Wednesday, December 17, 2014

Classics and fanfic

One of the things I've often heard said is that most texts of ancient  mythology are pretty much fan fiction, since they reuse and repurpose characters that already exist. "Virgil was writing Homer fanfic" is the way it's often phrased. I'm not too sure that the equivalence is as strong as it's sometimes claimed to be. For a start, the concept of fan fiction is predicated on the idea that there are 'official' and 'unofficial' stories set in a particular megatext, and that the official stories hold an essential position of privilege over the unofficial ones. That's not really true in ancient literature - not even Homer is quite treated in that fashion. Still, what the comparison does show is that fanfiction, telling new stories about characters in stories that we've heard, is a manifestation of an urge in human storytelling that has very deep roots indeed, and that making the creation of original characters a sign of a superior writer, a stick that is often used to beat fanficcers, is a fairly recent idea.

Anyway, Juliette Harrison has written an interesting blog post on this subject. And Ika Willis will be editing an issue of  the Journal of Transformative Works that addresses Classics and fanfic, If you want to contribute you have until 1 March.


Monday, October 20, 2014

A couple of posts on my OU blog

I've put a couple of posts up on my OU blog (which I don't use much, but occasionally I post something closely related to my teaching interests).

One is a medium-length exposition on 'What is myth'.

The other, much shorter piece, applies a theoretical framework to a particular myth.

Monday, October 13, 2014

Marcus the Evangelist

I've had my attention drawn to an online piece by W. Robert Connor, arguing that the name of the author of the second Gospel, "Mark", or "Marcus" in Latin, suggests that he was from a pro-Roman and pro-Herodian family. The name, Connor suggests, may be a nod towards the Roman general Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa, who spent two periods in the East in charge of, among other areas, Judaea - as an example of pro-Roman naming he mentions the Tetrarch known to us as Herod Agrippa, but who was born Marcus Julius Agrippa. The author of the Gospel, the argument goes, may have been named at a time when the name "Marcus" was in vogue, which Connor suggests may have been the late teens BCE, making the Evangelist born rather earlier than he is generally thought to have been.

My immediate thought was this: Surely the use of Marcus shows that Mark was a Roman citizen?

To elaborate: "Marcus" is a praenomen, the first part of the tria nomina, the three-part Roman citizen name. In the first century CE praenomina were, as far as I know, the exclusive preserve of Roman citizens - hence the inscriptional formula [praenomen] + filius (e.g. M(arci) f(ilius)) could be used to demonstrate that one's father was a Roman citizen, and therefore one must oneself be a freeborn Roman citizen. If praenomina were in more general use, this formula could not carry the intended message. Connor (who seems throughout unfamiliar with Roman naming conventions) implies that any Jewish family could choose to name their child Marcus; I think that's only the case if the family were already Roman citizens.

Why Marcus? Let's first get rid of the red herring of Marcus Julius Agrippa. The Agrippa part of this name (the cognomen)* is certainly in honour of Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa. But the standard practice (which doesn't mean it was universal - naming practices regularly broke any "rules" that may have existed) was for first-born sons of Roman citizens, such as Herod Agrippa, to inherit their praenomen and nomen from their father. So Agrippa's father, who we know as Aristobulus, was probably Marcus Julius Aristobulus (we don't actually have Aristobulus' full citizen name recorded, but he must have had one). The Julius comes from when Herod Agrippa's great-grandfather Antipater was made a Roman citizen by Julius Caesar. Standard practice was to take the praenomen and nomen of the person who raised one to Roman citizenship, and use one's own name as one's cognomen. So Antipater would have become Gaius Julius Antipater.

Why the change to Marcus? I think this is because Aristobulus was the third son, rather than the first, of his father Herod the Great. Now, usual practice amongst Greeks who had achieved Roman citizenship was to distinguish between brothers through the use of a different cognomen, whilst retaining praenomen and nomen. In Italy, however, brothers were distinguished by different praenomina, whilst the nomen and cognomen remained unchanged; so the brother of Marcus Tullius Cicero was Quintus Tullius Cicero, I wonder if Herod was using both systems; so instead of distinguishing between Gaius Julius Antipater and Gaius Julius Aristobulus, he distinguished them as Gaius Julius Antipater and Marcus Julius Aristobulus. If that's correct, then given that Aristobulus was born in 31 BCE, if a Roman Marcus was being honoured here, it was not Agrippa, who would not come out to the east until eight years later, but the ruler of the Roman East at the time (and Herod's close ally), Mark Antony.

So why Marcus for the Evangelist? One might speculate (and this is very much speculation) that if his family received Roman citizenship from Agrippa when he was in charge in the east, they may have taken the names "Marcus Vipsanius" as the family praenomen and nomen. But one might alternatively have expected them to have taken the names of the emperor at the time, Gaius Julius (Caesar Augustus); certainly this was later practice, ensuring that such honours were monopolized by the imperial family. And even if "Marcus" does come from Agrippa, this merely indicates when Mark's family were enfranchised - it says nothing about when Mark himself was born.

In the end, I don't think we can say with any certainty why Mark was called "Mark" rather than any other name. But this does not mean that Connor's broader point about the pro-Roman nature of Mark is invalid. Indeed, given that I think it can be 100% asserted that Mark was a Roman citizen (which leads me to wonder why it never is), his pro-Roman stance is implicit and to be expected. I also think Connor is right about where Mark grew up, in the heavily Hellenized city of Caesarea, which would have had a strong community of Roman citizens, rather than the more traditional Jewish environment of Jerusalem.

I now invite comments from better Romanists than me.

[Edit: Emma England rightly points out that the above is based on the a priori assumption that "Mark" was the Evangelist's birth-name. I don't think that's an unreasonable assumption, but it is an assumption, and I should have flagged it as such.]

*Actually I suspect "Agrippa" is an agnomen, an additional name, and the cognomen here was the family name Herodes, so he was Marcus Julius Herodes Agrippa.

Wednesday, October 08, 2014

Does Catullus sing Smokey? A meditation on the fannish academic and the return of the personal voice

This is one of those long essays I probably shouldn’t write here. You might want to read this in conjunction with my piece on Reception theory.

I began this piece in response to a conference in Bristol in 2010, organized by the ever-interesting Ika Willis, “Desiring the Text, Touching the Past: Towards An Erotics of Reception” (I fear the official conference webpage has long since disappeared into the black hole of institutional reorganization of webspaces). The thinking behind the conference was inspired by Roland Barthes’ The Pleasure of the Text (1975), and focussed upon responses to texts that were more personal than the usual “distanced” academic approach (you can read some of Ika’s thinking on this topic here). It kicked off a number of thoughts in my head about the overlap between fannishness and academic study, and I wrote some preliminary notes for this piece at the time (initially intending it for the Friends of the Text blog that started up in the wake of the conference, but has since sadly disappeared). It never got very far, as other matters intervened, but I always meant to get back to it. I am doing so now because of a couple of interrelated developments in the teaching I am doing in the current academic year.

