their sources colonial government and its puppet arrival proper in the region came with as Shakespeare was with his, give us a figures among the Ugandan elite. The the Victorian expeditionaries - Burton, Shakespeare richly transfigured in his murder of Caesar, then, ritually enacted Speke, Stanley, and their imitators - each new home: a Twelfth Night where the the overthrow of an illegitimate tyrant of whom publicly protested that they shipwreck on the Illyrian coast becomes by those with the true spirit of the nation took Immortal Shakespeare as their only a train accident, Hamlet meeting his at heart, in which light it is rather less reading and who left fascinating records father’s ghost on Mughal battlements, surprising that the spectators responded of reading Shakespeare as they trekked interpolated songs to the glories of as they did. The glorious intertwining into the interior. ‘English Brandy’. My personal favourite of student culture and colonial politics Despite their attempts to keep is the change to one version of Romeo did not, however, end there: members Shakespeare apart from Africa, to and Juliet, where the heroine’s fatal of the English Faculty were shortly after treat him as an amulet that would dagger is replaced with an Asp, making forced to defend themselves from the protect them from the Dark Continent, her a twin in death with Cleopatra. I stones being hurled by the same student the region was soon awash with rather like to think that had Juliet lived protesters using the costume armour Shakespearean stories, from plays to get over Romeo, she would have created for the production’s Roman performed in corrugated iron shacks to turned out somewhat like that ‘Rare soliders. And not too many years later, stories that seeped into the local folklore. Egyptian’. the student who had played Caesar - A translation of Charles and Mary Shakespeare’s proliferation in Milton Apollo Obote - became the first Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare was East Africa of course had everything President of an independent Uganda. among the first things printed in Swahili, to do with a belief in his universality The Shakespeare productions at on the island of Zanzibar in the 1860s, and timelessness, and part of what Makerere in the 1940s and 50s were to and it was soon a core schoolbook for a prompted me to return to my childhood serve as a breeding ground for future language group that now has hundreds home in the region to find out more

4 9 West Road Apollo Milton Obote as Julius Caesar at Makerere University in 1948. Courtesty of The University of Makerere Archives.

What. When. Where. was the chance it offered to examine For some, though, even a Shakespeare The Faculty has hosted a wide contending claims about this appeal made African still allowed the former variety of events in the last year, and its foundation. If the explorers and colonizing culture too much presence on from a day of readings from David settlers brought Shakespeare with them the continent, and in the 1970s and 80s Foster Wallace’s work marking the as a totem of British culture and a proof Shakespeare was at the centre of a debate 20th anniversary of the publication of its superiority, local readings were about whether independent East African of Infinite Jest – soon turning this against them, leading states should (or could) share anything to productions and readings of the plays www.english.cam.ac.uk multimedia/ with their former colonizers. The later dfwallace which showed the colonizing nation history of Shakespeare’s presence in East its own reflection in an unflattering Africa saw an intense struggle between – to the Judith E Wilson Poetry Shakespearean mirror. Perhaps the African intellectuals and the soft power Lecture, in which Jeremy Prynne crescendo of this was the translation of the West in the closing years of the spoke on ‘Reading Kazoo’. into Swahili of two plays - Julius Caesar Cold War. Yet while the end of the Cold and The Merchant of Venice - by Julius War took some of the edge off these For up-to-date information on other Nyerere (another Makerere graduate) events of interest in the Faculty and during the very years that he was debates about cultural colonization, the story of Shakespeare in East Africa is beyond, look at our news listings pushing for Tanzanian independence and and calendar: serving as its first president. These bold far from at an end. My account of this translations, which are a cornerstone of history ends with the curious story of www.english.cam.ac.uk/events the Swahili literary canon, produced not how Shakespeare is once again playing only a reading of Caesar by someone a central role, now in the culture and To find out what Faculty members with unmatched experience of regime politics of South Sudan, where bardolatry are contributing to the University’s change and its aftermath, but also a is affecting not only the cultural scene in annual Festival of Ideas, see: Merchant which draws out that play’s war-torn Juba but also influencing the www.festivalofideas.cam.ac.uk rich confusion of love and money as a language politics of this deeply complex parallel to Nyerere’s own developing region. And so, as the saying goes, the philosophy of ‘African Socialism’ whirligig of time brings in its revenges. (‘ujamaa’). In a darker parallel to this, the last Emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, was at the same time forging an African Shakespeare in a series of state- sponsored Amharic translations; these Edward Wilson-Lee translations, however, ended up turning Fellow in English at Sidney Sussex College. against their patron, and providing a His book Shakespeare in Swahililand was dramatic commentary on the collapse of published earlier this year. Selassie’s deeply Shakespearean court. www.edwardwilsonlee.com

english.cam.ac.uk 5 Digital Knowledge

In the 2015 issue of the newsletter, Hazel Wilkinson described her efforts to establish an online database of printers’ ornaments. A year on, it’s up and running. She explains below what its uses might be. And Ewan Jones, who is also working with the Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO), describes his work with the Concept Lab.

Fleuron

Fleuron is a database of eighteenth- century printers’ ornaments, broadly defined as the decorative features of the pages of printed books. ‘Printers’ ornaments’ is an umbrella term for the devices, flourishes, and images that decorate printed books. Ornaments were usually cut by hand in blocks of wood that developed unique flaws, can help us is to add an ‘image search’ function, or metal, or cast in metal, and came in to discover when and where a document which will allow matching ornaments the form of headpieces, tailpieces, initial was printed, two pieces of information not to be found within the database. This letters, factotums, and dividers. The always conveyed accurately on title pages. is under development by Cambridge’s database also includes printers’ flowers, This has applications for the study of Research Software Engineering group, and or fleurons (the database’s namesake), authorship, piracy and counterfeiting, and should represent a major resource for the which are two terms for ornamental cast book trade relations. identification of anonymous printers and type. Fleurons could be assembled into Fleuron was created using a custom- authors. designs consisting of many pieces, or made image detection program, the Using the keyword search functions used individually and in pairs for smaller currently available, users of Fleuron flourishes. creation of which was sponsored by the have already begun finding ornaments Printers’ ornaments are often Bibliographical Society. The program that have furthered their research into overlooked in both literary criticism and was designed by Machine Doing Ltd., individual printers and publishers, as well art history, since they have fallen through in collaboration with the Cambridge as topics such as depictions of eighteenth- the gap between the two disciplines, Research Software Engineering group. century London, and early zoological being neither full-scale illustrations nor We began with 32 million page images, illustrations. We have also carried out (supposedly) part of the text. There has provided by the online publisher Gale- experiments using 3D printing to recreate previously been no central catalogue of Cengage, from their digital repository eighteenth-century woodblocks. At the them, and no way of locating and studying Eighteenth-Century Collections Online Radcliffe Science Library in Oxford we them other than by browsing through (ECCO). Our program was trained have turned 2D images of ornaments from books. Fleuron is the largest collection of to identify and extract ornaments Fleuron into relief models, and printed printers’ ornaments ever assembled, and it from these pages. The analysis and them on the 3D printer. The reincarnated aims to enable new research by making it extraction process took place on the printers’ ornaments have then been used easy to locate them and track their usage High Performance Computing cluster at on a hand press to create new images. You across multiple books. University Information Services, which can see photographs of these experiments There is extensive and exciting allowed multiple images to be processed on Fleuron’s Twitter feed (@fleuronweb), research to be done both on the subject at once. The result was a database of and find out more about the ongoing of printers’ ornaments themselves, and over 15 million images. To ensure we development of the project on the blog by using them as evidence. Early printed captured as many ornaments as possible, (accessed from the Fleuron homepage). books were much more highly decorated the program was designed to be lenient in its inclusion criteria, so it incorrectly than their modern counterparts, and we Hazel Wilkinson identified as ornaments some library do not yet understand enough about Junior Research Fellow, Fitzwilliam College, how they affected the reading experience, stamps, handwritten notes, and blurred or and Principal Investigator on Fleuron. and how early readers interpreted them. overexposed areas of text. We are using They are interesting and often beautiful machine learning to gradually identify and examples of graphic design, and are remove these items from the database. Introducing the Concept Lab untapped resources for the study of Currently, the 15 million ornaments, iconography. More elaborate printers’ engravings, and other decorative material How do we practice intellectual history ornaments can feature images that will are all searchable on the Fleuron website when the full extent of the cultural be useful for historical research across by date, location, author, publisher, repository is no longer restricted to the disciplines, such as depictions of women at and book title. You can also search for academic expert armed with a reader’s work, theatrical scenes, landscape gardens, ornaments by their size, and restrict the pass but available at the click of a button? cityscapes, and scientific instruments. kinds of ornaments you see by searching When the archive extends beyond the Printers’ ornaments can also be used within subject areas such as ‘History and established Big Names to encompass an as evidence in bibliographical studies. Geography’, ‘Law’, and ‘Religion and unmanageable number of obscured texts, Ornaments that were cut by hand, or casts Philosophy’. The next step for Fleuron forgotten treatises and long-forgotten

