It is risky to teach or conduct research in ways that depart from certain modish formulae. To teach in ways which do not fit the assessment-focused, packaged-learning formats that are currently in vogue is to risk jeopardising one’s own standing within a department, but also, via the National Student Survey, to damage that department in the eyes of the faculty, the school, the university, and of course the media and its league tables. And to carry out research into areas of thought or knowledge that are not currently fashionable (that is, easily convertible into mercantilistic political clichés), is drastically to reduce one’s chances of obtaining external funding, the securing of which is key to the realisation of major scholarly projects.
So by and large we muddle on, teaching in ways we hope are worthwhile whilst also (or despite) satisfying fee-paying students; and writing often preposterous research proposals which make promises about ‘impact deliverables and milestones,’ gush about ‘leadership development plans,’ and detail unique ‘project management skills.’ [read full essay]
So who was François Mauriac? He was a French novelist, essayist, public intellectual and later in life a prolific journalist. These days, though his novels are somewhat out of fashion, he still has a strong contingent of admirers. His novels, like those of two other modern Catholic novelists, Muriel Spark and Beryl Bainbridge, were short but exquisite and perfectly formed. Written with beautiful economy and profound psychological depth, they are a brilliant study of the murky depths of the human personality. There was little that was outside his creative range: incest, miserable marriages, sexual ambiguity, religious hypocrisy and the endless capacity of human beings for self-deception. [read full essay]
The commonplace complaint is that no-one reads reviews anymore, and that reviews sections are consequently a nonissue. But we should read reviews, and we should read them carefully and think about the huge role they play in a magazine. The reviews section in any given publication is oftentimes the largest section and covers a substantial number of artists. It is thus a place where we need to scrutinise representation, but also a place in which a magazine asserts its stakes: if the reviews section is an entryway into the features well, then both the artists covered and the writers assigned may be involved with it more closely in the future. It’s where writers learn to write and where artists often get their first significant bibliographical notation. Lastly, the reviews section has a significant financial role in any given magazine. The fact that advertising and revenue models are changing because of the internet only makes this more crucial. [read full essay]
The success of the SNP, Plaid Cymru and the Greens is strong evidence that building left alternatives is much more effective when done outside of Labour, not within it. Efforts to combat climate change may well be, simultaneously, the anti-austerity and anti-establishment driving force that British politics is in dire need of. The two things must surely go hand in hand. If not, then the resulting environmental cataclysm will drown out all the major ideological debates about people vs profit, independence vs unionism and socialism vs neoliberalism, and the only remaining social agenda will be survival. [read full essay]
When you suffer from stage fright you are inexplicably aware of almost every single body movement: a curve of the lip, a twitch of the finger, a closing of one eye. You begin to wonder how these actions are making you appear to the audience. This suddenly becomes your core concern. Recently, whilst re-watching the first-season of Friends, Chandler Bing summed this up when he weighed up the decision to go and talk to a beautiful woman: ‘I'm very, very aware of my tongue.’ Then a strange external shutdown begins and you enter into a place where all your internal chemicals combine in a twisted science experiment overseen by the ghost of Timothy Leary. At that precise moment you become aware of the growth of your own fingernails and hair. Star Wars fans might say this sounds a lot like The Force, though it offers no such powers [read full essay]
The music and people David Stubbs gathers under the term ‘Krautrock’ mark precisely this definitive question of post-war German life: how to start afresh? Their musical innovations similarly bear testament to the inextricability of geography, of nations and wars, whilst also proffering a radical interrogation of these tyrannical logics. Krautrock is portrayed as blurring the stable boundaries upon which arbitrary identities are forged: ‘Man–Technik–Natur.’ No Führers. Transformation and renewal. Stasis and kinesis. Combinations best expressed, in music journalist Julian Cope’s phrase, as ‘a raging peace’. Krautrock was a many-headed Hydra, whose gestation exemplifies precisely the contingency of foundations that pervades and energises its most vertiginous moments. [read full essay]
Crime was a topic which Thatcher often referred to, especially during the 1979 general election campaign when she frequently talked about people wanting to feel safe walking the streets. She also favoured the use of corporal punishment and voted to bring back hanging whenever there was a vote on the topic in the Houses of Parliament. But in practice, her governments were not known for being especially ‘tough’ on crime. The memoirs of successive Home Secretaries in the 1980s reveal that Thatcher was content to leave them to run the Home Office and to bring forth whichever sorts of acts they wished to – despite the fact that crime rose during the 1980s in a dramatic fashion. [read full essay]
At the heart of the Booker Prize, there lies a contradiction. The Prize is, with very few exceptions, awarded, and intended to be awarded, to a novel which undersigns the premises of a humanism by which we are all unique individuals possessed not only of depth but of multiple dimensionalities. Its recipients should give an image of the individual, bearing the full weight of its Shakespearean contrariness, in time. Yet the victors, along with most shortlisted works, are also commended on the grounds of the recognisability of the personal worlds they portray: it is not just that these fictions communicate unique experience, they make of a unique experience a generalisation about the human condition whose truth is commonly attestable. [read full essay]
A new exhibition at the Barbican explores the relationship between photography and architecture in the epoch of modernity. It is testament to the enduring power of the city in the artistic imagination, exposing the aching desolation of the urban landscape, inhuman and austere – but also, conversely, its site as a crucible of resistance. [read full essay]
Sophie Collins, along with Rachael Allen, is co-founder and editor of tender, ‘an online quarterly promoting work by female-identified writers and artists,’ which, since its appearance last year, has published work by Emily Berry, Carina Finn, Lavinia Greenlaw and Emily Toder, among others. She is currently carrying out research on poetry and translation at Queen’s University Belfast, and her poems, translations and other writings have been published in Poetry, Poetry Review, Poetry London, The White Review and elsewhere. [read full interview]