First up, I got offered the opportunity to teach some sessions on the University of Roehampton’s “Theories and Methods in Classical Research”, part of their MRes in Classical Research. When I was offered this, I had just been listening to Neil Easterbrook lead a class at the Science Fiction Foundation’s Masterclass in Science Fiction Criticism on the writing of scholarly articles and criticism. That inspired me to want to spend one of my MRes sessions talking about academic writing to the students. Something that never really got said to me when I was starting out as an academic was that I was now an aspiring writer, and I suspect still that most postgraduates think of themselves as researchers and scholars rather than writers. But research in the humanities must (in the majority of cases) eventually result in a published outcome. The various research assessment processes which have dogged the UK university system since the 1980s judge university departments on the publications of their members, which means, in effect, that scholars are judged on their writing, and that those wishing to make their way in an academic career will find that their chances of appointment and advancement are based upon what they have written.

The second thing was that I successfully applied to teach on the Open University’s new MA in Classical Studies. Reading through the first Block, I discovered there a Unit on “Finding a Voice”, exactly the sort of discussion I was planning for the Roehampton students. So I thought it was time I finished this piece off, to use it as a teaching object.

At the end of 2010, John Sutherland, Emeritus Professor of English Literature at University College London, appeared, as he often does, on BBC Radio 4’s nightly arts review programme, Front Row. He came on to promote his then-new book 50 Literature Ideas You Really Need To Know. That book is not of particular concern here, but something he said at the end his item struck me. He said that he now knew so much about how fiction worked, and how it was constructed, that he was no longer able to enjoy it in the way he once had. He wished he could recapture the innocent enthusiasm he once had for H. Rider Haggard, but this was now impossible.

And I thought, “Professor Sutherland, you are doing it wrong.”

This is hardly the first time John Sutherland has been wrong. Anyone from a background in science fiction fandom and criticism who has followed his pronouncements over the years on genre fiction, and why it should not be recognised by the likes of the Man Booker Prize, will be familiar with his wrongness. (And I wonder if his inability to enjoy Rider Haggard any more has anything to do with his hostility towards genre.) But his error here cuts right to the heart of what I believe to be the largely artificial and often wholly unnecessary and counterproductive divide between fandom and the academy.

First of all, let’s define our terms. In a number of academic contexts, when people talk about fannish writing, they mean fanfiction writing, and by “fandom” they mean the communities of fanfic writers who come together – so usually people will refer to “fandoms” and mean the communities that have gathered around fanfics about a particular film, novel or television series. Of course, not for a moment would I say that this is not fannish writing – indeed, a lot of my own fannish activity involves being part of those communities, if not actually writing fanfic myself (any more). But this is not the only form of fannish writing. [Edit: And see also Kate Keen's very valid point in the comment below that these writers write more than just fanfic.] There are a lot of different fandoms out there, and in many of them, the predominant writing mode is non-fiction rather than fiction. This is true, for instance, of the science fiction fanzines that were my main outlet for writing in the period 2000-2002, which were (and remain) full of critical analyses of texts. Other fandoms, such as Doctor Who, have devoted as much attention to analysing official stories as to creating new ones. So when I discuss fannish writing here, what I primarily mean is that critical analysis.

Fandom often sets itself up in opposition to academia. Academics are viewed as outsiders, and academic writing and teaching is seen as sucking all the enjoyment out of reading texts, exactly as Sutherland feels it does. On the academic side, there are some who are dismissive of the obsessiveness of fans; but as others have observed, it is a bit rich for anyone who conducts detailed academic research to use “obsessive” in a pejorative fashion.

This opposition between fandom and academia is, in my view, largely false. For a start, there are many academics (e.g. myself, Farah Mendlesohn, Juliette Harrisson, etc.) who self-identify as fans, and attend fannish events such as Eastercons or what was once the SFX Weekender. “They” are “us” in this case. And fans, as Stacie L. Hanes (another person both fan and academic) has pointed out, are entirely capable of engaging in exactly the sort of detailed and lengthy analysis of texts that academics do, in a manner that is often indistinguishable beyond the apparatus of academic criticism (footnotes, bibliographies, etc.). By doing so, not only do these fans demonstrate the falsity of the divide between academia and fandom, but they also demonstrate the falsity of Sutherland’s assertion that detailed study of the mechanics of texts robs you of the ability to enjoy them. Rather, if approached properly, this study (and being taught about texts) should enhance your enjoyment. 

Unfortunately, study of texts is associated in many people’s minds with school experience, and being made for class to read literary works that you don’t want to. This, I would say, is nothing to do with the quality of teaching (or of the texts – I appreciate that the antipathy I picked up towards Dickens from school is probably largely unfair), it’s just the child’s natural resistance to being forced to do anything; but it does lead to an attitude that is hard to shift, that analysis of a text and love of that text are antithetical (and that brings us back to the theme of the Bristol conference).

Much is lost through this division. There’s a really good discussion of the things that academics and fans can bring to each other in the “Introduction” to Matt Hills’ Triumph of a Time Lord. I recommend everyone reads this. However, there is also some recent pushing back from the academic side against the concept of the “acafan” – I particularly remember the closing session of the 2011 conference “Alien Nation: A Conference on British Science Fiction, Horror and Fantasy Television” at Northumbria University, where Ian Hunter argued for a move away from the acafan and paying attention to fandom, which prompted James Chapman to say that he didn’t see himself as a fan of the texts that he wrote about. Now, since I believe fervently (in contrast to the self-appointed gatekeepers of some fandoms) that “fan” is a term of self-definition, and not a label that anyone else can grant or withhold, I cannot object to Chapman’s choice not to define himself in that way (Hunter and Chapman are, incidentally, both scholars that I respect). And I can also see that scholars working with fan readings of texts run the risk of assuming (almost always incorrectly) that fan readings necessarily represent the responses of the wider audience (the problem is, of course, that while I understand what Hunter is trying to move towards, the casual consumer of a text – what Hunter calls the “indifferent audience” – tends not to record their reaction to a text in any form that is easily accessible to scholars).

But I do feel that scholars are in some manner fans, or enthusiasts, of the texts that they study, or even that they love them. I mean, if you have devoted your life to the study of the Aeneid, there must be something about that text that attracts you. I can imagine that people might write commentaries on texts in which they are not really interested, but I can’t imagine they would be particularly good, and I suspect almost always there is something in a project that engages the scholar's interests and enthusiasm. And where there is enthusiasm, I feel that there is a lot of value in scholars admitting this. It destroys the myth of academic objectivity, and allows you to situate yourself in relation to the text, thus ensuring that your audience knows exactly where you stand. 

