Hello blog,

It was the first week of the new semester this week with all the chaos that that entails. The madness is sometimes fun too – we (me, Iain Vaughan and Naz) gave the first seminars of the new module ‘Monstrous Bodies’. Iain gave an excellent and really thought-provoking presentation on the idea of ‘monstrous politics’. Using James Gillray’s cartoon ‘New Morality’ (which can be seen here: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a7/GillrayNewMorality.jpg), Iain noted the various types of monster represented, including Coleridge and Southey as half-men half-asses, and a crocodile with a corset on, which Iain suspected may have been meant to be Mary Wollstonecraft. Iain’s point was that Gillray, publishing this cartoon in a conservative anti-Jacobin magazine, was saying that this was the physical representation of people’s monstrous new republican politics. We took a look at the alarmingly wide definition of ‘Monsters’ given by the surgeon William Lawrence in Rees’ Cyclopedia from 1819, which included people with a hare-lip and many other very minor disfigurements. It’s an interesting module, which I’m trying to orient in a number of ways, using both contemporary medical texts and twentieth-century theoretical texts. Let’s hope that it works!

Just a quick note to make sure that everyone knows the resources are now online for event 1 at http://www.litscimed.org.uk/page/learning. Just click on the picture of Gladstone’s bust (thanks for that Paul!) and you’ll see the kinds of things that are available. You can also read the evaluations (anonymised of course) for that event there.

Yesterday I had a look at the AHRC funded network ‘Literature and Madness’ http://www.madnessandliterature.org/. They have a conference coming up, which looks very good, and on their website are featuring reviews of books that in some way reveal issues relevant to the topic. It’s called ‘revealing reads’ and there are a great range of novels reviewed from Conrad to Amis, to writers I don’t know.

Finally, I very much enjoyed the research and teaching colloquium seminar that Phoebe Moore and I took on Wednesday (with Naz and Abby present) on ‘Interdisciplinarity’. Postgrads there were working on many more subjects than literature and science (though I was very fascinated by a PhD student working on photography and biology). It was useful to think about the positives and negatives of interdisciplinary study, how possible it was in practice, what definitions of it were, and I thought (as I have done before) about how LitSciMed needs to have a rigourous methodology and approach if it is to exist as a sub- or inter-discipline. I’ve been asked to give a paper to the annual general meeting of CCUE (the Council for College and University English) in April and I have been mulling over these ideas for that too.

More on the second event soon, which is shaping up nicely.  

All best,

Sharon