Matthew Taunton

Anglo-Russian Research Network - Reading Group on Soviet Cinema and British Modernism led by Laura Marcus, 24th Febraru

2012-01-30T03:21:00.000-08:00

The second meeting of the Anglo-Russian Research Network will be a reading group on Soviet cinema and British modernism led by Laura Marcus (Goldsmith's Professor of English Literature, New College, Oxford). The reading group - an informal, termly event that aims to bring together scholars and postgraduates with an interest in the cultural relationships between Russia and Britain in the period 1880-1950 - will be held in the Library at Pushkin House on Friday 24th February 2012 from 5.30-7.30pm. We will be looking at a selection from Bryher's Film Problems of Soviet Russia, which will be will be circulated by email in advance. Please contact Matthew Taunton and/or Rebecca Beasley if you would like to attend. All are welcome.

Literature and Music, Sibiu, Romania 10-12 May 2012

2012-01-16T03:42:00.000-08:00

Please contact me with paper proposals, or for further details.

Socialism, Literature and the Radiant Future: Before and After 1917

2012-01-11T06:04:00.000-08:00

I am giving a paper in the research seminar series in the Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies at the University of Westminster in March. You will need to contact the organisers (details here) in advance if you want to attend.

Wednesday 7th March, 1.15pm – 2.30pm
Regent Street building, room 257
Matthew Taunton (Queen Mary, University of London)
‘Socialism, Literature and the Radiant Future: Before and After 1917’

Abstract: The idea that a “radiant future” (in Zinoviev’s phrase) was just around the corner was central to the Soviet myth. But how were Western ideas about the future affected by the advent of the Bolshevik revolution? This paper will suggest that the bright eyed visions of the future prevalent in the fin de siècle and the Edwardian period were increasingly replaced, after 1917, by sectarian debates about Russia. The future had become a spatial, rather than a purely temporal entity – whether it was to be welcomed as the true democracy (Shaw, the Webbs) or feared as a totalitarian nightmare (Orwell, Koestler, Nabokov). Speculative fictions like those of Morris, Bellamy, and Wells gave way to anti-Communist texts like Darkness at Noon, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Bend Sinister, and endorsements of Stalinism by Day Lewis, Shaw and others. This paper explores a range of ways in which ‘the future’ had to be rethought in light of the events of 1917.

Details of this and the other seminars in this semester's series are available here.

Cottage Economy or Collective Farm? English Socialism and Agriculture Between Merrie England and the Five-Year Plan

2011-10-18T09:03:00.000-07:00

My contribution to the special issue of Critical Quarterly on food is all about how British writers thought about Stalin's collectivisation of agriculture in the Soviet Union. Here's the abstract:

The cottage economy and the collective farm are two alternative models of socialist agriculture that relate broadly to the traditions of Romantic and utilitarian socialism and embody diametrically opposed attitudes to food and its production. In the decades following the Russian Revolution of 1917 – at a time when collectivised agriculture was being implemented on a previously unimaginable scale, with disastrous consequences – the case for such a model was made enthusiastically by British Stalinists such as George Bernard Shaw, Jean Beauchamp, Margaret Cole, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb. This fed into a wider shift in British society where responsibility for securing the food supply was increasingly seen as a function of the state rather than the market. During the inter-war decades the centre of gravity for British socialists’ thinking about food production shifted from the cottage economy to the collective farm. Yet there were those – like Chesterton, Belloc, Orwell and Muggeridge, as well as the emerging thinkers of the organic movement like Louise Howard and G. T. Wrench – who in various ways held on to the cottage economy ideal and the peasant smallholder as a bulwark against the vast, industrialised mega-farms of the Soviet Empire. They were often seen not as socialists but as cranks. This paper explores the debates around this issue and considers their continuing relevance to our own thinking about the ways food is produced.

Lucky institutional subscribers can access the piece here, anyone else is welcome to contact me for details.