So, for instance, when I teach cinema history, I feel there is value in letting the students know that, whilst I admire Citizen Kane (1940) for its cinematic techniques, I’m never going to love it the way I love Casablanca (1942), or that while I can see there are interesting things to say about James Cameron’s Titanic (1997), particularly in relation to the way it uses the tropes of 1940s melodrama, the way it is coded as a science fiction movie without actually being a science fiction movie, and its status as a cultural and economic phenomenon, I have to grit my teeth every time I’m required to watch it.

I think an awareness of the scope of your emotional engagement with a text may perhaps help avoid some potentially spurious avenues of research. I’ll begin with a possibly unfair example. Some recent work on the Aeneid has postulated that, far from being the unqualified work of propaganda for the regime of the emperor Augustus that everyone used to believe it is, The Aeneid actually includes some subtle criticism of Augustus. I’m not sure I buy this; if the criticism is sufficiently unsubtle to be picked up by modern scholarship, there’s a good chance it might be something that Augustus himself could spot, which might have landed Virgil in the sort of situation vis-à-vis the emperor that Ovid later faced.

Now, as I say, I may be out of order in postulating this (and perhaps just treat this as a thought experiment), but I find myself wondering if what is going on here is a clash between a love of Virgil’s craft and a dislike of the imperial system he endorses. This wasn’t an issue, at least in terms of what filtered through to students, when I was being first educated. Everyone admired Virgil, and everyone admired Augustus for bringing the Roman world out of chaos and into order (these were the days when the Roman principate was described as a sort of “constitutional monarchy”). In our post-colonial age, people are rather more wary about praising imperialists, and can see that, while it certainly can be argued that some aspects of the Augustan settlement benefited some people (the transformation of provincial government from a licence to steal to something that actually had to be done properly must have had an impact, at least on provincial élites), the emperor’s position was extra-constitutional, being a military dictatorship covered by a veneer of legality, and that intellectual freedom was not what it had been under the Republic (Catullus could never have been tolerated under Augustus as he was under Caesar.) 

But we still admire the poetry of Virgil. So are attempts to argue that Virgil is actually criticizing Augustus manifestations of a desire to continue admiring Virgil whilst removing uncomfortable elements of his political allegiance? As I say, I’m no Virgil scholar, and I’m surely oversimplifying, so I could be wrong here, though this review does make similar points about the so-called “pessimistic” reading of Virgil. If I’m right, I don’t think this is the way to go; better to acknowledge both the greatness of Virgil’s art, and the problems of the propaganda in the poem. I recommend “How to be a fan of problematic things” as a guide to how to handle this sort of issue. But as I say (and yes, this is getting boring), I could be wrong, and constructing a pure straw man in this part of my argument.

In any case, the point that is actually important here is that a more openly fannish attitude towards the text being discussed might at least enable readers to make a more accurate judgement about whether affection for Virgil is distorting anyone’s arguments, and perhaps even help authors take into account their own biases.

So let’s move onto something a bit more solid. For a really egregious example of how wrong scholarship can get when it is divorced from an emotional response to the text, I offer the late Guy Lee’s commentary on Catullus, Poem 85. Lee was an eminent Latinist, and his Oxford World’s Classics translation is well-respected, and appears on a lot of reading lists. I haven’t read enough of the work to form an overall judgement of it, but I think he goes badly astray with his commentary on this poem, one of Catullus’ most famous:

Odi et amo. quare id faciam, fortasse requiris.
nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior.

I hate and I love. Why do I do that, you might ask?
I do not know, but I sense it happening, and I am torn apart.

Here is what Lee has to say about it in his notes:

This famous epigram disproves the theory that every good poem provides all the information needed to understand it. Presented with it out of context one could not possibly know that Catullus was talking about hating and loving the same woman at the same time. In other words we need to have read LXXII, LXXV and LXXVI in order to understand it.

I have used this poem and Lee’s comment when I was teaching Intermediate Latin, and the students I taught had much the same reaction as me to what Lee says here – that it’s an astonishing misreading of the poem, and in fact, palpable nonsense. The poem does contain everything necessary for its understanding, and that Catullus is hating and loving the same woman ought to be apparent from the second line; indeed, to admit the possibility that this is not the case is to render that line ridiculous. There is no emotional conflict inherent in loving one person and hating another, and it can hardly be described as “excruciating”.

No-one needs to have read another word of Catullus, or even to know anything more about him, to see that the object of odi and that of amo must be the same. You need only to have been in love with someone and feel that said person has unforgivably betrayed or hurt you, and be in that cleft stick of hating them for what they have done to you but still unable to shake the love you had for them in the first place – or to be aware that these sorts of things can happen. It is the same emotion expressed, if less elliptically, in Smokey Robinson’s “You Really Got A Hold Of Me”: “I don’t like you, but I love you.” It is precisely because of the universality of its sentiment that the poem is so famous (it is in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations). Through his commentary, Lee inadvertently casts himself in the role of Catullus’ clueless addressee, who can’t quite understand what the fuss is all about. (It is true that Catullus also deals with conflicted feelings, specifically towards Lesbia, in poems 72, 75 and 77, but that does not mean knowledge of those poems is needed to understand the emotional impact of 85.)

I have a sneaking suspicion (and this may get me into trouble) that part of the problem that results in comments like Lee’s is the emphasis placed upon philology in the discipline of Classical Studies (Lee’s introduction to his translation of Catullus is quite philological in its approach). Philology is the intensive study of the language and its constructions, through close detailed analysis of the texts. Philology is, of course, vital to a subject based upon texts in foreign and ancient languages. The only reason we can say anything at all about Catullus is that philologists have worked on the manuscripts, and given us confidence in the published texts from which we work. Everybody working in Classical Studies, in my opinion, needs to know a bit of philology.

The problem comes when some seem to suggest that philology is all that is needed, that once the intricacies of Greek and Latin grammar are mastered, any other skills (e.g. literary or historical analysis) are easily picked up without really trying. This, I fear, can lead to poor scholarship. Philology is very useful for drawing out what a text says, but it is rather less useful when it comes to what that text means (I well remember a conversation with Professor Emeritus Christopher Rowe where he expressed the view that it may be true that undergraduates are overall less able to read Latin and Greek than they were, but that critics, in focussing on that, are overlooking that these self-same undergraduates are far better equipped than their predecessors to talk about Greek and Latin works as literature). My suspicion is that an over-emphasis on philological training at the expense of anything else leads to commentary on love poetry that seems disconnected from the emotions that said poetry deals with; or people writing on Aristophanes who can tease out the complications of his syntax, but seem unable to spot where he is making a joke (and to judging the reliability of historians at least partially on the attractiveness of their literary style, and whether they tell us that they are intrinsically trustworthy – but that’s probably a rant for some other time).

