Brave New Worlds. An academic conference on dystopian fiction, 29th April 2015 – 30th April 2015, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK On the spot April 4, 2015 By Cristian Tamas 9 min. read BRAVE NEW WORLDS: THE DYSTOPIA IN MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY FICTION A Conference at Newcastle University, Wednesday 29th & Thursday 30th April 2015 “Brave New Worlds. An academic conference on dystopian fiction” is an interdisciplinary conference examining the various aspects of dystopia within literature and film of the modern and contemporary era. Newcastle University (formally, the University of Newcastle upon Tyne) is a public research university located in Newcastle upon Tyne in the North-East of England, 437.65 kilometres from London. The Keynote Speakers: Professor Andrzej Gasiorek from the University of Birmingham. Professor Gasiorek is Head of English at Birmingham and a modern and contemporary literature specialist. He has written extensively on Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, and Joseph Conrad, and on dystopian authors including George Orwell and JG Ballard. He is currently working on research relating to Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’. Dr. Keith Williams, author of ‘HG Wells, Modernity and the Movies’. Dr Williams comes to us from the University of Dundee and will present a paper on Wells’ under-appreciated novel, ‘When the Sleeper Wakes’ and in particular its relationship to Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis’. BRAVE NEW WORLDS: The Dystopic in Modern & Contemporary Culture, Old Library Building, Newcastle University Wednesday, 29th April 2015 8:45-9:15 Registration Research Beehive Foyer, Old Library Building 9:15-10:45 Session One Panel 1A – The Early Twentieth Century (Research Beehive 2.21) Chair: Fran Bigman Sarah Cullen (Newcastle), ‘“a book explodes a thousand times”: Soviet Futurists and Literary Heretics in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We’ Margery Palmer McCulloch (Glasgow), ‘Karel Čapek and Early Twentieth-Century Dystopian Writing’ Nathan Waddell (Nottingham), ‘Classical Music, Fascism, and Dystopia: Katharine Burdekin and Storm Jameson in the 1930s’ Panel 1B – Innocence & Youth (Research Beehive 2.22) Chair: Antony Mullen Gul Dag (Hull), ‘Inverting the Bildungsroman: The Child and the City in Jack Womack’s Random Acts of Senseless Violence’ Ronan Hatfull (Warwick), ‘Carrying The Fire’: Cormac McCarthy and William Shakespeare’s Optimistic Apocalypse’ Jonathan Mitchell (East Anglia), ‘The Empty Child: Dystopian Innocence in Samuel Delany’s Hogg’ 10.45-11.15 Refreshments 11:15-12:45 Session Two Panel 2A – Fragments (Research Beehive 2.21) Chair: Stacy Gillis Fiona Anderson (Edinburgh), ‘Wild Boys on the Waterfront: David Wojnarowicz and Bill Burroughs’ Recurring Dream’ Mark Johnson (York), ‘Dusk Hour: Depictions of Ecological Collapse and Posthuman Survivalist Ideologies in Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun’ Niek Turner (Liverpool), ‘Etching an Influential Imaginary Space from the Real: Piranesi and Eisenstein’ Panel 2B – Apocalypse & the Human (Research Beehive 2.22) Chair: Marc Hudson Kanta Dihal (Oxford), ‘Diseased Dystopia: The Apocalyptic Outbreak Narrative in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy’ Simon Mernagh (QUB), ‘Inhuman Condition: Dystopia, Apocalypse, and Arendtian Phenomenology’ Sarah Paterson (Glasgow), ‘Can a Song Change a Nation? Music and Verse in Dystopian Fiction’ 12:45-13:30 Lunch Research Beehive Foyer 13.30-15:00 Session Three Panel 3A – Emotion & Society (Research Beehive 2.21) Chair: Ronan Hatfull Asami Nakamura (Liverpool), ‘The Function of Nostalgia in Dystopia: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go’ Prayag Ray (QUB) and Trisha Ray (Independent), ‘Dystopic Science Fiction and Social Change: Narrative Strategies in Social Science Fiction’ Maaike Zoelman (Hull), ‘From Hopelessness to Hopefulness: Comparing the Dystopias Anthem with The City of Ember’ Panel 3B – Subjectivity & Existentialism (Research Beehive 2.22) Chair: Sarah Paterson Maren Conrad (Munster), ‘Reinventing the Last Man: Rewriting Romantic Utopias within the Dystopian Settings of Post-Apocalyptic Films’ Andrea Dietrich (Birkbeck), ‘Uncovering the Golden Thread: Existential Agency as Driving Force of Dystopian Narrative’ Adam Welstead (St Andrews), ‘Dystopia and Dissensus: Reading Rancière in Contemporary British Dystopian Fiction’ Panel 3C – Crisis & Malevolence (Research Beehive 2.20) Chair: Rosie Lewis Dorothy Butchard (Edinburgh), ‘Malevolent Elevators in Dystopian City Spaces’ Marc Hudson (Manchester), ‘Louder