Some tractors. Sergei Eisenstein, The General Line (a.k.a. Old and New)

Critical Quarterly 53:3, a Special Issue on "Food", edited by Matthew Taunton and Lucy Scholes

2011-10-18T08:53:00.000-07:00

The new issue of Critical Quarterly (53:3) is a special issue edited by me and Lucy Scholes, on the subject of food. The issue includes contributions by Alex Mackintosh and Laura Salisbury, as well as by Lucy and me. As we put it in our editorial:

The media today is food obsessed. Our television schedules are packed with food programming, cookery books sell like hot cakes, and questionable nutritional advice is everywhere. Celebrity chefs are the philosophers of our time.
There has also been a significant increase in academic interest in the histories and cultures of food, spanning a number of disciplines. This issue of CQ does not attempt to provide a comprehensive survey of this material. It seemed to us, however, that the general emphasis of much of the existing work has been on consumption, and part of our aim was to redress the balance by putting production back into the picture. So we have brought together four essays that address aspects of food culture, from agricultural production and animal slaughter to contemporary food-media and finally the bodily – and psychological – processes of ingestion, digestion and excretion. Although it was not our original intention to produce an issue that was primarily concerned with the abject side of food, this has turned out to be a significant feature of the collection: among other things, these articles discuss famine, slaughter, cannibalism, vomiting, and Jamie Oliver.

Institutional subscribers can access the full issue here. Anyone else is welcome to contact me for details.

Anglo-Russian Research Network

2011-10-05T08:07:00.000-07:00

The Anglo-Russian Research Network has its inaugural meeting from 5.30-7.30pm on Friday 4th November at Pushkin House. It is a reading group focussing on the work of John Kenworthy, a leading British Tolstoyan who established a utopian Tolstoyan colony at Purleigh, Essex. The reading will be circulated in digital form soon - please let me know if you would like to attend. We will also be discussing possible future texts and subjects for the reading group.

Co-organised by Rebecca Beasley and me, the Anglo-Russian Research Network brings together scholars with an interest in the influences of Russian and Soviet culture and politics in Britain in the period 1880-1950. We are getting started with a termly reading group, but hope that the network will provide a context for developing future events and publications. The reading group benefits from the generous support of Pushkin House and the Leverhulme Trust.

Literature and Music, 10-12 May 2012, Sibiu, Romania

2011-09-29T06:28:00.000-07:00

This international conference about the interaction between music and literature is a collaboration between Roehampton University and Lucian Blaga University, Sibiu, Romania, and I'm on the organising committee. Please email me if you are interested in giving a paper or being involved in any other way. Full details are up here and here.

Distributism and the City

2011-09-21T03:31:00.000-07:00

There's a symposium on 'Chesterton and the Paradox of the City' at UCL tomorrow, Thursday 22nd November. I'll be giving a paper called 'Distributism and the City', all about how Chesterton's social and political thought can be applied to the problem of the modern city (if it can at all!). The full programme for the event is up here. It should be an interesting day.

Fictions of the City Reviewed in Screen

2011-09-12T03:04:00.000-07:00

Malini Guha has written a perceptive review of my book in Screen. She takes issue with a few aspects of the book, but overall decides that

In moving away from flânerie to contemplate its underside in relation to the often static nature of social class, Taunton shows us that dwelling spaces can sometimes tell a very different story of the city than can be found on its streets.

You can read the full text of the review here. I will respond to the criticisms raised by Guha and others in a separate post, when all the reviews are in.

What Did Orwell Ever Do For Us? 17 September 2011

2011-08-19T04:41:00.000-07:00

George Orwell festival 2011, 9th-18th September 2011

I'm speaking about 'Orwell on the Farm' at this festival, in a symposium called 'What Did Orwell Ever Do For Us?' Is should be a great event. You can see the programme here. Here's a brief summary of what I'm going to be talking about:

Animal Farm is one of Orwell’s most enduring works, and it is rightly read as an allegory of the Russian revolution. But was it only an allegory, or was Orwell also interested in book’s more ostensible subject, the proper management of a farm? Various evidence from Orwell’s life and work suggest that he was indeed deeply interested in the ethics of agriculture – from his patient attempts to establish himself as a smallholding farmer, recorded in his domestic diaries, to his hatred of industrialised food: ‘making sausages out of fish, and fish, no doubt, out of something different’, as George Bowling puts it in Coming Up for Air. Orwell was expressing concerns about the industrialisation of agriculture both in the capitalist West and – perhaps crucially – in Stalin’s brutal collectivisation drive in the USSR, which he heard about in detail from his friend Malcolm Muggeridge. Agriculture is a key political issue for Orwell, and this paper will show that he shares some of the concerns of the organic movement, whose first theorists were his close contemporaries.

Science Fiction Study Day - 16th September

2011-07-15T05:17:00.000-07:00

I'm giving a talk about J.G. Ballard's early short stories at this Science Fiction Study Day at the British Library on Friday 16th September. Details are here. And here's what the BL has to say about the event:

To support the Out of this World exhibition we’re hosting a study day to explore the ways in which science fiction has inspired and had impact upon research and study across a wide range of disciplines.

Like the exhibition itself, the day will challenge popular perceptions of the genre, by bringing together a host of acclaimed academics and researchers from fields ranging from English literature and visual arts to social and cultural studies, geography, science and medicine.

From utopian to dystopian visions, Futurism to Futurology, the participants will talk about recent projects that feature various aspects of science fiction discourse. Learn about the most recent research trends, methodologies and applications, and get inspired by the ideas and questions examined during the day.

The event is open to all, but will be of particular interest to postgraduate researchers.

Fictions of the City Reviewed in the International Journal of Housing Policy

2011-05-16T07:48:00.000-07:00

When I was working on Fictions of the City it was my hope that as well as providing a new perspective on certain films and novels it would make a useful contribution to thinking about public policy in the area of social housing. I was therefore very pleased to see the book reviewed (and praised for its 'very original approach') in The International Journal of Housing Policy. You can read the review here.

The Flâneur and the Freeholder: Paris and London in Julian Barnes's Metroland

2011-04-18T05:44:00.000-07:00

My essay "The Flâneur and the Freeholder: Paris and London in Julian Barnes's Metroland" is coming out in Sebastien Groes and Peter Childs (eds.) Julian Barnes: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (London; New York: Continuum, 2011). You can look at a preview and buy the book using the links below.

Contemporary Women Novelists: University of Roehampton, Thursday 14th – Friday 15th April 2011

2011-03-27T16:04:00.000-07:00

I'll be giving a paper about Andrea Levy at this conference at Roehampton in April - it should be an interesting event, and all the details are here. My paper is called 'Council Housing and the Politics of the Welfare State in Andrea Levy's Never Far from Nowhere'. Here's an abstract in case you're interested:

In Andrea Levy's second novel - a story about two sisters, Olive and Vivien, coming of age on a council estate - the characters are frequently defined by the spaces in which they live. We read that Maggie lived 'in a council house, not a very nice place', that Carol lived 'in a big house, but her family only seemed to occupy a little bit of it', that Georgina lived in an 'old', 'big' house with 'fitted carpets and cushions scattered around', while Eddie lived in 'a block of flats made of pale concrete slabs looking like the council had left it there to upset architects'. Levy draws attention to these markers of social class in order to raise questions about the contrasting experiences of the two sisters.

The estate in which they grow up initially appears as a 'fairy-tale kingdom of white concrete, radiant in the sun', combining the utopian ideals of architectural modernism with the cradle to grave provision of the British welfare state. Levy's novel shows, however, that the estate 'held the promise of decent living but didn't fulfil it'. Olive becomes a teenage mother who survives on benefits, while Vivien escapes to art college in Canterbury, feeling that 'I had grown too big for our council flat'. Olive encounters racism, while Vivien (who has a paler complexion, and tries to conceal her Caribbean parentage) is almost unaware that she is black. The novel uses the divergent experiences of its two narrators to explore the ways in which race, class and housing can determine our existence. Vivien believes that coming from a council estate had little bearing on her destiny: 'We had the same chances, we started from the same place and you chose to lead your life and I chose to lead mine'. Olive, by contrast, emphasises the paralysing stigma that attaches to council estate dwellers, perhaps especially black ones: 'I didn't have a choice, I never had any choices'.