I don’t mean, of course, to condemn anyone with a philological training – the majority of philologists are really good, and are aware that there is more to talking about a text than simply the philological approach. Indeed, there’s a lot of that sort of training in my background, though tempered by a Ph.D. completed in a History department, for which I will always be grateful.

What I am saying is that we, as a discipline, need to be aware of a wide range of issues when writing about texts, possibly a wider range than we sometimes consider, and that a “fannish” approach (or however you wish to describe it) can be an advantage here.

Writing with a fannish perspective almost inevitably involves writing from a personal point of view. Classics/Classical Studies academia has been here before. Twenty years ago “personal voice criticism” burst into the field, with sessions at the American Philological Association in 1994 and the Classical Association in St Andrews in 1995 (where the late David West criticised the approach in his Presidential Address as part of a general call for the rejection of “theory”). I didn’t attend the APA or Scottish CA sessions, but I was at the St Andrews conference, and I do recall there being a buzz around it about the papers (much of it, I recall, antipathetic responses to Judy Hallett’s paper about American universities’ preference for employing British scholars over Americans, a thesis which she perhaps overstated, but which probably carries more weight than it was allowed). This activity culminated in the publication of Compromising Traditions: The Personal Voice in Classical Scholarship, edited by Hallett and Thomas van Northwick (1997). And there overt theoretical exploration of the personal voice seems to have stopped, bar a couple of reviews, e.g. one by Gideon Nisbet in Bryn Mawr Classical Review (on his own admission written by “a younger and angrier Nisbet”), and an even more hostile one in Classical Journal. Clearly the issue occasionally resurfaces, at least as a practical consideration, as indicated in a report of a Twitter debate that Liz Gloyn was part of back in 2012. [Edit 20/10/14: I checked with Liz, and this debate seems to have been a general academic one, rather than one confined to Classical Studies. I have no idea of the state of play of the debate on the personal voice outside of Classical Studies.] There are clearly some scholars who have subsumed the personal voice in practice, very often, as both Liz and I have noted, in Reception Studies, where perhaps the nature of the material makes a less formal approach more comfortable.

But it is a shame that theoretical debate has not really continued – as Gideon says in a comment on Liz’s post, this is a conversation we should have continued having in the discipline (though, as I note at the beginning of this piece, it is interesting that the OU’s new MA course chooses to engage directly with the personal voice). Perhaps now is the time for it to come back. For me, the intrinsic advantages of the personal voice still apply. With impersonal usage, it is too easy for statements to appear as objective facts, when they are actually statements of opinion. I am not arguing that there is no such thing as an objective fact – it is, for instance, simply the case that the Cato who appears on stage in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is Portia’s brother and not, as Wikipedia had it until I found this and corrected it, her father. But that is a completely different statement from “Wordsworth is a better poet than Bob Dylan”, which, however much I may agree with it, remains a subjective statement of opinion. At its most egregious (yes, this is my current favourite word), an over-reliance upon the impersonal can result in students writing “It is suggested that…”, implying the existence of some third party consulted, when what they actually mean is “I wish to suggest that…” But more subtly, and perhaps more dangerously, I have seen articles in which subjective opinions are then employed as if they are objective facts – canon creation is full of this (see the Wordsworth/Dylan comment above, which is something I genuinely heard on Radio 4 – it’s entirely possible that it was John Sutherland again). And I repeat, expressing enthusiasm for your subject matter is no bad thing. I am just about to finish a long-delayed review of Classics and Comics, [Edit 21/02/21: don't go looking for this - I never finished it.] and one of the points I will make there is that a weakness of the volume (one that I am sure the editors wished to avoid) is that few of the pieces capture the enthusiasm for the subject matter that informs the best writing in comics fandom.

My own feeling about Compromising Traditions is that it often falls short of its hoped-for target because, whilst all the contributors are theoretically interested in the personal voice, not all of them actually have practical experience of its application. This results in writers unsure of their tone, and often in danger of crossing the line between writing with a personal perspective and over-sharing (I personally feel that on at least one occasion that line is crossed). I don’t myself think that the personal voice requires the dumping of large elements of autobiography into your writing – it requires merely writing from your own perspective (rather than from some omniscient “objective” view). You can liven your writing up with anecdotes without necessarily revealing your every emotion.

The solution to the problem of lack of practice in the personal voice is, of course, to practise the personal voice. And that requires finding a venue where the personal voice is more accepted, and honing your writing skills there, before bringing them to bear on more academic material. For me, this was the two years I’ve already mentioned which I spent writing almost exclusively for fanzines, which made me a massively better writer – for others, it is active writing on social media, in particular on blogs (Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter don’t really encourage writing sufficient length here). Blogging still sometimes seems something that lies outside academic activity. The pressures on full-time academics very much push them towards spending all their writing time directly focussed upon their research. Yet blogging can be very useful in raising one’s profile. This is certainly true for Mary Beard – her position as “Britain’s best-known classicist” is, I would argue, very substantially connected with her blog A Don’s Life and the increased media presence that has resulted. Beard is a special case – her blog is a piece of paid journalism. But other early career academics have certainly raised their profiles through blogging, at least within the discipline – I think of Juliette Harrisson and Liz Gloyn – and Helen King notes that she finds blogging useful to keep in the discipline of writing. As more younger (and indeed older) scholars blog as well as write in more academic arenas, I feel sure that a more personal approach will inform more academic writing (though at the same time, the opportunities blogging provides for getting noticed will decline). That doesn’t necessarily mean more use of overt autobiography, something that often gets included in the personal voice approach, but which, as I say, I don’t think is necessarily intrinsic to it, but more of a sense of the personality of the writer coming over in what they write.

What will that look like? Well, I think there’s a good example in Gideon Nisbet’s Ancient Greece in Film and Popular Culture from 2006. This is a book very much written in an individualist style – I have indeed told Gideon that I hate him, for writing exactly the sort of idiosyncratic, erudite and funny book that I wish I had written myself (it’s okay, we’ve been friends since the early 1990s, we’ll get by this…). The jokes, to me, function as memorable cores around which the points that Gideon is actually trying to make can coalesce. There’s a great gag about Antony in Cleopatra (1963) crying in front of the tomb of Alexander, whom Richard Burton had played seven year earlier – “a famous drunk (played by a famous drunk) weeping for another famous drunk (ditto)”.