6 9 West Road minor works, how does humanistic differs from such precedents, insofar as Both terms occur frequently around enquiry necessarily change? These we are less interested in the semantic one another, even at very large textual questions lie at the heart of the Concept or grammatical patterns that emerge at distances. This is unsurprising, given Lab, an interdisciplinary research project proximate lexical distances than we are in that a text that employs one word is that for the past three years has been the more unsuspected relationships that likely to employ the other, so to avoid running under the auspices of Cambridge’s emerge at very large distances—distances excessive repetition (linguists call this Centre for Digital Knowledge, under that transcend the clause, sentence or phenomenon ‘elegant variation’). What the direction of our current Chair of the paragraph. is more unexpected, however, is that the Faculty, Professor Peter de Bolla. We take these latter patterns to data shows that ‘liberty’ has a pronounced The Concept Lab brings scholars from indicate conceptual structure, as distinct tendency to occur more frequently before the Faculty of English (Peter de Bolla, from grammar or syntax. The distinction ‘freedom’ than after it. Why should this be John Regan and myself) into contact with between word and concept feels intuitive so? After all, to say ‘freedom and liberty’ researchers in cognitive science and corpus enough—yet research into concepts seems just as plausible an utterance as linguists (Paul Nulty and Gabriel Recchia, traditionally falls back into the analysis ‘liberty and freedom’. both affiliated to CRASSH). Together, we of words. Raymond Williams’s Keywords When we move from the data back design new computational resources to (1976) is a case in point: a brilliant, to the texts that generate it, we find a read, understand and manipulate large engaging discussion of the manner in partial answer, in that the comparative historical datasets. A resource such as which the semantic extension and political priority of ‘liberty’ consistently indicates Eighteenth-Century Collections Online resonance of individual terms (‘power’, an abstract notion or ideal, which would (ECCO) offers a case in point, containing ‘culture’, etc.) change over time. But what then produce or result in freedom as a as it does digital reproductions of some if word and concept are not identical? concrete entity. ‘By this means our liberty 136, 291 titles. This scope has transformed What if a concept might exist in a culture, becomes a noble freedom’, states Edmund eighteenth-century scholarship. Burke in his Reflections on the Yet ECCO’s front-end interface Revolution in France. ‘It carries remains fairly rudimentary: an imposing and majestic users can search for a keyword aspect. It has a pedigree, or two keywords within a and illustrating ancestors’. specified lexical window, Alternatively, such a process and … not much else. By may fail to take place: ‘this using the data that underlies whole state of commercial a corpus such as ECCO, we servitude and civil liberty taken have constructed a variety of together’, continues another more complex measures: these extract from the same text, ‘is demonstrate (among other certainly not perfect freedom.’ things) the power of attraction This example merely that a given word exerts on all sketches the possible other lexical material. applications of a computational The principle underlying analysis of large datasets. such a procedure is that work On the simplest level, we can in the digital humanities imagine such techniques being should not merely expedite used to verify or falsify existing what we could have established through prior to its having been articulated as a large conceptual histories, or to recover analogue means; rather, it should reveal word? Or what if the same word indicates, concepts (and conceptual clusters) that what we might well not have anticipated. at separate historical moments, very have remained obscured. The Concept The protocol outlined in the previous different concepts? Lab certainly sees such case studies as paragraph does just this: while we start A practical illustration clarifies such part of its intellectual justification. But it with a particular word in mind, we cannot questions. A dictionary or thesaurus would also wants to raise larger philosophical always predict what kind of environment tend to define ‘freedom’ and ‘liberty’ in questions regarding what it might mean it will be embedded within. This reference broadly similar terms, as synonyms or to ‘possess’ a concept. Concept-use, we to ‘environment’ serves notice of a second cognates. While intellectual historians have suggest, cannot ever be the same thing as cardinal point within the Concept Lab’s at separate moments sought to contrast looking up the meaning of a word in a research. We seek to redirect scholarly their meaning or application (often based dictionary; rather, it relies upon a broader, attention away from individual words on their respective derivation from Anglo- often subliminal network of associations, so as to grasp more fully the networks Saxon or French roots), such an approach which the culture at large hands down to of which they form part, as they emerge, is necessarily piecemeal, relying as it does us. It is in the recovery of these networks mutate and decay over time. The field upon the selection and consideration of a that our work consists. of study known as corpus linguistics small fraction of the available documents. has for some time been investigating When we plot the relationship between Ewan Jones massive datasets so as to predict and the two terms across ECCO as a whole, Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature explain linguistic patterns. Our approach some very interesting patterns emerge. Fellow of Downing College

english.cam.ac.uk 7 Samuel Beckett’s Letters

hortly before he died, the novelist, playwright and poet – and prolific letter-writer – S Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) finally agreed that his letters could be published. He asked the academic Martha Dow Fehsenfeld to take charge of the project, handed over some letters in his own possession and advised her of other people she should approach. He only had one proviso: that publication should be restricted to ‘those passages only having bearing on my work’. Since Beckett’s death everyone involved has tried to carry out his wishes, but what exactly did he mean? To a scholar almost everything a writer writes has bearing on their work, and every omission risks creating distortion. The writer’s family and friends – understandably – would see things very differently. For a long time it seemed as if the problem of interpreting this vexed phrase would scupper any efforts to publish any of the letters, particularly since Beckett’s friend, publisher and literary executor Jerome Lindon saw his main role as protecting the privacy of Beckett and his family. For years Martha and a growing editorial team worked steadily on the project in hopes of finding a publisher who could help break – gainer of permissions to use them. the highlights of the year’. ‘Can a writer’s the deadlock. Once Cambridge University George Craig, newly retired from the letters – occasional and ephemeral as Press became involved in the late 1990s University of Sussex, took on the near- these tend to be – really qualify as great there were extensive exchanges between impossible task of producing effective literature?’ asked Marjorie Perloff; Andrew Brown, the Press’s Academic and accurate translations of Beckett’s ‘In Beckett’s case, yes.’ Tom Stoppard Director, and Lindon, which consisted difficult, idiomatic and often punning wrote that ‘The prospect of reading largely of Brown suggesting items which French. Dan Gunn, a literary critic and Beckett’s letters quickens the blood he felt might reasonably be included and novelist in his own right teaching at the like no other’s, and one must hope to Lindon saying – in the politest of terms American University in Paris, took charge stay alive until the fourth volume is – ‘non’. of the introductions and notes. safely delivered.’Stoppard’s concern And in fact it was only after Lindon’s Arrangements with the Press about timing was an understandable death in 2001, when Samuel Beckett’s were finally confirmed in 2005, with one: very often it is hard to keep up the nephew Edward took a more active agreement for four volumes, divided initial impetus of a huge project such role in the discussions, that a way was chronologically and marking distinct as this, and the publishing world is found between estate, publisher and periods of Beckett’s life. The first volume full of examples of late or non-existent editors to publish what in the end was a – covering the period between 1919 and follow-up volumes. But miraculously generous selection of letters (though still 1940, including Beckett’s early literary the Beckett Letters volumes accumulated. only a small part of the whole), many endeavours and his move away from The second volume appeared in 2011. It of them for the first time, letters which Ireland (the country of his birth and covers the period 1941 to 1956 and takes cumulatively offer new insights into both with which he always had a troubled account of Beckett’s wartime activities in the works and the man who wrote them. relationship), and ending in 1940 France (for which he was awarded the By now there were four editors of with Beckett in war-torn Paris – was Croix de Guerre in 1945) as well as the the project. Martha, now retired, had published in 2009. It was immediately published work leading to his landmark already taken on a more advisory role. apparent what a remarkable body of play, En Attendant Godot, which in its Lois More Overbeck, a theatre historian work the letters were proving to be. English translation has been described as at Emory University in Atlanta, set up an Reviews of the volume were spectacular: the most important play of the twentieth office for the Letters project and proved Seamus Heaney wrote of ‘prose that is century. The third volume (1957-1965), a formidably efficient fundraiser, finder undoubting, delighted and demanding’; reflecting Beckett’s continuing struggle of letters and – through sheer persistence Paul Muldoon saw the volume as ‘one of with the creative process, whether in

