Bloomsbury Literary Studies

Expressway to your heart

 

Кто придумал, скажи, эти пробки?

В переулках – зима затаилась

И ждет: что же будет.

                           Zemfira, "Traffic"

(Who thought up, tell me, these traffic jams?  In the alleyways winter awaits us.  And we shall wait - what will happen.)  

 

Jammed streets.  Smoking exhausts.  Lost time.  Road rage.  A built environment that reflects the needs of the automobile and forgets the most important component in society:  children, women, and men who play and work, sit and read, exercise and play music, and stroll and bicycle among us.

In 1967 the Soul Survivors’s hit, “Expressway to Your Heart,” a song that reached number 4 on the Billboard Hot 100, the singer laments “On the expressway to your heart.  The expressway is not the best way.  At five o'clock it's much too crowded.”  He adds, “I was wrong, baby, I took too long.  I got caught in the rush hour.”  And yet here we sit, more and more of us, longer and longer, every day on the expressway to work, home, in an emergency to the hospital, to the grocery store, and perhaps to someone’s heart.

Traffic addresses the growing national and international problems connected with automobile congestion in cross-national comparisons of traffic, accidents and safety, and solutions to these problems.  I discuss early efforts to deal with traffic and growing safety issues.  The former usually involved building more roads and straightening and widening existing ones – the “if you build it, they will come” approach. This led to more traffic, higher speeds, and more deaths and disfiguring injuries.  As for safety, until the 1990s most countries, including the world leader in automotive technology, the US, relied on industry-sponsored safety measures – and long delays in rolling them out.  And we’ve spent trillions of dollars on automobiles and their infrastructure and wars to secure oil, while crying tears of gasoline when someone suggests better public transportation.  At least the Europeans have recognized public transport and bicycles as the way to get to someone’s heart.  Or to work.

You know what?  We’re number 1!  America is great again!  LA is first in the world in traffic jams, followed by such cities as Bangkok, Jakarta, Istanbul and Beijing. Traffic, mixed with reference to philosophy and rock and roll, offers solutions, not only criticisms to gridlock and congestion.  Americans spend on average 120 hours annually commuting per year.  That’s five full days.  Just sitting.  On that expressway.  To your heart.

We continue to focus on the car as if it is a human right, and we’ve equipped the car to be more isolated from social concerns and pollution.  New ones have USB ports, Bluetooth connectivity, rearview cameras, and screens. Is the autonomous car the solution?  No, first there will always be human error. Second, they are perfect vehicles for terrorist bombers and hackers.  Third, they cost about $100,000 per vehicle.  What about driving in inclement weather?  What if traffic signals fail?  The autonomous vehicle represents the foolish tradition of seeking a technological solution to a problem of technological origin.  How about safe, inexpensive, proven solutions to put an end to auto carnage and exhaust?  How about bicycles in bicycle lanes?   Let’s not go the way of the automobile, but away from the automobile.  We can use our minds to create obstacles to the automobile, and to disincentivize their use. 

Traffic began as a poetic and ontological musing about the speed bump. (“If speed bumps exist, then there must be a higher order of being to help us out of this mess.”)  Here are some solutions:  signs and fines enforced without remorse; roundabouts and traffic circles; dedicated bicycle and pedestrian ways; heavily subsidized public transportation (it’s much cheaper than building roads, roads, and repairing more roads); neighborhoods made for people not cars; and speed bumps.

Traffic thus is a kind of polemic.  I argue that we need to make cities and towns for people, not for automobiles.  We need to recognize the huge environmental costs associated with automobiles, the foreign policy dictated by the need for oil, and the decay of existing infrastructure.

Traffic calming (Verkehrsberuhigung) came from German (and Dutch) traffic engineers.  There’s probably a direct line from Georg Hegel to the dialects of calming.  If Hegel has been in a VW on the Autobahn, he’d likely never had had the time to write Phenomenology of Spirit.  And then where would we be?

 

Paul Josephson is Professor of History at Colby College, USA. He is the author of twelve books, including Fish Sticks, Sports Bras, and Aluminum Cans (2015), The Conquest of the Russian Arctic (2014), Lenin’s Laureate: A Life in Communist Science (2010), Would Trotsky Wear a Bluetooth? Technological Utopianism Under Socialism (2009), and Motorized Obsession: Life, Liberty and the Small Bore Engine (2007). His latest book, Traffic, is now available from Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series.