There are risks here. I’m sure that there are some who think Nisbet’s style to be wholly inappropriate (though the reviews I’ve seen have been favourable; however, he did receive some criticism for his previous book, Greek Epigram in the Roman Empire, written in a similar style). And I myself have been told off for being too chatty. Despite what Helen Sword says, it is not entirely mythical to suggest that early career researchers may need to be concerned about this issue. As Susanna Morton Braund notes in her contribution to Compromising Traditions, the Latinist with the most individual voice in the 1990s, John Henderson, wrote from a safe position as a Lecturer (and later Reader and Professor) at King’s College Cambridge. (Interestingly, I’ve found quite hard, without doing more diligent research than perhaps this piece really warrants, to find much that Henderson wrote prior to 1987 – I’ve only turned up one article in Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society that I’m not able to access online, so I can’t say whether Henderson always wrote in an idiosyncratic style. Anyone who would like to enlighten me about this, please do so.) On the other side of the coin, my own prospects for career advancement in academia are non-existent, so it doesn’t matter what and how I write, something which, as I note in my chapter in The Para-Academic Handbook, is actually quite liberating. But I appreciate that there are many people who fall between these two points, and their concerns about how they write and the effect it might have on their careers are not entirely illusory.

Nevertheless, I encourage you to at least think about writing in a more personal, and more fannish style. I am not remotely saying that you should write like Gideon Nisbet, or John Henderson, or Roz Kaveney (another scholarly writer, though one outside the academy, whose style I admire for its personality) – indeed, the whole point of the personal style is that it is unique to the individual using it. But given the choice, I would rather write like any of these than like the dry, dull author of Dynastic Lycia.

I think it would be good for scholars at all stages of their career to meditate on what a more fannish perspective and a more personal voice could do for them. The advantages – communicating more clearly, communicating your enthusiasm for the subject, writing more honestly, and not sucking the joy out of your topic, either for yourself or for your readers – seem to me well worth considering.


That’s what I think anyway.

Tuesday, September 23, 2014

Bi Visibility Day

Today is Bi Visibility Day.  Bisexuality, as I've said before, has become in some people's eyes a sort of Schroedinger's Cat of sexuality - bisexuals exist in a state of indeterminacy, either gay or straight, which will be fixed when the "box is opened", the box-opening moment being the person getting involved with a person of the same or the opposite sex, thus becoming gay or straight.

This, of course is bollocks, but the inability of people, both gay and straight, to see beyond a binary division of sexuality remains a problem.  I myself have been part of this problem - there was a time when I saw someone saying "I am a bisexual man who's never had a homosexual experience" as ridiculous posturing, rather than a legitimate statement of identity.

It's also a problem in scholarship on the ancient world.  For instance, I have seen the fact that Achilles and Patroclus are described by Homer as having sex with girls in The Iliad employed as an argument to demonstrate that they could not be themselves lovers.  Not the case, of course.

The binary divide is also employed in Eric Shanower's Age of Bronze, where Achilles is depicted as completely losing interest in Deidamia once he meets Patroclus.  It's as if a switch has been flicked from "straight" to "gay".  And I suspect that some people's problems with the poetess Sappho derive from the fact that she writes love poems to both men and women.

In the end, one has to accept that human sexuality is not that simple.




Monday, June 30, 2014

BSFA Lecture at Loncon 3


paula-jamesA special BSFA Lecture will be given at Loncon 3 by Dr Paula James (Open Unversity), and is entitled ‘Pygmalion’s Statue and her Synthetic Sisters: The Perfect Woman on Screen′. The lecture will be given at 20.00 on Saturday August 16th, the ExCel Centre, London Docklands. The lecture is open to any member of Loncon 3.
Paula James is a familiar face and voice to anyone who has studied the Open University’s Arts Foundation courses over the past fifteen years or so, or any of their courses in Classical Studies. Paula is Senior Lecturer in Classical Studies and Staff Tutor in Arts at the OU. She began her academic career after raising her family, and joined the Open University in the 1990s. She is an expert in Latin Literature, particularly the Metamorphoses of Ovid and Apuleius. She also writes on the reception of Latin texts in modern cinema. She has written an excellent introduction to Ancient Rome, Understand Roman Civilization, now in its second edition, and has jointly edited works on the imagery of Trade Union banners and the parrot in literature. Her most recent book is Ovid’s Myth of Pygmalion on Screen: In Pursuit of the Perfect Woman (2013), and it is from this work that her talk to us is derived.
The BSFA Lecture is intended as a companion to the George Hay Lecture, which is presented at the Eastercon by the Science Fiction Foundation. Where the Hay Lecture invites scientists, the BSFA Lecture invites academics from the arts and humanities, because we recognise that science fiction fans aren’t only interested in science. The lecturers are given a remit to speak “on a subject that is likely to be of interest to science fiction fans” – i.e. on whatever they want! This is a special lecture for Worldcon, and is the seventh BSFA Lecture.

Thursday, June 19, 2014

D-Day movies

A friend's Facebook last week linked to this article by David Denby, the New Yorker's movie critic, about the 1962 movie The Longest Day, a telling of the events of 5 and 6 June 1944. I get the impression Denby is a respected critic, but I find this article wrongheaded on a number of levels. For a start, there's a xenophobic dig at the cowardice of the French. The piece has a number of errors (John Wayne plays an officer in the 82nd Airborne Division, not the 101st, and Kenneth More plays a British naval Commander, not an Irish general). Also, two of the points on which he criticises The Longest Day (the depiction of the sea-wall at Omaha Beach, and the lack of portrayal of Canadians) appear to be lifted from the Wikipedia article on the movie. All in all, I get the impression that it is quite a long time since Denby actually saw The Longest Day.


















For Denby, The Longest Day is a forgotten movie, and rightly so. It is aimless, because it attempts to present the story from all perspectives. It is not a movie for our time. And it falls far short of Stephen Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan. This is not an uncommon comparison (and one now invited by the Blu-ray packaging of The Longest Day, which deliberately evokes the poster for Ryan). The Longest Day is often used as a whipping boy for those who want to show what a great movie Ryan  is. They often, like Denby, give the impression that that they haven't seen The Longest Day recently, and, indeed, that they are not particular familiar with, nor like very much, war movies as a genre. Very often, as Denby does, critics will note the way that the older movie fakes for dramatic effect, whilst overlooking the way in which Ryan does this as well, at least as much. And they always note how the deaths are more realistic in Ryan, as if the use of gory effects inherently renders a character death more meaningful.