8 9 West Road A Correspondent

drama, the novel or (a new venture) radio, while also coming to terms with the demands of growing international fame, appeared in 2013. The fourth and final volume, published in September 2016, reveals yet more about the writer and the man as a literary giant facing old age and the sense of failing powers with a spare eloquence and bleak wit. It was Beckett, in his 80s, who wrote (in Worstward Ho), ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.’ Beckett was a very private man. He was notorious for not giving interviews. When offered the Nobel Prize in 1969 he tried initially to turn it down and then asked whether he could accept the prize but refuse the money; and when he was told this wasn’t possible he proceeded, quietly, discreetly, to give the money away, often to other writers in distress. What would he have made of the celebrations around the completion of the Letters project? We have had I find myself one of the correspondents in volume 4 of the Cambridge University Press receptions and readings at the Irish Letters of Samuel Beckett which has just appeared. In early 1982, I was a newish Embassy in Paris, the Ecole normale lecturer in Birkbeck and the Head of Department, Barbara Hardy, took me out to supérieure where Beckett briefly lunch to celebrate the publication of my second article (these were genial, gentler taught, and the Centre Cultural times). The article was called ‘Beckett’s Animals’, and Barbara encouraged me to Irlandais; the Department of Foreign send a copy to Beckett. I thought this a bit of a neck but, as I was already starting to Affairs in Dublin will be holding think like an academic, vanity got the better of me and I sent it off to Paris. A couple a celebration in November; and of weeks later an envelope arrived containing a postcard, on which (after several there will be further celebratory squinting goes), I made out the words: events and readings in Atlanta, New York, London and – not least – in Dear Mr. Connor Cambridge. We have all – family, publisher, Thank you for your letter of Jan. 22 and for “my” animals read with editors – been on an amazing interest. journey with Beckett over the past decades, and none of us have been The unswottable fly of the early poem (La Mouche) might also have been untouched by his achievements and made to mean something. And the flies in the waiting room at the end of his eloquence. We can all only hope, Watt. now, that we have done our subject justice as we have finally made public Yours sincerely, Samuel Beckett the great letters of a great writer. I continue to enjoy the slight ribbing (‘might have been made to mean something’) I Linda Bree got in the card, even as I appreciated being reminded of two rather marginal creatures Senior Executive Publisher and Head of in Beckett’s work and the fact that, pestering and pestiferous though they might seem, Humanities, Cambridge University Press. flies are kinds of animal too. Indeed, Beckett’s sentences were still buzzing in my ear 24 years later when I came to write a little book on flies in literature and culture. And in 2013 I made good the deficit teasingly registered in the card with an essay on flies in Beckett’s work for the CUP volume Beckett and Animals, edited by Mary Bryden, which I had no choice but to call ‘Making Flies Mean Something’. CUP are kindly offering English alumni 20% off these books. Get Steven Connor your discount by using the URL Grace 2 Professor of English www.cambridge.org/tlsb Peterhouse

english.cam.ac.uk 9 Read Any Good Books Lately? Members of the English Faculty recommend books, and other things, that they’ve recently enjoyed.

Mark Ford’s Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner (Harvard University Press, 2016) is the most enjoyable as well as the most informative study of an individual author I’ve read for a long time. The last of the many strange things to happen to Thomas Hardy happened in the days immediately after his death, on 11 January 1928, at Max Gate, the house he’d had built for him on the outskirts of Dorchester in 1885. Hardy’s will stated that he wished to be buried in Stinsford Churchyard near to the graves of his parents and of his first wife, Emma. But his pushy literary executor, Sidney Cockerell, thought that a niche in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey would constitute a more appropriate resting-place for the remains of an internationally celebrated British writer. Hardy belonged to the nation. His body was accordingly taken by hearse to a crematorium near Woking, and the ashes transferred to Westminster Abbey. While it still lay in the bedroom at Max Gate, however, the heart had been removed, by a local surgeon, and deposited temporarily in a biscuit tin (they’d forgotten to bring a casket). And this bit of him, at least, did eventually find its way to Stinsford Churchyard. Throughout his life, Hardy had been a man torn between opposing impulses. Ford finds in the gruesome episode at the very end of it a ‘telling re-enactment’ of the ‘tensions’ – between metropolis and province, commerce and pastoral, gentility and earthiness, public and private – that made him the writer he became. Had he not spent a formative five years in London during the 1860s, and thereafter returned to the capital for varying periods as often as he decently could, Hardy would not have gained, for all his intellectual precocity, ‘the kinds of perspective on Dorset that would Isabel Allende is known for romances illegal abortion, AIDS, sex trafficking, eventually enable him to transform it that have strong historical undertones paedophilia and child abuse – and into Wessex’. Ford ‘gets’ Hardy. His peppered with contemporary social always triumphant love. This book is a blend of shrewd commentary on the life malaise. The Japanese Lover is no perfect holiday companion for devotees and times and detailed analysis of the exception. In Lark House, an idyllic of the genre and will, as Chaucer fondly poems and novels doesn’t just illuminate retirement home in San Francisco, the said of another romance, ‘drive the night the latter: it’s a continual provocation to two heroines, Alma Belasco and Irina away’. go back and read them again. Bazili, take us on a journey of memory – the WWII Jewish persecution and Orietta Da Rold David Trotter diaspora and early nineteenth- century Lecturer in Medieval Literature and Edward VII Professor of English American racism – social trauma – Fellow of St John’s College

