Spaces of Comparison Conference

The focus of the twenty-first annual conference of the Association for Welsh Writing in English at Gregynog Hall in Powys, Wales, UK from March 27 – 29th, 2009 will be ‘Spaces of Comparison: Welsh Writing in English in Comparative Contexts’. In recent years ‘postnationalism’, ‘transnationalism’ and the ‘transatlantic’ have become influential paradigms in a variety of academic fields. This conference aims to explore the applicability of these concepts to Welsh writing in English. Is it time that we moved beyond the ideological and political requirements of the nation state? Or does ‘Wales’ remain a politically fragile entity that needs to be continually reimagined and reinforced by literary texts? What other peoples, nations and literatures may shed light on the histories and literatures of the Welsh people? Panel papers of a broadly theoretical nature are welcome, as well as papers that compare the literatures of Wales, that place Welsh writing within European and Transatlantic contexts, and that relate comparative approaches to colonial, postcolonial and global contexts.

Keynote Speakers:
Our three keynote speakers are pre-eminent figures in the field of comparative cultural studies. Peter Lord's work will address Wales directly, while Professors Susan Manning (Edinburgh) and Marc Shell (Harvard) are leading figures in the fields of transatlantic and comparative literatures respectively.

CALL FOR PAPERS
Papers are invited on any aspect of the theme ‘Spaces of Comparison: Welsh Writing in English in Comparative Contexts.’ Both short papers (c. 20 minutes) or longer ones (c. 50 minutes) will be considered; a brief abstract should be submitted to the organizer for consideration by the deadline of January 14th, 2009. Organizer: Dr. Daniel Williams, CREW, Department of English, Swansea University, Singleton Park, Swansea SA2 8PP. daniel.g.williams@swansea.ac.uk
Possible topics may include (but are not limited to):

- Celtic comparisons: Ireland, Scotland, Brittany.
- Welsh Writing in English in relation to English literature in England
- Welsh writing in English and Breton writing in French and other cases of a ‘minority’ literature in a ‘majority’ language.
- Wales and India – from William Jones through Alun Lewis to Desmond Barry
- Wales and the United States.
- Ethnic Modernisms in Wales, Ireland, Scotland, Harlem, Scandinavia etc.
- Comparative approaches to Gender, Ethnicity or Nationalism
- The making of Black Welsh, or Afro-Welsh, identities.
- The concept of diaspora.
- Marxisms / Nationalisms / Feminisms / Religious Traditions.
- Translation.
- Comparisons across genres: literature in relation to music, art, architecture.
- Theoretical papers exploring the validity of comparative and transatlantic models in relation to minority literary studies.

Organizers:
CREW (Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales) , Swansea University
Dr. Daniel Williams, CREW, Department of English, Swansea University, Singleton Park, Swansea SA2 8PP. daniel.g.williams@swansea.ac.uk
Sarah Morse, c/o Dr. Daniel Williams, CREW, Department of English, Swansea University, Singleton Park, Swansea SA2 8PP. sarahmorse@gmail.com

An Afternoon CREW Tea

To mark the end of a busy term, CREW hosted an afternoon of cakes and wine for its current cohort of students; a CREW tea rather than cream tea if you will (though we did overlook Welsh cakes and Bara Brith in favour of carrot cake, chocolate mascarpone muffins and chocolate, banana and peanut butter cupcake, and of course, mince pies).

The afternoon gave old hands and new a chance to meet one another, talk about their interests in Welsh Writing in English, and how perhaps we should try to persuade Only Men Aloud to stage a benefit concert for CREW PhD students as surely our cake-baking skills (second only to our writing and research skills of course) could surely fulfill any rider requests.

Winifred Coombe Tennant - A Life Through Art

An exhibition of works from the collection of Winifred Coombe Tennant, one of Wales' most significant art patrons of the twentieth century comes to Swansea.

The exhibition is curated by Peter Lord, renowned art historian and Research Fellow at CREW. It includes works by Evan Walters, Kyffin Williams, Gwen John and John Elwyn from both private and public collections.

This touring exhibition by the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth is at the Glyn Vivian Art Gallery 13 December 2008 - 15 February 2009.

There is an interesting article with some pictures on the BBC website written to mark the arrival of the exhibition at the National Gallery of Wales in the summer.

The picture here is by Evan Walters, Mother and Babe, 1919, oil on canvass, private collection.

The Art of Conversation

On the December 1^st edition of Radio 3’s flagship arts programme ‘Night Waves’, Daniel Williams discussed Dylan Thomas's radio play The Art of Conversation, with radio drama and documentary maker Piers Plowright and presenter Matthew Sweet.  Found by Thomas's biographer Andrew Lycett among a sheaf of papers, the play is a short piece of wartime propaganda, taking as its theme the decline of conversation. It also features 'contributions' from the likes of Oscar Wilde, Aubrey Beardsley and Dr Johnson, frequently reminding listeners that 'careless talk costs lives'. You can listen again this week at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00fr8h0

The play itself will be broadcast on Radio 4 at 11.30 am, December 3rd.