Obviously, I disagree with a lot of this. True, the mass of characters in the 1962 movie, generally dressed alike, means that it can often be hard to follow who is who, especially amongst the American front-line troops. But there are plenty of deaths in The Longest Day that unsettle the viewer. You don't need to show someone's head being blown up by a 20mm shell - a parachute slowly disappearing into a well can be just as disturbing. At the time, this was a very significant movie. It marked the point at which war movies became more epic and multi-stranded than they had generally been in the 1950s. And allowing the French and German characters to speak in their own languages was a notable innovation. If The Longest Day is forgotten today, it has as much to do with it being made in black and white - an aesthetic decision rather than a commercial one - as it does with any other qualities of the movie.

This is not the first time I've dealt with this sort of material. I wrote a fanzine article back in 2004 about Saving Private Ryan and the related television series Band of Brothers (which I rate very highly). I tidied that up a little, corrected a few points, and uploaded it to Academia.edu. I got the following response from my old friend Derek Macleod:

I think the references to previous war films in Ryan won't bug me now that I can think of it as an homage (albeit partly unintentional) to classic war movies, rather than a new take on the war film.
I agree with that. I think it's hard for anyone with a familiarity with the 1960s war movie not to see how much Ryan draws from them - I deduce therefore that those who praised it (and continue to praise it, as Denby does) as a "new" sort of war movie simply weren't familiar with the genre.

On one point I do agree with Denby: Saving Private Ryan is more of a movie for our times than The Longest Day - but not in the way that Denby wants it to be. He sees it as a post-Vietnam movie, imbued with cynicism about war and the military. I see it as much more of a flag-waver, a return to pre-Vietnam values. Where The Longest Day is a movie about the collaborative fight, Saving Private Ryan appeals to American exceptionalism. It is D-Day how the Americans want to remember it; The Longest Day is closer to how it was.

Monday, June 02, 2014

Is this a trumpet I see before me?

A couple of weeks ago I finally got my copy of Star Wars and History. This was actually published in November 2012, but for various reasons my complimentary copy got lost, and I didn't chase it up as I should have. I finally mentioned this to the editors, and they got on it very quickly. I got my copy in five days.

It's a handsome volume. In particular it's been very well-designed. I'm not sure I requested all the illustrations that are in there, but any that have been added by the editors were added with the greatest of sensitivity for my text. (There is a Kindle version available, but I really recommend the proper book to fully appreciate the design work.) There's a lot of Classical material in there, not just in my chapter. I wrote about historical dictators that could be paralleled to Palpatine, and in particular the moment when democracy slides into dictatorship, my examples being Augustus, Napoleon and Hitler (if I were redoing this, I would find more space for Julius Caesar, but I realised late on how important he was to George Lucas). That meant I got to find out a lot about Napoleon and Hitler - but I think what I wrote remains credible.

So I wrote to the editors, thanking them for getting on the case so quickly, and got the following in reply from Janice Liedel:

"Your chapter was a key piece in the collection. I know that George Lucas really loved it and it still gets a lot of comments from readers, especially teachers who're using the book in K-12 classrooms."

Well.

My.

I am almost more pleased to find that the chapter is being used in schools than I am that George Lucas loves my work - but only almost. This is now the coolest thing that has ever happened to me, above having taught a former Formula 1 World Champion, having a label in the British Museum that reflects a piece of research I published, and having (I'm pretty certain) inspired a scene in The Archers.

As a consequence of deciding to blog about this, it occurs to me that I have been very remiss in trumpeting my other achievements over the past couple of years - this post means to correct that.

One thing I've talked about very little is the conference on the links between science fiction and fantasy and Greece and Rome that I organised last June. That was something that connected directly with my research interests, and was something I hoped would be a great success - and it was. I talked about it a little myself in an interview for Classics Confidential, about which I have spoken here on the blog. There are write-ups online by Liz Bourke, Cara Sheldrake, and Liz Gloyn, with another by Cat Wilson in Foundation 116 (alongside a piece by me setting out what I thought I had achieved with the conference).  There will be a collection of some of the papers appearing in Foundation 118 in the autumn. A version of Liz Gloyn's paper has already appeared in Strange Horizons, whilst a version of Jarrid Looney's is also online; A few more will be forthcoming from Strange Horizons by the end of the year. I have been trying to keep the course blog going as a source of relevant news, largely unsuccessfully since October, I'm afraid, though I do mean to get back to it. (I do have hopes for a further publication of papers, but I can't think about that just now, due to other committments.)

My major research publication in this field this year - there's only this and the Star Wars and History piece with a 2013 date on them - has been my contribution to Steven Green and Penny Goodman's Animating Antiquity: Harryhausen and the Classical Tradition. My paper is "Greek Elements in the Sinbad Movies of Ray Harryhausen: A Lesson in Reception". This paper connects with a theme I've been developing in my study of movies set in the Classical past - that you can't properly talk about movies with ancient settings if you're only talking about movies with ancient settings. (A related anecdote: I was on 6Music, suggesting a track for The Chain, and I was asked what I did. I mentioned that I taught Classical Studies, but that I'd also taught film and fantasy literature, and Stuart Maconie said "Ah, so the perfect thing for you would be to talk about Jason and the Argonauts". "As it happens," I said, "I'm writing an article about that.")

I have given a couple of research papers at the last two Classical Association Conferences, in 2013 on "Kipling’s centurion and Nesbit’s Caesar: Rome in Edwardian children’s fantasy" (an abstract can be found in this document), and in 2014 on "A Wild West Hero: Motifs of the Hollywood Western in the four Hadrian’s Wall movies" (an abstract can be found in this document). This last was part of a panel I organised called Across the Border: Four movies about Hadrian’s Wall, connected with the book I'm planning on co-writing with Juliette Harrisson, on Screening Roman Britain. Though I say so myself, it was a pretty cracking panel, with excellent contributions by Juliette, Liz Gloyn and Alex McAuley.

In January of 2013, I got made a Research Affiliate of the Open University, so I now have a staff page on their website. I wrote a couple of pieces for their OpenLearn website, one on Star Trek and the Greeks, and one on how Doctor Who engages with human history. This last post is linked to a wider project on Doctor Who and history that I'm part of, and have mentioned in a couple of places already. Amusingly, this piece apparently got mentioned in a paper at the Classical Association conference, but described as an OpenLearn course. It's not, though in fairness, that's sort of how the OpenLearn website presents the short papers that are put up on their website. And if anyone would like to commission me to create an online course on Doctor Who and ancient history, I'm certainly game.

On the subject of the good Doctor, I was invited to participate in a Locus Roundtable along with Graham Sleight on Doctor Who. You can hear that here. I very much regret interrupting Graham to be pedantic about the difference between Out of this World (pioneering ITV sf anthology series) and Out of the Unknown (essentially the same show, transferred over to the BBC), thus obscuring Graham's rather more important point, that Terry Nation was not, as he is sometimes characterised, a mere comedy writer chancing his arm at sf, but someone with a pedigree of writing science fiction for the small screen before he created the Daleks.

