Month: December 2015

By Chloe Ashbridge, Ellie Booth & Becca Hall

 

As part of the ‘State of the Art: British Literature’ module on York St John’s MA in Contemporary Literature, students were asked to read Alistair McDowall’s play Pomona, which premiered at the Orange Tree Theatre in London in 2014. On Saturday 14^th November 2015 a group of students visited Manchester on a guided tour of the urban wasteland that lends the play its name, to hear McDowall in conversation with Dr Rachel Clements from the University of Manchester, and to watch the play itself. Here they discuss the experience.

 

“Pomona Metrolink Station (4)” by Rept0n1x – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Commons.

 

Pomona is a ‘grassy limbo’ that buffers Salford and Manchester. On one side of the canal is the Bridgewater Canal while on the other, creating the island and speaking of its past purpose as an industrial dockyard, is the Manchester Ship Canal. As we walked out onto Pomona the only other human present was a dog walker in the distance. This view of tangled vegetation and distant people captured the island’s edgeland feel. As we walked around the island, Dr Alex Beaumont, the coordinator of the State of the Art module, discussed the history of the island and its uncertain future. The discussion turned to psychogeography and how poverty has been hidden in Manchester, both now and throughout history. The increasing sense of alienation and separation felt while traversing the urban countryside of Pomona anticipated the mood of the play, which we were due to see later in the day.

Following the visit to the island of Pomona we attended a discussion of the play with the playwright Alistair McDowall, hosted by Dr Rachael Clements from the University of Manchester. The talk took place in the main theatre of the Royal Exchange, with Clements and McDowall on the stage where the play would be performed. Throughout the talk McDowall emphasised his discomfort with being labelled as a ‘northern writer’, which in his opinion suggests that a writer from the south of England is the norm, whilst a writer from northern England is considered ‘other’. He further stressed that whilst Pomona is set in the city of Manchester and on the island of Pomona it is not actually about either. McDowall described how the play is primarily an expression of his own anxieties and fears, a fact which was demonstrated in the talk with McDowall’s self-confessed unease with talking in front of an audience.

In an interesting exchange, Clements asked McDowall whether it was problematic that such a dark play should index its theme of evil to the representation of sex workers. McDowall’s critical self-awareness as a writer was captured in this moment, as he pointed to his insistence that ‘the actors playing Ollie and Fay should not at any point be wearing sexually suggestive or revealing clothing, despite their employment’. However, despite his strong opinions on the text and precise author’s note, McDowall was aware of the criticisms that these characters could attract and suggested that, in order to succeed as a playwright, one must be willing to grant some control over the text to the director, the producer and the audience.

It was hugely beneficial to have the opportunity to watch Pomona at the Royal Exchange Theatre following our visit to the island earlier in the day. The concept of ‘liveness’, which we had been discussing on the module with Julie Raby, was foregrounded early on, as upon entering the theatre the actors were stood between the aisles and sat in reserved seats amongst the audience. Zeppo, the play’s most omniscient presence, was already on the stage, donning only a khaki parka jacket and white underpants, and eating chicken Mcnuggets as the audience filed in. Due to this staging it felt as though the play had already started, and because it was hard to distinguish between actor and audience member, the performance quickly became an immersive experience that threw the audience into McDowall’s dystopian vision even before they took their seats. The architecture of the Royal Exchange Theatre complemented the immersive quality of the production, as the heptagonal theatre-in-the-round replicated the stark atmosphere created by some urban spaces. The history of the Royal Exchange was also significant as the building had previously been a stock exchange – the trading board still displayed the final day’s trading – which corresponded with the play’s themes of capitalism and the buying and selling of the human body.

The trip was ultimately a brilliant day out that increased our understanding of the themes, ideas, and setting of Pomona and enriched the experience of the Contemporary Literature MA.

 

Every few weeks we’ll be getting to know more about a member of the @YSJLit programme team by speaking to them about their research and teaching. First up is lecturer Dr Alex Beaumont

 

 

 

What are your research interests?

 

Postwar British literature, film and television; critical, cultural and literary theory; political philosophy. My broad interest lies in the intersection of culture, politics and space, so I’m generally attracted to anything involving spatial forms of representation, especially literary geography. I started my life as a researcher working on representations of the city, architecture and spatial practice, but I’ve become increasingly interested in how provincialism and regionality interact with simplistic understandings of nationality on the one hand, and, on the other, lofty claims regarding cosmopolitan or ‘global’ forms of political action. More recently I’ve been thinking about archipelagic approaches to British literature, which seek to understand the complex interaction between state, nation and region in the literatures of the North Atlantic Archipelago (often referred to – problematically – as the ‘British Isles’).

 

What was your last publication about?

