Updated Programme- 2nd June

Richard Burton Centre Annual Postgraduate Conference in Welsh Studies

Thursday 2^nd June 2016 10am-5.30pm

Arts and Humanities Conference Room, B02/3, James Callaghan Building, Swansea University

Provisional Programme

10.00-11.30 Panel One

Cath Beard, Nesta’s Scream: Representations of working-class women in Raymond Williams’s Loyalties

Dan Gerke, Raymond Williams with Frustration: The Long Reception of Georg Lukacs

John Boaler, At work: Miners’ wives and mothers

11.30-11.45 Coffee/Tea

11.45-12.45 Panel Two

Sophie Williams The Politics of Welshness: A Response to Bradbury and Andrews

Brian Roper The Multiple Identities of Modern Wales

12.45-1.30 Lunch/Cinio

1.30- 2.30 Panel Three

Alex Lovell Model newydd ar gyfer Cymraeg Ail Iaith? Astudiaeth ar sut orau y gellir cyflwyno’r Gymraeg fel ail iaith yn llwyddiannus i’r rhai yn yr ardaloedd mwyaf Seisnig yng Nghymru (session yn y Gymraeg- translation facilities available).

Jay Rees, Student experience, a mere footnote in education history: a case study of Swansea University

2.30-3.30 Panel Four

Clare Davies, Remembering 1926: Representations of the General Strike in Welsh Writing in English

Syd Morgan, Jack White: Wales and Ireland, Socialisms and Nationalisms

3.30-4.00 Coffee/Tea

4.00-5.30 Keynote Lecture,

Dr Angharad Closs Stephens (Swansea University) ‘From National Mood to Political Affects: notes from the funeral of Margaret Thatcher.

Conference Report: Beyond the Border Country/ Tu Hwnt i’r Gororau / 辺境をこえて

On the fifth anniversary of the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan, killing 16,000 people and causing the Fukushima reactor meltdowns, an international one-day symposium on ‘New Directions in Raymond Williams Studies’ took place in Williams’ birthplace of Pandy, Monmouthshire. Two seemingly unconnected events, but by the end of the conference, in the moving summing up by Shintaro Kono, a thread linking the two had been established.

The first panel - ‘Culture and Materialism’ - featured papers from Ryota Nishi (Chuo University), Alice Barnaby (Swansea University) and Masashi Hoshino (Manchester University). Beginning with an examination of Raymond Williams’ encounters with eco-criticism, Ryota Nishi introduced the notion of ‘red and green working together’ which came to encapsulate the political direction Williams himself both had taken in association with both Plaid Cymru and Labour, and his move toward a greener socialist politics at the end of his life. Alice Barnaby injected a note of controversy with her presentation on the ‘Problems of new materialism’, offering a compelling overview of ‘Thing Theory’. This connected well with Ryota Nishi’s earlier link between colonisation and the nature of the Fukushima disaster. If the object has agency, it can also have power. Williams’ anticipation of some aspects of new materialism was placed against this idea of ‘thing power’ and the question it poses- ‘does it turn too far from the human subject?’. A meaty theoretical sandwich was completed by a presentation from Masashi Hoshino on Ernst Bloch and Raymond Williams. The ‘sense and the impulse’ of the long revolution was the connecting factor between Williams and Bloch’s ‘unmastered now’.  The idea that ‘the old is pregnant in its forces of production’ linked in with Williams’ belief in the fundamental power and importance of experience, both as a resource of hope and as a way of understanding in itself. 

It is worth mentioning the coffee break for the great spilling out into the early spring sunshine, where tea and biscuits were enjoyed in the shadow of the Skirrid, outside the village hall in Pandy. For a conference celebrating a figure so aware of place, it was entirely fitting that we did not remain sequestered and separate from it but escaped into it at every opportunity. 

Following the break Tony Pinkney (Lancaster University) spoke on the subject of Raymond Williamsas Oxford Thinker. Williams is most often connected with Cambridge, yet many formative parts of his life took place in Oxford, and the city itself provided the physical setting for his novel Second Generation. Pinkney opened by describing how Oxford had woven itself into his memories of Williams. It was at Oxford that Williams first memorial event took place, 16 days after his death. His son’s first outing was at a lecture where ‘I lifted up my 6 week old [son] and said ‘you’ve got to see Raymond Williams’. Oxford is where Williams built the reputation that takes him back to Cambridge. It is where he writes Culture and Society- and Pinkney argues it is the experience of being in Oxford at that time, the academic connections and ‘distinctively Oxfordian moment’ in Williams development, the influence of Matthew Arnold and William Morris as much as F R Leavis, that results in this work. Williams is an Oxford Thinker, academically and in his considerations of Oxford itself. Oxford gave Williams the resources to become fully himself, and the Oxford story needs retelling to rebalance this.