than War: The Carbon Diaries 2015/2017, Teen Fiction and the Apocalpyse’ Louise Squire (Surrey), ‘Imagining the Unimaginable: Dystopia, Sustainability, and Contemporary Environmental Crisis Fiction’ 15:00-16:00 Keynote Address (Research Beehive 2.21) Dr Keith Williams (Dundee) ‘Seeing the Future: Urban Dystopia in H.G. Wells and Fritz Lang’ Chair: Andrew Shail 16:00-16:30 Refreshments 16:30-18:00 Session Four Panel 4A – Landscape I (Research Beehive 2.21) Chair: Maxim Shadurski Paul Dobraszczyk (Manchester), ‘Dystopian Ruin: Genealogies of London’s Imagined Destruction’ Martin Schauss (Warwick), ‘On the History of Natural Destruction: an Apocalyptic Reading of W. G. Sebald’ Madeleine Scherer (Warwick), ‘The Construction of a Dystopian Landscape: Marina Carr’s Midland Tragedies’ Panel 4B – Authorship & Afterlives (Research Beehive 2.21) Chair: Gul Dag Ben Clarke (North Carolina), ‘The Return to Airstrip One: Nineteen Eighty-Four, Dystopian Fiction, and Edward Snowden’ Gareth Proskourine-Barnett (Independent), ‘Frankenstein and the Remix’ Simon Stevenson (Doncaster), ‘Xenofiction: Dystopic Narrative in Philippe Vasset’s ScriptGenerator 18:30 Conference Dinner (Bar Loco, Newcastle) Thursday, 30th April 9:00-10:30 Session Five Panel 5A – YA Fictions (Research Beehive 2.21) Chair: Madeleine Scherer Bill Hughes (Sheffield), ‘Genre Mutation and the Dialectic of Dystopia in Holly Black’s The Coldest Girl in Coldtown’ Nicole Shipley (Newcastle, Aus.), ‘“Blood is a strange color. It’s darker than you expect it to be”: Female Adolescence and the Lack of Menstruation in Dystopian Young Adult Fiction’ Alison Tedman (Buckinghamshire), ‘Moving Mazes: Genre, Hero and Place in Young Adult Dystopian cinema’ Panel 5B – Landscape II (Research Beehive 2.22) Chair: Fiona Anderson Sameerah Mahmood (Huddersfield), ‘The Pesthouse: A Futurescape Post-apocalyptic Craceland’ Daniel Schlaber (Kiel), ‘The Textuality of Materiality: Will Self’s The Book of Dave’ Luana Barossi (Sao Paolo), ‘Airgela: The Poetics of Dystopia in The Boy and the World’ Panel 5C – Culture & Civilisation (Research Beehive 2.23) Chair: Andrea Dietrich Antony Mullen (Newcastle), ‘Dystopia After Thatcher: The Case of Never Let Me Go’ Mark West (Glasgow), ‘A Future Without History: Lauren Groff’s Arcadia’ Diletta De Cristofaro (Nottingham), ‘Anti-Apocalypses, or Why Is Dystopia So Prevalent in Post-Apocalyptic Fiction?’ 10.30-11.00 Refreshments 11.00-12.30 Session Six Panel 6A – Reading & Resistance (Research Beehive 2.21) Chair: Shelby Derbyshire Anna Holt (Newcastle), ‘Dystopian Final Girls – Feminism in The Hunger Games and Divergent Films’ Rebecca Hursthouse (Lincoln), ‘The Past as Power: The Control and Emulation of History in the Fallout Game Series’ Rosie Lewis (Durham), ‘Re-envisioning Female Subjectivity, Aesthetics and Collective Resistance in Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames’ Panel 6B – Conservatism & Capitalism (Research Beehive 2.22) Chair: Martin Gleghorn Amy Bride (Manchester), ‘Apocalypse Now: Commodity Capitalism and Dystopic Currency in Bret Easton Ellis’ Glamorama’ Adam Bristow-Smith (York), ‘Market Futures: Devaluation as Violence and Self-Justifying Self-Myths in Richard Morgan’s Market Forces’ William Fingleton (Dublin), ‘Super-Cannes and the Spirit of Terrorism’ 12:30-13.15 Lunch 13:15-14:45 Session Seven Panel 7A – Aldous Huxley (Research Beehive 2.21) Chair: Reanne Crane Michael O’Brien (Glasgow), ‘A Post-Lacanian and Postmodern Interaction with the Utopian Project of Modernity: Ideology and Power in Brave New World’ Maxim Shadurski (Siedlce), ‘Aldous Huxley’s Utopian Conservatism: between Tradition and Imagination’ Aleksandra Wawrzyszczuk (Newcastle), ‘“The beauty of tidiness [can] merely [be] an excuse for despotism”: The Implications of Over-organisation for the Modern Legal System’ 14.45-15.15 Refreshments 15:15-16:45 Session Eight Panel 8A – Technology & Resistance (Research Beehive 2.21) Chair: Dorothy Butchard Fran Bigman (Cambridge), ‘Mother Machines?: Technophobia in Recent British Repro-dystopias’ Martin Gleghorn (Durham), ‘The “Blade Runner Outcome”: The Technological and Temporal Dystopia of Will Self’s Walking to Hollywood’ Adam Stock (Newcastle), ‘The Social Anatomy of Robots’ 16:45-17:45 Keynote Address (Research Beehive 2.21) Professor Andrzej Gasiorek (Birmingham) ‘”Mischievous Little Animals”: On Thinking Utopianly’ Chair: Katy Madgwick 18.00 Close of Conference dystopianfictionconference.wordpress.com Professor Andrzej Gasiorek BA, PhD is a Professor of Twentieth Century Literature, Head of English Literature and Creative Writing Department of English Literature, University of