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Research English At Durham
by Research English At DurhamREAD gives you an insight into the groundbreaking literary research from Durham University’s world-class Department of English Studies. Our podcasts feature lectures by our researchers, as well as poetry readings and interviews with authors. Visit our blog and follow us on social media, or find out more about the Department of English Studies.
Copyright: Research English At Durham
Episodes
Brexit and the Democratic Intellect
17m · PublishedThe debate surrounding Britain’s vote to leave the European Union exposed, among other things, a suspicion of ‘experts.’ How did intellectuals become alienated figures? And how might citizens and academics come together in order to better understand the attitudes and experiences of the other? English lecturer Simon Grimble reflects on why despite being in the position of an 'intellectual' he failed to engage with the democratic process and discussion.
This podcast was recorded at a workshop organised by Durham University Department of English Studies, in 2017. For more information visit https://readdurhamenglish.wordpress.com/2017/05/16/brexit-and-the-democratic-intellect/
Will Harris on Becoming a Poet
16m · PublishedIt can seem dauntingly difficult for a young poet to gain a name and to get published by a respected press or magazine. But that’s exactly what Will Harris has achieved with his 2017 pamphlet All this is implied, a collection that explores the complexities of being a person of mixed Anglo-Indonesian heritage.
In this conversation with Suzannah V. Evans, recorded at StAnza poetry festival in 2018, Will shares some advice for up-and-coming writers, borne of his own experience as an editor and now established author. They discuss creative writing degrees, the value of poetry magazines and the challenges and benefits of reading so much of the work of other poets when learning to be a writer. They also have a look at trends in contemporary poetry in the UK and the US.
Will reads three poems at the end: ‘Self-Portrait in Front of a Small Mirror’, ‘Identity’, ‘With Cornflowers’. These come from his collection All This is Implied, published by HappenStance.
Future Memory and Circular Time in Charles Dickens' 'The Signal-Man'
29m · PublishedOn June 9th of 1865, sitting comfortably on his train home from Paris, Charles Dickens had a brush with death. Workmen on a bridge had failed to signal that a section of the track was missing. Several of the carriages plunged into the river below, with Dickens’ own carriage left teetering at the top. The following year, Dickens would publish his most haunting ghost story, ‘The Signalman’. Claire Ashworth shows how this inspired tale is a representation of repressed trauma, that both looks back to Dickens’ own experiences but also anticipates the work of later psychological theorists.
For more information visit https://wp.me/p2iX9Z-7En
The Classical Underworld as a Memoryscape
45m · PublishedIn reality death may be a one-way trip, but literature allows us to travel imaginatively to and from the afterlife, visiting the ghosts of the past, often encountering them in that strange meeting room represented throughout Western culture as the underworld. Dr Madeleine Scherer (Warwick University) is our guide to spectral depths from classical Greece to contemporary Ireland.
For more information visit https://readdurhamenglish.wordpress.com/2019/11/01/new-podcast-the-classical-underworld-as-a-memoryscape/
Polly Atkin on the Places of Her Poetry
25m · PublishedPolly Atkin published her first full length poetry collection, Basic Nest Architecture, in 2017. Like her two pamphlets before it – bone song (2008) and Shadow Dispatches (2013) – Basic Nest Architecture won critical acclaim, including New Writing North’s Andrew Waterhouse Prize. Suzannah V. Evans chatted with Polly about the roots of her poetic life in places like Cumbria, where she now lives, as well as within the StAnza poetry festival, where this interview was recorded.
Read more about this podcast on our blog.
Time and Place: Bakhtin and Shakespeare
35m · PublishedAll the world’s a stage – one of Shakespeare’s more famous sayings, and perhaps now almost a cliché. However, Helen Clifford uses the work of Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin to cast a new light on how Shakespeare’s stage and language are indeed bounded to coordinates in the world. His metaphors often ask us to imaginatively look up or down to heaven or hell, and to visualise where different symbolic spaces might exist in the actual theatre – something that different venues and theatre companies have exploited over the centuries.
For more details, visit https://wp.me/p2iX9Z-7y0
JL Williams on the Origins of Her Poetry
32m · PublishedWhen she was growing up in rural New Jersey, JL Williams wrote a play about pirates. Today, Williams is best known as a poet, but she has continued to sail across various genres, including visual arts, dance, theatre, and, most recently, opera. Although Williams may have put pirates long behind her, associations with the sea, and the dramatic portrayal of a vividly realised world, still run deep in her poetry, as Suzannah V. Evans discovered when she caught up with her at StAnza poetry festival in 2018.
Read more about this podcast at our blog.
Wandering Across Scandinavia in Egils Saga
43m · PublishedAn island nation that wants to be involved in the politics of wider Europe, but also removed from it. A fractious debate over power, sovereignty, the rule of law. The experiences of emigrants and immigrants. Not a potted summary of twenty-first century political events, but rather of the themes raised by the thirteenth-century Icelandic poem, Egil’s Saga, and the travels and travails of its eponymous hero. Kate Marlow tells a tale that gives us a tantalising glimpse into identity, place and history.
Find out more at https://wp.me/p2iX9Z-7xr
Gillian Allnutt on a Life in Poetry
21m · PublishedGillian Allnutt is the author of nine collections of poetry, the most recent of which, Wake, was published by Bloodaxe in 2018. Ahead of its publication, Suzannah V. Evans caught up with Gillian Allnutt at the StAnza Poetry Festival in St Andrews, to reflect on her career in writing and to hear her read from some of her earlier work.
For more about this podcast, visit our blog.
Sounds Unreal
42m · PublishedSound is part of our everyday life experience, but it’s hard to understand and define its meaning and workings; sound can feel strange or unfamiliar when we try to put it into words. Professor Helen Abbott, a specialist in nineteenth-century French poetry and music at the University of Birmingham, introduces us to various ways we might grasp on what sound is, especially through its relationship with voice and language.
For copyright reasons we are unable to include the music recordings themselves in this podcast. However, you can listen to most of the missing tracks via Helen Abbott's Spotify playlist.
For more information visit https://wp.me/p2iX9Z-7qc
Research English At Durham has 45 episodes in total of non- explicit content. Total playtime is 23:22:59. The language of the podcast is English. This podcast has been added on August 12th 2022. It might contain more episodes than the ones shown here. It was last updated on March 29th, 2024 17:13.