Blog | English Literature | York St John University
YSJ students can catch a bargain for the two weeks, with tickets for the Theatre Mill production of Moby Dick currently playing at Guildhall for just £10. All you need to do is sail along to the venue with your student card in hand, and quote the words SHIP’S RUNNER on the door.
You’ll have a whale of a time: just try not to blubber during the sad bits 🙂
@rachelatkin_
It’s October! Cue the soundtrack to The Nightmare Before Christmas! Or maybe dressing up in uncomfortable outfits and singing along to animated musicals isn’t your thing, so instead let me recommend you seven books which I think capture the essence of Halloween perfectly. Whether through their use of gothic tropes, ghostly inclinations or murderous tendencies, all of these books are frightening in their own unique way.
You might think I could put any old Stephen King book on here, but I’m a firm believer in reading his novels strategically. His prose has developed significantly through the years as he experiments with voice and genre, and many of his classic horror works sit at the beginning of his career. This is why I recommend you begin with The Shining. Turned into a film by Stanley Kubrick in 1980, this novel follows Jack Torrance and his family as they move in to the Overlook Hotel for a season. If it’s not uncanny enough living inside an empty hotel in the middle of winter, there’s also a bunch of creepy ghosts, telekinetic powers and fire extinguishers that turn into snakes. It’s a staple for fans of the horror genre, but I believe it also plays on a fear of confinement that was prominent in Britain during the 18th century. Asylums, like hotels, were places where people were temporarily contained inside individual rooms, and had the same sense of belonging-but-not-belonging.
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Hollywood Cinema’s most famous axe?
Prop from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining.
Although usually listed under ‘science fiction’ rather than ‘horror’, this classic is just as terrifying as a ghost story. Set in Victorian England, the novel is told from the point of view of a man who hears that a mysterious ‘shell’ has landed near where he lives. After a few days, the shell starts to open. And it’s aliens. The entire country is thrown into a panic and our main character races to London in an attempt to reunite with his fiancée. I can hold my hands up and say this is the scariest book I’ve ever read in my life. Wells’ descriptions of the way the Martian’s heat-ray sweeps across the ground and their movement through the country on spindly, mechanical legs makes me cringe with fright. Again, this novel has been adapted into film various times – most recently by Steven Spielberg in 2005. The book has such a different atmosphere that all they appear to share is a title, but I guess that’s up to you to decide.
This novel is actually the sequel to Harris’ ‘Red Dragon’, but it seems to be better known than its predecessor. It appears in a tetralogy of books surrounding the serial-killer-slash-cannibal Hannibal Lecter, famously played by Anthony Hopkins in the 1991 film adaption. It is a horror novel which feels like it could belong comfortably with crime-thrillers, but it is the horrific descriptions of torture, murder and gore which makes it an extremely uncomfortable read for anybody even slightly squeamish. The head of the FBI Jack Crawford is psychologically manipulated by Lecter, meaning that this book frightens you in a more personal, realistic way than a science-fiction or a ghost story could. Maybe it’s because when you’re reading about something so intimate, it’s hard to distance yourself from the idea that this isn’t fantasy – it’s more about the horrors of real life.
Another staple of the horror genre, Bram Stoker’s vampire novel is thought to be the work that has sparked our obsession with vampires across the globe. From TV to literature, theatre to comic books, vampires are everywhere, but Dracula is always the name that keeps coming back to us time and again. The novel is told in an epistolary format to get you uneasy from the get-go, and follows Jonathan Harker as he goes to stay with Count Dracula for a real estate transaction. He starts to notice weird things about his host though, and Harker soon realises that he’s become the imprisoned by the Count. Although most people think they already know the story of Dracula, when reading this for the first time I was surprised by how little had been filtered into modern culture from the original text. In fact, all that we really have remaining now is the idea of Count Dracula has a guy with a cape who lives in a castle and sucks blood. I’d encourage you to read the novel, just because it’s a fascinating insight in to what a whole modern subculture has based its entire aesthetic on (looking at you Whitby).