Levy puts these divergent stories and opposing attitudes into the context of a political debate about the welfare state. The novel is set in the 1970s, when the social-democratic consensus that had prevailed since 1945 was starting to come apart and Thatcherite conservatism was being formulated in explicit opposition to it. Nigel argues that 'if you give people money it encourages them not to work' (p.203), and similar views are expressed by Olive and Vivien's mother. Levy's novel seems to defend the values of the welfare state from these attacks, but it is also alive to the ways in which well-meaning state institutions can intrude into our lives and cause alienation. This chapter will show how Levy's novel engages with the spatial politics of council housing, setting this into the wider context of state education, unemployment benefits, healthcare and youth centres, all of which feature in the story. In doing so, it will show how the novel intelligently reflects on a period in which the relationship between state and individual was being redefined.

Lunchtime Seminar, UCL City Centre

2011-01-19T06:17:00.000-08:00

I'm giving a paper in the UCL city centre's lunchtime seminar series on Tuesday 22nd February. I'll be talking about 'Class, Culture and the Council Estate in London', looking at several representations of council estates in fiction and film and relating these to the history and politics of the British welfare state. Details of the series are up here. All are welcome as far as I know!

Restless Cities

2010-11-30T01:30:00.000-08:00

My review of Matthew Beaumont and Gregory Dart (eds.), Restless Cities (London; New York: Verso, 2010) is in the new issue of Textual Practice. The review can be accessed here.

UCL City Centre

2010-11-05T05:46:00.000-07:00

I have become an affiliate of the UCL City Centre, a research network dedicated to the literary and cultural history of the metropolis from the Middle Ages to the present. This is an exciting new venture run out of the English Department at UCL, and it will host a variety of seminars, talks and symposia featuring artists, writers and academics. The website is here, and my profile is here. I'll update when some events are scheduled.

"On or about December 1910 human character changed"

2010-11-01T04:02:00.000-07:00

Centenary reflections and contemporary debates: Modernism and beyond.
University of Glasgow, 10-12 December 2010

I'm giving a paper at this conference in December. Here's the abstract of my paper...

G.K. Chesterton's Politics Around 1910

In The Man Who Was Thursday (1907), G.K. Chesterton’s depicts an anarchist cell bent on destroying society. Except that as it transpires, the Central Anarchist Council is composed entirely of undercover policemen, aping the bloodthirsty views of anarchists but fiercely committed to defending the country from a ‘modern lawlessness’ articulated by ‘dirty modern thinkers’.

Yet as this paper will show Chesterton’s politics around 1910 were more complicated than his critics have tended to assume. He was seen by the modernist avant-garde as a spokesman for the old, Edwardian order, and was associated with a bland populism: ‘Chesterton is the mob’, Ezra Pound grumbled. When Virginia Woolf diagnosed the emergence of a new sensibility in 1910, Chesterton was hardly at the forefront of her mind: his hostility towards ‘dirty modern thinkers’ and his Christianity were hardly likely to appeal to Woolf’s sensibilities. Chesterton’s association with conservatism persists to this day: David Cameron’s in-house ‘philosopher’ Philip Blond cited his influence in his book Red Tory. Even Slavoj Zizek – whose interest in Chesterton is symptomatic of a minor revival – tends to cast him as a conservative.

This paper will make a claim for Chesterton as an intelligent critic of capitalism who – unlike some of his contemporaries – saw the dangers of communist collectivism. In fact, as time went on his fiercely egalitarian politics often put him to the left of Soviet sympathisers like Bernard Shaw and the Webbs, and he had more in common with anarchist thinkers such as Proudhon than The Man Who Was Thursday might lead us to assume. Focusing on What’s Wrong With the World (1910) and drawing in Chesterton’s fictional writings from this period, I shall argue that Chesterton has much to offer us in 2010, both as a political thinker and as a novelist.

