From this week until the end of term, the Centre will be offering tea and biscuits every Wednesday between 4 and 5 pm, in the Solarium, Queens’ College.

The weekly CMTea will give people for members and those who would like to join to meet informally, discuss
current projects, and perhaps to dream up new ones. Please bring along any information about forthcoming events, funding opportunities, etc that might be of interest to other members. And if you’ve just come across some
brilliant book or article in the field, bring it too and spread the news.

We know that not everyone will be able to come every week, but please do put the date in your diaries and drop by at some point during the term.

By the end of 1914, five months after Britain’s entry into the First World War, over a million men had volunteered to serve in the British Army.  A year later, shortly before the introduction of the first of five Military Service Acts in January 1916 (which conscripted all unmarried men aged between 18 and 41), a further one and a half million had signed up.  It seems particularly fitting, therefore, that a new project to commemorate those killed during the First World War and in conflicts since has been undertaken primarily by dedicated groups of volunteers.

The War Graves Photographic Project (WGPP) aims to digitally photograph ‘every war grave, individual memorial, MoD grave, and family memorial of serving military personnel from WWI to the present day’, and to correlate these images with the records held by the Commonwealth War Graves Commission (CWGC).  At the time of writing, 1,599,630 names have been entered into their searchable database, and small images of graves or memorials are visible online free-of-charge.

Individually and collectively, the headstones which mark each burial site are material texts: the format in which they are engraved and their physical form are together illustrative of the particular ways in which twentieth- (and twenty-first) century society has chosen to remember its war dead.  According to the guiding principles of the CWGC, the headstones are permanent and uniform; ‘no distinction [is] made according to military or civil rank, race or creed’.  The aesthetic simplicity of their design was a necessary function where many thousands of graves were to be concentrated on one site – but is this the only reason for their uniformity?

The First World War had a profound effect on British social attitudes – universal male suffrage soon followed the Armistice – and perhaps such uniformity signifies an attempt to bestow on these fallen men an equality in their death which they did not enjoy in their lives.  Or maybe there is a more radically pacifist message contained in these simple stones.  Each headstone has been carved and engraved alike, is impeccably maintained and, when the forces of erosion demand it, re-engraved: ‘an eroded inscription is a brave man or woman forgotten and that is unacceptable …not a single sacrifice will be allowed to fade’.  Their uniformity symbolises the universal value of human life, and in the meticulous acts of care bestowed upon these monuments we can see an ongoing enactment of public atonement for the waste of human life in four long and bloody years.

Most headstones from the First (and Second) World Wars – and the Cenotaph on Whitehall – were carved out of the distinctively bright white Portland stone (some have latterly been replaced by a similar but more hard-wearing white marble).  Scattered across the graveyards of the British Isles, and concentrated in the cemeteries of Belgium and western France, they are instantly recognisable, and represent both a private memorial to an individual casualty, and a permanent public reminder of the conflict as a whole.  At Tyne Cot cemetery near Passchendaele on the Ypres Salient (see picture), 12,000 or so headstones (over 8,000 of which are unnamed) stand in serried ranks before the Memorial to the Missing, upon which a further 35,000 names are engraved.  Even in this one ‘corner of a foreign field’ – which is forever not just England, but also forever Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, West Indies, France, and even Germany too – the sense of the immensity of the slaughter is immediate and powerful.  If this is just a small fraction of the war dead, one thinks, how horrifying was the whole?

Anyone who believes in the fundamental importance of public libraries and their contents will be interested to read the damning speech made by novelist Philip Pullman in response to news that his local libraries in Oxfordshire are threatened by public funding cuts. The polemical speech, which takes us from our own local libraries to the Bodleian, Alexandria, Chicago, and back again, is available in its eloquent entirety here.

Thursday 27 January, 5:30pm, SR-24, Faculty of English
Harriet Phillips: ‘Waste Paper: Early Modern Broadsides as Popular Print’; and Marie Léger-St-Jean: ‘“long for the penny number and the weekly woodcut”: Early Victorian Popular Authors and their Readers’

Thursday 24 February, 5:30pm
Managing curious collections: Stuart Stone (Radzinowicz Library): a visit to the collection of ‘banned books’ from the Home Office; Katie Birkwood (St John’s College Library), on managing the Fred Hoyle Collection of papers, books and other material texts.