10 9 West Road The Faculty Library and Twitter @eflcam

Donald Barthelme once had a Academic libraries have a habit of adopting new character declare, grandly, that technologies pretty quickly. The Faculty Library is certainly ‘The aim of literature . . . is the up for trialling new things and, along with trials of other creation of a strange object covered social media, Twitter made its first appearance in 2010 with fur which breaks your heart.’ here. Since then we ambled along for a time trying to find Alexandra Kleeman’s new story our way with this new technology, aware at first that those collection Intimations updates engaged in English Literature were not quite so interested. Six years later things Barthelme’s absurdist legacy with have moved on significantly and the Faculty itself now has a Twitter account @ pieces derived from fairy-tales, englishunicam and we have more than 1,000 followers. dreams and small secret moments. The range is broad: Kleeman is What do we do with Twitter? as comfortable reflecting on bad Hallowe’en costumes as she is on • Share library information and online content the challenges of motherhood and food ethics. Full of strange objects • Focus on local Faculty information such as graduate (some even furry), the collection is a training funny, moving curio shop that seeks https://twitter.com/eflcam/status/786578841946816512 to redraw the lines between the or giving Freshers a map to find lectures https://twitter.com/eflcam/ intimate and the unfamiliar. status/783946538322132992 Gillian Moore • Advertise the many local events where Faculty PhD Student in American Literature at Darwin College members are represented • Raise awareness of recent publications I’ve enjoyed three quite different eg.https://twitter.com/eflcam/status/687301023560527872 books recently: The Vagina: A Literary and Cultural History • Promote the Faculty to prospective students by Emma L E Rees (Bloomsbury, eg. https://twitter.com/eflcam/status/748446954091339776 2013) is a wide-ranging academic study of the representation and • Follow publishers, other libraries, and academic misrepresentation of female genitalia through history in colleagues in order to keep informed about their literature, film, TV, visual and activities performance art; No Medium by Craig Dworkin (MIT Press, • Retweet/advertise useful information from other 2013) examines works that are University departments blank, erased, clear, or silent, by luminaries such as Jean Cocteau, • Keep users apprised of changes in the Library Robert Rauschenberg, Maurice eg. https://twitter.com/eflcam/status/778562685919195136 Blanchot, and John Cage; and finally, Correspondences by Nisha • Raise our profile with other libraries, both in Ramayya (Oystercatcher Press, 2016) is a beautiful pamphlet Cambridge and outside from a London-based poet of experimental feminist poetics • Engage, in ‘instant messaging’ style, with student examining Tantra and Hindu questions mythology. • Keep in touch with alumni David Rushner Senior Library Assistant, English According to statistics our followers are most likely to appreciate posts relating Faculty Library to events and library updates. The EFL staff have a very good sense of humour which often permeates library-specific tweets. This is not entirely accidental, as we always aim to be approachable and friendly, and humour plays a useful part in that. Twitter is one of the many ways we engage with people.

Of course, now it’s getting popular we’ll be on to the next technology…..so try looking us up on Instagram.

Libby Tilley English Faculty Librarian

english.cam.ac.uk 11 Athena SWAN Gender Equality and Diversity in the Faculty

he Faculty of English and serious concerns about the promotion already generating a number of plans, Department of ASNC are of women in the Faculty. Despite the some of which are being put into action now participating in the fact that a few years back the Faculty right away: for instance, embedding T Athena SWAN Initiative, a had a very high proportion of female reflection on our admissions process nation-wide award-giving scheme for professors, for example, this is no longer as it proceeds; making sure we have a promoting gender equality and diversity the case, and we now have only one variety of teaching role models and that in academia. Athena SWAN concerns female professor in English and one in we study a variety of types of author; itself with equality and diversity across ASNC. instituting pedagogic practices that the full range of academic activities, from The plan is that departments and are supportive of gender and diversity undergraduate intake and experience faculties appoint a self assessment team and encouraging supervisors to attend to senior promotion and the working (‘SAT’), which, under its chair, Nicolette unconscious bias sessions. Amongst these conditions of administrative staff. In Zeeman, and in collaboration with the initiatives we have been considering Cambridge the scheme initially started in University Equality and Diversity team, having a photographic ‘showcase’ not STEMM subjects (Science, Technology, consults, and collects and assesses data just of former academic staff, but also Engineering, Mathematics and Medicine), on the current successes and weaknesses of successful and influential alumnae/i. but is now being brought in across the of the faculty or department in this area. Suggestions requested! rest of the University. It might be thought As part of the programme, we are trying that we in English and ASNC were to think not just about gender, but also ahead of the game in this area, but this about other kinds of diversity too. The is not necessarily the case. Historically, team then draws up an action plan with Nicolette Zeeman in English both our undergraduate and identifiable – and check-able – targets, Professor of Medieval and Renaissance MPhil graduate results reveal better which is then submitted in November Literature results for male candidates over female 2017 to the national Athena SWAN Fellow of King’s College ones in a number of papers and courses scheme in the hope of an award; over the (though this was less apparent this last following years, the SAT will continue Please contact the Newesletter editor year in undergraduate final results). to monitor progress in all target areas if you have any suggestions for our At the other end of the scale, we have identified in the submission. We are showcase.

12 9 West Road Faculty People

an earworm’s neurotological effects can Richard Beadle be traced back at least as far as the 1840s. While attending to the jingles of Moore, Richard Beadle, Professor of Medieval Eliot, Proust, and Riley, I will be returning English Literature and Palaeography, in Sticky Reading to a number of earlier who joined the Faculty in 1975, retired case histories, including Poe’s ‘The Imp in September. Richard is known both of the Perverse’ (1845) and Twain’s ‘A for his work on medieval drama - his Literary Nightmare’ (1876): these took magisterial two-volume edition of the the syndrome seriously for the first time, York Cycle appeared in 2009 and 2013 and they garnered renewed attention in - and for educating many generations the 1920s, when jingle-writing was turned of students and future scholars in the into a commercial enterprise. In revealing reading of medieval manuscripts (not least this bumpy history, I hope to demonstrate through the development of the MPhil that the interest of earworms may not in palaeography). To mark the occasion reside in their ubiquity, or in the fact of of Richard’s retirement a symposium on their cognitive dissonance, but rather in Textual and Related Studies took place Dylan Thomas, the multimedia modernist how artists have managed to render them at the Faculty of English, the University par excellence; and the other is a book legible, turning them from everyday pests Library, and St John’s College, on 22 about the subgenres of twentieth-century into creatures of the imagination. September. poetry, which will be among the first My research for Sticky Reading has attempts of its kind to evaluate the formal gained momentum in recent months, In October we welcomed the arrival of six integrity of avant-garde poetics since the thanks to the generosity of the Wellcome new lecturers, who describe their work 1940s, from the elegies of W. S. Graham, to Trust and its provision of a medical- below. the misremembered songs of Denise Riley. humanities grant. This will enable me to My contribution to the volume turns on undertake archival research next summer the nocturnes of Jeremy Prynne. in Philadelphia, New York City, and Edward (Ned) Allen My next research project, which is Washington DC, where I have arranged funded by the Wellcome Trust, has to do to work with a range of lab technicians Lecturer in British and Irish Literature, still with hearing literary voices, but is and sound archivists, initially with a view 1830-present, and Fellow of Christ’s specifically attuned to the phenomenon of to documenting the semantic drift of the College sticky listening – that is, the experience of syndrome through time – from ‘earworms’ getting a tune or poem stuck in your head to Involuntary Musical Imagery (INMI). I came up to Cambridge in October 2005 – and to the problems this phenomenon The Wellcome Trust has also provided to read for a degree in English, and I may pose for cognitive behaviour and me with funds to host an international continued here (after a sunny hiatus in artistic representation. A good deal of conference in December 2016: Ear Pieces: Padua) as a graduate student in 2009. my work stems from an unabashed Listening, Diagnosing, Writing. One aim I’ve since held research positions at the enthusiasm for the (old) new media, and of the conference is to talk about the Library of Congress, Washington DC, the from a related curiosity as to how we read, definitional contours of harmful listening in Huntington Library in California, and write and make sound history. My new the last 200 years, from colloquial strains most recently at Jesus College, Cambridge, book is consistent with these interests, but of otitis, like ‘glue ear’ and ‘swimmer’s where I’ve spent three years as a Junior what I hope to do in Sticky Reading: The ear’, to peripheral kinds of hearing loss, Research Fellow. Literary Life of Earworms is offer a model impairment and excess, such as otosis, My research centres for the most for thinking about modernism’s acoustic sound-blindness, and melomania. How part on literature of the nineteenth and sensibilities that speaks also to the findings have such complaints been understood twentieth centuries, and especially on the of the clinical and cognitive sciences. In historically? Whose vocabulary are interface between literary invention and most recent approaches to the subject, we drawing on when we speak of technophilia. My first book illuminates this ‘stuck song syndrome’ (or ‘cognitive neurotological trauma? In bringing interface in relation to a cluster of North itching’) has been attributed unequivocally historians, musicologists, neuroscientists, American poets – Robert Frost, Wallace to the influence of recorded music, and and literary scholars together, the aim of Stevens, Marianne Moore, and Langston commentators have been quick to reassure Ear Pieces will be to excavate the parallel Hughes – each of whom became more maddened listeners that the only way to histories of otology and literature, and than usually attached in the early years of expunge or explain an earworm is to pin it to gauge their present affinities, in public the twentieth century to elements of their down with the latest software (witness the policy and the popular imagination. I hope new media ecology, from rural telephone rise of Shazam, an app designed to process it will be the first of many such events in lines to synchronized cinematic sound. I’m ‘acoustic fingerprints’). What I propose to the Faculty of English, which I’m delighted also engaged at the moment in finishing illustrate in Sticky Reading, however, is that to have joined, and which is already two edited collections of essays that have the sensation of getting a tune lodged in beginning to feel like home. grown out of – but which remain somehow your head antedates the moment streaming intertwined with – my principal teaching and storage media converged as material interests. One is a series of essays about possibilities, and that attempts to articulate

