King's College London Speculations - 23rd March, 6pm

On the 23rd March I'll be a giving a talk as part of King's College London's new series of talks "Speculations". To be held at 6pm at K6.63 King's Building, Strand Campus, King's College London

My talk is entitled Blurred Lines: Interplay between Biography and the Fantastic in the Graphic Memoir

Comic books represent a narrative medium which fuses visual information with text in a manner very likely unique, certainly amongst commercial markets in the West. Perhaps because of their pulpish origins, and their recent history of writing themselves into literary respectability, comics and graphic novels have an unquestioned ease of association with speculative fiction and the fantastic. This presentation will examine a subset of texts which exploit this association by blending elements of the fantastic with the non-fiction of graphic memoir. These fictive breaks within otherwise realist narratives challenge traditional notions of biography and memoir and their necessary adherence to mimetic representation.

As such, these blurred narratives become especially useful when discussing experiences which challenge the limits of communicative narrative: trauma and ill mental health, as such this examination of fictive incursions will use examples from Steven Seagle’s It’s A Bird, Katie Green’s Lighter Than My Shadow and Paul Dini’s Dark Night, amongst others.

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The talk is free to attend so if you're in the area please do come along.

I was invited to present my paper by the series organiser Sinéad Murphy.

The facebook event for the talk is here.

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'Speculations' engages in current research in speculative and science fiction, but with a particular interest in intersections across a spectrum of disciplines which engage in varieties of speculative thought.

'Speculations' is supported by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at King's College London.

'Civilisation and Virtual History' by Niall Ferguson

Wednesday 29 June 2011, The British Library Conference Centre.

This lecture was part of the programme of events surrounding the British Library's Out of this World: Science Fiction But Not As You Know It, a superb exhibit which I'll blog about separately soon. If I could I'd attend every one of the events that were organised, they all looked brilliant, but when I saw that Niall Ferguson was giving a talk on counterfactuals I knew I just had to be there.

Some context perhaps. Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard, but is probably best known for his work on several Channel 4 documentaries such as The Ascent of Money and the recent Civilization: Is the West History? Now in all honesty, I've never caught one of these shows, the reason I wanted to attend the lecture was his 1997 book Virtual History.

Virtual History is a collection of essays by historians imagining counterfactual scenarios, essentially engaging with "what might have been" rather than "what was". Given my study of alternate history fiction these "non-fiction" accounts are immensely interesting and the manner of their executions, their reception, and their relationship with the historical narrative are all of massive relevance to my thesis. Given the seeming rarity of academic discussion into alternate history in the UK (by which I mean conferences and lectures) I couldn't very well let this opportunity slide by, especially since it cost me a humble £5 to attend plus my travel (which luckily I pre-booked far enough ahead to get at a bargain rate).

The talk itself was very interesting and superbly well delivered, a masterclass in expressing what were at times pretty complex ideas to an audience of laymen in an engaging manner. It was essentially a summary of the lengthy introduction that Professor Ferguson includes at the beginning of Virtual History, explaining the arguments surrounding the counterfactual examination of history, the theory behind such examinations, and the benefits of counterfactual thought. Given that the original introduction was written for a book published 14 years ago it was interesting to see which elements Professor Ferguson chose to expand upon, leave out, and alter.

I was looking out for was any reference to the fictional renderings of counterfactual history, not least because they are the versions which I am studying, but also because the comments made in the introduction to Virtual History are quite dismissive: "Of course... science fiction [is] not academically respectable" (p.3) and "one thinks, for example, of Robert Harris's recent novel Fatherland, a detective story set in an imaginary Europe twenty years after a Nazi victory. As such books go, it is well researched. But it is irredeemably fictional..." (p. 7). Professor Ferguson is focusing on the historical merits of counterfactuals, as is his want, and therefore is understandably dismissive of the historical value of alternate history fiction. To put it another way, if any other historian were to dismiss historical novels as "irredeemably fictional" we might understand that the historian is arguing that the historical novel cannot imbue a proper understanding of history upon the reader, that it is a pale representation of the past intended primarily for recreation and enjoyment and only secondly (if at all) for instruction. I understand Professor Ferguson's stance in this respect, however to make such a blanketing statement as "science fiction [is] not academically respectable" is a slap in the face to everything I am trying to achieve with my thesis, not to mention the numerous more distinguished scholars who have preceded me in the field of sf.

My ears pricked then when he referred to Philip Roth's The Plot Against America and called it "fiction of huge historical merit". I regret that I wasn't selected to give a question in the brief Q+A or I would have requested Professor Ferguson expand upon this comment: what is it about The Plot Against America that gives it "huge historical merit" despite being "irredeemably fictional", is this something unique to Roth's approach on the topic, or does this represent a softening of opinion towards fictional counterfactuals from the standpoint put into print 14 years before, if so I would be interested to learn how and why this softening has occurred (I have since e-mailed my question to Professor Ferguson's Harvard account as the answer to this question could be a massively significant factor in the way in which I think about the relationship between history and fiction).

