The School of English hosted the annual postgraduate conference on campus on Thursday 16th May. The event is organised every year by postgraduate students in the school and offers students the opportunity to share their work in a supportive environment.
The Conference opened with a panel which examined autobiographical writing in transcultural spaces, including Adhaf Soueif and Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo and intertextuality and memoir in Azar Nafisi’s Tehran. Cross-cultural exchanges and communication, through reflection on the collapsing of the local and global, through echoes of the past in the present and the relevance to political movements were all presented and explored.The Keynote speech followed this by Professor Abdulrazak Gurnah on the significance of the local which raised extremely interesting questions of cosmopolitan consciousness and the perspectives and discourses of globalisation. If ‘writing engages us beyond what we know’ then the truths told still raise questions of universal critical standards – all relevant to postcolonial studies today.
The new scholarship on the work of Barbara Guest, interrogation of her social alignments and convincing arguments on her omission from New York School Anthologies was discussed in panel two. The panel examined the Avant-Garde poetry tradition. It included papers on T.S.Eliot’s broadening of the modernist ‘love poem’ by means of privileging tradition in constructing the inability of men and women to communicate, and the issue of interpretation of translations of Francois Villon’s work, making the case for Rodefer’s subjective performativity as superior to that of Pound and Williams.
The panel on traversing boundaries investigated an eclectic range of genres; from the relevance of Derrida in Hilary Mantel’s tension of language and representation of the body, to his philosophy and how it communicates with conceptual art in Karen Green’s ‘Tiny Stampede’; from transactions between natural and supernatural worlds via the use of sea metaphors in the work of A.S. Byatt to the ‘commingling’ and exchange in the poetics of James Schulyer with a strong case for the potential of phenomenology in readings of the avant–garde.
The final panel which emphasised moments in history also had wide geographical and interdisciplinary relevance and closed the Conference within the true spirit of its vision. Papers looked at how inter-war westward migration in America was fertile for modernist literature, how it engaged with landscape and culture; how neuroscientist Rodrigo Quian Quiroga uses Cervantes’s ‘Don Quixote’ as a literary figure to interrogate the brain/mind in terms of a quest for authenticity and translation; and finally presented as a performance itself – how and why Allen Ginsberg’s Albert Hall readings enact ideological transaction of political agency.
The Conference supper at the Veg Box Café in Canterbury was followed by a superb and entertaining range of readings by postgraduate poets of their own work. The evening ended with the launch of Splinter Magazine and spirited performances of many of the authors from within this first publication.
Professor Abdulrazak Gurnah (PhD director) commented that the organisers of the Conference: ‘did wonderfully well’. Vybarr Cregan-Reid (Graduate Studies director) said that ‘the School of English is proud to have such engaging students with a broad range of research interests. It was a wonderfully interesting day.’