Following lunch, and another spilling out into the sunshine, the afternoon session took place with a focus on Aesthetics, Art and Literature. Fuhito Endo (Seikei University, Tokyo), Takashi Onuki (Swansea University), Cath Beard (Swansea University), and Peter Wakelin considered Marxism, translation, critical receptions, and aesthetic interpretations of Williams and Wales. Fuhito Endo placed Williams alongside Jameson and Felman in an analysis of the institutionalism of new historicism in the early 1980’s. Takashi Onuki gave a fascinating insight into the issues thrown up during translation in his paper on translating People of the Black Mountains. The intricacies of language and translation as an act of revealing valuation gave a fascinating insight into the politics of the act of reading. Cath Beard examined how critical responses to the 1985 publication of Loyalties betrayed an anti-Welshness at the heart of anglocentric criticism, but also helped to magnify the value of considered examination in the works by Bruce Robbins and Tony Pinkney. Set against each other it was clear the fiction of Williams had been unfairly treated as the poor relation by many who cast a critical eye over his body of work, and was worthy of re-evaluation. The session drew to a close with Peter Wakelin’s moving presentation of ‘Border Country in paint: Raymond Williams artist contemporaries’. This collection brought much of what had been discussed during the day into visual representation and was a fitting end of the panels.

In the conference overview that followed, Daniel Williams (Swansea University), Shintaro Kono (Swansea University) and Daniel Gerke (Swansea University) wove together the treads of the differing presentations.

‘The sense and the impulse’ - at first glance the papers making up the body of the international symposium ‘Beyond the Border Country- New Directions in Raymond Williams studies’ may have seemed only vaguely related. Yet a fascinating thread ran through and within each presentation, building into a wider feeling. Agency, ecology, the body, the indiscriminate anger of the elements, the connection with the earth, Williams’ ‘locatedness’ (from Wales to Oxford) and the power of the image combined to provide a structure of feeling culminating in a moving summing up by Shintaro Kono. Shintaro described the impact of being in Tokyo on the day of the earthquake and tsunami, and the fear of radiation from Fukushima. The coming together of ‘red and green’ and the new direction toward ecologically aware politics that Williams was taking is needed now, more than ever. Hugely diverse papers came together within this context to make the Yeats quote paraphrased by Tony Pinkney ‘Our best labourer dead, and all the sheaves still to bind’ the end result of the day. The new academic and critical labourers are set to tying the sheaves left behind, especially those languishing in the field of ecocriticism, the direction perhaps in which Williams was moving towards the end of his life. 

Following the conference, delegates headed to The Art Shop and Chapel, Abergavenny, for the launch of Peter Lord’s ‘The Tradition: A new History of Welsh Art’. Part of the Parthian tour to celebrate the book, we enjoyed a 30 minute talk from Peter Lord, along with tea and cake. In the best tradition of Williams’s scholarship, Lord deconstructed the ‘selective traditions’ of the past that rendered a Welsh artistic tradition invisible. But his is no mere act of deconstruction, for his work and career has been dedicated to the construction of a Welsh artistic ‘Tradition’. The fruit of that work is distilled in his new, lavishly illustrated, volume. It is a fabulous book that all reading this should head out and buy immediately.

Cath Beard 

The Conference was supported by:

Richard Burton Centre for the Study of Wales 
CREW  - Canolfan Ymchwil i Lên ac Iaith Saesneg Cymru / Centre for Research into the Literature and Language of Wales
Raymond Williams Kenkyukai with the support of JSPS/MEXT Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research 
Parthian Books 
Eisteddfod Genedlaethol Sir Fynwy a’r Cyffiniau
With special thanks to Stuart Neale of Pandy Village Hall

Call for Papers- Annual Burton Centre Postgraduate Conference/ Galwad am bapurau- Cynhadledd i Fyfyrwyr Ol-raddedig

Richard Burton Centre Postgraduate Conference

New Research in Welsh Studies

Thursday 26^th May, 2016

Call for Papers:

The Richard Burton Centre for the Study of Wales seeks paper proposals from postgraduate researchers (MA by research, M.Phil. and PhD) working in any discipline on subjects that concern or relate to Wales (literature/politics/history/Cymraeg).

Papers will be of 20 minutes’ duration and will be presented within a multi-disciplinary forum. Presenters should be aware that the audience will be interested, but not necessarily expert, in their own specific field of research. Some thought should therefore be given to exploring the context (theoretical, methodological etc) in which the research has been designed, in order to maximize points of contact and opportunities for comparison across subject areas and disciplines.