(Please note that the seminar on 24 February will begin at 5.30pm in the Radzinowicz Library at the front of the Institute of Criminology on the Sidgwick Site, for a ‘show and tell’ of banned books, and will move for the second presentation and discussion to the Faculty of English.)

All welcome. For information, this term contact Sarah Cain (stc22@cam.ac.uk)

International graduate conference of The Research Training Group „Notational Iconicity“ at Freie Universität, Berlin (D) in cooperation with eikones – National Centre of Competence „Iconic Criticism“, University of Basel (CH)

Berlin, 2011, July 13th – 15th

The creative process in art and science makes use of many different kinds of notation.  The wide variety of notational methods, in turn, gives rise to structures which alter and redefine our understanding of the discipline or genre in which the work is being carried out. Notational systems open up spaces within individual creativity that enable thinkers and artists to plumb the inner workings of ideas, and develop unconventional solutions to problems.  The notation used in a creative act often makes use of existing notational systems, but equally as often modifies them, or even replaces them with entirely new ones developed within the specific conditions of the problem or project being tackled.  Each new notational system helps redefine the parameters of the creative process.

What are the conditions that define the role of notation in artistic and scientific creativity?  What creative potential does notation unlock? Our conference aims to investigate these crucial questions with the help of notational and creative phenomena taken from many artistic, scholarly and scientific contexts.  The following questions will help guide our inquiry:

– Upon what rules or constraints is notation dependent when it avails itself of elements of a pre-established notational system?
– What conditions does notation require in order to be effectively deployed?
– What potential do individual notational systems or methods possess, especially in relation to  their alternatives? Comparing approaches can help us to see to what extent unconvential notational formats cross traditional epistemological boundaries – especially in relation to traditional methods of notation.
– What creative potential is revealed by the transcription-process implicit in many notational systems? What possibilities come to light in the intra- and inter-medial translations and adaptations that play such an essential role in realizing creative work?
– What methodological approaches are suited to describing various notational configurations and their creative potential?

The international, English-language, graduate student conference is open to young scholars from all disciplines interested in the questions and phenomena surrounding the role of notation in creative processes. All speakers will be asked to give a twenty-minute presentation and lead an in-depth discussion immediately following their talk. The conference will take place at the Free University, Berlin.  Keynote lectures will be given by Professor Sybille Krämer and other distinguished scholars in the field.

Requirements for submitting a conference talk proposal:
First and last name of the presenter
Institutional affiliation
Biography of presenter (maximum 1200 characters)
Mailing address, telephone number and email address
Proposed title of talk
Abstract (maximum 3000 characters), clearly presenting the subject, objectives and methodology used
Selective bibliography (3-8 references) and principal sources used (archives, experimental or ethnographic data, etc.).

Deadline for submission of proposals:
Proposals should be sent before 15. March 2011 as an email with an attached Word file to the address: papers@schriftbildlichkeit.de
Conference talk proposals (abstract and selective bibliography) will be submitted to the conference committee.
Notification of selection will be sent to presenters within four weeks. Funds are available to cover travel expenses for some conference participants.

Organising Committee:
Fabian Czolbe  (Research Training Group „Notational Iconicity“/Berlin (D))
David Magnus (eikones/Basel (CH))
Mark Halawa (Research Training Group „Notational Iconicity“/Berlin (D))
Elisabeth Birk (Research Training Group „Notational Iconicity“/Berlin (D))
Rainer Totzke (Research Training Group „Notational Iconicity“/Berlin (D))

Institutional Support:
The Research Training Group „Notational Iconicity“: On the materiality, perceptibility and operativity  of writing at Freie Universität Berlin, funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG)
http://www.geisteswissenschaften.fu-berlin.de/en/v/schriftbildlichkeit/index.html

eikones – National Centre of Competence (NCCR) „Iconic Criticism – The Power and Meaning of Images“, Cluster „Image – Writing – Ornament“
http://www.eikones.ch

The Guardian reports that a US publisher, Black Ocean, is offering lifetime subscriptions to their publications for anyone who gets a real tattoo related to one of Black Ocean’s book titles. Read more about this bizarre material interface between readers and their books here, and see some of those hopefuls who’ve already sent in photos of their tattoos to Black Ocean here.