Urban Confrontations

2010-09-29T01:44:00.000-07:00

My review of Edward J. Ahearn's book, Urban Confrontations appeared in the TLS on 3/9/2010.

Ballard and Chronopolis Talk - Video

2010-07-28T06:06:00.000-07:00

Here's a video of the talk I gave at the Ballardian Architecture symposium at the Royal Academy.

Ballardian Architecture 6 - Matthew Taunton from static tv on Vimeo.

Ballardian Architecture - Listen Online

2010-06-30T01:19:00.000-07:00

The Royal Academy of Arts make available an audio archive of many of their events and symposia, now including 'Ballardian Architecture: Inner and Outer Space' where I gave a short talk. You can listen to my talk about 'Chronopolis' as well as all the other talks on their website.

Fictions of the City Reviewed in the TLS

2010-06-16T03:41:00.000-07:00

This review of Fictions of the City appeared in the Times Literary Supplement for 11/06/2010.

Office in the Sky

2010-05-26T02:09:00.000-07:00

My review of Merrill Schleier, Skyscraper Cinema (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009) appears in the TLS for 21/5/2010.

Worlds Made of Concrete and Celluloid

2010-05-18T03:28:00.000-07:00

I have an essay called 'Worlds Made of Concrete and Celluloid: The London Council Estate in Nil By Mouth and Wonderland' appearing in Cultural Ways of Worldmaking: Media and Narratives ed. by Vera Nünning, Ansgar Nünning & Birgit Neumann (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010).

The book collects responses to and applications of Nelson Goodman's book Ways of Worldmaking, from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. My contribution examines London council estates in film, comparing two quite different depictions in the context of Goodman's notion of 'worldmaking'. The book is coming out next month and also contains essays by my London Consortium colleagues Ben Dawson, Stephen Sale, and Steven Connor. Details are here.

Literary London 2010

2010-05-10T04:23:00.000-07:00

I'm going to be giving a paper at the forthcoming Literary London conference, to be held at the IES from the 7th-9th July. For a number of reasons beyond my control I've never attended this before so I'm particularly excited. I'll be giving a paper called 'De-centring London: The Politics of Localism in G.K. Chesterton's The Napoleon of Notting Hill'. This is part of a larger project about which more soon...

Ballardian Architecture: Inner and Outer Space

2010-04-20T00:54:00.000-07:00

I'm giving a short talk as part of the Architecture programme at the Royal Academy of Arts, in a forum about J.G. Ballard and Architecture. I'll be talking about his short story 'Chronopolis' as an engagement with the Fordist and Taylorist tendencies of modernist urbanism.

Here's the blurb:

Acclaimed writer J. G. Ballard derived inspiration from aspects of the built environment that architectural convention and critics tend to overlook. This forum looks at how omnipresent but under-recognised spaces such as airports, car parks, motorway interchanges and suburban streets provided source material, and how Ballard’s perceptions may challenge and inform contemporary architecture.
Royal Academy; 2–5.30pm; £25/£16 reductions (incl. drink)

Full details (and online booking facilities) are here.

Brewer's Dictionary of London Phrase and Fable

2010-02-28T15:00:00.000-08:00

My review of Russ Willey's Brewer's Dictionary of London Phrase and Fable appeared in theTimes Literary Supplement for 19th Feb 2010:

Cultural Hybridity

2010-01-16T04:43:00.000-08:00

My review of Peter Burke's Cultural Hybridity appears in this week's TLS (15/01/10)

J.G. Ballard, Intertextuality and Architectural Modernism

2009-11-04T05:42:00.000-08:00

I'm giving a lecture to the Centre for Editorial and Intertextual Research at Cardiff University on 8th Decmber 2009. It's called 'J.G. Ballard, Intertextuality and Architectural Modernism'. Details (and the rest of their programme of speakers) can be found here.