My last publication was a monograph entitled Contemporary British Fiction and the Cultural Politics of Disenfranchisement (Palgrave Macmillan 2015). In it I trace the impact of experiments with freedom by Britain’s ‘cultural left’ during the 1980s in contemporary British fiction, and argue that the celebration of the UK’s lively urban subcultures during and after Margaret Thatcher’s period in power has contributed to a political logic which elevates disenfranchisement to the status of a political principle. Practically speaking, this meant that expressive subcultures – music subcultures in particular – were burdened with the expectation that they would develop new forms of political participation for the poor and disenfranchised, which I think is a project that they weren’t really suited to. I argue that the failure of the left to develop specifically political forms of participation during this period contributed to and even accelerated the various forms of disenfranchisement that were part of the Thatcherite – and wider neoliberal – projects. The book includes discussions of Jeanette Winterson, Hanif Kureishi, J.G. Ballard, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Monica Ali, Zadie Smith and China Miéville.

 

What are you currently working on?

 

I’m currently in the early stages of a new project on the location of northern England in nationalist, four nations and archipelagic discussions of ‘British literature’. The referendum on Scottish independence has produced a lot of exciting critical work concerning devolution, constitutionality and political form within the UK, but only a few people are attending to the highly vexed question of region in this debate. I think ‘the north’ (as it’s frequently – and problematically – termed) is a particularly interesting place, because it sometimes inspires calls for regional and even national autonomy, even though, unlike Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, it lacks any immediate historical justification for such claims. And yet devolution within England has so far taken the form of handing political power to entities identified in one way or another as ‘northern’, such as the Greater Manchester Combined Authority. I’m interested in the wider implications of this development for the representation of political geography within contemporary writing, so I’m spending quite a lot of time looking at the ways in which regions within northern England are providing a basis for regional autonomy movements, and examining how this interacts with the broader literary tendency to identify northern England itself as culturally, politically, economically, geographically and even topographically distinct from ‘England proper’.

 

Which modules are you teaching on this year? (UG & MA level)

 

I teach on the undergraduate modules Writing for Academic Success; Contemporary Writing; Gender and Writing; Literary Theory; Gender, Sexualities and Contemporary Popular Culture. At MA level I teach British Literature – The State of the Art.

 

Is there a topic or text you especially enjoy teaching?

 

Although of course I enjoy teaching anything related to my area of research expertise, I particularly enjoy teaching film. On Gender, Sexualities and Contemporary Popular Culture we spend a lot of time examining the interaction between theoretical discussions and cinematic representations of gender and sexuality. This allows me to become my other self for a bit – my film studies self – and I very much enjoy being that person for a while. In terms of a favourite text: on the MA module British Literature – The State of the Art we recently discussed a comic book called Gast by the Welsh artist Carol Swain, which I think is a bit of a masterpiece. The representation of the relationship between silence and landscape in the text is fascinating, and Swain captures emotional complexity in the blank, inexpressive faces of her characters with tremendously clarity.

 

What do you read for pleasure, when you’re not researching?

 

I don’t really read for pleasure if I’m honest. Reading is work – work I love, obviously – and if I want to get through everything I feel I need to, and have a life outside work, reading for pleasure can’t really be part of the picture. There are vaguely related activities I enjoy, which don’t form part of my research activities: for example, I love playing video games – mostly because they’re fun, but also because they speak to my interest in the representation of space. So when I want to read for pleasure I’ll often seek out intelligent writing about video games on websites such as Critical Distance and Kill Screen.

 

 

 

On 2 December Dr Anne-Marie Evans, Dr Jo Waugh and Dr Adam stock accompanied students taking our Writing the 20th Century module (3EN300) to Castle Howard in North Yorkshire.

Castle Howard was an inspiration for the ancestral seat of Sebastian Flyte and the Marchmain dynasty in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited (1945). But as our guide from the Castle Howard Estate Stephen pointed out, the novel was by no means faithful to all of Castle Howard’s features or geography. Not only did Waugh transpose the location from North Yorkshire to Wiltshire in the novel, but as our guide Stephen told us, the paths which characters take around the house and grounds in the novel are fundamentally incompatible with the topography of the house as it is. Waugh did visit Castle Howard in 1937, but when he sat down to write about a Baroque house with a dome and an “artsy chapel” (as the hapless Hooper puts it) seven years later he was inventive and creative in his approach.

Neither are the Howards the inspiration for the residents of Brideshead. Notwithstanding Waugh’s curious disavowal on the inscription page, “I am not I: thou art not he or she: they are not they”, the dubious honour of providing some of the family dysfunctions at the heart of the narrative goes to Waugh’s friends the Lygon family, whose country estate was near Malvern.

 Picture perfect? The way we view Castle Howard in relation to Brideshead Revisited

has been framed by the 1981 ITV series and the 2008 Miramax film

But Castle Howard does remain an important place to improve our understanding of the novel. Inside the short frame narrative the entire story is told by a process of reconstructing memories, and the sub-title of the novel, The Sacred and Profane Memories of Captain Charles Ryder alludes to the two key themes of religion and memories. Brideshead is a means of anchoring these memories to solid and material spaces. Just as Charles’ Ryder’s career as an architectural painter is spent trying to capture the majesty of stately homes before they are lost to ‘progress’ and social change, so too the fountain, the chapel and other key places around the house give Charles’ memories a real depth of perspective.

Spending a day at Castle Howard was a great way to think about how novels engage with space, place and memory. We all thoroughly enjoyed walking around the house and grounds and taking a little bit of time out from the busy end-of-semester period to think about key ideas from the module from a different perspective.

 

Storify of the day