Notice: Undefined index: reset in /var/www/html/wp-content/mu-plugins/cets_blog_defaults.php on line 733

Deprecated: define() was called with an argument that is deprecated since version 3.0.0! The constant VHOST is deprecated. Use the boolean constant SUBDOMAIN_INSTALL in wp-config.php to enable a subdomain configuration. Use is_subdomain_install() to check whether a subdomain configuration is enabled. in /var/www/html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 5497
Uncategorized - Welcome to Exeter English!

Home » Uncategorized

Category Archives: Uncategorized

Exeter Students Interview ‘Rafiki’ filmmaker Wanuri Kahiu

The Kenyan film Rafiki was released in the UK this month, and three of our students (Ben Apea, Aysha Taylor, and Molly West) recently interviewed director Wanuri Kahiu for the Africa in Words blog. Rafiki was banned by the Kenyan Film Classification Board for (in the words of its chief executive) “its clear intent to promote lesbianism” – then unbanned for seven days, then banned again. Ben, Aysha, and Molly are taking the module African Narratives, run by my colleague Dr Kate Wallis, and the interview was one of their assessments on the module – good job folks!

Student Photo Competition

Hello All!

Teaching came to an end last Friday and everyone is satisfied a good term’s work has been completed. We will be blogging a little less regularly over the coming months and this post is a chance to pay tribute to some of our first year’s budding photographers…

I set my first-year seminar groups a competition to take a photograph of their favourite thing on campus: it could be a view, a tree, a seat in the library, anything they wanted really. Here are the winners:

 

FIRST PRIZE: Harry Whattoff (BA English)

 

JOINT SECOND PLACE: Kate Debling (BA English) and Name Withheld

 

Some very impressive efforts – well done all!

Many thanks to everyone who came along to an Offer-Holder Visit Day over the last two months, we hope you enjoyed your time on campus and learnt more about our degree programmes in the Department of English & Film. You can still ask us questions about English at Exeter, we’d be happy to help!

Adventures in Theatreland (Devon’s Theatreland, that is)

It’s a special post this week focusing on the University of Exeter’s rich variety of drama clubs, theatre production companies, and performing arts societies! As you can see, whether it’s writing your own play, developing your production skills, or standing in front of the spotlight, there are all sorts of opportunities to take part in student theatre, on and off campus.

Kicking us off, playwright and performer Emily Reader (BA English), who is in her final year:

During my time at Exeter, I’ve been lucky enough to try my hand at a wide range of theatre societies in multiple capacities. One of the biggest is Footlights, a society specialising in large musical theatre productions. I have so far done two shows with them as a cellist in the band – My Fair Lady and Oklahoma! – with the latter being performed in the Northcott, our local professional theatre. Both shows have been highlights of my university experience. It is immensely rewarding to put on shows of incredibly high standards with talented students who also have their own degrees to do!
I was also the cellist for an original musical, Sherwood, based on the story of Robin Hood. This was in partnership with Shotgun, the more niche musical theatre society, and Theatre With Teeth, which specialises in original student theatre. Theatre With Teeth subsequently put on a play I wrote last summer which then toured to a drama festival in Glasgow. All of these societies have gifted me unforgettable experiences that have transformed my time at Exeter. I have become obsessed with theatre and as a consequence have decided to pursue writing professionally and cello in a more amateur capacity in the future.
 Emily’s play is called Rumours and I went to see it last term as part of a double bill:
It was excellent stuff, a tense, funny play set in the garden during a house party, a slow unravelling of the dangers of intimacy and the damage done by hearsay. The central premise is two people trying to work out how far what they’ve heard about the other is true, and testing how much trust they can place in each other.
We are very lucky to have the Northcott Theatre on campus, which not only stages student and professional productions but also stand-up comedy performances. Over the years, we have been to see Dylan Moran, Alexei Sayle and others perform at the Northcott. On 15 March, my colleague Dr. Sinéad Moynihan went to see Ardal O’Hanlon perform his stand-up comedy routine, “The Showing Off Must Go On,” there. Ardal O’Hanlon is perhaps most famous for his role as Father Dougal Mcguire in the Channel 4 comedy, Father Ted (1995-1998). It was a full house at the Northcott and the show was the perfect warm-up event for the St. Patrick’s Day festivities that took place in Exeter on Sunday.
 Student theatre doesn’t just take place on campus and there are several venues in the centre of the city. One of those is the Phoenix Arts Centre, where, at the end of last term, I saw the Dicebox production of Tennessee Williams’s play Summer and Smoke.
One of the stars of the play was Hannah Johnston, who is visiting the university for a year from Kenyon College, Ohio, and here’s what Hannah had to say:

I’m an American student studying English and Drama, and know how intimidating it can be trying to enter a new theatre community. Within the first few weeks at Exeter, all the societies had their auditions in the same building. The hallway was completely hectic, as students rehearsed monologues to themselves and queued up to show their talents. It was a lot to take in, and I ended up just bouncing from room to room, trying anything and everything, until I had auditioned throughout the entire hallway, and was completely ready to fall into bed. But as I was leaving, I saw a familiar name on a door downstairs, a room separate from all the rest. “Auditions: Tennessee Williams’ Summer and Smoke”. It was the last thing I expected to see at student auditions in England, and even though I was exhausted, I knew I had to give my go at Williams. I never thought my first Southern gothic drama would take place in Exeter, England, alongside a cast of Brits, but I cannot be more thankful for my experience. It’s the only show I got a callback for, and I think it was fate that I stumbled upon Annie Bunce’s little audition room before heading out. Over the next couple months, I would spend my nights rehearsing with a talented bunch of actors, all the while making amazing friends and becoming familiar with British culture. I fell in love with the writing of Tennessee Williams because of Annie, who fell in love with him after seeing a production of Summer and Smoke in London. I was able to make Exeter feel like home by finding my own little theatre community.

 I thought I would finish with a musical I saw earlier in 2019: Oklahoma!
 
This was the big Footlights musical that takes place every January. It is always one of the university’s biggest productions and it tends to be terrifyingly professional. It is no exaggeration to say that I MASSIVELY look forward to start of each Spring Term because of it! If I had to choose my very favourite production of all time I would go back to 2001, when Footlights also put on Oklahoma! and Will Young played Curly. Now, I wouldn’t want to attribute his long and successful career to his appearance on stage at the university… but maybe just a little bit…

Field Trip!

We take every opportunity to knit our teaching into the resources available on campus and within the city of Exeter. A case in point is the Level 2 module Renaissance and Revolution: Seventeenth-Century Literature!

Below are some photographs from the mid-term field trip led by my colleagues Dr Jo Esra and Dr Ayesha Mukherjee. Speaking to the major theme of Renaissance and Revolution, this outing centred on the relationship between literature and local history during the Civil War. Exeter reflected the political turmoil and schisms of the period: the city was divided between royalists and parliamentarians and Exeter was twice besieged by royalist forces (it was eventually recaptured by Thomas Fairfax and parliament’s New Model Army in 1646). Exeter’s Civil War left behind a wealth of written evidence that students read before the field trip, such as pamphlets, news reports, sermons, declarations, and legal documents, including the writings of Robert Herrick and Thomas Fuller, two churchmen active in the area.

Outside Exeter Cathedral the students (and Jo) get ready for the learning to begin…

The field trip took in a variety of historic sites around the city…

   

…before heading into Exeter Cathedral…

  

…where the students examined evidence of iconoclasm:

I wish I had gone myself, especially to see the cathedral’s medieval cat flap:

And courtesy of the Exeter Cathedral Twitter feed, here it is in action!

 

Mukoma Wa Ngugi and The Rise of the African Novel

This week the Department of English & Film hosted a talk by Cornell University’s Mukoma Wa Ngugi on the subject of his latest book, The Rise of the African Novel (2018). Mukoma talked about the historical exclusion of African authors who don’t write in English and the cultural costs of assuming that English is the language of aesthetic writing. As a result of this assumption, there is an incomplete archive of literary works written in African languages.

