Plenary: 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’: Blending philosophy, experience, and literary influence in the Bildungsroman novel.

by Tyler Keevil

 

This paper will examine the work of several authors who have written in the Bildungsroman tradition, including S.E. Hinton (The Outsiders), Joyce Carol Oates (Foxfire), and JD Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye).  It will discuss their sources of influence and inspiration, and demonstrate how personal experience helped them to create authentic fictional worlds.  The paper will pay particular attention to the ideas, tropes, and motifs that are common to all these works.  It will also seek to understand how those elements relate to the wider traditions of the genre.  Additional emphasis will be given to the aspects of the Bildungsroman that crossover into what has been called ‘the antiestablishment novel.’  That is, themes of personal autonomy, rebellion, and the homogenization of culture and society.  Works in which these themes feature prominently, such as Albert Camus’s The Outsider and Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, will be examined in conjunction with those mentioned above.  Through comparison and contrast, the paper will aim to draw parallels between these two traditions, and demonstrate their continued relevance to the modern literary landscape.  In so doing, it will also touch on how the writing of all these authors has influenced the speaker’s own fiction.

 Biography:

Tyler Keevil grew up in Vancouver, Canada.  He first came to the UK in 1999 to study English at Lancaster University.  Since then, he has received several awards for his writing and filmmaking.  His work has been published in a wide range of magazines and anthologies, including Interzone, New Welsh Review, On Spec, and Planet: The Welsh Internationalist.  His main areas of academic interest are autobiographical writing and Canadian short fiction.  Parthian Books published his first novel, Fireball, in 2010.

Plenary: Annotated reading and discussion from Dr. Atkinson’s forthcoming poetry collection.

by Dr. Tiffany Atkinson

Dr. Atkinson will be giving an annotated reading of her forthcoming poetry collection and will discuss how it relates to her current body of work and future direction. 

Biography

Dr. Tiffany Atkinson is a lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Aberystwyth University, and she gives regular readings and poetry workshops in the UK and internationally. She was winner of the Ottakar’s and Faber National Poetry Competition (2000) and the Cardiff Academi International Poetry Competition (2001). Her poems are published widely in journals and anthologies, and her first collection, Kink and Particle (Seren, 2006) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation, shortlisted for the Glen Dimplex New Writers’ Award, and winner of the Jerwood Aldeburgh First Collection Award. Her second collection will be published by Bloodaxe in September 2011.

Plenary: Covering Authenticity: A Few Words on Pop Music and Morality, in Three Movements and a False Start.

by Professor Mark Willhard

 

Like fans of anything, music fans love to argue over the nitty gritty of their favorite artists.  It’s easy to see such arguments – often based upon fairly unexamined notions of “authenticity” – as subcultural, and thus relegated to the underground of cultural critique.  What I argue in this presentation, however, is that it’s not only possible to parse authenticity itself but that doing so is a way, perhaps, to reassert an ethical center to cultural critique.  By looking at the symptomatic case of a song and its cover version, I explore what it might mean to understand authenticity as more than an excuse for toe-to-toe tussles.

Biography:

Having completed doctoral work on Hugh MacDiarmid and nationalism, Professor Mark Willhardt turned to gender and poetry as co-editor (with Alan Michael Parker) of The Routledge Anthology of Cross-Gendered Verse.  He subsequently edited The Routledge Who’s Who in 20^th-Century World Poetry.  His current research interests in authenticity and popular music follow hard upon his publications on George Clinton and the Parlafunkadelicment Thang, and Billy Bragg.  He is Professor of English at Monmouth College (Illinois, USA).

Plenary: 'A Country Difficult to Find’: Exploring the Asemic Hinterland of Poetry

by Professor Peter Barry

This session is about ‘extreme’ forms of poetry – poems consisting of a single word, or even a single letter or typographical fragment; poems which are wordless, or merely a gesture towards the space of their own absence; and poems which exist in perpetual kinaesthetic suspension. These are the provinces of the land of Asemia, ‘a country difficult to find’, from which no traveller emerges unchanged. We can take you there. But we cannot guarantee to bring you safely back.
 
Biography:

Peter Barry is Professor of English at Aberystwyth University. His books include Beginning Theory, Contemporary British Poetry and the City, English in Practice, Poetry Wars, Literature in Contexts, and Enjoying Poetry. He also has a secret life in post-textual poetries.

Deadline for Abstracts: *THIS* Friday April 1st

The clocks went back this morning, and time is running out to apply to present at New Horizons! The deadline is coming soon – so do finish off your proposals and send them in. If you have any queries and want to run your ideas past the committee first, do email your questions.

Please send 300-word abstracts to postgradconference@aber.ac.uk  by no later than Friday April 1st. If you are interested in giving your presentation in Welsh, please indicate on the abstract.

Conference Location

The conference will be held over three days at the National Library of Wales – one of the UK’s five copyright libraries. As a copyright depository, it is entitled to receive a copy of every published work from the United Kingdom and Republic of Ireland – home to millions of books; this the perfect location for our conference.

Between panels and events you will be able to browse in the gift shop and have a meal in Pen Dinas, the on-site restaurant with breathtaking views of the Ceredigion coast.

The Library also has numerous exhibitions including:

Writers of Wales

Jean-Claude Charbonel & John Welson, Surrealism: The Celtic Eye

Tour

As part of the conference delegates are being given a ‘behind the scenes’ tour of the library. Experienced staff will give you an introduction to the library’s history, its collections and its extensive building (including layers of underground archives that, rumors has it, housed the Crown Jewels and Magna Carta during World War Two!).

Coming soon...

A delegate registration form will soon be available on the website - do check back in a few days.

Postgraduate Humanities Conference: Get Involved!

The Aberystwyth University English and Creative Writing Postgraduate Conference is accepting abstracts for New Horizons: Crossing the Borderlands of the Humanities.
  
What is the conference about?

With the rise of interdisciplinary criticisms, new and exciting light has been shed on the humanities, whether new avenues into past or contemporary literature, art or history, new forms of fiction and poetry, or blended methodologies and criticisms.

This conference will discuss various ways that the humanities might approach this new and open territory.

Can you be involved?

Yes!

The Postgraduate Conference Committee will consider abstracts from any of the humanities including – but not limited to – literary studies, creative writing, art and art history, philosophy, history, rhetoric and composition studies, film and television studies, communications, or education.

What else?

Besides panels from graduate students, the conference will feature a tour of the National Library, readings at the Arts Centre Bookshop and plenary talks from:

Professor Peter Barry (Aberystwyth University, author of Beginning Theory, and Literature in Context)

Professor Mark Willhardt (Monmouth College; Monmouth, IL, USA

Dr Tiffany Atkinson (Aberystwyth University, author of Kink and Particle)

Tyler Keevil (Writer of the Year, Writers Inc of London).

Please send 300-word abstracts to postgradconference@aber.ac.uk  by no later than Friday April 1st. If you are interested in giving your presentation in Welsh, please indicate on the abstract.

Coming soon...

Check back for more information and to see biographies of the plenary speakers.