English and Media Centre: 6th Form English Literature Conference 2019
English Literature students from Y12 and Y13 attended the eMagazine Literature Conference 2019. The conference is held annually and covers a variety of areas of the literary world.
Literature is not always to be taken so literally, and this was evident at the conference. In order to understand the more familiar side of novels, we have to shift our attitude to what we are reading. There will be a common humanity weaved between all texts, which this conference brought to light. Throughout this conference it was interesting to find out how literature strongly connects us and is connected to the world around us – whether it be past, present or future. Overall, the talks were light-hearted with lots of humour and laughs, but they also challenged us as literature students to look at the deeper meanings and bigger pictures.
This was especially prominent in author Andrew Michael Hurley’s lecture about the genuine importance of setting in the novel and how it shouldn’t be overlooked or underestimated. We found it interesting how for many authors the choice of setting isn’t a coincidence, or because it’s familiar to them; instead, it has reasoning and purpose behind it. It allows the author to shape the novel and its powerful presence can shape characters themselves and their choices. In this case he argued that the symbolism settings create can be as important as the characters themselves and the landscape can even foreshadow the whole novel. Some key examples he touched upon were about the inclusion of the setting’s colour, mood and space, and how these can reflect the human psyche, ultimately bridging the gap between fantasy and reality.
There was an emphasis also on poetry and the poets process in ‘sculpting’, as Ruth Padel put it; after all, the word poem stems from the Greek ‘poein’ – to make. Padel talked to us about drafting a poem and the pressures of form. We got an insight into how she created her poem “Capoeira Boy” from her initial inspiration on YouTube through to the final draft. She described the stanzas of the poem as rooms the reader moves through and compared the writing process with Michael Angelo’s unfinished ‘Prisoners’. Later in the day we watched Raymond Antrobus and Theresa Lola in conversation. These two award-winning contemporary poets discussed their work, its origins and audiences. In particular, the two poets focused on the difference between poetry on the page and performance poetry. In addition, Raymond Antrobus explained how the form and presentation of a poem influences the reader’s experience. Theresa Lola commented how a poem is different every time it is read or performed as it provokes different thoughts and emotions.
Performance is a key aspect of much literature, and although in schools this aspect is often overlooked, it’s actually a key element to how many writers intend for their literature to be received. Conor Short trained to be an actor and is currently a comedian and showed us there was true comedy within Shakespeare, even within his plays which are categorized as tragedies. In fact, Short even went on to remark that, in fact, comedies can be deeply sad and usually the two can go hand in hand as comedy is what can help us get through bad situations and make them seem less serious. He reinforced the point that this is why many liked Shakespeare in the beginning is because people could have peace in the fact that whatever had happened to them that day, someone in the play could be having a worse day than them. Indeed, Shakespeare purposefully shapes the dialogue in his plays to provide humour and wit. Techniques such as purposeful repetition of words can be comical and even involuntary mistakes by the actors can create humour. The use of prose for humour is also more important than one might think. Prose can be used by an actor to convey the language in a way that is coherent to the character. Drunk or mad characters would slip in and out of prose to convey that they are waffling on about things out of their depth. Furthermore, Conor taught us that Shakespeare’s dedicated iambic pentameter wasn’t just to show off; it actually helped the actors lean their lines as it’s easier to remember song-like lines with a rhythm to them. In ‘Hamlet’, the actors acting as actors within the play are told to overact and time their speech and volume at inappropriate times to create comedy. Conor Short even went as far to say that Shakespeare was responsible for a comedy revolution. Usually audience participation can lend itself to conversation and improvisation, especially as the actors had so many lines to learn. However, as unexpected audience participation was becoming less useful for improvisation and more problematic for Shakespeare, it inspired this movement for he was tired of fools interrupting and causing disruption of scenes and lowly humour being rewarded with attention by his audience; he wanted the world to appreciate a more sophisticated wit. Shakespeare set about combining clever digs at these types of people and their humour into his plays, which can also be seen in ‘Hamlet’. Overall, ‘Finding the Funny in Shakespeare’ proved to be very entertaining for us too as Conor got the EMC audience involved to show us what it would’ve been like to be one of Shakespeare’s audiences.
The conference was summed up with another round of comedy performed to us by feminist comedian, Natalie Haynes. Haynes chose to do a comic retelling of Homer’s ‘Iliad’, an Ancient Greek epic, managing to summarise the great epic of 24 books within a matter of half an hour. She told us of the battle of the Trojan war including Greek gods. There are key human themes that run even in this ancient text such as love, betrayal, friendship, romance, revenge and death, which links with even the most modern texts. Natalie took us on a journey of this nine year war story with a modern, light-hearted, feminist view on the events and made us realise the foundation and importance of literature we have the Greeks to thank for.
The eMagazine conference exceeded expectations and revealed a lot more about the subject we have chosen to study at A-level. It gave us a different perspective on many aspects of literature, from ancient texts to Tudor plays to the modern day. We learnt how poetry is important in modern life and awareness of other cultures and how others live their lives. We would definitely recommend this trip to anyone whether studying English or not. We took a lot from this talk and now have a new light on literature.