english.cam.ac.uk 13 in the past been read as reflecting ethnic Ali Bonner divides, but recent new interpretations of this linguistically challenging material has Lecturer in Celtic History of the Medieval undermined simple ethnic equations. In Period, Department of Anglo-Saxon, Norse Scotland the contemporary issue of British and Celtic and Scottish identity has produced some exciting scholarship, for example, Dauvit I read Classics at Oxford and then after Broun’s Scottish Independence and the Idea a period working outside academia, I of Britain. studied Anglo‑Saxon, Norse and Celtic in The opening lines of Pelagius’ ‘Letter to The increasing numbers of medieval Cambridge, and have now returned to the Demetrias’. Trinity College R.17.5, s. manuscripts being digitised and put online department to teach Celtic History. xv, f. 156r. Courtesy of the Master and has given a huge impetus to all areas of My research has focused on Pelagius, Fellows of Trinity College scholarship on the medieval period, and the first known British author whose made possible so much that was impossible work survives, who was excommunicated he became abbot of Lérins in the 420s, and before; it is a very exciting time to be for heresy in 418 AD. I work on the then bishop of Riez, not far inland from working in the field, and a special privilege manuscript transmission of Pelagius’ Letter the monastery, up among the lavender to be working in the department of to Demetrias; this Latin text was his full, plateaux of Provence. Faustus too wrote Anglo‑Saxon, Norse and Celtic. considered statement of his arguments about the free will issue; he gave somewhat for free will and for the retained capacity half‑hearted assent to the doctrine of of human beings for goodness, even after original sin, but withheld his consent for Philip Knox Adam’s expulsion from Eden. There are the doctrine of predestination. Meanwhile about 140 surviving manuscript witnesses, Lecturer in Middle English Literature, Patrick, the British apostle to the Irish, held across Europe. The fact that Pelagius’ Fellow of Trinity College works were a staple of medieval monastic took the opposite view on these issues, and gave his wholehearted assent to the book‑collections, and the content of I arrive in Cambridge still preoccupied by doctrines of original sin and predestination marginalia associated with the text, a question I’ve been asking myself for the as set out by Augustine of Hippo. My raise questions about the paradigm of past few years: how was it that fourteenth- ‘Pelagianism’, and during my PhD I next project will trace the impact of the century English poetry was so indelibly realised I had to address those questions myth of ‘Pelagianism’ on the history of the marked by the influence of that hugely before I went any further. This led me to Insular milieu and Continental Europe. The popular and richly complex French poem, a wide‑ranging study of patristic authors controversy kept recurring and was never the Roman de la rose? The conditions of of the late fourth and early fifth centuries, resolved, and much surviving literature its English circulation, the environments and also to heresy studies generally and addresses the issue. in which it was read, and above all how sociological analyses of heresy accusations. The history of the Gaelic‑speaking poets responded to its disorientating In a sense ‘Pelagianism’ is the Ur‑heresy peoples likewise reveals the profound exploration of the nature of love, the place because the paradigm still stands, and still impact of Christianity on the literature, law of love in nature, the powers of poetry to arouses controversy. The result was a book, and society of the Irish people. One of the represent it — all these issues are making The Myth of Pelagianism, which is now in most exciting things about working in the their way into the monograph that’s taking the final stages of revision and will appear department has been the chance to study shaping on my desk and my hard-drive as in due course. I can now return to studying how law was shaped by Christianity, and I write. Although a deeply learned work, manuscript witnesses of Pelagius’ heartfelt the productive tensions between kin‑based the poem’s depiction of sexual desire is and engaging defence of free will. private law and Christian norms. The so outrageous and so destabilising that Meanwhile my overall interest lies Insular milieu produced many legal texts, the Rose seems at once to inaugurate the in the history of the Insular milieu in the both Celtic and Anglo‑Saxon, and these possibility of writing philosophical poetry early medieval period. Relatively little reveal a vibrant scholarly environment in the vernacular for English writers, while hard evidence survives about Britain in in Britain, Ireland, and Brittany. Overall, also establishing the shakiest imaginable this period, but what we do have speaks however, perhaps the most debated topic grounds for such a project. Some of the of Christianity and the influence of the currently in the history of the Brittonic‑ and strange effects it could have on medieval ascetic movement, for which Pelagius Gaelic‑speaking peoples is ethnogenesis; readers can be seen, I think, in the image was an eloquent spokesman. Another the story of how the different language I include here from a fifteenth-century example of how Christianity dominates groups in the Insular milieu created and French copy of the poem, but unfortunately our evidence for this period is Faustus of switched their cultural identities. The there is no space here to discuss just how Riez, our second known British author literary cultural memory that was created this scene is (even) weirder than it might whose work survives, who also lived in is not always backed up by other historical appear. Ask me about it. the fifth century and wrote in Latin. In the evidence. For example, Bede conveyed a I am interested in how the ‘intellectual early 400s AD Faustus went down to the picture of hard and fast ethnic divisions, culture’ of the Middle Ages (in the broadest newly‑founded monastery of Lérins, off the but the flexibility revealed by the personal sense) interacts with poetry, and one coast of what is now Cannes on the French names and marriages of the élites belies element of my work on the Rose’s English Riviera, to live a life of ascetic discipline; this account. British praise‑poetry too has afterlife is how ideas about nature — its

