1, September 10 Orientation2, September 17 John Fowles3, September 24 Salman Rushdie4, October 1 Angela Carter and Amy Sackville5, October 8 Julian Barnes6, October 15 Tibor Fischer in the flesh Gólyavár 2-3:30 PM7, October 22 Ted Hughes

(October 23-31 autumn break – no lectures)8, November 5 Tony Harrison: V9, November 12 Seamus Heaney (cf. 18 Sept)10, November 19 Carol Ann Duffy11, November 26 Tom Stoppard & the success of the playwright12, December 3 Caryl Churchill & in-yer-face theatre13, December 10 Anthony Burgess (lecturer: Ákos Farkas)

COMPULSORY READINGS AT SEAS3.ELTE.HU

Angela Carter 1940-1992

Angela Carter (1940-1992)

• née Stalker, born in East Sussex, anorexic teenagerjournalist (as her father), studies at Bristol Universitymarries in 1960 but separates in 1969 and moves to Tokyo

• ”learnt what it is to be a woman and became radicalised”

(Nothing Sacred, 1982)

•1970s, 80s: travelling (often writer in residence at universities)1977 marries again, later has a son

•dies of lung cancer at the age of 52

Angela Carter's life – the background of social mobility, the teenage anorexia, […] the travels, the choice of a man much younger, the baby in her forties – is the story of someone walking a tightrope. It's all happening "on the edge," in no man's land, among the debris of past convictions. […] Her genius and estrangement came out of a thin-skinned extremity of response to the circumstances of her life and to the signs of the times.

Lorna Sage, "Death of the Author", Granta, No. 41, Autumn 1992, p. 236. N.B.: Lorna Sage also edited Flesh and the Mirror; Essays on the Art of Angela Carter (1994)

 Novels (secondary ?)

Shadow Dance, 1966. The Magic Toyshop, 1967. Several Perceptions, 1968. Heroes and Villains, 1969. Love, 1971. The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman, 1972. The Passions of New Eve, 1977. Nights at the Circus, 1984. Wise Children, 1991.

Collections of storiesFireworks: Nine Profane Pieces (1974) The Bloody Chamber (1979) Black Venus (1985) aka Saints and Strangers American Ghosts and Old World Wonders (1993) Burning Your Boats: The Collected Short Stories (1995)

Non-fiction (only some are listed here)The Sadeian Woman: An Exercise in Cultural History (1979) (US title: The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography)Nothing Sacred: Selected Writings (1982) Expletives Deleted: Selected Writings (1992)

TranslationThe Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault (1977) Sleeping Beauty and Other Favourite Fairy Tales (1982)

Surrealism is better known and easier to define in the visual arts than in literature.… Surrealism is not quite the same as magic realism… In surrealism, metaphors become the real, effacing the world of reason and common sense. The Surrealists’ favourite analogy for their art, and often its source, was dreaming, in which, as Freud demonstrated, the unconscious reveals its secret desires and fears in vivid images and surprising narrative sequences unconstrained by the logic of our waking lives.

David Lodge, The Art of Fiction, 1992

besides the dream: the tale

(for children? cf. Lewis Carroll: Alice in Wonderland)

Celtic folklore: twilight (haunted places / castles, forests)

northern Gothic tradition

But this resemblance to dreams is deliberate, conscious as it were. I have studied dreams extensively and I know about their structure and symbolism. I think dreams are a way of the mind telling itself stories. I use free association and dream imagery when I write. I like to think I have a hot line to my subconscious.…But I see my business, the nature of my work, as taking apart mythologies, in order to find out what basic, human stuff they are made of in the first place.

Angela Carter interviewed by Rosemary Carroll

http://www.bombsite.com/issues/17/articles/821

Barthes, “Death of the Author” (1968)

• We know now that a text is not a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture….

The Bloody Chamber (1979)

often published earlier, but revised

• 1. The Bloody Chamber Bluebeard

• 2. The Courtship of Mr Lyon Beauty and the Beast

• 3. The Tiger's BrideBeauty and the Beast

• 4. Puss-in-Boots

• 5. The Erl-King goblin (personification of the forest)

The Bloody Chamber (1979)

• 6. The Snow ChildSnow White (obscure)

• 7. The Lady of the House of LoveVampirella (radio play)

• 8. The WerewolfLittle Red Riding Hood

• 9. The Company of Wolves Little Red Riding Hood

• 10. Wolf-Alice Little Red Riding HoodThrough the Looking Glass

The Bloody Chamber (1979)

self-awareness of the female protagonist (often virgin)sexual awakening: fears and dangers, enormous powers

shame

”He lay beside me, felled like an oak, breathing stertorously, as if he had been fighting with me. In the course of that one-sided struggle, I had seen his deathly composure shatter like a porcelain vase flung against a wall; I had heard him shriek and blaspheme at the orgasm; I had bled. […] I had been infinitely dishevelled by the loss of my virginity.”