Raymond Williams study is Archbishop of Canterbury's "biography of the year"

Dr Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, has selected a Swansea researcher's study of Raymond Williams as his biography of the year.

Professor Dai Smith holds the Raymond Williams Chair in Cultural History at Swansea University's Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales (CREW), which is based in the School of Arts. He published Raymond Williams: A Warrior's Tale in May 2008.

Following excellent reviews, he now joins authors Barack Obama, Martin Amis and Stefan Zweig on the 2008 Times Literary Supplement (TLS) Books of the Year list.

Writing in the TLS on Wednesday 26 November, The Archbishop of Canterbury describes Professor Smith's biography as "a completely engaged, imaginatively dense study of someone who was with good reason a sort of moral touchstone for one important strand in the British Left".

Raymond Williams is widely held to be one of the one of the most influential socialist writers and thinkers in post-war Britain. He introduced radical new approaches to the theory and practice of culture as a social dynamic and is regarded as one of the last, great male intellectual figures of the 20th Century.

He is also seen as Wales' major intellectual figure of the 20th Century. By the end of the 1950s he had broken down the academic barriers between different forms of study, such as literary criticism and sociology.

For more see http://www.swansea.ac.uk/news_centre/LatestNews/Headline,29509,en.php

Raymond Williams Conference Report

The CREW conference on Raymond Williams's Culture and Society@50 took place on November 7th at the Dylan Thomas Centre, Swansea, and was a resounding success.

The day opened with Professor Stefan Collini’s probing and questioning analysis of the assumptions informing Raymond Williams’s view that the term culture emerged as a result of industrialisation. While recognising the widespread influence of the tradition of thinkers mapped out by Williams in Culture and Society, Collini suggested that the historical argument informing the book was inaccurate and has left a misleading legacy. Professor Catherine Belsey, followed by exploring the uses made in contemporary criticism of Williams’s redefinition of ‘culture’ as a process of creating meanings, and as the site of contested meanings. Developing some of the ideas explored in his celebrated biography of Williams, A Warrior’s Tale, and drawing on Williams’s literary analyses of Welsh novels, Professor Dai Smith argued for the particular exceptionalism of the south Wales context of Williams’s upbringing. Anthony Barnett described the 1970s context of his celebrated defence of Williams against Terry Eagleton’s attack on Raymond's ‘gradualism’ and ‘humanism’ in the pages of the New Left Review. The remarkable volume of interviews Politics and Letters resulted from this debate, and Barnett discussed the making of that book and the legacy of Williams’s commitment to pluralism for contemporary politics in Britain. The day ended with the film director Colin Thomas discussing his award winning documentary on Raymond Williams, Border Crossing , followed by a showing of the film. The conference as a whole resulted in an illuminating, multi dimensional, appreciative but at times critical, engagement with Williams’s seminal volume and its legacy. Among those present were representatives of the Raymond Williams Society, The Raymond Williams Foundation, Director of the Institute for Welsh Affairs, John Osmond, theatre and opera director Ceri Sherlock, Ross Leadbeater of Only Men Aloud, poet Letitia Rees, and most importantly many recent and current CREW postgraduate students. Several delegates drew appreciative attention to the ample time given for discussion (a change from the rushed nature of many conferences) and while culture may be ordinary, the food at the Dylan Thomas Centre was exceptional.

Tony Conran@ Swansea

Tony Conran reads from his new autobiographical long poem What Brings You Here So Late at 4.00pm Wednesday 29th October in Room 216, Keir Hardie Building, Swansea Univeristy. Nigel Jenkins of the English Department's Centre for Creative Writing writes:

"It is difficult to image how English-language poetry in Wales would have developed from the 1960s onwards, without the hugely influential presence of Tony Conran – as poet, translator, critic, dramatist and general one-man cultural turbine! In 1967 he gave Wales and the world The Penguin Book of Welsh Verse. A book whose extended introduction represents both a concise cultural history of Wales and a challenging bardic manifesto. Conscious of the Welsh poet’s traditional socio-political stance, whilst at the same time invoking the powerful engines of modernism, Conran is one of only two or three Anglophone poets with the authority to deliver a major national statement, as in the controlled fury of his ‘Elegy of the Welsh dead in the Falkland Islands, 1982’. A nationalist with an internationalist’s deep interest in poetries way beyond his own country, he is capable also of ‘the ‘loneliness, tenderness and slenderness’ that he identifies as the defining qualities of the haiku, of which – as of so much else – he has been a pioneer in Wales".