Q&A with Willard Bohn

Willard Bohn answered some questions for us about editing the new anthology Surrealist Poetry.

Tell us a bit about a significant piece in the collection and why you selected it.

I selected “When I Sleep I See Clearly,” by J. V. Foix, for two reasons. Since Barcelona was, and continues to be, a hotbed of artistic experimentation, I wanted to include works by someone from Catalonia. Although Spanish is the dominant language spoken in Spain, it is not the only language. Foix was not only the most talented poet writing in Catalan but also one of the finest Surrealist poets in any language. The whimsical play of his imagination is both immensely entertaining and totally original. Since the poem attempts to describe the nature of Surrealist inspiration, it constitutes an important theoretical statement as well as a delightful lyrical exercize.

What made you realize this kind of collection was missing from the field?

Historically anthologies of Surrealist poetry have been few and far between. In general, they consist of texts in the original language or translations into English. Although bilingual anthologies present a rare opportunity to compare the original poems with their English versions, they are exceedingly rare. Bilingual translations of Surrealist poems taken from more than one language do not exist at all. Combining texts translated from French, Spanish, and Catalan, the present volume attempts to partially remedy this situation. Readers are able to compare texts composed in different languages and to note the various ways they exemplify Surrealism.             

Did you begin compiling the anthology with a certain piece or pieces in mind?

The volume was initially conceived as a companion to an earlier anthology entitled The Dada Market. As such, it represents a further investigation into the twentieth century avant-garde. Since André Breton was the leader of the French Surrealists, who were the first to experiment with automatic procedures, I began by choosing a selection of his poems. The names of other prominent Surrealists came to mind as well but not particular works. My goal was to present a broad selection of the most significant members of the French and Spanish groups. The twenty-three writers chosen for comparison are not limited to just France and Spain, but also come from Belgium, Egypt, Martinique, Mauritius, Mexico, Chile, and Peru.

What do you think is the most unusual piece in the collection?

Among the most unusual works are those composed by three individuals simultaneously. In “Out for a Stroll,” for example, André Breton, Paul Eluard, and René Char describe an imaginary walk through mysterious city streets, where they encounter an anonymous woman singing in a deserted public square, a group of gypsies, and a paralyzed train. Framed by images of a crumbling coral pharmacy, the poem contains numerous examples of the Surrealist marvelous (le merveilleux). Although the latter includes such notions as the uncanny and the peculiar, it may be defined essentially as exacerbated beauty.    

What are the benefits and challenges of editing a collection?

Editing an anthology is a challenging task and certainly not for the faint-hearted. Most of the problems encountered by anyone seeking to publish a collection of poems are associated with copyright law, which sorely needs to be overhauled and standardized from one nation to the next. That an author deserves to reap the fruits of his or her labor is indisputable. That his grand-nephew deserves to reap the same fruits is not. In general, the sums involved are modest, and most of the authors’ heirs or rights holders are usually cooperative. However, the present project was delayed for years by the incompetent editorial staff of a prominent French publisher. My initial contact person took a leave of absence after one year to have a baby, ushering in a series of inept (or worse) replacements with some very strange ideas. Two or three years later, she returned, resumed the permissions process, and left a year later to have a second baby. Ironically, in a few years the poems will all be in the public domain, and anyone will be able to quote them without permission!       

Given unlimited space, what would you have added to the collection?

As it stands, I believe the anthology is a well-balanced and representative example of Surrealist poetry. For one thing, the contributions in Spanish are about as numerous as those in French. For another, the principal genres and styles are illustrated by a number of different works. Thus adding more poets and more examples of Surrealist poetry would not have substantially improved the volume.   

Tell us one new thing you learned from editing this volume.

I learned to be incredibly patient as the years passed. The copyright process doesn’t have to be cumbersome and unpleasant, but it certainly can be. As my case illustrates, permissions that should only require two or three months to obtain can drag on forever.

What do you hope readers will take away from this collection?

I hope my readers will gain a better understanding of Surrealism, of its principal methods, goals, and accomplishments. I also hope they will gain a new appreciation for the poets who appear in this volume, who were incredibly inventive and creative. More than anything, perhaps, I hope I have succeeded in conveying the tremendous excitement that accompanied the Surrealist adventure. André Breton and his colleagues were basically engaged in a voyage of discovery. They sought to shed new light not only on the workings of the Freudian unconscious but also on the creative act itself.  