Mukoma in conversation with Dr Kate Wallis, Lecturer in Global and World Literatures

The English programme at Exeter has seen several new modules offered in the last few years so that students can study a wide range of world literature on their degree. Second-year undergraduates can take Culture, Crisis and Ecology in a Postcolonial World, which introduces students to how texts from around the globe inscribe the social, historical and environmental impact of colonialism and new forms of imperialism. In the final year students can choose Acts of Writing: From Decolonisation to Globalisation as well as specialist options such as:

And if you are thinking about starting an MA in September, we offer a Pathway in World and Postcolonial Cultures on our MA English Literary Studies too!

Mary McCarthy and Vassar College

Last week, we studied Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (1957) on an M.A. module entitled The Literature of Cold War America. McCarthy (1912-1989) died thirty years ago this October. She was one of the most important American intellectuals of her generation but is relatively understudied and taught. My colleague, Dr. Ellen McWilliams, is working on McCarthy and will discuss her in her forthcoming book, Irishness in North American Women’s Writing: Transatlantic Affinities. You can read some of Dr. McWilliams’s work on McCarthy in this January 2017 piece that appeared in the Irish Times.

For the Cold War module, McCarthy is a very interesting writer to study because she had been a “fellow traveler” in Communist circles in the 1930s. However, after the Moscow Trials and the treatment of Leon Trotsky, she severed her connections to Communism and became an anti-Stalinist liberal. She wrote about her flirtation with, and subsequent disaffection from, Communism in an article for Encounter magazine in 1954.

I also find McCarthy interesting because she’s an alumna of Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, with which Exeter’s Department of English and Film has longstanding teaching and student exchanges. Most years, a staff member from English and Film goes there to teach for a semester and a colleague from Vassar’s English department comes to Exeter in exchange. I’ve been lucky enough to go there twice, from January to June 2012 and January to June 2017. In 2017, I arrived four days before the Trump inauguration!

Over the years, many students on our English with Study in North America degree have also studied at Vassar for a full academic year.

McCarthy graduated from Vassar in 1933, when it was still a women’s college (it became co-ed in 1969). Her immediate post-graduation years were thinly fictionalised in her marvelous tell-all novel, The Group (1963). Her papers are housed in the special collections at Vassar’s stunning library. Here’s me, looking very cold outside said library, in February 2017.

And this is the entrance to Vassar, looking decidedly less wintry, in June 2017.

Off to Paris

The University of Exeter has a huge array of student societies covering sports, art, music, performance, film… you name it, and there is probably a society for it (yes, there IS a Hide and Seek Society).

Most relevant for the Department of English & Film, there is an English Society. In recent years they have arranged field trips, balls, talks, Christmas dinners, quizzes… you can see more info on their Facebook page.

The students certainly seem to enjoy the annual weekend break to a European city. This year it was Paris! Cue literature-themed photo opportunity:

Here is first-year student Mary Helafi outside the bookshop Shakespeare and Company, where James Joyce’s Ulysses was published for the first time in its entirety in 1922. Which seems like a good opportunity to mention that my colleague Professor Vike Martina Plock convenes a third-option focusing on Joyce’s Ulysses. I didn’t make Mary visit Shakespeare and Company just so I could mention Vike’s Ulysses module – honest!

Beckett at Exeter

The novelist, short story writer, and dramatist Samuel Beckett (1906-1989) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1969 and he remains centrally important to our understanding of twentieth-century literature and its aftermaths.

Beckett appears in several places on our English BA degree. By my count, his work features on at least four modules, and I teach his Fizzle 6 on a second-year critical theory module entitled Humanities After the Human.

This is hardly a surprise, since we have some of the world’s best Beckett scholars at Exeter! Dr John Bolin‘s Beckett and the Modern Novel inserts the writer into the tradition of the modern European novel.

Another of my colleagues Dr Beci Carver researches and teaches Beckett, especially his novel Watt, which features in her book Granular Modernism.