Related to this, I uploaded to Academia.edu a paper on invasion narratives in British sf television (specifically Quatermass, Doctor Who and UFO), which previously had been unpublished, having been written as my final assignment for an OU course on film and television history. In fact, I've updated my Academia.edu page with a lot of links, and some articles.  (And you might also be interested in the fact that there is now a Kindle version of The Mythological Dimensions of Neil Gaiman, in which I have a chapter.)

I also got asked through the OU to speak at the Southbank Centre's weekend on The Rest is Noise: Art of Fear. My topic was "Eisenstein and Stalin: The father of montage against socialist realism". I didn't know much about Eisenstein, but I wasn't going to turn down a chance to speak at the Southbank Centre, so I went away and researched the topic. The talk was recorded, and you can hear it here; there's also a photo of me delivering the talk.

I've branched out in teaching for other institutions as well. I will be doing my "Fantastic London" course for Middlesex University again this summer. I've also taught "Classics and Cinema" for the University of Roehampton in spring 2013 and spring 2014, and will be teaching "Myth and Mythology" for them in the autumn. And for the University of Notre Dame's London Undergraduate Programme I taught "London In The Literature of the Fantastic".  I enjoyed all of these, and seem to have done well - at Roehampton one response apparently was "Why can't all Visiting Lecturers be like Tony?"

I've also given a couple of papers on the work of Iain Banks. The first was "Genre Sensibility in the First Three Novels of Iain Banks", which I gave as part of the academic track at the brilliant Nine Worlds GeekFest (best convention of 2013 by a long way). This has been largely superseded now by a much better paper covering the same ground by Paul Kincaid in the latest issue of Foundation.  I also spoke at The State of the Culture: a One-Day Symposium on Iain M. Banks's Utopia, where I gave a paper on "Inversions as Planetary Romance".  These are both part of a project on Banks which has stalled a bit for the moment, but which I and a colleague will get going again soon. (I also wrote a short piece on my reaction to Banks' death for issue 351 of The Drink Tank.)

An old research topic reappeared in November. My friend Alan Greaves invited me to speak at the Mediterranean Archaeology Research Day: Ancient Lycia that he was organising. I was a bit dubious about this - I'd written a Ph.D. thesis, book and numerous articles and book chapters on Lycia in the 1990s, but really hadn't thought about the subject much in the present century, and didn't like the book I'd written much. So the paper I gave on "Dynastic Lycia 15 years on" was a bit of an oddity, and not quite what the audience were expecting - they were waiting to hear what new insights I had developed since writing the book. But it transpired from what others said that apparently my book is highly respected - "seminal" was Alan's comment - and I feel a lot better about it now than I did before. I don't think I'm going to go back to writing about Lycia - there's too much scholarship that I haven't kept up with, most of it in German - but I'd be interested in talking to some of the younger scholars who are now working in the field.

Finally, one of the things I do is co-edit a website on comics, FA - The Comiczine. I've been writing a lot of reviews for it in the last few months. I've also written a couple of features, one on Batgirl, and one, which I'm particularly pleased with, on 1940s patriotic superheroes. I think we're doing good stuff with the site. It will never be comprehensive, but I think we've got interesting things to say (and we are always on the lookout for new contributors).

So that's my round-up of the last eighteen months. 2014 should also be a productive year - there are five chapters in books that are currently in some form of completed text, and should come out over the next twelve months. I'm also giving a paper at the academic track of Loncon 3, the 2014 World SF convention. And I'll try to post more here.

Sunday, March 23, 2014

Classics Confidential: Popular Culture and the Democratisation of Classics

Last November I was interviewed for a second time for Classics Confidential, a site which hosts video discussions with scholars about their work.  The interview has now gone up.

This is, I think, rather interesting.  It was meant to be me talking about my research - how the Liverpool conference on Classics and Science Fiction went (brilliantly, thank you very much), and what I'm planning on doing next. And then Anastasia asked me why studying popular culture was important, and that led to me stating clearly on record what I believe the objectives of widening access to Classics should be (don't ring-fence the subject, either for socio-economic elites or for intellectual elites, but don't impose it on everyone either), and why I think pushing people away from the humanities towards sciences and business studies in some cases is failing students. These are ideas I've been talking about in conversation for a long time, but I haven't stated them publicly very often.  I suspect a number of people will not agree with me on some of these points, but I stand by what I say here.

Saturday, March 08, 2014

Edith Hamilton: A blog post for International Women's Day.

"It has always seemed strange to me that in our endless discussions about education so little stress is laid on the pleasure of becoming an educated person, the enormous interest it adds to life. To be able to be caught up into the world of thought — that is to be educated." - Edith Hamilton

Until recently, I knew very little about Edith Hamilton. I had heard the the name, but was not familiar with her achievements. That changed because I was showing students Michael Cacoyannis' 1971 The Trojan Women. Though Cacoyannis takes the screenplay credit, his contribution is a few scenes, and deciding what people would actually be doing on screen. Most of the words come from Hamilton's 1937 translation Three Greek Plays (an interesting selection: Prometheus Bound, Agamememnon and Trojan Women, not necessarily what one might have thought of if asked to name three Greek plays).  So I decided to find out a little about Hamilton.

She's a fascinating character.  Born in 1867, she was introduced to Latin and Greek by her father, who home-schooled her, and went on to get Bachelor's and Master's degrees at Bryn Mawr College.  She went on to do postgraduate work in Germany, enrolling first at the University of Leipzig, and then at Munich.  This wasn't an altogether happy experience - the German professors were interested in the minutiae of grammar, whilst Hamilton was interested in the overall beauty of Greek literature (this fight between philology and classical civilization still goes on to a degree).

She returned to the US, invited to become head of Bryn Mawr School.  She taught there for twenty-six years, and then retired.  She set home with someone described in biographies as her "life partner", Doris Fielding Reid, with whom she adopted Doris' nephew. Hamilton was in her fifties, Reid in her twenties. So, clearly Hamilton was unconventional in her family arrangements, which in the 1920s was brave. Her biggest contribution to Classics came after she retired. The Greek Way was published in 1930, and was a bestseller. So were several books that followed, such as Mythologies, still apparently used in the US, and Three Greek Plays, which replaced Gilbert Murray's translations as the standard ones in use in the US.  Many people were introduced to the Classics through Hamilton's works.

Yet she's largely forgotten now.  Books such as The Greek Way are perhaps considered too populist, and her translations have been superseded by others.  I'm not convinced I have any of her books in my personal library (though there are things in there that I've forgotten about).  But I shall be trying to rectify that from now.  It's quite clear that she had a love of the ancient world that was not lost though over-familiarity.  And she believed in the value of education for its own sake, as the above quote indicates.  And I have to admire someone who stands up for that.