 

Willard Bohn is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of French and Comparative Literature at Illinois State University, USA. He is the author or editor of sixteen books, including The Avant-Garde Imperative (2013); Marvelous Encounters: Surrealist Responses to Film, Art, Poetry and Architecture (2005), Italian Futurist Poetry (2005), The Dada Market: An Anthology of Poetry (1993), and The Aesthetics of Visual Poetry, 1914-1928 (1993). He is the editor of the new collection Surrealist Poetry: An Anthology, now available from Bloomsbury.

Password

Guest post by Martin Paul Eve

What does it mean to write a cultural history of passwords? Aren't passwords, after all, digital phenomena, part of computers and the internet? Surely passwords aren't really old enough to have a history?

Well, Ali Baba's “Open Sesame” suggests otherwise. As does Aeneas Tacitus's account of Roman siege defence where he implies that a casual whistle might work well as a password. As do the cryptographic devices of the Ancient Greek empire. As do the exploits of Alan Turing and all in Bletchley Park in World War II. Even in the limited sense of “words that grant access”, passwords pre-date our computational technologies by a substantial margin.

But what if we thought differently about passwords? What if, instead of taking them at face value, we drilled to the core of what they do? What if we had a broader concept of passwords that spanned pass-spaces, pass-actions, and pass-words?

For passwords are actually about identity. They are the mechanisms that we use to substitute for an actual person when we cannot compare every feature of a person to a pre-stored version. Instead of storing a copy of a person (which we can't do), we say: if this person knows this word, then I suspect this is the person I seek. On the basis of such decisions, made through proxies for identity, we grant access.

In such thinking, a labyrinth that is impenetrable to all but one quester is like a password. Theseus, who entered the labyrinth of the Minotaur and found his way back using a piece of string, might be called the first hacker. So too might the magic spells in the Harry Potter series be called passwords; a sequence of words of knowledge that grant access to magical feats. Does the bible give us a clue to the power of Godly pass-words when, “in the beginning was the word”?

What is also interesting about passwords, though, is that for as long as they have existed in their many forms, there have been those who would seek to defeat them. What, though, might this mean when we say that your eyeball or your fingerprint is your password (a system of measuring the body that is called “biometrics”)?

The first thing that evildoers attempt in such an environment is to hold up a picture of your eye to a scanner in order to fool it. This, in all seriousness, even worked with the first eye scanners! Yet several films—such as Angels and Demons and Demolition Man—have envisaged a gruesome scenario that is know as the “borrowed biometric bypass” that goes a step further. For our bodies are, sadly, not fixed and stealing someone's finger is easier than we might imagine for a determined villain.

These are some of the histories, contexts, and cultural aspects that I explore in Password. Speak friend and enter...

 

Martin Paul Eve is Professor of Literature, Technology and Publishing at Birkbeck College, University of London, UK. He is the author of Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future (2014) and Pynchon and Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Foucault and Adorno (2014). His most recent book, Password, has just been released in Object Lessons.

The Aesthetics of Care: On the Literary Representation of Animals

Guest post by Josephine Donovan

I’ve long been concerned about the aestheticization of evil; that is, the setting off or the framing of evil deeds as material to be appreciated for the beauty of its arrangement (in the case of pictures) or for the transgressive thrill provided (in the case of literature) by the experience of vicariously entering or glimpsing into forbidden territory.  

Here is a good example of the aestheticization of evil: it occurs in the war novel, The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien.

For all its horror [O’Brien writes] you can’t help but gape at the awful majesty of combat.  You stare out at tracer rounds unwinding through the dark like brilliant red ribbons. . . . You admire . . . the great sheets of metal-fire streaming down . . . the purply orange glow of napalm. . . . [A]n artillery barrage has the aesthetic purity of absolute moral indifference–a powerful implacable beauty.

Here atrocious evil is disconnected from its ethical effect–the killing and hideous wounding of living creatures (not to mention the destruction of the environment).  The scene is set off from its ethical context, framed, and viewed purely from a dispassionate aesthetic point of view.

