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97 - War
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- By Corinne Fowler, University of Leicester, United Kingdom.
- Edited by Charles Forsdick, Zoë Kinsley, Kathryn Walchester
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- Book:
- Keywords for Travel Writing Studies
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 13 July 2019
- Print publication:
- 22 April 2019, pp 286-288
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Summary
Travellers from nations allied to the War on Terror face the unique challenge of an ever-shrinking number of viable destinations. The global struggle against terrorism has rendered an increasing number of countries inaccessible. This inaccessibility has a direct impact on the nature and purpose of postmillennial travel writing. During the 1960s and 1970s, travellers journeyed through countries like Afghanistan, Algeria, Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia, the Sudan and Tunisia. Yet many of today's travellers are deterred by war, terrorist attacks and prohibitive insurance costs. The clear exception is the war reporter. War reporters are uniquely equipped, and professionally obliged to enter conflict zones. Moreover, they have a professional investment in providing authoritative news coverage in line with mainstream news values (Youngs and Hulme 2002, 10), and which does not alienate their official sources (Pedelty 1995).
Journalists’ turn to travel writing raises clear questions about travel and ethics. Postcolonial critics have focused on travel writing's colonial origins (Said 1978; Syed 1996), leading to the genre's asymmetrical and unidirectional mode of representation (Clark 1999; Lisle 2006). While much late twentieth-century travel writing negotiates and comments upon the genre's imperialist orientation, war reporters tend to adopt less self-reflexive approaches. The route taken by journalists who produce travel writing has been markedly anthropological. Travel writing in the anthropological mode carries the attendant risk of an unquestioned belief in anthropology's integrity as a discipline.
The anthropological turn in travel writing by war reporters can be largely explained by journalists’ professional frustration at the restrictions placed upon them by the increasingly narrow requirements of transnational, consolidated mainstream news outlets. To remedy this, war reporters have turned to travel writing. As the correspondent Christina Lamb observes, there are ‘details […] you [as a journalist] would like to convey and yet […] you can't get that in; those pieces are very much news-driven’ (Fowler 2007, 256). Elsewhere she notes her frustration with male news editors, who she believes require accounts of actual fighting rather than ‘stuff from behind the scenes’ (258). There is a corresponding concern by many journalists that the strictures of war reporting prevent women's voices being heard due to their association with the domestic sphere. Part of the solution to this dilemma has been to produce longer-length features for weekend newspapers or to write books which offer behind-the-scenes accounts of war zones.
28 - Ethics
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- By Corinne Fowler, University of Leicester, United Kingdom.
- Edited by Charles Forsdick, Zoë Kinsley, Kathryn Walchester
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- Book:
- Keywords for Travel Writing Studies
- Published by:
- Anthem Press
- Published online:
- 13 July 2019
- Print publication:
- 22 April 2019, pp 81-83
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Summary
Since the late 1970s, there has been considerable scholarly engagement with questions of travel and ethics within and across the disciplines of anthropology, linguistics, modern languages and literary studies. Three landmarks are Edward W. Said's Orientalism (1978), James Clifford and George E. Marcus's Writing Culture: The Politics and Poetics of Ethnography (1986) and Syed Islam's Travel and Ethics (1996). Said was among the first to take travel writing seriously. His 1978 study inaugurated a focus by postcolonial critics on travel writing's complicity with colonial discourse (see colonialism and orientalism). Concentrating on accounts of the Middle East, Said argued that travel writers have promoted and perpetuated established myths about corrupt despots, fanatical Muslims, labyrinthine thought-processes, noble Arabs and alluring women (Hulme and Youngs 2002, 107). Said's study fostered widespread investigations of his claim that travel writing autocratically denies colonized subjects a history or a voice (107). Islam's book made a major contribution to the subsequent debate. The Ethics of Travel similarly emphasizes travel writing's generic and historical tendency to produce one-sided portrayals of intercultural encounter to which travellees have no right of reply (Islam 1996, 2013).
