Stephen Benson

Bio: Stephen Benson is an academic researcher from University of East Anglia. The author has contributed to research in topics: Narrative & Opera. The author has an hindex of 7, co-authored 20 publications receiving 137 citations.

Literary Music: Writing Music in Contemporary Fiction

Abstract: Music is commonly felt to offer a valued experience, yet to put that experience into words is no easy task. Rather than view verbal representations of music as somehow secondary to the music itself, Literary Music argues that it is in such representations that our understanding of music and its meanings is constituted and explored. Focusing on recent fictional and theoretical texts, Stephen Benson proposes literature, narrative fiction in particular, as a singular form of musical performance. Literary Music concentrates not only on song and opera, those forms in which words and music overtly confront one another, but also on a small number of recurring ideas around which the literary and the musical interact, including voice, narrative, performance, and silence. The book considers a wide range of literary and theoretical texts, including those of Blanchot and Bakhtin, Kazuo Ishiguro, Vikram Seth, David Malouf and J.M. Coetzee. The musical forms discussed range from opera to the string quartet, together with individual works by Elgar, Strauss and Michael Berkeley. As such, Literary Music offers an informed interdisciplinary approach to the study of literature and music that participates in the lively theoretical debate on the status of meaning in music.

Cycles of Influence: Fiction, Folktale, Theory

Abstract: In this wide ranging and insightful analysis, Stephen Benson proposes a poetic of narrative for postmodernism by placing new emphasis on the folktale. Postmodernist fictions have evidenced a return to narrative - to storytelling centred on a sequence of events, rather than a "spiralling" of events as found in modernism - and recent theorists have described narrative as a "central insistence of the human mind". By characterizing the folktale as a prime embodiment of narrative, Benson relates folktales to many of the theoretical concerns of postmodernism and provides new insights into the works of major writers who have used this genre, which includes the subgenre of the fairy tale, in opening narrative up to new possibilities. Benson examines the key features of folktales: their emphasis on a chain of events rather than description or consciousness, their emphasis on a self-contained fictional environment rather than realism, the presence of a storyteller as a self-confessed fabricator, their oral and communal status, and their ever-changing state, which defies authoritative versions. The arguments presented should not only interest folklorists and scholars of narrative but also readers in fields ranging from comparative literature to feminist theory.

Gossip from the Forest: The Tangled Roots of Our Forests and Fairytales by Sara Maitland (review)

Abstract: Gossip from the Forest: The Tangled Roots of Our Forests and Fairytales By Sara Maitland London: Granta, 2012 354 ppGossip from the Forest is a major work of creative criticism by a writer of some of the most interesting and challenging fiction of recent decades, a writer with a profound interest in the life and workings of the fairy tale It is a work that lives and breathes in the space of the hyphen that links-or does it keep apart?-creative writing and various forms of literary-critical and historiographic practice, an occupancy entirely appropriate, given the element of critique that has long formed a central strand of Sara Maitland's fairy-tale fiction And yet as suggested by its title, Gossip from the Forest has more than just the fairy tale on its mind In addition to signaling Maitland's concern for the byways of popular knowledge and understanding, the titular gossip is indeed a nod to the tales; but the forest of the title is more than just a casual gesture toward a generic fairy-tale setting Gossip from the Forest is as much about forests as it is about fairy tales, in particular, twelve real forested areas situated variously in England and Scotland, each of which is visited and inhabited by Maitland in the course of a calendar year, March to February Around half of the book is devoted to the subject of forests: what and where they are, what we've done to them, what they've done to us, and what might become of them A fair proportion of this discussion is written against the very idea that we can conceive of forests in the abstract or the collective, as opposed to conceiving them as comprising a set of singular spaces each with its own irreducibly textured and resonant presence: as Maitland says, "1 want the forests in the book to be real-real walks, real people, real 'nature'" (20) Hence she works to mark the presence of each of her chosen forest spacesSaltridge Wood, the Forest of Dean, and Kielder Forest, among othersthrough a seductive mix of geography, natural and cultural history, and, above all, personal observation She walks and sits and talks and looks and listens, alone and with others, and her writing is a register of the presence of her mind and body in each of the forests in question It is a book of inhabitation, person in place and place in personGossip from the Forest is thus an example of nature writing, that rich but until now relatively minor genre that has in recent years come to occupy a significant space in bookshops and on publishers' lists The renaissance in nature writing is of course a symptom of our growing concern for the environment, locally and globally, a concern variously contentious in intention and orientation, nowhere more so than in the praise and criticism generated in response to the likes of Robert MacFarlane, Richard Mabey, and Roger Deakin (to name just a few of the more prominent English authors of such works) Ecocriticism is the term used most commonly to mark the environmental turn within literary-critical studies; and although I am sure its author would bristle at the notion, Gossip from the Forest can and perhaps should be identified as a work of ecocriticism As such, it is one of the first major works to offer a bridge between ecocriticism and fairy-tale studies, just as previous decades witnessed similar bridging work between fairy-tale studies and the likes of structuralism, psychoanalysis, strains of feminism, Marxism, deconstruction, postcolonialism, and queer theory (a ridiculously totalizing list, but it serves a purpose) No doubt there are essays already in circulation that offer an ecocritical engagement with the fairy tale-that is, that read fairy tales ecocritically-not least within the thriving fields of cultural geography; but Gossip from the Forest is a book-length work published by a mainstream press, so we can at least propose as helpful the idea that Maitland's book marks the arrival proper of ecocritical fairy-tale studies …