In my book, The Aesthetics of Care, I explore the various aesthetic theories—mainly variations on the Kantian—that justify and legitimize such aestheticization; instead, I propose an aesthetics of care that doesn’t elide ethical consideration of the subjects being treated.  I then examine a series of works of literature—by such figures as Willa Cather, Leo Tolstoy, J. M. Coetzee, and others—from the critical perspective of an aesthetics of care, focusing on the treatment of animals therein.  All too often, I argue, in the fictions of modernity animals are framed aesthetically without regard to their ethical status.  There are, however, writers, such as those noted above, who treat animals as ethical subjects with stories of their own.

Focusing on the animal as subject opens up new ways of looking at received classics.  Anna Karenina, for example, is rarely, if ever, considered with attention to its animal characters.  Yet doing so reveals aspects of the novel (and the author) hitherto ignored.  Levin’s dog Laska, for example, receives a great deal of detailed attention by Tolstoy.  She is really a character in her own right.  Such a shift away from human-centered reading necessarily puts a new and limiting perspective on the human doings in the novel–a perspective Tolstoy offers in several of his short stories, such as “Three Deaths” and “Strider,” to great effect.

My hope in writing this book was to intensify readers’ awareness of animal characters as subjects and to propose alternatives to their habitual aestheticization, which continues to be a common fictional practice. More broadly, I critique the aestheticization of evil seen in other works and hold that ethical considerations must not be overriden by aesthetic interests and concerns.  My overall hope is that my readings may provoke readers to further reflect upon these issues.  

 

Josephine Donovan is Emerita Professor of English at the University of Maine, USA.  Her other books include:  Feminist Theory: The Intellectual Traditions, 4th ed. (2012)—named an Outstanding Academic Book by Choice; European Local-Color Literature (2010)—both Bloomsbury books; and Women and the Rise of the Novel, 1405-1726, 2d ed. (2013)—also a Choice Outstanding Academic Book.  With Carol J. Adams she co-edited The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics (2007) and Animals and Women (1995).  

Macbeth, Macbeth: Day 5

To end the week of blog posts celebrating the launch of Macbeth, Macbeth, John Schad, Professor of English at Lancaster University, and one of the editors of Beyond Criticism introduces the series—its inspiration, and what we might expect from it. For future Beyond Criticism news keep an eye on the series website at http://thebee.buzz or follow the series on Twitter @BeeInquiries.

A man in a desert, the desert that is the university, a man called Matthew Arnold, once lectured sadly to himself.  ‘Creative activity,’ he said, ‘is the promised land to which criticism can only beckon.’  The critic, you see, like Moses of old, is to die in the wilderness, the well-policed academy with its dry-as-dust dreams of cool argumentation, rational analysis, and objective investigation.  

Many, though, have since protested, crying out in the wilderness, peddling rumours of a criticism-to-come, Arnold’s utopia.  Chief among these crazy promised-landers is another man, also in trouble, a man called Oscar Wilde, he who said he could see or foresee what he called ‘the critic as artist.’

And now, right now, within the academy, there are many who, with the help of those without, are would-be desert deserters, quietly seeking to tunnel their way out, out toward the promised land.  These are those for whom the act of reading is not to be confined to the laws of the desert, the so-called norms of scholarship.  Instead, these tunnellers pursue a reading of books that does itself draw on the ways and means of books.  They seek, that is, to read from within, if you will, rather than without.  This, they say, will be a literary criticism that really is literary – criticism at the very limit of criticism, criticism beyond criticism.

Cue a new Bloomsbury series called precisely that, ‘Beyond Criticism’ - a wave of books written and yet-to-be-written that will see the act of reading take on a host of lawless forms: novel, poem, play, memoir, meditation, provocation, manifesto, jest, sigh, whisper, cry, prayer, etc. etc..

And as if all this were not enough, which it isn’t, there is, I see, a site, a website, to mirror the series, to ensure that it goes electric – like Dylan, I dream, in 1966.  Cry Judas!  This way lies forms of reading rich not only in word but other such hazards as sound and image, moving and still.  And its name, this website, it is ‘the bee.’   Do not ask why. 

Environmental Cultures: Day 1

Bloomsbury are delighted to be launching a brand new open access series in ecocriticism and the Environmental Humanities. Responding to one of the most urgent issues of our time, the Environmental Cultures series will be publishing innovative new research on the diverse ways in which culture has responded to the age of environmental crisis.