This is one I haven’t read, but that’s not because I’m lazy. It’s because even the physical idea of this book kind of freaks me out. House of Leaves is something difficult to describe if I don’t have the novel with me, but is famous for being written so erratically and fragmented that sometimes you won’t actually be able to read the words on the page. They might be printed backwards, or they might be overlapping with other letters so all you see is a smudge. Other times there can be only one or two words on a page, whilst on the next there will be text so small you will have to squint to read. As far as I can gauge it is a novel about a haunted house, but readers keep the details of the plot well buried so that you can go into it knowing close to nothing about what’s going on. If this hasn’t intrigued you enough to want to know what the hell this literary creation is, go and find it in a bookshop and flick through it yourself.
Most people already know the plot twist at the end of this novella. If you don’t, I won’t spoil it, but the key with this one is to go into it like you haven’t heard anything about it before. The use of science and technology reflected the ideas of rationalism becoming prominent during the Victorian Era, which could’ve made it uneasy for many readers in the way it was being used. In essence, Dr Jekyll has defied God (in a similar way to Dr Frankenstein) and this goes against many of the principles adopted by society. It’s less scary for modern audiences, but the plot-twist at the end still channels some important uncanny elements such as the idea of ‘the double’.
Locke & Key is one of the best graphic novels I’ve read to date. It follows the Locke family as they move into a new house after the murder of their father. Once inside, they start to find various keys lying around which give them specific supernatural powers depending on which key they use. Intertwined with this are flashbacks to their father’s youth where a ghostly mystery is brewing, and if that doesn’t sound cool enough then you should probably know that Joe Hill is Stephen King’s son. The series has a few nods here and there to some of his father’s classic horror works, but also has its own modern flair and really showcases Hill as a talented writer.
I hope you’ll decide to check some of these out before the month is over. If none of them take your fancy, there’s still a wealth of gothic and horror literature out there for you to get lost in. If you think you can handle the monsters, that is…
Excitement once again swept through York St John University, as famed author, artist, designer and illustrator Graham Rawle stopped by to deliver an enthralling lecture.
Rawle opened up the talk by confessing that his “background is as an illustrator and designer” and that he “doesn’t have a literary background.” This does not at all infringe on his capability as a writer, however. He has developed regular series for major broadsheets: The Observer, The Times and The Sunday Telegraph Magazine. For The Guardian he concocted the famed ‘Lost Consonants’, collections of panel artistry that depict comedic outcomes when a sentence loses a crucial consonant. Beyond this, Rawle has written several well received novels, such as The Card, Lying Doggo, The Wonder Book of Fun and the core text of his talk: Woman’s World. In addition to all of this, he is a tutor for the University of Brighton’s MA in Arts and Design by Independent Project, and seems to be admirably living several lives simultaneously.
Grahamrawle - collage artwork Previously published in The Guardian, CC BY-SA 3.0, Link
Rawle’s talk focused first on story structure. He explained that a story can be found anywhere so long as it accords with specific sets of rules, giving varied examples such as, “comedians, how they construct a joke, how they can construct a whole act around a joke or series of jokes. I might be looking at exhibition design, and how you navigate a crowd through a space. How to make that feel like a journey, feel like a story. Or the beginning and middle and end of a magic act […]
For Rawle, behind every solid story is strong structure. His claim is that all of these examples, “have a strong three act structure to them […] This patterned three act structure is detectable in lots of areas”. The basic sequence of the Three Act Structure (exposition, climax, and resolution) determines “How people orchestrate things like a firework display […] It’s the sequence in the way you put these things that deliver the most effective show you can”.
“I write fiction, but the books I write have a visual element to them that hopes to carry an additional narrative layer”
Rawle suggested that he approached storytelling as someone with a design background, explaining that designers study the fundamentals of something, respecting existing approaches, and then afterward craft something new. This mindset can be seen in his 2005 novel Woman’s World, in which Rawle to put his own spin on the literary. Spelling out his aims in writing such novels he stated, “I write fiction, but the books I write have a visual element to them that hopes to carry an additional narrative layer”. In keeping with the theme of ‘stories to be found everywhere’, Rawle crafted the critically acclaimed Woman’s World (2005), as a bombastic collage novel. Constructed solely by reassembling text snippets from 1960’s women magazines, the novel has been appropriately described by The Times as, “a work of genius […] the most wildly original novel produced in this country in the past decade”.