How would you depict your favourite book in tattoo form?

Postponed from 2010, this seminar will consider the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century practice of customizing books with images and texts cut from other sources, with two of the leading experts in the field:

Dr Luisa Cale (Birkbeck): ‘Reading and Cutting through the Page: William Blake and the extra-illustrated book’

Dr Lucy Peltz (National Portrait Gallery): ‘Facing the Text: the origins and rise of extra-illustration c.1770-1840’

Extra-illustrated materials from the UL’s collections will be on display.

Friday 28 January 5 pm – Morison Room – University Library

All welcome. To register for the seminar, please email Mina Gorji (mg473@cam.ac.uk).

Download a poster here.

The editors of the Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne are delighted to announce that on 26 March 2011, we will host the first of three AHRC-funded events: Editing Donne. This conference will appeal to scholars and students of the writings of John Donne, notably his sermons; to those engaged in textual criticism and bibliographical studies in the Early Modern period (and beyond), as well as to those with an interest in the historical, cultural, and religious milieu that forms the backdrop to Donne’s sermons.

We are very excited to have Claire Preston (Cambridge) as conference respondent.

Other speakers to include: Peter McCullough (Oxford); David Colclough (Queen Mary); Katrin Ettenhuber (Cambridge); Erica Longfellow (Kingston); Mary Ann Lund (Leicester); Mary Morrissey (Reading); Emma Rhatigan (Sheffield); Hugh Adlington (Birmingham); Philip West (Oxford); Sebastiaan Verweij (Oxford).

Student bursaries available.

For more information please visit: http://www.cems-oxford.org/donne

At a recent seminar, somebody recommended to me Nicole Boivin’s “Material Cultures, Material Minds” (CUP, 2008). Would the person who did so own up? I jotted down the title but not the person who passed it on, and I should thank that person. This book is very solidly engaged in archaeology, with some surprising discussions of soil and suchlike; it says next to nothing about material objects which carry texts (in the narrowest sense of the word) and takes issue with with the model of textual interpretation as a model for understanding material objects. But in mounting this bracing challenge it offers a helpful overview of ideas about material objects and runs through umpteen different theoretical approaches most helpfully. It has helped me to chew over the ideas behind a piece I’m currently writing, and I’ll be ruminating on it in the introduction to that. So I’d recommend it for others grappling with discussion of material texts.

A one-day event exploring aspects of street literature and popular print traditions.

26th February 2011   Cecil Sharp House, 2 Regents Park Road, London NW1 2AY

Organised jointly by the English Folk Dance & Song Society and the Traditional Song Forum.

£10.00 (£8 for EFDSS and TSF members)

Contact: To book a place – 0207 485 2206; other enquiries: Steve Roud on sroud@btinternet.com or 01825 766751

Program:
10.00  Welcome

10.15 Steve Gardham
Where’s that Song from? the Historical Links between Popular Song, Street Literature and Oral Tradition

11.00 Ewan MacVicar
The Eskimo Republic: Scottish Political Song on Broadsides and Song Sheets from 1705 to 1965

12.00 Gregg Butler
John Harkness, Preston printer (Work in progress)

12.30 Lucie Skeaping
Have I Got News For Thee!: Broadside Ballads of 17th Century England

1.30 – 2.30  Lunch

2.30 Roy Palmer
In Moor Street was a Printer: Aspects of the Ballad Tradition in Birmingham

3.15 John Hinks
Chapbook Bibliography Project (Work in progress)

Pete Wood
Newcastle broadsides & chapbooks (Work in progress)

4.00 Vic Gammon
The Street Ballad Singer in Pre- and Early-Industrial Society

5.00 end of session