Daniel Defoe's Zombies 8th April 19.00 - 22.00

Photos from the zombie event

Peter Jones giving his talk

Amy Cutler giving her talk

Q&A

Q&A with Jennifer Cooke, Amy Cutler and Peter Jones

Rob asking questions

Peter Jones answering questions

Amy Cutler and Peter Jones answering questions

'Everything You Wanted To Know About Zombies But Were Too Afraid To Ask Daniel Defoe', the third event in the series by the Birkbeck Literature Club including presentations by PASSENGERFILMS.

Venue: The Centre for Creative Collaboration, 16 Acton Street, London
Time: Friday 8th April, 7pm

Please come as plague victim, zombie, anointed one…etc. This is a nonfunded, free event, so you may want to bring your own wine or a donation towards it.

Feeling distempered? Not sure if it’s the plague or a zombie virus? Come along to this then…

Zombies are defined not simply by being dead, but by being the moving dead – as in recent TV series ‘The Walking Dead’ in which they are simply nicknamed ‘walkers’. This event connects the radical aspects of zombie mobility with its literary heritage in Daniel Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year (1722).


Often when geographers talk about zombie films they use the word ‘meatspace’. The concept of the zombie mob – like the flash mob, or the slum – reminds us of the corporeality of cities, and that they are filled by bodies (and that those bodies also create the city).
Amy Cutler will explore this using Defoe’s text, a plan of London, and clips from contemporary zombie films.
Peter Jones will talk about the plague-ridden Milan of Alessandro Manzoni’s novel The Betrothed (1827) and its connections with zombie outbreak.
Josh Morrall will perform readings from the texts, accompanying clips from films, and James DC will be present to answer questions about and take suggestions for his coming radio show about zombies on Resonance FM.

Bio's:
Amy Cutler is a researcher at Royal Holloway, University of London, completing an interdisciplinary PhD between the English department and the Cultural Geography department. Although her research is on contemporary landscape poetry, she teaches classes in film interpretation on the ‘Geographies of Mobility’ course, and has also recently launched a monthly film society, PASSENGERFILMS, ‘the carcrash of cinema and geography’ (www.passengerfilms.wordpress.com).

Peter Jones is a PhD researcher in English at Queen Mary, University of London, studying ‘abject streets’ and the urban gothic in literary representations of the Victorian street market.

The Contemporary Fiction

All sessions to be held at Birkbeck School of Arts, 43 Gordon Square. For more information email:
contemporaryfictionseminar@gmail.com

T.S. Eliot event

Friday 25th February 2011

The second event of the BLC was on T.S. Eliot. A rehearsed actors reading of his poems. The actors Josh Morrall and Tom Moores with the speaker Steven Quencey-Jones, a PhD student at Queen Mary made a perfect T.S. Eliot evening. Please see a video which is a part of Sweeney Agonistes.

This video is not the best quality but I hope you can hear and see the idea behind it. It's Josh Morrall and Tom Moores reading T.S. Eliot Sweeney Agonistes on Friday 25th February 2011.

 The actors Josh Morrall, Tom Moores and the speaker Quin

 The actors Josh Morrall and Tom Moores

 

 Q&A with Quin and the actors

The crowd at the event in both photos

19.00 - 22.00

at Milfords

1 Milford Lane

WC2R 3LL

Reading of a selection of T. S. Eliot's verse

Steven Quincey-Jones is a PhD student at Queen Mary, University of London. His thesis considers the impact of religious pluralism on poetry and systems of belief in Britain in the period 1910-1940. He is currently writing a chapter on the role of anthropology and the study of 'primitive religion' in T. S. Eliot's Criterion. This summer he is presenting a paper on Ezra Pound’s mystical theory of poetry, the ‘Doctrine of the Image’, at the Ezra Pound International Conference, London. He lives in Stoke Newington with his cat, Emmylou Harris.

Tom Moores having recently graduated from a Masters in Shakespeare Studies, currently spends his time busily enjoying his favoured stereotype, the struggling actor. Having appeared in a number of plays, short films and ads - which he would be very surprised to find anyone had seen - he will soon be playing a lead role in Max Frisch's 'The Fireraisers' at The Baron's Court Theatre from 8th-27th March (which he hopes at least some of you will see... please?)

Josh Morrall is a graduate of King's College London where he studied English Literature and Cinema Cultures. During that time, he managed to avoid coming into contact with the poetry of T.S. Eliot, and as such, is pleased to have been part of tonight's readings. He is currently writing a play about the state of contemporary literary criticism and will be appearing in the Anatrope Theatre production of George Hull's 'Peter' in late March.

T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns Eliot (September 26, 1888 – January 4, 1965) was an American-born English poet, playwright, and literary critic, arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. The poem that made his name, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock started in 1910 and published in Chicago in 1915—is regarded as a masterpiece of the modernist movement. He followed this with what have become some of the best-known poems in the English language, including The Waste Land (1922),The Hollow Men (1925), Ash Wednesday (1930), and Four Quartets (1945). He is also known for his seven plays, particularly Murder in the Cathedral (1935). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948.

Born in St. Louis, Missouri, Eliot went east for college and was educated at Harvard. After graduation, he studied philosophy at the Sorbonne for a year, then won a scholarship to Oxford in 1914. He became a British citizen at the age of 39. Eliot renounced his citizenship to the United States and said: "My mind may be American but my heart is British". (Hall, Donald The Art of Poetry No.1 The Paris Review, Issue 21 Spring-Summer 1959)