The unconventional collage construction of Woman’s World complements the journey of its protagonist, cross-dressing man Norma Fontaine. The women’s magazines of the 1960’s translated the ‘woman’s world’ to him, informing Norma how he can best become a woman. Using the collage, Rawle aimed to convey a sense of desperation: “The desperation was about becoming this ‘ideal woman’ […] the idea of a cross-dressing man in 1962, trying to be a woman, to learn how to be a woman, with only his mother who he can’t ask and not being able to go out anywhere, you look back at the magazines through that viewpoint, and it tells you everything you need to do”. The magazines offered a unique window into gender performance, and Woman’s World achieves part of that effect not just through narrative, but through the collage. Powerful and moving, it is a text that transcends time.
The innovation doesn’t stop in his books either. Rawle is taking Woman’s World to film, and stated that “I’m going to collage the whole film, exactly as I collaged the book. So replacing the story with fan clips to try and retell the story of Norma Fontaine.” Of course, the danger with adapting a collage is the danger of not being able to recapture the magic the collage effect had. No matter how well the story itself is adapted, part of the magic comes through the specific mode of imagery. Nonetheless, at the prospect of a film, movie stars came sniffing, such as Tom Hardy and James Franco. Though the two are no longer involved, one thing is clear: that Woman’s World is as adaptable as any of Graham Rawle’s many talents.
The unconventional appearance of Woman’s World, whether on page or screen, is a step toward true originality. To piece together a story through another’s words, to read what the characters themselves could have read, or to even hold a book similar to what the character could have owned, is an enchanting feeling. Ultimately, Graham Rawle pondered that, “the design of a book has been around for such a long time […] It is really interesting that nobody said to Mary Shelley then ‘what do you think a books going to look like in 200 years?’ It’s unlikely she would have said, ‘I expect it will look exactly the same’. It’s really odd!”
In retrospect, we should have asked Mr. Rawle the very same thing.
Dr Alexandra Medcalfe, “Archives and Memory: Conscientious Objection in York during World War One”. York Explore Library, 18 October 2016
This year’s York Big City Read is Pat Barker’s best seller Regeneration. 2016 is an important year in terms of the centenary of the First World War and Regeneration has been chosen as a book that explores the impact of war on ordinary people’s lives.
On Tuesday 18 October, Dr. Alexandra Medcalfe from the Borthwick Institute gave a fascinating lecture at York Explore Library. Dr Alexandra Medcalfe specializes in history of York during the 19th century with a focus on history of mental health. On Tuesday, her lecture used a variety of yellowed archival sources to guide the audience through a discussion of conscientious objection during WWI.
The documents examined showed how in York, a military city with a strong religious identity and a politically active community, a wide debate on conscientious objection was raised as soon as war was declared against Germany. Many of the documents examined related to the figure of Arnold Rowntree, who as a Quaker and Liberal MP for the city championed the cause of the city’s conscientious objectors, young men who refused to take up arms. Dr Medcalfe also introduced newspapers articles and letters to newspapers to demonstrate how the issue of conscientious objection aroused strong and contrasting feelings across the city. One newspaper article from the Yorkshire Herald refers to a Quaker meeting as a hotbed of ‘shirkers and slackers’.
Picture: a CO rally during WWI
The criticism on newspaper also targeted Mr Rowntree accusing him of not representing his constituency and of being anti-patriotic. As with many other objectors, Arnold Rowntree simply believed that fighting was wrong. He suggested ideas that could provide opportunities for unarmed service because although they did not want to fight, many were willing to do something to show their support. So the Government set up the Non-Combatant Corps to accommodate those whose consciences forbade them from bearing arms, and Arnold was instrumental in forming the Friends Ambulance Unit, a volunteer group to ferry casualties from the front line.
Picture: a Friends Ambulance Unit in action on the Western Front.The lecture was interesting, and especially lively in discussing contemporary feelings about conscientious objection. For the young men who objected during World War One the experience was difficult and traumatic and, while today conscientious objection is often viewed with more understanding and sympathy, public opinion remains divided. Recruitment techniques and nationalist narratives like those adopted in 1914 are still at use today.