Birmingham, UK. Professor Gasiorek is Head of English at Birmingham and a modern and contemporary literature specialist. He has written extensively on Ford Madox Ford, Wyndham Lewis, and Joseph Conrad, and on dystopian authors including George Orwell and JG Ballard. He is currently working on research relating to Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’. “Research My doctoral work focused on developments in the British novel after the Second World War, and this led to my first book, Postwar British Fiction (1995), which concentrated on the various responses to the legacy of Modernism and to the challenges posed by postmodernism. Since 1995 I have been working primarily on early twentieth-century literature, with a particular focus on Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, and Wyndham Lewis. I have also maintained my interest in contemporary writing, producing a book on J. G. Ballard (2005), and publishing essays on Michael Chabon, Jim Crace, Howard Jacobson, W. G. Sebald, and Zadie Smith. Wyndham Lewis’s writing and painting is an ongoing source of interest; I am currently the editor of the Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies and the chair of the Wyndham Lewis Society. My book Wyndham Lewis and Modernism (2004) discusses Lewis’s wide-ranging contribution to, and critique of, literary and visual modernism. I have recently completed A History of Modernist Literature (Blackwell, in press and forthcoming early 2015). My interest in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature led me to co-edit T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism (2006) with Edward Comentale, Ford Madox Ford: Literary Networks and Cultural Transformations (2008) with Daniel Moore, Wyndham Lewis and the Cultures of Modernity (2011) with Alice Reeve-Tucker and Nathan Waddell, The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms (2010) with Peter Brooker, Deborah Longworth and Andrew Thacker, volume 4 of The Oxford History of the Novel in English: The Reinvention of the British and Irish Novel, 1880-1940 (2011) with Patrick Parrinder, and to undertake Wyndham Lewis: A Critical Guide (2014) with Nathan Waddell. I am currently editing two books of the Collected Works of Wyndham Lewis: Wyndham Lewis, The Caliph’s Design (1919) and Wyndham Lewis, The Revenge for Love (1937). Together with Deborah Longworth and Michael Valdez Moses, I established the journal Modernist Cultures (http://www.euppublishing.com/journal/mod) in 2003. I am the editor of the Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies and am a co-founder of the British Association of Modernist Studies. I’m also currently writing various essays on a range of topics: the politics of modernism; Huxley’s Brave New World; Dreyer’s Joan of Arc; Lewis’s critique of modernism; the threat of totalitarianism in the 1930s; post-colonialism and Jean Rhys; and Leavis’s take on modernism from the early 1930s through to the 1960s.” Dr. Keith Williams, author of ‘HG Wells, Modernity and the Movies’. Dr Williams comes to us from the University of Dundee and will present a paper on Wells’ under-appreciated novel, ‘When the Sleeper Wakes’ and in particular its relationship to Fritz Lang’s ‘Metropolis’. Dr. Williams’s research interests include: literature and culture of the pre-1945 period; special emphasis on H.G. Wells and James Joyce; interdisciplinary interests, especially in writing and cinematicity, documentary and reportage. AHRC funded studentships are available in these research areas – more details. He is currently supervising an AHRC-funded doctoral research project on ‘The Gendering of the Visual: Katherine Mansfield and Visual Culture’. Dr Williams is Chair of the Scottish Word and Image Group (SWIG) which researches aspects of the relationship between verbal and visual representation and holds its annual conferences in early summer. He is also a member of the Executive Board of IAWIS/AIERTI and of the editorial board of theWellsian: the Journal of the H.G. Wells Society. SWIG hosted the major international conference, ‘Riddles of Form: Exploration and Discovery in Word and Image’, the 10th Triennial Conference of the International Association for Word and Image Studies / Association Internationale pour Étude des Rapports entre Texte et Image (IAWIS/AIERTI) at the University of Dundee (11-15 August 2014). See:http://www.scottishwordimage.org/conferences/iawis2014/index.htm 2015’s conference (SWIG’s 22nd) will be on ‘Afterlives: Reviving and Remediating in Word and Image’. He is currently researching for another monograph: James Joyce and Cinematicity. 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