Angela Carter and the Literary Märchen : A Review Essay

Abstract: It is perhaps fitting, given Angela Carter's interest in all aspects of folklore, that her work has itself become the subject of a modern legend, albeit one whose truth is very much ascertainable. This is the legend of the "Carter effect," identified by The British Academy Humanities Research Board, which distributes postgraduate studentships. Lorna Sage states the facts, as reported by the President of the Academy: in the year 1992-93, "there were more than forty applicants wanting to do doctorates on Carter, making her by far the most fashionable twentieth-century topic" ( Flesh and the Mirror 3). Paul Barker, editor of the magazine New Society, which published the bulk of Carter's essays from the late 1960s to the early 1980s, recounts a more detailed version, given at an academic conference devoted to Carter's work: the Academy received "[f]orty proposals for doctorates on her writing in 1992-93 . . . more than for the entire eighteenth century."1 Barker thus nominates Carter as "the most read contemporary author on English university campuses" (14), an assumption made in similar fashion by Jan Dalley, who, after rehearsing the facts, canonizes "St Angela of the Campus" (29); and finally, in Tom Shippey's further expanded version, we have the makings of a genuinely legendary aura: more English students are writing theses on Carter "than on any author or area from anywhere in the seventeenth or eighteenth century"; or so "it is said." Like Barker and Dalley, Shippey can thus extrapolate: postmodernism "wouldn't make sense without her" (20).

Reassembling the social: an introduction to actor-network theory, oxford university press, 2005.

Abstract: Bruno Latour, frances, e antropologo, sociologo e filosofo da ciencia. Um dos fundadores dos chamados Estudos Sociais da Ciencia e Tecnologia (ESCT), sua principal contribuicao teorica - ao lado de outros autores como Michel Callon e John Law - e o desenvolvimento da ANT - Actor Network Theory (Teoria ator-rede) que, ao analisar a atividade cientifica, considera tanto os atores humanos como os nao humanos, estes ultimos devido a sua vinculacao ao principio de simetria generalizada.