14 9 West Road times. Stranger than writing material for a Californian website about yoga (an activity in which I have never engaged) was promoting cat food in the Kilkeel branch of Asda. I had better luck as an assistant at the Belfast-based Irish Pages — a remarkable publication and one of the best places for contemporary writing that can be found anywhere today. I was educated at my local Christian Brothers school, the Abbey Grammar, in Newry. Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 371, With a brief hiatus, my academic f.139v. education and career to date has taken place entirely in Oxford, where I was most representation, its position in a tradition of recently a junior research fellow at New philosophical Latin poetry, that tradition’s College. I went to a talk by Terry Eagleton interaction with poetry about love and a few months ago where he said that his desire — makes its problematic way into Cambridge training had left him forever a great deal of Middle English writing. out of place among the whimsical pedants Medieval ideas about lyric and narrative of Oxford. I am looking forward to the (categories that interact in a particularly same experience in reverse. The cover of the Palestinian, Arabic fascinating way in the period) are also a language literary magazine al-Jadid (March recurrent concern. Since I work on literary 1968) texts written in both English and French Chana Morgenstern in both France and England, I think a lot Darwish, developed a common program Lecturer in Postcolonial Literature about how to conceptualise the culture in MAKI’s Arabic literary journal al-Jadid, I study in a period in which French was as well as in other party publications. I come to Cambridge University from (like Latin) a living literary and political Analyzing cultural criticism, images, language in England. When England’s Brown University in the United States, manifestos, prose, and poetry in journals frontiers were shifting restlessly across the as well as via multiple cities and research and magazines, I reconstruct this lost Continent and were contested across the facilities in the Middle East where I cultural archive, arguing that the program British Isles, and when writers would move completed my graduate and postgraduate of al-Jadid provided the only democratic through and work in different cultural research. This journey facilitated the cultural alternative to Zionist nationalism environments, I wonder about the category foundation for my work on the resistance within Israel during the 1950s and early of ‘English literature’ in my period. It often cultures of Palestinians and Israelis across 1960s. seems inadequate to accommodate all the the backdrop of international Marxism and The book then goes on to excavate local particularities of the writing produced the anti-colonial movements of the Arab the influences of this early movement by in the shifting territories of this corner world and the three continents. During of the European continent (continental this time, my interests gravitated from the tracking its relationship to two parallel poets writing in French in English courts, study of individual monographs to literary streams in Israeli and Palestinian literature. Welsh clerics writing francophone poems journals and material traces that revealed Firstly, I uncover the conversation between in England, Hiberno-English bureaucratic the complex conversations between anti- Arab Marxism, anti-colonialism and literary culture, a constant traffic of books colonial writers on a local and worldwide popular literature in the Arabic-language and people across the Channel). Although scale. stories of Arab Jewish Israelis (Mizrahim) I’m interested in a great many late-medieval My current book in progress A in al-Jadid, and the Hebrew protest poets — the Gawain-poet, William Literature for All Its Citizens: Democratic literature these same writers published in Langland, and John Gower in English (and Aesthetic Practices in Palestine/Israel the sixties and seventies. This transit camp French); Machaut, Christine de Pizan, and uncovers the relationship between literature (sifrut ha-ma’abarah) provided Charles d’Orléans in French (and English) Palestinian and Israeli resistance cultures in imaginative accounts of the material and — under pressure I usually describe myself regional and global contexts. It begins with existential depravation of Arab Jews in as a Chaucerian. the first study of the literary movement Israel and is considered the bedrock of I am from a town called Warrenpoint established by Arab Jewish and Palestinian Mizrahi literature, as well as a critical genre on the north coast of Carlingford Lough intellectuals and writers of the Israeli in minority Israeli literature. on the east side of Ireland. Interestingly Communist Party (MAKI) between 1948 Second, I look at the aesthetic project enough, the border that runs through and the early 1960s. During this period, of the writer and intellectual Emile Habiby, the lough between the UK and Ireland key Arab Jewish (Mizrahi) Communist one of the founders of al-Jadid, who (and soon the UK and the EU) is one of intellectuals such as Sami Michael, Shimon was dedicated to developing a socialist the few European maritime boundaries Ballas, Sasson Somekh and David Semah, Arabic literature and culture promoting to remain technically under dispute. Like and Palestinian intellectuals such as Emile co-existence within Israel/Palestine. My everyone, I’ve done strange jobs at different Habiby, Emile Tuma and Mahmoud study will for the first time look closely at

english.cam.ac.uk 15 Habiby’s rich intertextual and multilingual and movements. I will approach these prose in direct conversation with the dynamics through frameworks opposed radical aesthetic Marxist circle he was to teleological notions of lineage and at the center of. I will first examine how time, looking instead at how anti-colonial Habiby’s early short stories enact an artists and activists in different periods idiosyncratic development of popular connect through collectivity and memory socialist realism. Then I will analyze and by way of dialogic modalities such Habiby’s literary vision of revolutionary as affiliation and intertextuality, themes co-existence as seen through his linguistic which illuminate alternative modes of and referential networks that put multiple conversation and transmission across histories and temporally disparate cultural time. elements such as Marxist thought, Jewish, Christian and Islamic discourses, and contemporary Palestinian and Israeli Jacqueline Tasioulas narratives into a radical constellation of the past and the present. Lecturer in Middle English Literature, Alongside this scholarly volume, I plan Fellow of Clare College to publish a collection of translated stories, poems and literary manifestos from al- I have been a Fellow of Clare College since Jadid. The overall project will trace a multi- 2004, and before that I was a Fellow of generational cultural genealogy of shared Newnham for five years, so I can claim Palestinian-Jewish literary and cultural that this is technically my third decade in activity in dialogue with developments in Cambridge, and I have loved every minute the Middle East and North Africa. of it. I did my undergraduate degree at In addition, I am beginning work on the University of Glasgow, where it was in problems and dilemmas for the authors a project that theorizes the conditions possible to combine interests as diverse as of religious literature. They are problems, of anti-colonial archives and their Germanic philology and Modern American however, that these authors choose not relationship to cultural production. literature. From Glasgow, I took the well- to ignore, and which, in many cases, The physical conditions of the archival trodden path to Balliol College, Oxford, they choose to explore in artistic terms. collections in multiple former colonies— and a doctorate in Middle English drama. It is this relationship, sometimes fraught, afflicted variously by plunder, as well as My interest at that point was in dramatic sometimes confrontational, and sometimes the destruction, loss and repression of engagement with theological problems: conciliatory, that is the focus of the book. documents and materials—will provide those moments in a medieval play when At the same time, I am under contract models that will elucidate the study. Thus, the action is halted in order to consider with Routledge to produce a volume for I will proceed from the understanding some difficulty, usually in the context of their Basics series. Chaucer: The Basics that the writing of anti-colonial cultural scientific knowledge. This might mean a marks a departure in the series in that histories demands a non-traditional pause to contemplate the physical form its readers will be asked to engage with temporal framework that understands of Christ in the womb of Mary, or a texts in Middle English. I’m delighted to ruptures and gaps not as deviations digression on the capacity of angels to be writing this volume, as one of my key from the normative, linear flow of time produce sound. It seemed remarkable concerns as a medievalist is to ensure that but rather as intrinsic to the practice that plays performed by the trade guilds this wonderful literature is accessible to of cultural resistance, which progresses in the city streets should have engaged so everyone. I have published a considerable in fits and starts and is punctuated by directly with these issues, and this interest amount on Chaucer recently, much of interruption as writers are censored, has informed a great deal of my work. it centred on the role of the imagination imprisoned, driven underground or One of my current projects, therefore, is in his works, particularly the lover’s assassinated. This formulation speaks a monograph that investigates popular imagination, whether in the form of to the question, which my research will ideas about the human body in the later obsessive lovesickness, or the desire of the pursue, of how to write anti-colonial Middle Ages (The Flesh Transformed: the lover to create, rather than find, perfection. genealogies, as they reveal that radical Confrontation of Science and Theology in It is a theme that Robert Henryson finds tradition appears in a manner that is Middle English Religious Literature), and in Chaucer, and develops in his Testament idiosyncratic and non-linear. In Israel/ the ways in which scientific beliefs often of Cresseid. My recent work on Henryson Palestine specifically, instances of confront the demands made by theology in has explored the connection between the cultural and political resistance cannot terms of the bodies of the holy, of medieval two poets’ interest in Aristotelian concepts be made to appear in the form of a saints, or the physical forms of angels. of the imagination, a subject which has continuous historical narrative. Rather, Occasionally, literary authors use scientific intrigued me since I edited The Makars, they have thrived for short periods only knowledge to emphasise the humanity my volume on Robert Henryson, Gavin to be co-opted, labeled as failures, or of Christ, or the perfect femininity of Douglas, and William Dunbar. pronounced dead; yet they re-emerge the Virgin, but more frequently, the Having left Balliol to take a Junior time and again at particular moments of relationship between medical treatises and Research Fellowship at New College, danger, resurrected by scholars, artists theological texts is a difficult one, resulting Oxford, I found myself travelling north