And to end (yet again, as Beckett might say) Beckett is also a major presence in the work of my colleague Professor Laura Salisbury, who wrote her first book on Beckett and humour. She was talking about him on Radio 4 last month and you can listen to what she said here.

I was tempted to call this post something like ‘Beckseter.’ Aren’t you glad I spared you that!

The Year of the Pig

Today the University of Exeter celebrated Chinese New Year with a festival presented by the Chinese Student Scholars Association. I caught the parade as it started down the High Street…

  

… and then there was Dragon and Lion traditional dancing in front of Exeter Cathedral!

  

    

The parade continued through the city centre and onto campus, where more events were planned for the rest of the day.

At Exeter we’re committed to thinking about culture in a global context and seeing the parade reminded me of the Department of English & Film’s connections to Chinese performance, art, and literature! Here are just three examples:

My colleague Professor Nick Kaye has extensive research links with Chinese researchers and cultural institutions and one of his new projects involves engaging new urban audiences with traditional Chinese opera via digital mediation; Nick is working with Shanghai All-Female Yue Opera, the only all-female Chinese opera.

Professor Regenia Gagnier has just published a book entitled Literatures of Liberalization: Global Circulation and the Long Nineteenth Century which is centred on two of Regenia’s big interests: the global history of liberalism as a concept and the migration of literary texts around the world. Where the latter is concerned, Regenia has tracked the planetary circulation of decadent literature and the novels of Charles Dickens. China regularly features in her thinking and she has written about how both literature and liberalism have been translated, adapted, and negotiated in modern China.

Finally, Professor Corinna Wagner specializes in the relationship between art, literature, disease, and the body, and regularly writes about medical illustrations during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Corinna is also interested in global circulation and her publications include an article comparing Joseph Towne collection of anatomical waxes with the Lam Qua paintings of the patients of medical missionary Peter Parker. Corinna is giving the sample lecture at this Wednesday’s Offer-Holder Visit Day and I imagine medicine and the body will come up again!

Dion Boucicault on a sunny Monday morning

This morning, I gave a lecture to our second year students on the nineteenth-century playwright and actor, Dion Boucicault. The lecture was given as part of our level 2 module, Crossing the Water: Transatlantic Literary Relations, but it could easily have appeared on one of our numerous Victorian Literature and Culture modules. My Victorianist colleagues Prof. Joe Kember and Prof. John Plunkett are very interested in popular forms of entertainment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, of which Boucicault’s body of work (in “melodrama”) is an excellent example.

Dion Boucicault was an Irish-born playwright who was enormously successful in the nineteenth century theatre on both sides of the Atlantic. His first hit play was London Assurance in 1841. Our students study two of Boucicault’s plays: The Octoroon (first performed in New York in 1859) and The Shaughraun (first performed in New York in 1874). The plays fit really well with the themes of the module, which is concerned with the transatlantic circulation of authors, print culture and performances from the nineteenth century to today. It encourages students to consider how such works transcend national boundaries and configurations. The concerns of the module dovetail with my own research interests in the Irish Atlantic and the figure of the “Returned Yank” in the cultural imagination.

The question of genre is very important to the study of Boucicault. I draw students’ attention to the fact that, despite the seeming local specificities of the two plays (the one set in Louisiana during the time of slavery; the other set in rural Ireland), there are numerous similarities between the two, similarities that owe themselves to the overarching melodramatic form so beloved of Boucicault.

Boucicault has enjoyed something of a revival on both the stage and in scholarly contexts over the past several years. In 2004, the Abbey Theatre in Dublin – Ireland’s national theatre – revived The Shaughraun for its centenary celebrations, where it received mixed reviews. The staging of the play was somewhat controversial because the Abbey Theatre had been founded with a mission to do away with “buffoonery and easy sentiment,” the latter defining features (some would argue) of The Shaughraun.

The Octoroon has also been subject to re-staging and rethinking. The African American playwright, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, adapted and reframed Boucicault’s work in a play renamed as An Octoroon which premiered in New York in 2014 and was later staged in London at the National Theatre in 2018.

Dr. Sinéad Moynihan, Department of English and Film

Skip to toolbar