The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain

2009-10-26T08:02:00.000-07:00

Jack dusts off old things with the fascinated concentration of an archaeologist at a dig. Objects that speaks to his sense of a more wholesome past - bus conductors, British cherries eaten from a paper bag, a model of the Titanic made out of a coal-based resin, or his father's bookcase, which evokes an era of working-class autodidacticism - are the keys that link his experiences and those of his family to wider historical developments.

The big story here is the decline of Britian as an industrial force, and the effects of this on the working class. Digging through his father's old coal shed (left untouched for twenty years by his widow, Jack's mother) a series of scarcely identifiable tools and objects present themselves (dolly tubs: "a wooden appliance with two arms, and legs or feet, used to stir clothes in a tub"). These remnants of the "departed culture of coal" are viewed with ambivalence - they hark back to a simpler time of industrial prosperity, but Jack is not insensible to the hardships of those - like his mother - whose gruelling task it was to operate the dolly tubs.

My review of Ian Jack's book The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain is now up on the New Statesman website. The full text is online here.

Where the Other Half Lives

2009-10-08T10:05:00.000-07:00

My review of Sarah Glynn's new book is up on the New Statesman's website here.

"In some respects, it's the most important statistic in modern Britain. In 1914, ten per cent of Britain's housing stock was owner-occupied: the figure now is around 72 per cent. During a century in which it fought two world wars, dismantled an empire and built a welfare state, Britain quietly transformed itself from a nation of tenants into a nation where the majority are homeowners. The massive impact that this has had on the social landscape of the country is often neglected, and yet it is key to understanding contemporary politics. Thatcher's sale of council houses under the right-to-buy scheme finally tilted the electoral balance in favour of the homeowner, and the imperative to pander to the interests of an owner-occupying 'middle England' that is inherently conservative has largely defined the policy direction of New Labour. Seamlessly, the property-owning democracy of the Thatcher years segued into Blair's stakeholder society. Homeownership has become a precondition of citizenship, while those without property are increasingly disenfranchised."

Fictions of the City Officially Released

2009-09-29T10:05:00.000-07:00

Fictions of the City (Palgrave, 2009) is officially released today and is available in shops and to order online direct from Palgrave or via Amazon (as well as all the other usual outlets).

Many studies of fictions of city life take the flaneur as the characteristic metropolitan type and streets and plazas as definitive urban spaces. Looking at novels and films set in London and Paris from "L'Assommoir" to "Nil By Mouth", this book shows that mass housing is equally central to images of the modern city.

Please contact me for further details.

Utopian Spaces of British Literature and Culture, 1890-1945

2009-08-24T03:51:00.000-07:00

I will be delivering a paper called 'H.G. Wells and the Garden City Utopia' at this conference, to be held in the English Faculty at Oxford University on 18th September 2009. Full details of the conference are here.

Problems with Sartre

2009-08-06T07:06:00.000-07:00

My review of Alain Badiou's Pocket Pantheon appears in this week's New Statesman.

"The book was originally to be called Funeral Orations; it mourns the passing of not only an extraordinary group of individuals, but a style of thought. Badiou argues that the uncompromising quest for truth has been replaced in our times by the drear tenets of a "vegetable-based natural medicine", a lifestyle philosophy that advises us to "keep fit and be efficient, but stay cool"."

You can read the whole review online here.

Ties That Bound

2009-08-04T14:01:00.000-07:00

A review of The Future of Community published in the Times Literary Supplement, 31 July 2009.

Russia in Britain, 1880-1940: Reception, Translation and the Modernist Cultural Agenda

2009-05-28T07:25:00.000-07:00

I'm giving a paper called 'Russia and the British Intellectuals: The Significance of the Stalin-Wells Talk' at this conference, to be held at the institute of English Studies on 25-26 June 2009. Full details can be found here.