If you want to read more about Hamilton, there's an article by Judith Peller Hallet in Classical World 90.2-3.

Thursday, February 20, 2014

Me and the SFF Masterclass

I want to talk to you about the Science Fiction Foundation Masterclass in Science Fiction Criticism.  Since 2007 (with the exception of last year) this has run every summer, as an opportunity for all people interested in writing seriously about SF to develop their skills and broaden their critical toolkit, in sessions that are led (not taught) by a fascinating mix of professional authors, academics and fans.

The information about this year's Masterclass is here. It's conveniently in London, just before the Worldcon, and the opportunity has been taken to recruit a set of class leaders that would otherwise be difficult to get.

I've been on four Masterclasses over the years, and I have enjoyed every one of them.  They are brilliant opportunities for anyone.  For a start, they are great networking opportunities.  The first year I went, the class leaders were Geoff Ryman, Wendy Pearson and Gary Wolfe.  Geoff I knew already, but I hadn't met Gary or Wendy before.  Now, they are amongst my wide range of internet friendly acquaintances; when Gary comes over to the UK I try to make a point of meeting up with him if our schedules permit it.  I've not seen Wendy since, but we exchange comments on Facebook.  At a later Masterclass, I met Mark Bould.  I'm now writing a review of Pacific Rim for Mark's journal Science Fiction Film and Television (okay, he edits it with Sherryl Vint); I think doing the Masterclass helped, in that Mark knew I wasn't just some chancer when I asked if I could do the review.

I've also made a lot of helpful contacts amongst my fellow students.  The first year, I met Karen Burnham (who went on to edit the Locus Roundtable Blog), Stacie Hanes, and Paul Raven.  At another Masterclass I met Jude Roberts.  My social media is full of people I met through the Masterclass.  And that's not to mention the people who I already knew but with whom I strengthened relationships through being a fellow student.  Would Graham Sleight have asked me to be a co-editor on The Unsilent Library  had we not been on the Masterclass together?*  In the other direction, would I have realised that Audrey Taylor was the right person to take over the British Science Fiction Association's London meetings?  Possibly, but who knows?

The Masterclass is also a great excuse to discover new texts, or revisit old ones.  I would probably never have read Mary Gentle's Golden Witchbreed without the Masterclass (nor would Niall Harrison, and you can read about the effect that had on him here).  Nor would I have revisited John Brunner's brilliant Stand On Zanzibar, a novel that seems like a work of the 2000s rather than the 1960s.  And my exposure to new theoretical techniques would have been diminished - I know far more than I would have about Queer Theory through Wendy Pearson assigning several texts for us to read.

One of the great things about the Masterclass is the mix of different levels of experience - it's not just for newbies and postgrads.  Some of the best reviewers and critics we have passed through the Masterclass (Maureen Kincaid Speller, Jonathan McAlmont, and others).  And the fact that you can keep coming back if you want is another advantage - that core should help build a sense of community amongst those writing on sf.  I'm not alone in believing all this - Jude Roberts tweeted me to tell me the year she went it was awesome.

In short, I highly recommend the Masterclass to everyone interested in the field, especially with this year's class leaders.  Don't feel that you can't go because you've had your chance, or that you're too long in the tooth.  I'm going again this year.  You're joining me, aren't you?

*Actually, it turns out, yes he would, since he and Simon Bradshaw asked me to join the project six months before that Masterclass. Oops.

Wednesday, January 22, 2014

Science Fiction Foundation Masterclass

From Edward James:
Please share as widely as possible! 
The Eighth Science Fiction Foundation Masterclass in Science Fiction Criticism will be held from Monday 11 August 2014 to Wednesday 13 August, immediately before Loncon 3, the 2014 World Science Fiction Convention.

We are pleased to announce that the venue will be the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, founded by Charles II in 1675, and the home of the Prime Meridian. This is across the Thames from the Excel site where Loncon 3 will take place.

Price: £200.

The tutors for 2014 will be:

Andy Duncan, Professor of English at Frostburg State University, Frostburg MD, winner of the Theodore Sturgeon Award and two World Fantasy Awards, and winner of the 2012 Nebula Award for Best Novelette.

Neil Easterbrook, Professor of English at the Texas Christian University, and a prolific reviewer and critic, whose monograph on China Miéville is due to be published in 2014.

K.V. Johansen, a Canadian writer of fantasy, science fiction, and children’s fiction, who has also published three books on the history of children’s fantasy. Her adult novel Blackdog was shortlisted for the Sunburst Award in 2012.

Please apply to farah.sf@gmail.com.
Send a short piece of critical writing, and a one page cv.

Deadline for Applications: February 28th 2014

Monday, January 13, 2014

BSFA Awards nominations

Nominations for the BSFA Awards close on 14th January (i.e. tomorrow).  If you're a BSFA member, please consider works that you feel should be nominated.  In particular, historically artwork and non-fiction get fewer nominations than the fiction categories, so think of some deserving works for those.

Unfortunately, I haven't read that much stuff in 2013, but I have nominated John Johnston's excellent introduction to the Unearthed collection of early mummy stories, published by Jurassic.

Nominate by using this form: http://www.bsfa.co.uk/bsfa-awards/nominate-for-the-bsfa-awards/

And this post should give you a memory-jogging list of what has been nominated so far.

Saturday, January 04, 2014

Michael Gove and the First World War

Much though it pains me to admit it, there is some foundation to the remarks made by Michael Gove yesterday (in The Daily Mail, to which I shall not link). The view of the Western Front presented in Blackadder Goes Forth does indeed include a number of inaccurate myths. In particular the view presented of the general staff, insane and with little feeling for the soldiers they sent to the slaughter, is unfair on the real Captain Darlings and General Melchetts. Staff officers often worked themselves into a state of nervous exhaustion, and many tried to get posted back to the front, feeling that this was the proper place for them. Fifty-eight generals were killed as a result of combat (Richard Holmes, The Western Front, pp. 117-18). 

Nor is it the case that everyone saw the war as futile and pointless, either in 1918 or now. As Hew Strachan notes (The First World War, p. 321), it wasn't seen as pointless in Belgium in 1918.

Where Gove is wrong is in his politicization of the debate, in his lack of respect for those who disagree with him, in his promotion of an equally simplistic view of the war as a heroic struggle, in his support of the government's plans to commemorate the First World War, which are dangerously close to celebration, and in his linkage of all this to his educational "reforms", which seem intended to prepare young people for a world of imperial heroics, a world that no longer exists.