Overall it was definitely a worthwhile trip, although as ever when I visit London and the sun is shining, I wished I could stay much longer. Even if I receive no reply to my e-mail, the lecture has given me several new leads on historical theory, as well as explained some of the fine points of Virtual History which otherwise I might easily have underestimated or misunderstood.

'From Flaubert to the Fantastique: Science Fiction and the Literary Field' by Professor Andrew Milner

On Wednesday the 10th November I attended a lecture given by Andrew Milner, Professor of Cultural Studies at Monash University, Melbourne in the Cypress building of the University of Liverpool. Although entitled 'from Flaubert to the Fantastique' the lecture was actually mostly about French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu, and specifically his Les Règles de l'art. In Les Règles de l'art was a map which charted the positions of all of the current art of France giving it a relative location to all other forms of contemporary art. From left to right the items on the map increased in their profitibility and decreased in their 'art for art's sake' philosophy, meanwhile their vertical position was determined by their level of consecration, or how institutionalised they were. Here's an English translation of Bourdieu's map, I couldn't find a French one (such as the one Prof. Milner used in his demonstration) on the interweb:

Professor Milner proceeded to explain the original diagram in far better detail than I have above, before unveiling his remodelled version based, not on the French arts contemporary to Bourdieu, but on Science Fiction. Other changes made were that Bourdieu limited his diagram to only living influences (such as Zola in the centre), whilst Professor Milner expanded his to include artistes who have passed on, but who remain a "living influence" such as Philip K. Dick and J.G. Ballard, amongst others. Similarly, Bourdieu's diagram restrains itself to France alone whilst Professor Milner's reflects the multinational nature of modern movement such as Science Fiction and is global in its scope.

Being unable to provide a picture of Professor Milner's revised map there is little else I can do in this blog post except to attempt to draw a rough sketch of it in your mind's eye. Prof. Milner's map retained the three rough divisions of Poetry, Literature and Theatre that Bourdieu creates (in that order as vertical columns for left to right), expanding Theatre to encompass TV, film and radio, and including sf criticism such as Darko Suvin in the poetry category both because it makes a similar amount of money, and because there is so little sf poetry with which to flesh out the diagram.

Commercial TV occupied the bottom right corner, being the most populist, "all about the money" form of sf, and Gene Roddenberry was singled out as the exemplar of this movement. Above it came mainstream (ie. Hollywood) cinema moving up the map towards art-house cinema by people like Andrey Tarkovskiy. On the bottom left, occupying the role of Bohemia, was Ballard and Moorcock and New Worlds magazine, above them (though slightly more to the right and centre) was weird fiction as exemplified by China Miéville, before shooting back to the left (ie. the poor end) and the top with Darko Suvin-level critique. Zola's position as the dead centre of French culture was occupied by Wells and Verne and Scientific Romance. Below them were various sub-genres such as cyberpunk moving down to the pulps and championed by Hugo Gernsback. Above Wells and Verne were the American Feminist and Afrofuturist writers such as Le Guin and Delany with the top echelon of the novel being occupied by "literary" sf such as Orwell, Huxley et al.. A dotted line was drawn around literary sf, Darko Suvin and arthouse cinema which Professor Milner explained was a permeable barrier between sf and wider cultural movements. The things within the dashed line had crossed the barrier and been appropriated by wider society and thus no longer seen as sf by said community - or at least not tarred with the same brush - the nature of this barrier was interesting however, as Prof. Milner explained its one-way permeability as the sf community still involve it in their discussion and ideology, whilst mainstream communities prefer to ostracise it.

Overall it was an interesting lecture which felt much more like a "just throwing this out there" kind of a affair than the turgid affair genre theory can devolve into. I thought that Professor Milner's adoption and adaptation of Bourdieu's method of mapping had real potential as a method of thinking about the relationships of different forms of sf and their relationships with the social spheres of which they are a part. Of course the positioning of some of the elements is arguable, it's all based on conceptual ideas rather than formal numerical data, and some ideas could be expanded in a larger diagram but you have to stop somewhere or you could draw a map the size of the Liver Building and still be missing some of the details. One item, or possibly two, that I thought should have been on there but weren't were video games (which could possible be split up into commercial and indie) as they are valid narrative vehicles which can still be plotted on the map relative to the other items mentioned.

This is, however, a detail which doesn't detract from the usefulness of the model and I look forward to reading the full article in a forthcoming edition of Science Fiction Studies. One interesting exercise would be to overlay the map with another for Fantasy and Horror as they occupy similar spaces in the wider literary community, but their sub-genres and movements have as varied a relationship as sf.