Phobia: Constructing the Phenomenology of Chronic Fear, 1789 to the Present

2009-04-21T01:09:00.000-07:00

An international conference hosted by the Glamorgan Research Centre for Literature, Arts and Science

Friday 8 – Saturday 9 May, 2009

The ATRiuM Campus, Cardiff

I'm giving a paper called 'Anarchophobia: The Structure of GK Chesterton's Conservatism' at this conference, which is all about phobias. Full details of the conference are here, and the conference programme is here.

Fictions of the City

2009-04-19T14:09:00.000-07:00

It's not coming out until September, but information about Fictions of the City is now available here.

Realism, Modernism and the General: Beckett, Lukács, Adorno

2009-04-15T13:46:00.000-07:00

My essay on Beckett, Lukács and Adorno appears in the latest issue of Static, which is on the theme of 'the general'. Here's the gist:

This paper starts from the proposition that theories of realism have tended to hinge in some sense on the generalizability of the text. In the work of the Marxist critic Georg Lukács, realist texts were valued for the facility that they offered to move from an identification with the specific experiences of their characters to a more general understanding of the social and economic conditions which produce those experiences. This paper makes a contrast between this position and the purportedly anti-realist theories of Theodor Adorno, using the two theorists' polarised reactions to Beckett's Trilogy (and modernism itself) to interrogate the role of generalizability in their aesthetics. In this regard, they are both heritors of a problematic concept of the 'general will' that can be traced back through Marx to Hegel and Rousseau. By focussing on the Trilogy itself, this paper makes the argument that its relation to the general should not be sought in the way that it reflects (Lukács) or mediates (Adorno) general social and political realities. The Trilogy's foregrounding of the materiality of thought and experience and its exploration of immanence suggest that the general is to be found in humankind's shared experience of the material universe.

The full text is available here.

Fictions of the City Wordcloud

2009-04-03T06:43:00.001-07:00

My book Fictions of the City: Class, Culture and Mass Housing in London and Paris is being published by Palgrave Macmillan in the autumn. Here's a wordcloud (from www.wordle.net):

Film Rebuffs

2009-02-14T06:25:00.000-08:00

A review of D.M. Thomas, Bleak Hotel: The Hollywood Saga of the White Hotel, published in the TLS, 30/01/2009.

Immortal Pages

2009-02-14T06:23:00.000-08:00

A review of Jeff Gomez, Print Is Dead, published in the TLS last year.

Publications

2009-01-15T09:19:00.000-08:00

Book

• Fictions of the City: Class, Culture and Mass Housing in London and Paris. Book based on doctoral thesis in press and forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan in September 2009

Chapters in Edited Volumes

• ‘The Flâneur and the Freeholder: Paris and the London Suburbs in Julian Barnes's Metroland’, in Julian Barnes: Contemporaary Critical Perspectives, Groes, S. and S. Matthews (eds.) London and New York; Continuum, forthcoming in 2010

• ‘Advertising’ and ‘Copyright’ in This Is Not A Book About Gavin Turk, Rachel Newsome (ed.). Historical thematic essays in this book, forthcoming in 2010

• ‘Worlds Made of Concrete and Celluloid: The London Council Estate in Nil By Mouth and Wonderland’ in Ways of Worldmanking: Narratives, Archives and Media, Birgit Neumann & Ansgar Nünning (eds.), forthcoming from De Gruyter in 2010

Journal Articles

• ‘Realism, Modernism and the General: Beckett, Lukács, Adorno’ in Static (www.static.londonconsortium.com/index.php) (Issue 8, Spring 2009)

• ‘‘Monumental Alabaster’: Sculpture in The Winter’s Tale and When We Dead Awaken’ in Static (www.static.londonconsortium.com/index.php) (Issue 5, Summer 2007)

Dictionary Entries

• Over 100 entries for the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism (London: British Library, 2008) on periodicals, publishers, journalists and themes

Conference Papers

• ‘H.G. Wells and the Garden City Utopia’. Given at Utopian Spaces of British Literature and Culture, 1890-1945 at Oxford University, English Faculty, 18th September 2009