Papers might present an overview of the research project as a whole, or of one or more parts of it. The focus might be (for researchers in the early stages) on the research question and involve some speculation as to how best to resolve it. For researchers nearing completion it might be more appropriate to concentrate on outcomes and possibilities for further research beyond the qualification currently aimed at.

Please send proposals (no longer than one side of A4) for papers (in either Welsh or English) to Clare Davies, CREW, Swansea University: 632589@swansea.ac.uk

Closing date for proposals: 30^th April 2016

 Canolfan Astudiaethau Cymreig Richard Burton
Ymchwil Newydd ym maes Astudiaethau Cymreig
Cynhadledd i Fyfyrwyr Ôl-raddedig

Dydd Iau 26ain Mai, 2016

Galwad am Bapurau:

Mae Canolfan Astudiaethau Cymreig Richard Burton yn galw am bapurau gan ymchwilwyr ôl-raddedig (MA trwy Ymchwil, M. Phil. a PhD) sydd yn gweithio mewn unrhyw ddisgyblaeth ar bynciau sy'n ymwneud â Chymru (llenyddiaeth/gwleidyddiaeth/hanes/Cymraeg).

Bydd y papurau yn para 20 munud, ac mi fyddant yn cael eu cyflwyno mewn fforwm rhyngddisgyblaethol. Ni fydd holl aelodau’r gynulleidfa felly yn gwbl hyddysg yn y gwahanol feysydd, a dylid rhoi peth sylw i gyd-destun damcaniaethol y gwaith er mwyn galluogi cysylltiadau rhwng meysydd gwahanol.

Gall y papur gynnig trosolwg o'r prosiect ymchwil yn ei gyfanrwydd, neu ganolbwyntio ar un neu fwy o rannau ohono. Gall fanylu ar un cwestiwn ymchwil gan archwilio’r dulliau mwyaf addas i ymwneud â’r cwestiwn hynny, neu edrych ar bosibiliadau ar gyfer ymchwil pellach.

Anfonwch gynigion (dim mwy na un ochr A4 o hyd) ar gyfer papurau (yn y Gymraeg neu’r Saesneg) at Clare Davies, CREW, Prifysgol Abertawe: 632589@abertawe.ac.uk

Dyddiad cau: 30ain Ebrill 2016

Beyond the Border Country/ Tu Hwnt i’r Gororau / 辺境をこえて

New Directions in Raymond Williams Studies

Friday, March 11, 10 – 6.00

Dydd Gwener, Mawrth 11, 10 – 6.00

An international  one-day symposium to be held at Pandy Village Hall, Wern Gifford Estate, Pandy  NP7 8DL . Followed by the launch of Peter Lord’s new history of Welsh Art, The Tradition, at The Art Shop & Chapel,  8 Cross St,  Abergavenny NP7 5EH.

Cynhadledd ryngwladol undydd  i’w gynnal yn Neuadd y Pentre,Ystad Wern Gifford, Pandy  NP7 8DL. I’w ddilyn gan lawnsiad cyfrol newydd Peter Lord ar hanes celf yng Nghymru, The Tradition yn The Art Shop & Chapel, 8 Cross St, Y Fenni  NP7 5EH. 

Amserlen / Timetable

10.00. Daniel Williams, Croeso / Opening Remarks

10.05 – 11. 35.  Culture and Materialism

- Ryota Nishi,

'"You're An Ecologist, Aren't You?": A brief Note on Ecocriticism and Raymond Williams' Cultural Materialism

- Alice Barnaby (Swansea University / Prifysgol Abertawe)  

Problems of New Materialism (for literary critics)

- Masashi Hoshino, (Manchester University)

Ernst Bloch and Raymond Williams: Principle and Resources of Hope

11.35 - 12.00 Tea / Coffee Break

12. 00 – 1.00 Tony Pinkney (Lancaster University), 

'Oxford is making all the running': Raymond Williams as Oxford Thinker.  

1.00 – 1.30 Lunch / Cinio  (Provided)

1.30 – 3.30 Aesthetics, Art and Literature

- Fuhito Endo, Seikei University Tokyo

Marxist Aesthetics Reconsidered: Jameson, Felman, and Williams  

- Takashi Onuki (Research Fellow, Richard Burton Centre, Swansea University), 

 ''[T]he place-name which you now say as Ewyas": Trying to Translate The People of the Black Mountains

- Catherine Beard (Swansea University), 

The ‘half-turned away child’- Loyalties and critical responses to the fiction of Raymond Williams

- Peter Wakelin, 

Border Country in Paint: Raymond Williams' artist contemporaries

3.30 – 4.00 Making Connections: Conference Overview 

Daniel Williams, (Swansea University)

Shintaro Kono (Research Fellow, Richard Burton Centre, Swansea University)

Daniel Gerke (Swansea University)

4.00 – Drive to Abergavenny  / Gyrru i’r Fenni.