Today, many scholars have retained Said and Islam's pessimism about travel writing's culturally imperialist nature. Debbie Lisle's (2006, xi) book The Global Politics of Contemporary Travel Writing argues that travel writing overwhelmingly entrenches a ‘conservative political outlook’. Postcolonial scholarship by Steve Clark, Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan claims that, representationally speaking, contemporary travel writing continues to resemble ‘one-way traffic’ (Clark 1999, 6). A common ethical complaint against travel writing is that travellers lack solidarity with the travellees featured in their accounts. Meanwhile, scholars have amassed evidence to support the claim that travel narratives both inherit and entrench established modes of representing particular regions. Paraguay, for example, has been alternately represented as Arcadia, Eden and El Dorado (Fowler 2013, 55). Such patterns are geographically varied and often contradictory. While Afghans have, for instance, traditionally been represented as medieval, unruly, murderous and warlike (Fowler 2007), Paraguay persistently figures as ‘languid and insular, Edenic and apocalyptic, exotic and erotically charged’ (Fowler 2013, 62). Moreover, travel writers demonstrably project their own societal anxieties and preoccupations onto sites of travel elsewhere (55).
Practice at Large: How Creative Writing can Enhance University Research Environments
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- By Corinne Fowler, University of Leicester., Harry Whitehead, University of Leicester.
- Edited by Robert Eaglestone, Gail Marshall
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- Book:
- English: Shared Futures
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 15 October 2019
- Print publication:
- 15 November 2018, pp 171-179
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Summary
‘I don't at all favour the institution known as the “creative writer on the campus”,’ opined F. R. Leavis in 1967. ‘What next?’ linguist Roman Jakobson remarked, when he heard Vladimir Nabokov had been offered a Harvard professorship, ‘shall we appoint an elephant to teach zoology?’ Like King Cnut, their helplessly raised hands failed to hold back the tide. Creative writing (hereafter CW) maintains an uneasy relationship with its academic mother subject, English, ‘rather like welcoming Heathcliff into the family’, in Nicholas Royle's British ‘elephant’ equivalent. Beyond this uncomfortable duality as academic sub-discipline and object of study, however, Royle recognizes that CW attracts students, connecting its rapid expansion in many minds to the marketization of Higher Education.
A success story, yet often eyed still with suspicion then, CW has gradually carved out a distinct academic identity for itself. This essay outlines the subject's genesis within English Studies, and describes the ways it has come to describe its own research paradigms. It considers how the subject is currently securing its future in Higher Education. We discuss how the University of Leicester's CW research centre, the Centre for New Writing, has adapted to the wider academic research environment. Notwithstanding the subject's business value to institutional managers, we show how it provides many opportunities, both to serve the wider writing community, and to design innovative research projects with colleagues from other disciplines. Archaeologists, archivists, historians, geographers and medical researchers are awakening to the power of imaginative writing and beginning to understand its potential for delivering considerable public benefits.
Understanding ‘Creative Practice’
Sociologist Laurel Richardson ‘was taught … not to write until I knew what I wanted to say’; instead, she finds ‘I write in order to learn something that I did not know before I wrote it.’ The late author and screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet believed the
function of art is never to illustrate a truth – even an interrogation – known in advance, but to bring into the world certain interrogations not yet known to themselves… When we ask [the writer] why he has written his book, he has only one answer: ‘To try and find out why I wanted to write it.’
Revisiting Mansfield Park: The Critical and Literary Legacies of Edward W. Said’s Essay “Jane Austen and Empire” in Culture and Imperialism (1993)
- Corinne Fowler
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- Journal:
- Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry / Volume 4 / Issue 3 / September 2017
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 30 August 2017, pp. 362-381
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Edward W. Said’s seminal essay “Jane Austen and Empire” exhorts critics to attend to novels’ “historical valances.” Yet advances in British imperial history show that Said underestimated the extent of country houses’ Caribbean and East India Company links. Historians of British imperial history have yet to reflect directly on the implications of these discoveries for the critical legacy of Said’s essay. Informed by twenty years of critical debate, I explain why research into country houses’ colonial connections warrants a definitive modification of Said’s view on Austen. Correspondingly, the article considers the literary legacy of Said’s essay on Austen in three texts: John Agard’s poem “Mansfield Park Revisited” (2006), Jo Baker’s novel Longbourn (2013), and Catherine Johnson’s novel The Curious Tale of the Lady Caraboo (2015). Agard, Baker, and Johnson are heirs of both Austen and Said, whose writings continue to shape postcolonial renderings of the English countryside.