• ‘Russia and the British Intellectuals: The Significance of the Stalin-Wells Talk’. Given at Russia in Britain, 1880-1940: Reception, Translation and the Modernist Cultural Agenda at the Institute for English Studies, University of London, 25th & 26th June 2009

• ‘Anarchophobia: The Structure of G.K. Chesterton’s Conservatism’. Given at PHOBIA: Constructing the Phenomenology of Chronic Fear, 1789 to the Present at the Glamorgan Research Centre for Literature, Arts and Science, 8th & 9th May 2009

• ‘‘H.G. Wells and the New Science of Town Planning’. Given at the H.G. Wells Society Annual Conference, H.G. Wells, Science and Philosophy at Imperial College / Conway Hall, London, 28th & 29th September 2007

• ‘Paris: Walled City’. Given at the 2007 Critical Legal Conference, Walls at Birkbeck College, London, 14th–16th September 2007

• ‘Worlds Made of Concrete and Celluloid: The London Council Estate in Nil By Mouth and Wonderland’. Given at the European Summer School in Cultural Studies, Ways of Worldmaking: Narratives, Archives and Media, Geißen & Heidelberg, 30th July – 4th August 2007

• ‘Modernism and Utopia in the Architecture of J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise’. Given at Heaven and Earth: A Multidisciplinary Conference at Tate Modern, London, 27th January 2005

Selected Reviews

• ‘Problems With Sartre’, review of Alain Badiou, Pocket Pantheon: Figures of Postwar Philosophy in New Statesman, 6th August 2009

• ‘Ties that Bound’, in-depth review of Dave Clements, Alastair Donald, Martin Earnshaw and Austin Williams (eds.) The Future of Community: Reports of a Death Greatly Exaggerated in Times Literary Supplement, 31st July 2009

• ‘Film Rebuffs’, review of D.M. Thomas, Bleak Hotel: The Hollywood Saga of the White Hotel in Times Literary Supplement, 28th January 2009

• ‘Immortal Pages’, review of Jeff Gomez, Print is Dead in Times Literary Supplement, 7th March 2008

• ‘Heart of Darkness’, review of Slavoj Zizek, Violence in New Statesman, 31st January 2008

Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism

2009-01-15T07:07:00.000-08:00

Working as a post-doctoral researcher for the Dictionary of Nineteenth Century Journalism, I wrote over 100 entries on a diverse range of topics. There are some thematic articles (e.g. on the Printing Press, Distribution, and Typewriting), some biographical ones (on the journalism of Hazlitt and Coleridge as well as less celebrated hacks), and some about various journals and newspapers. The book, edited by Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor, is out now.

Introducing Le Corbusier

2009-01-15T05:50:00.000-08:00

Victoria and Albert Museum

Saturday 14 March
Seminar Room 1, Sackler Centre
14.00–17.00

Review the main tenets of Le Corbusier’s thinking and assess his significant impact with architectural historians Barry Curtis, Matthew Taunton and Alan Powers. Arguably the most important and influential architect of the 20th century, Le Corbusier was a pioneer of modernist design. He championed the use of industrial materials and revolutionised approaches to urban planning. This event is part of the Le Corbusier centenary and coincides with the V&A’s display, The Olympic Stadium Project – Le Corbusier and Baghdad.

£20, £15
Book online or call +44 (0)20 7942 2211

Resonance FM: The Thread

2009-01-15T05:39:00.000-08:00

I appeared on the London Consortium's discussion show 'The Thread' on Resonance FM on Tuesday, discussing IKEA and airports as examples of 'non-places' (and also a bit of Hugh Fearnley-Wittingstall) with Richard Martin and Mitha Budhyarto, who's writing her PhD on the topic. I was hoping to link to a podcast, but it doesn't seem to be up... I'll update if and when this becomes available. The show (with a variety of topics and guests) is on for the next four Tuesdays at 11pm anyway, so listen in!

New Statesman

2009-01-15T05:31:00.000-08:00

I have been writing occasional reviews and columns for the New Statesman for a while. The full text of all my articles can be read here.