”I was not afraid of him; but of myself.” (The Bloody Chamber)

"There is a striking resemblance between the act of love and the ministrations of a torturer." (Baudelaire)

Puss-in-Boots: ”saraband of Eros” (playful enjoyment)

end of adolescence

parental relationships: mother saving her daughter, father selling her (The Courtship of Mr Lyon)sexuality NOT linked to a harmonious relationship or maternity

• ”on the day my childhood ended. For now my own skin was my sole capital in the world and today I'd make my first investment. […]'The sight of a young lady's skin that no man has seen before--' stammered the valet. […] That he should want so little was the reason why I could not give it; I did not need to speak for The Beast to understand me. ” The Tiger’s Bride

• „the construction of a feminist subjectivity defined as active rather than passive.” (Brooke 68)

„she knew she was nobody’s meat”

• Self-conscious, strong minded, ready to lose her virginity

the reader’s expectations (evil punished, good rewarded)

The Lady of the House of Love She is so beautiful she is unnatural; her beauty is an abnormality, a deformity, for none of her features exhibit any of those touching imperfections that reconcile us to the imperfection of the human condition. Her beauty is a symptom of her disorder, of her soullessness. He has the special quality of virginity, most and least ambiguous of states: ignorance, yet at the same time, power in potentia, and, furthermore, unknowingness, which is not the same as ignorance. He is more than he knows

The Company of Wolves

• Those slavering jaws; the lolling tongue; the rime of saliva on the grizzled chops--of all the teeming perils of the night and the forest, ghosts, hobgoblins, ogres that grill babies upon gridirons, witches that fatten their captives in cages for cannibal tables, the wolf is worst for he cannot listen to reason.

• You are always in danger in the forest, where no people are.

• nature: opposite of civilization (non-pastoral)creatures of the night (of the subconscious?)

The Company of Wolves

• wolf and hunter in one person: good and evil characters: not so obvious

• „She stands and moves within the invisible pentacle of her own virginity.”„the scarlet shawl […] was as red as the blood she must spill.”

„she freely gave the kiss she owed him”

What saves her?

Amy Sackville

•

Amy Sackville

• b. 1981 in Durham

• studies English and theatre in Leeds and English (modernism) in Oxford

• works as publisher’s assistant and editor

• creative writing in Goldsmiths College, London

• The Still Point published in 2010• Orkney in 2013

http://www.amysackville.co.uk/

The Still Point (2010)

• parallel stories of an Arctic expedition in 1899 and the life of a couple ca. a 100 years later

• omniscient narrator with different p. o. v. s (female / male)• grave difficulties of marriage – yet happiness may be worked

out (an extraordinary day in the life of an ordinary modern marriage)

• Arctic as a "space that can't be mapped, that's constantly shifting, that resembles land, but isn't" (cf. Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas 2004)tension between the need to express and the impossibility of expressing

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/dec/07/amy-sackville-accidental-novelist

The Still Point• both wives waiting for their husbands to return• Emily and Edward

Julia and Simon

passivitypeople in relationships

• similarities with V. Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway

parallel stories (Clarissa-Septimus…)

one day in life of… (with memories)

novels of character

• chief difference: male p. o. v. strongersolution offered

The Still Point

• comparison with The Bloody Chamber

Carter / postmodernism: subversion, deconstruction / destruction of identitydisconcert, astonishmentreevaluation of tradition (rejection?)

individual liberalism

Sackville: post-postmodern / pseudo-modern (?)rebuilding of identitycooperation based on the rebuilt identityimportance of tradition (restored / rebuilt)individual in relationship

• ”Parting is the Mackley romance. Parting, waiting and romantic loss.” negative turned into positive

•    ”Edward Mackley shed a tear, it is not for us to judge him, for heroes too love their viwes and fear death.” (63)wife: hero?

present: unheroic?•    Simon vs. Edward: ”Simon’s love story is not epic in scale

[…] He would like to be admired, he would like to be needed, he would like to be noticed.” (108)

• downgrading ambition

•    ”There would be kippers and baked eggs and bacon for breakfast, there would be luncheons, casseroles and cutlets, and then there would be tea and muffins […] then cigars then port then sleep in separate beds then gout or rheumatism and then, eventually, death.” (37)

• unlived life:”…it had been efficiently filed away in the corner of his mind that he prefers not to visit. […]The time he hasn’t spent with the children he doesn’t have…”(123)

”There are many words that have gone unsaid in those ten years, to fill the silences that widen between them.” (144)”only grow louder with time” (285)

• parallel disasters of adultery (Emily and John / Simon and Sandra)

• ”So soon, she betrayed him. Julia herself exists because of this betrayal.” (225) ”it may have been that she wanted only a husband, not a hero.” (264)

• Simon and Julia’s struggle to maintain / rebuild their unity

• „Their breathing falls into a rhythm with a harmony of its own, a syncopated sighing that cannot be transcribed. But listen: it is peaceful. The symmetry of them, naked above the sheets…” (307)