‘On a shiny night’: the representation of the English poacher, c.1830-1920

Abstract: This thesis examines the representation of the English poacher from around the time of the reform to the Game Laws in 1831 to the ending of the First World War. Although a considerable body of work exists on nineteenth-century poaching, its representational aspects have yet to be fully explored. Moreover, existing studies have had little to say on poaching in the early years of the twentieth century. Set against the backdrop of the Edwardian Land Question the poacher, or more properly the idea of him, carried a far greater resonance than has been allowed for. Drawing on a wide range of literary and visual material, the work in hand offers a number of fresh perspectives on a significant figure in English culture and society. Chapter One considers the evolution of poacher representations from c.1830 to the next round of Game Law reform in 1880. The poacher of these years was largely defined by what he was against and made victim of. By the end of this period, however, representations of the poacher were clearly starting to show more positive aspects. The next two chapters focus on the years between 1880 and 1900. Chapter Two provides context by examining the growingly heated politics of the land-game nexus and the reasons for poaching’s recorded decline. Chapter Three considers the implications of these developments by looking more specifically towards poacher representations. Here we see how the poacher was viewed increasingly in terms of what he did, and the skills and values he embodied, as much as for the laws he opposed. Chapter Four takes us through to the end of our period – a time when the shooting and preservation of game reached their historic peaks and when debates about the land were at also their height. Focused on the production and consumption of ideas and images relating to the poacher, the central argument to be made is that during these years of profound social and economic change two clearly discernible developments occurred. First, the poacher came to occupy a more prominent place in English culture than hitherto had been the case; and second, he came to be represented in a number of more positive ways even as he remained on the wrong side of the law. This broadening representational palette served a surprising number of emotional and ideological needs and is suggestive of two further points. One, that the politics of the Game Laws - and thus of the poacher - carried greater importance than has previously been understood. And two, that existing accounts of ruralism’s role in shaping ideas of national identity in late-Victorian and Edwardian England have if anything been underplayed.

Geographic enchantments : the trickster and crone in contemporary fairy tales and storytelling

Abstract: or metaphoric representations of place and space; reconfigurations of place to address nonlinear perceptions of place and space; the play of scale, borders, and symbols; and the cartography of concepts (e.g. identity) rather than physical places (ibid 40). Collage proved particularly useful in a study of the varied textures of Panama City—a city which is “ensconced and revealed in multiple layers” (ibid 550; see figure 2). Here, collages served both as lively orientating devices in the final research output (guiding the reader through the research booklet), and to give “a physical ... as well as a subjective, lived space sense of place” to the mapping practices of research (ibid). It proved a particularly appropriate medium for evoking the confusion of the researcher as “an outsider observing the community” (ibid), and the confusion of the city spaces. Finally, collage was able to compel a different, more attentive way of looking, that switches between the general (the collage as a flattened ‘image’) and the particular (details of texture, flashes of the underlying map, and photographic details of the city) (ibid). images or other media over a surface, to give increased density and texture. Both collage and montage are ‘disruptive’ media, however whilst in montage “reality seems to stutter” (Doel and Clarke 2007:899), allowing us to insert critique in the ‘gaps’ (e.g. Dittmer 2010), collage “emphasizes the diversity and fragmentation of [experience]” (Rose et al. 2009:2103). 138 Powell (2010:539-40) comments on these conventions: “typically maps are thought of, and used, as a directional tool, a graphic means of representing places that are held to particular conventions of scale, scope, symbol, and legend”—in short they act as a geophysical, utilitarian “orientation device.” 139 This includes social mapping (e.g. Cairns et al. 1995; Serriere 2010), concept mapping (e.g. Novack and Gowan 1996; Prosser 2008), and cognitive mapping (Lynch 1960; Seyer-Ochi 2006). See Powell (2010:540) for more detail on each of these forms of mapping, and on the cross-disciplinary and academic-public collaborations of this new “visual genre” of mapping.

The Magical Imagination: Magic and Modernity in Urban England, 1780-1914

Abstract: This innovative history of popular magical mentalities in nineteenth-century England explores the dynamic ways in which the magical imagination helped people to adjust to urban life. Previous studies of modern popular magical practices and supernatural beliefs have largely neglected the urban experience. Karl Bell, however, shows that the magical imagination was a key cultural resource which granted an empowering sense of plebeian agency in the nineteenth-century urban environment. Rather than portraying magical beliefs and practices as a mere enclave of anachronistic 'tradition' and the fantastical as simply an escapist refuge from the real, he reveals magic's adaptive and transformative qualities and the ways in which it helped ordinary people navigate, adapt to and resist aspects of modern urbanization. Drawing on perspectives from cultural anthropology, sociology, folklore and urban studies, this is a major contribution to our understanding of modern popular magic and the lived experience of modernization and urbanization.