Academia

8 May 2012

Conference news – ‘One Day in the City’

I was recently accepted as a speaker for the forthcoming One Day in the City event, which will be happening at UCL on Friday 15th June. Pitched somewhere between literary festival and conference, it’s billed as ‘a celebration of London and literature’. Non-academics are encouraged to attend, and registration is free, though if you want to come along it is important that you register, which you can do by following this link.

My talk will be about Harry Beck’s iconic London Underground map and the art it has inspired – for a taster of what this will entail you can read an article on the same subject that I wrote last year.

I’m particularly excited about this event, as I’ve been put on the same panel as Will Self. Although the fact that he’s likely to be sitting next to me as I’m speaking is somewhat nerve-wracking, it’s flattering that my work is considered to be covering roughly the same territory as his.

28 July 2011

New Publication – ‘The Invaded Home in Ian McEwan’s Solar and Saturday’

Ian McEwan has become almost notorious for the highly dramatic set pieces that appear in several of his novels, on which the narrative generally hinges. These set pieces range from the dramatically surreal – as in the moment at the beginning of Enduring Love (1997) in which a hot air balloon drifts away into the air – to the intensely personal, such as the crucial incident in Atonement (2001) in which the protagonist witnesses her sister at a moment of great sexual tension. As such, we can view the isolated dramatic incident as something that is characteristic of McEwan’s writing. Both of the novels that I address in this paper, Saturday (2005) and Solar (2010) include scenes of this nature; however they are less integral to their narratives than the comparable moments in Enduring Love and Atonement. What is particularly interesting about these two scenes is that they both occur in the setting of the home, and in both novels this location is given great importance.

An essay of mine is included in the recently published sixth issue of Peer English. Entitled ‘The Invaded Home in Ian McEwan’s Solar and Saturday‘, it considers the importance of protagonists’ homes, and the transgressions that occur within them, in two of McEwan’s recent novels.

Further information on the volume is available here.