10 - The Poetics and Politics of Spoken Word Poetry
- from PART III - RESTORATIONS AND RENOVATIONS
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- By Corinne Fowler, University of Leicester
- Edited by Deirdre Osborne, Goldsmiths, University of London
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- Book:
- The Cambridge Companion to British Black and Asian Literature (1945–2010)
- Published online:
- 05 September 2016
- Print publication:
- 14 October 2016, pp 177-192
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Summary
Poets are notoriously resistant to categorisation. In Britain, as elsewhere, the spoken word category encompasses a wide range of poets, a large proportion of whom are black and Asian Britons. Yet, as Kwame Dawes observes, poets who perform their work are often keen to escape such labels as ‘performance poet’. Many poets also regard the terms ‘spoken word poet’ or ‘spoken word artist’ as reductionist. ‘Spoken word poetry’ itself is a contested category, implying the separateness of oral and printed poetry. Such distinctions touch on the sensitive issue of literary status, pointing to a long-standing poetic injustice in Britain whereby influential publishing houses rarely endorse poetry associated with the performance scene. The lack of parity between so-called ‘page’ and ‘stage’ poets points to a long-running, unresolved argument in Britain about what poetry is and who it is for, an argument that reaches back to the British poetry revival of the 1960s.
This chapter challenges some persistent assumptions about spoken word poetry's province and provenance, given the considerable contribution of British black and Asian writers. It places spoken word poetry in the context of the wider devolution of literary culture, emphasising the pivotal role of non-metropolitan localities in its development, to ultimately question the idea that British spoken word poetry is, and always has been, an urban form.
Provenance
It should not be said that poets of the 1980s inaugurated Britain's spoken word scene. More accurately, post-1980s British Asian and British black poets have recuperated and developed British poetry revival poetics, bringing them into dialogue with popular traditions such as dub poetry. This confluence of ideas has proved productive. Spoken word's transnational routes have obscured its 1960s British literary origins and British black and Asian poets, who reinaugurated Britain's ‘submerged’ traditions of performance, collectively integrating the national performance scene into the international world of poetry.
Advocates of spoken word poetry routinely observe that all poetry has its roots in orality. As John Coutts notes, ancient poetry was orally transmitted. The semi-literate medieval world of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales marks the emergence of printed poetry in English literary history, coinciding with the development of the printing press. Male writers especially, including John Agard, Fred D'Aguiar and Linton Kwesi Johnson, are umbilically connected to 1960s British poetry, when the form reached giddy heights of popularity, with charismatic performances in mass readings throughout the country.
Virtual reality and paranoid ideations in people with an ‘at-risk mental state’ for psychosis
- Lucia R. Valmaggia, Daniel Freeman, Catherine Green, Philippa Garety, David Swapp, Angus Antley, Corinne Prescott, David Fowler, Elizabeth Kuipers, Paul Bebbington, Mel Slater, Matthew Broome, Philip K. McGuire
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- Journal:
- The British Journal of Psychiatry / Volume 191 / Issue S51 / December 2007
- Published online by Cambridge University Press:
- 02 January 2018, pp. s63-s68
- Print publication:
- December 2007
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Background
Virtual reality provides a means of studying paranoid thinking in controlled laboratory conditions. However, this method has not been used with a clinical group
AimsTo establish the feasibility and safety of using virtual reality methodology in people with an at-risk mental state and to investigate the applicability of a cognitive model of paranoia to this group
MethodTwenty-one participants with an at-risk mental state were assessed before and after entering a virtual reality environment depicting the inside of an underground train
ResultsVirtual reality did not raise levels of distress at the time of testing or cause adverse experiences over the subsequent week. Individuals attributed mental states to virtual reality characters including hostile intent. Persecutory ideation in virtual reality was predicted by higher levels of trait paranoia, anxiety, stress, immersion in virtual reality, perseveration and interpersonal sensitivity
ConclusionsVirtual reality is an acceptable experimental technique for use with individuals with at-risk mental states. Paranoia in virtual reality was understandable in terms of the cognitive model of persecutory delusions