York Big City Read events will take place during all October and November and a full list of upcoming events can be found here: https://www.exploreyork.org.uk/introducing-the-big-city-read-programme/. For anyone who is interested in finding out more about conscientious objection in York, on 5 December Clements Hall History Group will host a workshop exploring the impact of WWI conscription at Priory Street Centre in York. More information is available on their website: www.clementshallhistorygroup.wordpress.com.
@behindthecritic
Live jazz music fills the air and guests are chattering, armed with a glass of wine. York St. John University has transformed its Arts Foyer into a guided history of 1930s Harlem, New York.
Last year a group of second year English Literature students on the ‘Literature at Work’ module created resources based on the Harlem Renaissance and now their work is on display for staff, students, and members of the public to see. The exhibition includes film, models, photography, and slide shows. To promote Black History Month, the students have the opportunity to talk about their work and express their enthusiasm for the cultural movement.
Although the students created their works of art separately, together the pieces complement each other to display the rich culture of Harlem. One of the works on display is a York/New York trail, where famous Harlem Renaissance landmarks are matched up to locations in York. The brochure is displayed on one of the walls and is accompanied by a short film in which the creators follow the trail they made around York.
Below the York/New York trail is a 3D model of key landmarks from the Harlem Renaissance. Accompanying each building on the miniature version of Harlem is a plaque listing the pop cultural references relating to the locations used.
Visitors also cannot help but admire the beautiful collages occupying some of the boards at the exhibition. These wonderfully creative pieces combine vintage styling with a contemporary artistic edge to inform the audience about key areas of culture. One golden frame discusses music of the Harlem Renaissance while a few smaller frames look at the works of the great literary mind Langston Hughes.
At the exhibition launch, the crowded room was testament to how student work is valued. The launch night was a huge success, bringing members of the university and the public together. Attendees left feeling better educated about the Harlem Renaissance, and hopefully inspired to pick up some literature from the era.
The ‘York/New York’ Exhibition will be displayed in the Arts Foyer at York St. John University until the end of October.
This Autumn Theatre Mill return to York, following their summer 2015 courtroom staging of Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution. This time the company are tackling a true Leviathan of a text: Herman Melville’s masterful mid nineteenth-century epic Moby Dick. The maritime novel is being brought to life in a new production from the 19 Oct – 3 Nov 2016 at the historic York Guildhall.
Theatre Mill promise a voyage to the South Seas that begins “in a local fishing inn, an in-the-round interactive theatre set where a group of old fisherman meet. Featuring spectacular live music and songs of the sea this promises to be a bold, exhilarating sea-faring adventure like no other.”
Ahoy mates! There she blows!
Currently enchanting audiences as Hermione Granger in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child at the Palace Theatre, Noma Dumezweni has enjoyed a varied career on stage and screen including roles in everything from TV favourites Shameless and Doctor Who to Royal Shakespeare Company productions. To mark the opening of Black History Month, Dumezweni came to York St John to discuss her lead role in A Human Being Died That Night at the Hampstead Theatre.
Dumezweni began the sell-out event by quite literally drawing in the audience, asking them to gather their chairs closer to where she and YSJ English Literature Lecturer Julie Raby, who mediated the discussion, sat. The move seemed natural for the discussion of a play that demanded enormous personal investment from audiences and actors alike. The play is based on a book-length report by psychologist Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela of her interviews in prison with the head of Apartheid South Africa’s state-sanctioned death squads, Eugene De Kock. Dumezweni played the lead role of Gobodo-Madikizela herself. The play reminds theatre goers that, beneath immoral action, killers are mere people – not always the ‘other’. Dumezweni describes the play as being about the meaning of forgiveness, explaining that De Kock, “was able to apologise to three women whose husbands he had killed. They forgave him, because they felt his remorse.” It may seem initially difficult if not impossible to attribute remorse to such a monster. But in the face of murderous atrocities and sharp racial divides, empathy enabled a more complete truth to emerge, placing a fundamental human attribute into a time of enormous strife.
