Dr Jeremy Scott, Senior lecturer in the Department of English Language & Linguistics is to talk at the 3rd International Conference on Dialect and Literature to be held at the University of Sheffield on Thursday 14 and Friday 15 July 2016. The conference will explore the ways in which dialect is represented from a range of disciplinary perspectives.
Jeremy’s talk is entitled ‘Playing a Blinder: Quotidian Lives and Discourses in the Work of Barry Hines’ and is, in part, a tribute to the South Yorkshire writer Barry Hines, who died in March this year. He will explore extracts from two of Hines’s early novels, The Blinder (1966) and A Kestrel for a Knave (1968) along with a collection of his short stories and poems, This Artistic Life (2009). It will also examine his 1984 film script for the nuclear holocaust TV drama Threads (1984). The paper’s central thesis, is that Hines’s narrative method revolves around the re-framing of quotidian lives, objects and discourses as ‘art’ and as such provides analysts with a workable case study of the essential and elusive quality of literariness in principled linguistic terms. According to Peter Stockwell, Professor of Literary Linguistics at the University of Nottingham, literary texts challenge, influence and even alter our ways of thinking about the world. They do this by interacting with pre-existing patterns of understanding which cognitive poetics has dubbed schema. Hines’s work, however, insists upon the everyday and familiar as the heart of a literary fiction; often, schemas are preserved, reinforced and accreted. What can his work tell the scholar, then, about processes of reading and writing the literary and the ‘aestheticising’ of demotic discourse as a central aspect of those processes?
Full details of the conference can be found at:
www.sheffield.ac.uk/english/icdal3