The series is co-edited by Greg Garrard of the University of British Columbia, Canada and Richard Kerridge of Bath Spa University, UK. The first two books are Serenella Iovino’s explorations of Italian landscapes, Ecocriticism and Italy and Hubert Zapf’s study Literature as Cultural Ecology. The full text of both books are available online in full here and published under a creative commons license, with print and ebook editions available to buy.

And here’s Greg Garrard to tell you more about the series himself:

 

 

We’ll be celebrating the launch of this exciting new series with a week of posts here on the Bloomsbury Literary Studies blog:

• On Tuesday, we have a Q&A with Serenella Iovino who will tell us more about the first book in the series, Ecocriticism and Italy
• On Wednesday, Hubert Zapf will preview his just published book, Literature as Cultural Ecology
• On Thursday, well be hearing from three members of the series’ international Editorial Board – Mandy Bloomfield (University of Plymouth, UK), Pablo Mukherjee (University of Warwick, UK) and Christa Grewe-Volpp (University of Mannheim, Germany) – about their hopes for the series
• And, on Friday, we’ll have a video from Series Editor Richard Kerridge on the types of books we’re hoping to publish in the future.

So, stay tuned!

The Uncanny Power and Artistry of Biofiction

Guest post by Michael Lackey

The Danish painter Einar Wegener had an elective surgery in 1930 to become the woman Lili Elbe.  At first glance, David Ebershoff’s novel The Danish Girl is about this transformation.  But if one understands how the biographical novel converts an historical figure into a literary symbol, then one can see how The Danish Girl actually illuminates more than just the “life” of the first person to have a sex-reassignment surgery.  It illuminates some of the most important ideas and experiences about sex and gender identity in the contemporary world.

The biographical novel, a work of fiction that names its protagonist after an actual historical figure, has become a dominant literary form in recent years.  But why?  This is the question I sought to answer when I interviewed prominent biographical novelists for my book Truthful Fictions, and my new book The American Biographical Novel contains the results of my four years of research. 

One could wrongly assume that readers get an accurate version of an actual historical figure in a biographical novel, but Lance Olsen illustrates why this is not and cannot be the case.  For a long time, historians and scholars believed that Hitler and the Nazis adopted and made use of the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche.  But Nietzsche explicitly and unambiguously opposed core Nazi ideas, such as nationalism and anti-Semitism.  So how could the Nazis appropriate him and his work?  In Nietzsche’s Kisses, Olsen answers this question by picturing how Nietzsche’s sister, Elisabeth, converted the paper person of Friedrich Nietzsche into her husband, Bernhard Förster.  In essence, to advance their political agenda, the Nazis adopted and used, not the ideas and person of Friedrich Nietzsche, but Elisabeth’s Försterized version of her brother, a figure that is almost the complete opposite of Nietzsche. Nietzsche’s Kisses is vintage biofiction because, while it is about an actual historical figure, it is also about so much more.    

To put the matter simply, biographical novelists are different from biographers, because they are more committed to the sacred art of imaginative creation than biographical representation.  Thus, they take unapologetic liberties with the life of their subject in order to communicate their own vision of life.  For instance, Barbara Chase-Riboud authored a powerful biographical novel about Sally Hemings, the slave-“wife” of Thomas Jefferson.  Jefferson was forty-five and Hemings was fifteen when they first became romantically involved, and Jefferson fathered at least seven children with her.  Chase-Riboud found something historically, politically, and intellectually significant in this story, so she invented a wide range of characters and scenes in order to clarify how Jefferson could promote a philosophy of life and liberty for all, but simultaneously enslave his own children.  So while Chase-Riboud creatively imagines the “life of Hemings,” she actually uses Hemings to expose a contradiction at the core of American democracy, a contradiction that originated with Jefferson but persists even to today. 

Only now are we starting to understand the uncanny power of the biographical novel.  This is a form of fiction that tells us as much about someone from the past as it does about who we are and how we came to be in the present. 

There is still a lot of work to do in order to understand and appreciate the biographical novel.  Fortunately, this is the ideal time to do this work, since there are now so many brilliant biographical novels out there.

 

Michael Lackey is Professor of English at the University of Minnesota, USA. His books include The Modernist God State, Truthful Fictions: Conversations with American Biographical Novelists and The American Biographical Novel, all available from Bloomsbury.

 

 

Special offer! Buy both Truthful Fictions and The American Biographical Novel and get 35% off, now through May 31st! Check out both books here.