[He] “was able to apologise to three women whose husbands he had killed. They forgave him, because they felt his remorse”
-Noma Dumezweni, on State-sanctioned murderer Eugene De Kock.
To convey this, A Human Being Died That Night was original and immersive in its theatrics from the get go; even the Hampstead Theatre’s bar, and its patrons, were part of the performance. On arrival, audience members were lectured on forgiveness by Dumezweni in character as Gobodo-Madikizela. For Dumezweni, this intervention was part of the production’s wider sense of “freedom of things staging wise. You come in relaxed, and its listen to the story, oh no let’s move you, oh shit I have to move all my bags again, oh now everything has gone really quiet. And now you have to be really referential to the space you’re walking in. You are now a witness to something you didn’t know was coming.” Such unpredictability garners attention and marks memories. No doubt this understanding could have inspired Dumezweni’s chair moving tactics. She adds that in the theatre, “there’s a cage, there’s a cell. You’ve just walked into darkness, and Matthew [Marsh]’s sitting in a silver cell, and he’s dressed in bright orange. You the audience, have to go past him before you can get to your seat.” The audience are suddenly no longer bystanders in the proceedings – but part of the production.
Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela
Few actors are granted the opportunity to meet those they are playing, but Noma Dumezweni is one of them. However, it wasn’t smooth sailing to meet Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, and Dumezweni’s rationalisation for potentially being denied this opportunity was that “someone is playing you, that you have never met, and using your words. I would be terrified, she must be so nervous, because I was nervous with meeting her. But she did turn up, and I was able to ask her: were you scared? And she went: yeah.”
The cast of A Human Being Died That Night had many such remarkable experiences during the course of the production. This included meeting De Kock himself in Victoria Prison. Dumezweni recalls this as being “an extraordinary thing, when you see somebody you’re supposed to hate. But I think the play helped me go along with this as well to a certain extent. I met a human being, who has taken absolute responsibility for everything he has done in his life […] He realised he was part of a system […] I got to meet him, extraordinary, and I can say gosh, I was able to forgive him. When we talk to people, it becomes a different thing.”
“I met a human being, who has taken absolute responsibility for everything he has done in his life”
-Dumezweni, on meeting “Prime Evil” Eugene de Kock in prison.
Ultimately, A Human Being Died That Night counts on the humanity of the audience to engage on an intimate level with characters that are based on real people. Even in the aftermath of the apartheid, one of humanity’s darkest times, human beings will always have the capacity to understand, empathise and even to forgive.
edited by Ollie Driver
Careers website gothinkbig.co.uk are holding a ‘Jobhack’ event with major publishers Penguin Random House. Here’s how they describe it:
JobHack is a workshop day on Friday 28th October in Halifax. Through activities and talks, you’ll learn about how to get into publishing, the different roles in the industry and what they really mean, and find out how to stand out and get hired.
We’ll put you in the shoes of an editor, a recruiter, a marketer and many other roles in between, so you can get to grips with what it’s like to work in those functions. Plus, you’ll even get a chance to network with the team (we’re nice, promise!), get CV tips and advice, and go behind the scenes of the world’s first global publisher.
For more information on how to apply, head over to the gothinkbig website:
https://gothinkbig.co.uk/opportunities/job-hack-penguin-random-house-yorkshire-28th-october
The deadline for applications is 21 October
October 2016 sees a month long celebration and remembrance of important people and events in the history of the African diaspora. It is celebrated across the world as has been a feature of the UK calendar since 1987.
At York St John we will be participating in Black History Month with a series of events taking place on campus. This will include a month long exhibition in the Arts Foyer and three evening events celebrating art, literature and cultural history.
As part of our programme we are running a creative writing competition with the winner to be announced at a special evening with the poet Jack Mapanje on 27th October. We are looking for submissions of no more than 500 words that explore any aspect of black history. We are happy to accept work in prose or verse and encourage you to draw on your educational experiences and beyond.
If you are interested in submitting work then please email it as an MS Word document to Fraser Mann (f.mann@yorksj.ac.uk) by midnight on 15th October.
The competition is open to all undergraduate and postgraduate students currently studying at York St John.
Happy writing!