5.00 – 6.00.  Peter Lord, ‘The Tradition’

The Art Shop & Chapel, 8 Cross St, Abergavenny NP7 5EH 

30 minute talk, book launch and signing. (Refreshments provided)

Key Information / Y wybodaeth hanfodol

Pris y Gynhadledd:

Am ddim i’r cyfranwyr

£ 10 i bawb arall.

Mae hyn yn cynnwys cinio. 

Gellir talu ar y dydd ond rhowch wybod i Daniel Williams os ydych yn dod, erbyn 1pm ar ddyd Llun Mawrth y 7fed os gwelwch yn dda. 

Conference Fee:

Free to contributors.

£10 for everyone else.

This does include lunch. 

You may pay on the day but please let Daniel Williams know if you’re coming by Monday, March 7th. 

Trefnwyd gan / Organised by: Professor Daniel G. Williams

Director / Cyfarwyddwr:  Canolfan Astudiaethay Cymreig Richard Burton / The Richard Burton Centre for the Study of Wales. 

daniel.g.williams@swansea.ac.uk 

Co-hosted by:

Richard Burton Centre for the Study of Wales 

CREW  - Canolfan Ymchwil i Lên ac Iaith Saesneg Cymru / Centre for Research into the Literature and Language of Wales

Raymond Williams Kenkyukai with the support of JSPS/MEXT Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (A)




Parthian Books 

Eisteddfod Genedlaethol Sir Fynwy a’r Cyffiniau. 

Gyda diolch i / With thanks to: 

Stuart Neale, Pandy Village Hall 

Robyn Tomos, Swyddog Celfyddydau Gweledol , Eisteddfod Genedlaethol Cymru

Lunchtime talk next week

Women and Disability in South Wales Coalfields 
Alexandra Jones (Swansea University)

 

Lunchtime talk, Wednesday 20 January, 1.15pm at the National Library of Wales

 

As part of the Disability and Industrial Society project www.dis-ind-soc.org.uk , Alexandra Jones will give a talk on Women and Disability in South Wales Coalfields Literature:

 

It has been shown that coalfields women near the start of the 20th century were at greater risk of death than their male counterparts. Whilst the arduous work of women in the home was arguably an extension of the coal industry, women also worked both at the colliery and in other local industries. Depictions of female characters are plentiful, but the vast majority of the material was written by men, and writing by working-class women is scarce. This presentation seeks to redress this balance by exploring the representation of women and disability in coalfields literature.

 

Free Event: Book here  http://drwm.llgc.org.uk/cgi-bin/go.pl/show_event.html?uid=2442

 

The National Library is also hosting the exhibition:  ‘From Pithead to Sickbed and Beyond’ (until 2 April) which examines the hidden history of disability in the South Wales coalfields,https://www.llgc.org.uk/collections/activities/exhibitions0/from-pithead-to-sickbed-and-beyond/

3 seminars of interest this week / 3 Seminar diddorol

3 seminars of interest this week / O ddiddordeb yr wythnos hon:

Monday 16 November, 4.00pm / Dydd Llun 16 Tachwedd, 4.00pm
Room 230, Keir Hardie Building

The Richard Burton Centre in collaboration with the European Travellers to Wales AHRC Project, the Department of Languages, Translation and Communication and the Centre for Contemporary German Culture:

Dr Heather Williams (University of Wales Centre for
Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies / Canolfan Uwchefrydiau Cymreig a Cheltaidd Prifysgol Cymru Aberystwyth)

'Views and visions of Wales in French travel writing (c. 1780-1870)’

Tuesday 17 November , 1.00pm / Dydd Mawrth 17 Tachwedd, 1.00pm
Surf Room, Fulton House
CODAH Seminar:
Rhys Jones (Swansea University)

‘#DataMawr – Welsh Political Parties, Elections, and Reasonably Big Data’

Wednesday 18 November , 4.00pm / Dydd Mercher 18 Tachwedd, 4.00pm
Room 303, Keir Hardie Building
Department of English Seminar:
Dr Andrew Warnes (Leeds University):

‘Contactless?: Supermarket Flow and the Death of Experience in Randall Jarrell and Allen Ginsberg’

Angela V. John - Darlith Richard Burton Lecture