Research English At Durham

“Poetry doesn’t ask you how old you are at the door”, says Caroline Bird, reflecting on the fact that her first collection, Looking at Letterboxes, was published when she was aged just 15. Since then, Caroline has authored four more collections, won numerous awards, and been the official poet of the London Olympics – great hallmarks indeed, but in this conversation with Suzannah V. Evans, recorded at StAnza Poetry Festival in 2019, she reveals why her poetry can also be identified by analogy with a frozen duck.

Caroline reads three poems at the end of the podcast: ‘A Peace of Stained Glass in a Lonely Church’, ‘The University Poetry Society’, and ‘Patient Intake Questionnaire’.

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Caroline Bird author photo credit: Fabrice Gagos

Imagine yourself immersed in a  beautiful landscape, and being moved by the view before your eyes. To  remember the experience, perhaps you might take a photograph. But while a  photograph can snap a single moment, a still image doesn’t really  reflect the way your original experience unfolded through time. Can  writing achieve something different? Both William Wordsworth and James  Joyce were interested in the problem of how to represent the continuous  stream of conscious experience. Adam James Cuthbert trains his eye on  the poetry and fiction that they produced, and suggests that their  literary efforts can be understood through an analogy with the camera.

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Do you walk on a sidewalk or a pavement? Eat fries or chips? The differences between American and British English can seem trivial at times, but they point to a deeper debate around language and identity that has been fought in the literary sphere as well as in everyday life. 

What differentiates American writers from their English literary counterparts? And even looking within America rather than across the Atlantic, since America is a diverse and huge nation comprising many different forms of speech, how can one writer ever hope to represent the ‘American’ language or a quintessential American self? 

Molly Becker charts how the American Midwest ended up as the pin at the centre of a complex map of language and identity. This region was memorably treated by writers such as Sinclair Lewis, whose novels of midwestern small town life, such as 1920’s Main Street, came not unproblematically to be seen as representative of the nation in the mainstream.

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There can be few things in life more tragic than the death of a child. Not surprisingly, when this is represented in literature, the deathbed scene will surely be poignant, empathetic and emotionally memorable. But as Morven Cook and Oliver Hancock discuss in conversation together, nineteenth-century and twenty-first-century texts are very different in their approach, moving away from representations of the child as the angel of innocence to a more realistically human portrayal.

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“Vivam!” “I will live.” The final  word of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, proclaiming the poet’s hope that he will  continue to be known through his great work. It’s a prediction that of  course turns out to be true, as we’re still reading and influenced by  the Metamorphoses 2000 years after it was written. In this podcast,  Simona Martorana helps us to appreciate why the cast of mythical  characters that inhabit the Metamorphoses still survive in our  imagination and culture today.

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When we say that a theatre  performance ‘brought the house down’, we usually don’t mean that  literally. But in the case of Shakespeare’s play Henry VIII, or as it’s  sometimes known, All is True, the phrase really does apply. In a  performance in 1613 a stray spark from a cannon ignited a fire that  burned the Globe Theatre to the ground. In fact, throughout its  chequered history of performance, this play has suffered or enjoyed a  variety of different climaxes. All of which makes Laura Jayne Wright  (University of Oxford) wonder: just what is the real ending of a work  of drama?

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When we listen to classical music, some of us might think we hear a story in the melody - but others will not. Some of us might know about the life of the composer and project their biography onto the piece – but others will listen with ears unbiased by context. The problem is that meaning doesn’t actually live anywhere that can be pinpointed in a particular sound or melody. Novels, on the other hand, tell us a story both about the characters within the text, and the music they listen to. So what happens when we read about music in their fiction? Can novels also help us to imagine the story of a tune? Does it change our interpretation of the novel if we already know the song being referred to and ‘hear’ it in our mind as we read? These are difficult and perhaps ultimately unanswerable questions, but Katie Harling-Lee invites you to try in this composition of words and music.

Listeners are advised that this podcast includes some discussion of conflict and violence. Due to copyright restrictions, we’re unable to integrate some of the music directly in the podcast and the talk has been edited accordingly; however, you can listen to the relevant extracts, which will be indicated at the appropriate time in the talk.

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Think of a medieval romance, and  you might imagine brave courtly knights dashing to the rescue of women  held captive by monstrous beasts and dragons. But think again. Olivia  Colquitt introduces us to the 14th-century Mélusine story, in which the  beautiful woman is not all that she seems and it is the man who ends up  in need of a rescuer.

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Which breakfast cereal do you prefer: Frosted Flakes or Sugar Puffs?  It’s the sort of decision many of us face, bleary eyed, each morning.  But if you watched Netflix’s interactive film, Black Mirror: Bandersnatch,  you might recognise that this is the first choice that viewers have to  make when deciding how the story of the protagonist will unfold. While  the ability to choose what happens next will have seemed like a novel  innovation to some, fictions that hand over power to the reader date  back to the 1960s. Do you want to time-travel back over six decades?  Then hit play and continue to listen to George Cox as he guides us through the labyrinthine history of interactive adventure.

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"Marley's ghost bothered him  exceedingly.  Every time he resolved within himself, after mature  enquiry, that it was all a dream, his mind flew back again, like a  strong spring released, to its first position, and presented the same  problem to be worked all through, 'Was it a dream or not?." Scrooge's  internal debate accurately reflects the mid-Victorian dichotomy on  Spiritualism, mesmerism and the supernatural. Claire Horton, of  Loughborough University, explains how in Dickens’s time the ability to  see ghosts was linked to mesmerism, a practice that fired the  imagination of the Victorians.

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