Dust Specks

Guest post by Michael Marder

Note: The small fragments on dust gathered here are based on my nearly daily tweets on the subject @michael_marder. Besides their belatedness, there is no reason why they could not have been a part of my book Dust (Object Lessons).

Prelude

Twitter generates and spreads the dust of thought: dispersed, inessential, fine shreds covering everything.

The book

I love the cover of DUST. In it, on it, my name seems buried under dust, the word and the thing.

DUST is now a material thing in the world! That is: It can gather and release dust.

...the dust of thought and that of matter... My DUST is the point where their vectors intersect...

In my book, I show how dust itself urges us to think, what it gives to thought, and what thought can dispense back to it.

One substance

Spinoza was right about the one substance. Its name is dust. The body and the mind are its two, not-so-different, modes.

In dust, the difference between ‘who’ and ‘what’ is abolished.

Dust is both verb and noun—a perfect, complete word for the imperfection and incompletion of existence.

Insignificance

Dust is the insignificant almost-not-a-thing reminding us of our own insignificance. 

Try to see the world from the perspective of dust, and all your problems will reveal their relative triviality. 

Paraphrasing Freud: Where there was world, there will be dust.

From dust to dust, our lives are a circle of the elements’ relation to themselves.

Nonidentity

Dust is a lesson in unlearning the rules of identity.

“Dust is” says in equal measure “Dust is not.”

In dust, the gruesomeness of death has been already neutralized—the products of decay desiccated, made subtle…

Dust is the indifference of difference.

Gathering-dispersal

Dust is posthumous dissemination, its origin (including immediate life) erased.

Till dust do us part? (and, in parting, bring us together anew).

Dust flies, settles, gathers, spreads in the finest parody of Aristotle's unmoved mover I know of.

Dust is the event of the thing.

 

Michael Marder is IKERBASQUE Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (UPV-EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain. His most recent monographs include The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium (2014), Pyropolitics: When the World Is Ablaze (2015), and Dust, recently released in Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series. He is now completing a book, co-authored with Luce Irigaray and titled Through Vegetal Being.

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Bookshelves at Sea

Guest post by Lydia Pyne

The winter of 1845-46 was rough for the Franklin Expedition. Between tuberculosis, exposure, pneumonia, scurvy, and lead poisoning, the expedition’s entire crew died before that winter was out, trapped in the Victoria Strait by the treacherous Canadian Arctic ice with ‘only’ 2,900 books from the ships’ bookshelves for company.

Lieutenant John Irving's cabin, facing port (note the iron knee, bookshelves, and folding table)

The Franklin Expedition was tasked with traversing the ever-elusive Northwest Passage – they were to find a route that would connect the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans at northern latitudes. The expedition’s commander, Captain Sir John Franklin, like his many contemporary Victorian explorers, saw to it that the expedition’s library was well-stocked and that the ships were well-shelved. When the Terror and the Erebus sailed from Greenhilthe, near London, in June of 1845, the Erebus had a library of 1,700 volumes and the Terror carried 1,200 books, including “everything from narratives of earlier Arctic expeditions and geographical journals to Charles Dickens’ Nicholas Nickleby and bound copies of Punch magazine.” But in order for the ships to house such a collection – the expedition intended to spend at least two winters in the Arctic, sussing out the best maritime route – the ships would need some serious bookshelves.

Libraries – with bookshelves – were important components of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century scientific expeditions. Not only were books crucial references for the ships’ naturalists, books with astronomical charts were critical navigational aids. Accounts of earlier travels were vital reading for the officers and crews if expeditions wanted the best chance of success, especially under harsh environmental conditions. For expeditions like the Franklin, where the crew would have to while away countless cold hours in the unforgiving Arctic, volumes like Punch and Nicholas Nickleby would help to pass the time. (The Franklin Expedition also stocked up on paper and materials to teach non-literate crew members how to read and write.) But more than anything else, bookshelves on the expedition ships were fitted to insure that they could accommodate collections as well as keep the books safe, dry, and accessible without sacrificing the ships’ buoyancy and balance.

Scale cross section of Captain Crozier's personal quarters 

Bookshelves tend to fall into the backdrop in the history of exploration – they’re overlooked objects, architectural curios. They’re practically background scenery, especially compared to other instruments of exploration and history of science – be it cartography, natural history, or any other kind of empire-building. But all expeditions depended on these ‘mobile’ libraries and the knowledge that was stored on the ships’ shelves. The Franklin Expedition’s collection of 2,900 books on the Terror and the Erebus was no exception. The shelves – and the books on those shelves – were an integral part of everyday expedition life, creating an inexorable and physical link between book and bookshelf.