16 9 West Road again, to a lectureship at the University of does go on when I read the page?’ This Stirling. Stirling was a great opportunity thesis explored practices and philosophies for a young academic, offering the chance of close reading criticism through the very to lecture on a wide range of subjects particular example of Empson’s prose. to audiences sometimes as large as four I wrote a book about these concerns hundred people. One of the department’s while a Junior Research Fellow at Christ’s key concerns was that courses should be College (2009-13). This book, Radical available in Scottish literature, and so an Empiricists: Five Modernist Close Readers interest in the late medieval Scots poets that (OUP, 2015), presents a new history of had been kindled at Glasgow took form criticism in the first half of the twentieth- as an edited volume of verse that became century by turning close reading back The Makars. Henryson, in particular, has on itself, paying careful attention to the been an abiding interest and is the focus styles of some major poet-critics whom we of some of my most recent research. It’s associate with looking closely at ‘the words neither fashionable nor just to think of him on the page’: T.S. Eliot, I.A. Richards, as a ‘Scots Chaucerian’, but re-establishing Empson, R.P. Blackmur, and Marianne those links with the older poet, while seeing Moore. Its chapters explore various critical Henryson as one of the most innovative counterfactuals, for example, what if we and dark of the fifteenth-century authors, is could admire a critic who refused either to crucial. There is a monograph there that I argue or to explain? What if paraphrase, to write poems in an intellectual context am keen to write, but it must currently take that violent heresy critics inflict on poems, of solipsism, or when you’re uncertain its place in the queue. In the meantime, wasn’t so bad after all? It circles around and that the table on which you write exists? I shall continue to enjoy lecturing on the delineates one of the most tenacious puzzles How does it feel to write philosophy makars as on everything else, and helping both for modernism and for the student of alongside modernist and postmodernist to shape the next generation’s interest in English Literature in general: ‘the meaning revolutions of the wor(l)d? I’m looking medieval literature. of meaning’. forward to exploring such questions with Since 2013, I have held a College students, while continuing the work of Lectureship and Fellowship at Robinson close reading by engaging with some of the Helen Thaventhiran College, where I’ve been Director of unique archival resources of Cambridge: Studies for Part I and Part II. When not the unpublished papers of G.E. Moore, T.S. Lecturer in British and Irish Literature, teaching, I’ve been working towards a Eliot, Wittgenstein. post-1830, Fellow of Robinson College new edition of Empson’s The Structure of Another archival project I’m beginning, Complex Words (1951), with Professor under the working title, Clarion Call: Wittgenstein explored his philosophical Stefan Collini. In this monumental study, Socialist Modernisms, concerns a circle of concept of ‘family resemblances’ in written across decades, continents, wars, Manchester socialists, who met in the first strikingly material form by producing Empson explores the intraverbal powers half of the twentieth-century to discuss composite photographs that layered four of ordinary-seeming words: sense, dog, their cultural and political encounters, faces: his own and those of his three sisters. honest, wit, fool. Our edition hopes to touching on suffragism and conscientious My ‘portrait’ as a newly appointed lecturer show how Empson engages a host of objection, the little magazines, difficult here has a similarly layered composition; in acute mid-century concerns about how we modernist poems. By turning to this it are the traces of past roles in Cambridge explain language to ourselves and others; heterogeneous set of autodidacts, who as undergraduate, PhD student, research with what techniques, tact, and power of read at a time of transition towards more fellow, and then Director of Studies. truth-telling. structured forms of literary education, I arrived here in 2001 as an I’m also working towards a book, I hope to complicate our picture of the undergraduate at Trinity Hall. I then provisionally titled Extraordinary high literary culture of modernism and to spent a year in Oxford for a Master of Language: Reading with Austin and explore some unexamined possibilities for Studies, where my thesis considered how Wittgenstein, about two ways of thinking new democracies of reading. modernism made new that puzzling about language that seem thoroughly Alongside these linguistic, cultural and aesthetic category ‘grace’, by reconstructing insulated from each other, or even allergic philosophical preoccupations with forms some dance choreographies from the early to each other: analytical philosophy and of reading, I continue to be preoccupied by twentieth-century. As I did this, I discovered literary criticism. Some of these research what cannot quite be written, dance. In the that Cambridge’s closest reader, William energies give shape to an MPhil course I’ll coming academic year, I’m excited to be Empson, had, improbably enough, written teach this coming year: ‘Phantom Tables: able to include, within the diverse scope of a scenario for a ballet (as yet unperformed). philosophy and literature (1890-present)’. the English Tripos and its ‘Contemporary But it was Empson’s ‘logopoeia – the dance This course departs from encounters Writing’ paper, lectures that consider of the intellect among words’ that drew or collisions between literature and the avant-garde performances of Merce me back to Cambridge for a PhD (King’s, philosophy to inquire into how modern Cunningham and Yvonne Rainer; the 2006-9), which took its impetus from and contemporary writers think about composite forms of their twentieth-first Wittgenstein’s seemingly simple question in their forms, sources, and limits of (self)- century choreographies, writings and Philosophical Investigations: ‘Well, what knowledge. What, for example, is it like sketches.

english.cam.ac.uk 17 Literature Cambridge

A trip to Bloomsbury

ummer schools are a rich part of Cambridge life, attracting students who bring great S energy and commitment. For years I had thought how satisfying it would be to devote a summer course to a single author or topic, immersing ourselves in a particular subject, all day, every day, for a week. I imagined lectures by expert scholars, the unique experience of Cambridge supervisions, and outings to relevant places, all in a community of people with a deep, shared interest. Now this daydream has been realised. I have set up Literature Cambridge with my business partner, Ericka Jacobs. We started by offering a focused, intensive summer course open to all, with lectures and supervisions by Cambridge academics, on the writings and context of Virginia Woolf. There is a particular joy in learning about an author and his or her context in great depth, and in trying to understand the nuances of the history out of which the literary work emerges. There is another and Nadine Tschascksch. We finished the Virginia, and Kabe Wilson discuss his kind of satisfaction in the skills of close week with a moving lecture by Gillian project which rewrites every word of A reading with which all of us, students Beer, much-loved Emeritus Professor and Room of One’s Own into a novel about and teachers, have been grappling since former President of Clare Hall, on her an African woman studying English at the 1920s. We wanted to bring these experience of reading The Waves across Cambridge, Of One Woman or So, by traditions of Cambridge English to a a lifetime. Olivia N’Gowfri (discussed by Malachi wider audience. Woolf knew Cambridge well and Macintosh in the Newsletter in 2014). Following this successful inaugural visited quite often. Her father had Alongside her ambivalence about course, with 21 students from all over been at Trinity Hall in the 1850s and universities, Woolf valued what she the world, ranging in age from 23 to 74, called the common reader – she counted we realised that there is a demand for 60s. Her brothers and her husband high quality short literary courses, and Leonard were at Trinity College. She herself as one – readers with things in so we have expanded our offerings to knew Maynard Keynes and Bertrand common, looking for common ground include not only week-long, immersive Russell at King’s, and Jane Harrison even as ideas might be in dispute. The summer residential schools, but also at Newnham. Woolf was somewhat course was offered in this spirit. Our lecture-based Study Days, and a fusion sceptical about universities as places next summer course on Virginia Woolf is of literature and cooking, Literary to cultivate the intellect, and refused Woolf’s Rooms (17-21 July 2017), with Kitchen afternoons, which combine to accept any honorary degrees. When a second course on Reading Bloomsbury an academic lecture with a hands- asked to write for an academic series, (24-28 July 2017). on cooking session. We held our first she refused, noting in her diary, ‘To Our day courses started in September summer course, Virginia Woolf in think of being battened down in the hold with lectures by Gillian Beer, Frances Cambridge, in July. This offered a week’s of those University dons fairly makes Spalding, and me on To the Lighthouse immersion in some of Woolf’s best- my blood run cold.’ Yet she was much (1927). People came from all over the known writings, including A Room of interested and engaged in the question UK and abroad for a fantastic day of One’s Own, Mrs Dalloway, and To the of education, especially for women. lectures and discussion at Stapleford Lighthouse. The participants lived like We visited Newnham and Girton to see Granary. On 18 March 2017 we will Cambridge students in the lovely setting the rooms in which she presented the offer our first Tragedy Study Day, of Homerton College, and immediately talks which became A Room of One’s inspired by the monumental Tragedy bonded as a community. Our lecturers Own (1929). Another day we went course in the Cambridge Tripos. Former included Alison Hennegan, Susan Sellers, to Bloomsbury for a lecture on art by students often say that the course gave Gillian Beer and myself. Each day we Claudia Tobin. them resources to think about many had a lecture followed by supervisions by In the evenings, we heard Susan issues – in politics, in culture, and in Alison, Steve Watts, Clare Walker-Gore, Sellers read from her novel Vanessa and their daily lives – and to understand

