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The august, lunar architecture of the University of London's Senate House provided an apposite setting for the March 2010 果冻影院 English Graduate Conference, which explored in some depth ideas of nightmare in literature, music, art, and film. The conference was remarkably well attended, and drew delegates from many disciplines, from as far afield as Paris, Istanbul and Knoxville, Tennessee, as well as from a range of institutions throughout the UK and Ireland.
Amy Billone, Associate Professor at the University of Tennessee, opened the conference with a vivid and engaging talk, 'Spectacular Fantasies: Nightmares, Longing and the Gothic' which used a nuanced theoretical framework to discuss ideological containment, with a strong focus on children's literature. Throughout the day's proceedings panellists grappled with the major paradigms of nightmarish aesthetics, from the menacing geographies of Gogol's St Petersburg and Dos Passos's Manhattan, to transgression and boundary-crossing in Titus Andronicus, late Medieval Britain, and postmodern fantasy fiction. Recurring nightmares, waking nightmares and existential nightmares, from Gothic literature to Kurdish politics to Philip Larkin's Aubade were also explored.
The papers selected for this issue of Moveable Type represent an illuminating cross-section of the ideas that arose from the conference.Joseph Crawford's essay, examining the repetition compulsion in Gothic literature, posits the notion that one trauma can be the mother of many nightmares, but that to encounter the fearful on our own terms in fiction and film renders it quite different from the experience of such events in real life. For Eleanor Spencer, dreams in the poetry of Anne Stevenson are a means of transcending the weight of normative consciousness, in which the dream or nightmare functions as a sort of mirror, reflecting but also distorting and defamiliarising personal experiences and memories. Steven Gregg argues that the escalating atrocities in Titus Andronicusoriginate in a loss of control over legally sanctioned violence. And for Alastair Beddow, the fragmentary nightmare of Dos Passos's machine-age Manhattan sees the people of New York increasingly taking on the characteristics of the city.
The evening's keynote address was delivered by the articulate and entertaining Professor Lawrence Rainey, author of two highly influential monographs - Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (Yale U.P.: 1998) andRevisiting The Waste Land (Yale U.P.: 2005). In a fascinating lecture, which he has very kindly reproduced for us here, Professor Rainey drew on his forthcoming publication, Office Affairs: Secretaries in the Modern Imagination, in order to pose the question: 'Women and Modernity: Dream or Nightmare?' His discussion of the interweaving threads of capitalism and trust in the 1931 novel Skyscraper, and the subsequent film, Skyscraper Souls (1932), considers the peculiar condition of modernity that allows 'the dream ... and the nightmare ... of our own relationship to modern capital' to interchange perpetually.
The interdisciplinary nature of the conference theme enabled us to show as part of the event a selection of artwork by London artists Jayne Evans and Kevin Gaffney, as well as two startling and thought-provoking pieces of performance art. We also hosted an afternoon screening of ten original short films, including Graham Young's Landing Lights, a breathtaking 'contemporary haunting', Thomas Darby's techno-primal I've got a lover way over there, and Oliver Mezger's angular and disquieting The Curse, filmed in post-industrial Glaswegian wastelands.
Though unsettling in its content, the 'Nightmare' conference was by no means nightmarish in the literal sense of the word. Countless fascinating ideas were generated and shared across disciplines, and this edition of Moveable Type has, I hope, captured the essence of a captivating day of both scholarship and creativity.
Rona Cran