Lydia Pyne (PhD) is a freelance writer, editor, and historian, and a Research Fellow in the Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Texas of Austin, USA. She is a Contributing Editor for The Appendix and a Reviewer and Essayist for NewPages and New York Journal of Books. Her latest book, Bookshelf, was recently released in Bloomsbury's Object Lessons series.

 

Images used with permission from Building HMS Terror.

Crunch Lit: The Future of Finance

Guest post by Katy Shaw

The financial world has long been a source of fascination for writers, and this intensified in the wake of the credit crunch. In my new monograph Crunch Lit I argue that following the financial crisis, literature was mobilised as an effective means of cultural resistance—a site for the struggle over the legitimacy of reality. Rewriting events, literary representations offer fictionalized micro-histories of a highly contested period that engage in a dialogic interaction with the lived fallout from the crisis. As part of a challenge to define the events of 2007–8, authors interrogate the capacity of contemporary genre writing to represent a new millennial crisis of credit and understand its legacy for contemporary society. Using writings not as a form of imaginative escape from the chaotic and confusing reality facing global economic systems, but as an exercise in critical understanding and reframing, they suggest that contemporary writings can be relevant and revealing in their social and political purpose.

Collectively, the corpus of cultural representations analysed by Crunch Lit – from stage drama and musicals, to stand-up comedy, reality television and movie screenplays – highlights the interconnected state of finance and society during and after the credit crunch. Reframing our relationship with and understanding of contemporary finance, these works transgress the boundaries of established narratives on finance and instead offer critical and alternative standpoints on the financialization of society in the new millennium. In literary examinations of what went wrong, why, and where the finger of blame should be pointed, artists foreground the financial ignorance of the pre-crunch period, the drama of events as credit froze and the benefit of hindsight afforded to cultural interventions created in the post-crunch period.

 

The credit crunch of 2007–8 made visible the impact of financialization across society, culture politic and the economy in the twenty-first century. More fundamentally, it revealed a new narrative: that savers, spenders and lenders were variously implicated in its international circuits of influence. The recognition that contemporary global capitalism cannot be dismissed or escaped has led to a fresh desire to engage with and understand it. The problem of what happens after the credit crunch, of how to ‘correct’ identified flaws in our financial systems and cultures, to improve public financial literacy and engineer a new relationship between the social and the economic, is a profoundly collective one.

The way forward raises important economic, social, political and moral questions for twenty-first-century societies. The consequences of the credit crunch will affect societies for years to come. In their response to the crunch, the governments of the UK and the United States transferred the debt bubble from a private to a public sector problem. While banks were given huge sums of money to be bailed out, public spending was cut across sectors in a desperate attempt to balance the books.

Admitting that something is not working is a vital step towards recognition and an impetus to change. Encouraging us to stop dreaming, cultural representations of the 2007–8 credit crunch form part of a wider dialogue about the need to move towards a new system, one governed by tighter regulation, intelligent finance and an end to the mystifications that have masked the operation of the financial sector to date. Improving financial literacy, enhancing awareness of the internal mechanisms of contemporary finance and critically reviewing the impact of financialization on twenty-first-century society, Crunch Lit foregrounds the need to think carefully about contemporary uses of capital, and the possibility of making capital our servant, rather than our master.

In 2010, the Archbishop of Canterbury in the UK, Rowan Williams, used an open lecture to tell the public that the credit crunch has taught us that ‘economics is too important to be left to economists’. Offering accessible contexts and intelligible representations of hitherto seemingly unpresentable events, they foster new communities of understanding, reframing the period of economic freedom preceding the crunch. From the rise of finance during the 1980s, to the fast finance of the 1990s, and the emergence of a financialization in the new millennium, new literary representations of the 2007–8 credit crunch remind contemporary audiences that value does not begin, and end, with the economic.


Katy Shaw is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Director of C21: Centre for Twenty-First Century Writings at the University of Brighton, UK. She is the author of Crunch Lit, part of Bloomsbury's series 21st Century Genre Fiction. Her previous publications include David Peace: Texts and Contexts and Funny Women: Gender and Comedy in the 21st Century.