18 9 West Road Literature and Creative Writing Courses at the University’s Institute of Continuing Education things with depth and nuance. We wanted to offer this rich intellectual experience to a wider audience, and to offer English Alumni the chance to revisit these powerful works and ideas. There will be three lectures with discussion: Jennifer Wallace on Greek tragic performance: Antigone, Electra, and Bacchae; Adrian Poole on Shakespeare and Rome: Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Coriolanus; and Alison Hennegan on modern tragedy: O’Neill, Orton, and Kane. Further Study Days in 2017 include Alice in Space with Gillian Beer in February to celebrate her new book on Carroll’s engagement with Victorian science, linguistics, education, and mathematics; Jane Austen on 22 April; Creative Writing on 13 May with Susan Sellers; Reading The Waste Land on 11 June; Virginia Woolf on 16 September; and Charles Dickens on 12 November. As well as high seriousness of the summer courses and Study Days, we offer a slightly whimsical set of classes in partnership with the renowned Cambridge Cookery School. The aybe you didn’t make non-fiction and life-writing and poetry Literary Kitchen presents a unique it out to Madingley masterclasses. Or come and stay for a combination of literature and food: a village when you were a weekend for a course on pre-Raphaelite lecture by a leading scholar, followed student, but 10 minutes poetry or the history of the oak tree in by a hands-on cookery class taught by M drive north-west of the English Faculty literature. Details of all these can be the School chefs. Offering include Hugh is beautiful Madingley Hall, home to found on our website: http://www.ice. Stevens’ lecture on E. M. Forster’s love the University’s Institute of Continuing cam.ac.uk/literature. of Italy, followed by a class making Education (ICE). ICE offers regular day Madingley Hall is a lovely place to focaccia and fresh pasta, and Susan schools and weekend courses in English, stay, offering good food and comfortable Sellers on Proust’s thinking about and also has a thriving community of accommodation, and beautiful Capability memory, followed by a class making creative writers attending workshops and Brown gardens to wander in when madeleines. Also on the menu are courses. If you ever find yourself thinking you’re not in class. Students come Katherine Mansfield and the Cream back with some nostalgia to supervisions year-round from all over the world to Puff (Trudi Tate), John Clare: Bread and and classes and that feeling of total and discover or renew old acquaintance Roses (Paul Chirico), Alice’s Tea Party pleasurable immersion in reading and with Cambridge. Literature Courses (Gillian Beer). Fine literature and simple learning, then a Madingley course could are taught by members of the Faculty, but inspired cooking. Whimsical, yet take you back to that happy place, or College and ICE tutors, and our creative still entirely serious. introduce you to a totally new area of writing tutors are all published authors. writing which you didn’t have a chance Recent writing courses have been taught to pursue during your undergraduate by Midge Gillies, Sarah Howe, Elizabeth days. Speller, Adam Mars-Jones and Roger Coming up for Lent term are evening Garfitt. You might also be interested in Trudi Tate classes on Dante, the contemporary the Institute’s part-time Master’s Course PhD Darwin College 1994 novel and ‘making sense’ of poetry, ‘one in Creative Writing: http://www.ice.cam. Fellow, Clare Hall ac.uk/mst-creative-writing Director, Literature Cambridge day. one novel’ Saturday day schools on a range of novels from Moby Dick Jenny Bavidge to On the Road, and short courses Find out more: University Senior Lecturer, Fellow of Murray which combine creative writing and Edwards College www.literaturecambridge.co.uk close-reading. ICE’s creative writing Academic Director for English at ICE programmes cover a variety of genres, www.cambridgecookeryschool.com/ including ‘first steps’ courses and more Contact Jenny with any queries: classes/category/the-literary-kitchen focused sessions of short-story writing, [email protected]

english.cam.ac.uk 19 Your Say

In last year’s Newsletter, Steve Connor asked for suggestions about ways of strengthening connections between the Faculty and its alumni as we approach our centenary in 2019. Here are some responses.

I am intrigued by the changing emphases Why don’t you ask alumni why they In the light of these comments, it might in syllabus and examinations. In my think Cambridge English should, or be interesting to consider an extract from time as a student, 1955-58, Leavis should not, survive for another hundred W.W. Robson’s 1958 review of Tillyard’s reigned almost supreme, John Donne’s years. It should make for good reading . book. was the poetic voice of interest, and . . at least if the Faculty has been doing literary criticism was, to a huge extent, its job for the past hundred! I also think Dr. Tillyard’s story was worth telling, textual analysis. It might be interesting alumni would be fascinated to hear from and he has told it well. But it is a pity to examine a syllabus and examination their fellow grads how reading English at that he has avoided particular discussion papers of a particular generation to see Cambridge has either enhanced or hurt of educational issues that are still in the underpinning assumptions and areas their careers and lives. So might current need of arguing. ... Dr. Tillyard avoids of exploration. What has happened in students. fundamentals. He is admirable in guiding criticism between then and now? Are us through the intricacies of academic there any lost areas? I regret the fading Jonathan Ferry (Magdalene 1966) politics, but he gives us no clear idea of influence of Alexander Pope and would what was—and is—at stake. Is ‘English’ wish for a re-appraisal. a subject, or a meeting-point of several Another idea might be an anthology subjects? Has it one characteristic of ‘alternative’ literary events which I was pleased to read the excellent discipline, or several distinct disciplines, occurred outside the formal programmes. Faculty Newsletter. The introductory or a mixture of disciplines, or no One such might be an account of a visit essay by Professor Steven Connor discipline at all? ... his short epilogue, by F.R Leavis to a small literary gathering discusses the question of the beginnings in which he offers a more general at Trinity Hall in 1957 (?) where he was of ‘Cambridge English’ but does not discussion of academic English, begs due to talk about his relationship with mention a most informative book by many questions. If ‘criticism’ is to be T.S. Eliot. It was a wonderful diatribe of E.M.W. Tillyard, a former Master of the paradigm for the discipline of an total hostility, so much so that when he Jesus, entitled The Muse Unchained, English school, its practice will involve was ushered out of the door, very late, the strap line ‘An Intimate Account of evaluation—the assertion, implicit or he was still in full flow, declaiming back the Revolution in English Studies at explicit, of Personal preferences and at the students gathered on the landing, Cambridge’ (published in 1958). Tillyard rejections; no English critic, whatever he ‘That man, Eliot, he is now such a describes the steps by which the School of may have said or thought he was doing, conformist, if he goes into a room where English secured a syllabus which gave it a has refrained from evaluative judgments, they are all wearing suits, and these days scope freer than that allowed in any other and it is hard to imagine any useful critic he doesn’t often go where they are not, British university. He relates how English who did. But this raises many difficult and they all have only one button done was given a Tripos of its own in 1917 and delicate questions about the relative up, he will fasten his jacket similarly, and that the actual examinations came maturity of undergraduates, about just to be the same!’ And he disappeared into force in the Easter Term of 1919. the setting and marking of papers, the into the darkness mouthing, now to his Practical Criticism in the exam papers phrasing of questions, the kind of criteria own satisfaction, repetitively, ‘Just to was introduced in 1925. This is not the to be applied ... the Cambridge English be the same!’ So much for the morally place to continue with the many names School was and is a great educational enlightening power of literary studies. and decisions involved but Tillyard experiment, the success or failure of One person who can confirm this story is patiently examines the whole history which has a most pressing interest for Robert Rendell, Trinity Hall, 1955, if he of which he was one of the founders. anyone who has any cares or hopes for is still alive!* The book is essential reading for those the future of humane studies in England. interested in the founding of the English (The Spectator, 31 Oct 1958, p.22) Amities, Tripos. Nigel Thomas (Trinity Hall 1955) Yours sincerely, * Sadly, Robert Rendell died in 2011. Arnold Wilson (Selwyn 1951) Dr Helena Shire’s Books Alisoun Gardner-Medwin wrote: ‘Thank you so much for putting my message in the Newsletter. It seems to have been very successful. I’ve had lots of charming emails, with amusing tales about my mother.’

Apologies for misspelling Graham Storey’s first name last year.