MEET THE TEAM

Much of the PhD studies will involve iconography. The proposed title of the project is Writing and Sign: Performance and Display of Social Identity.

Iconography is the branch of art history which studies the identification, description, and the interpretation of the content of images: the subjects depicted, the particular compositions and details used to do so, and other elements that are distinct from artistic style. The word iconography comes from the Greek εἰκών ("image") and γράφειν ("to write").

In art history, "an iconography" may also mean a particular depiction of a subject in terms of the content of the image, such as the number of figures used, their placing and gestures.

The term is also used in many academic fields other than art history, for example semiotics and media studies, and in general usage, for the content of images, the typical depiction in images of a subject, and related senses.

I believe, at present, I have a supervising team. I was under the impression that Professors John Hall and Jerome Fletcher were it; however, I am informed that my supervising team will include Dr. Dario Llinares as Director of Studies and Professor Phil Stenton  as Second Supervisor. I do not know if they are instead of or in addition to Fletcher and Hall. However it works out, it is quite an array of talent. I'm not sure I'm up to being in such company.

Here are a few stats on the team:

Jerome Fletcher:

Research interests

I am part of the Performance Writing Research Group at the University, investigating multi-modal forms of writing in contemporary social and artistic contexts.

At present I am awaiting the outcome of an AHRC Large Grant bid on Interactivity and Performativity submitted in conjunction with a number of UK universities including Dundee, Edinburgh Napier and Bedfordshire, as well as European universities (Bergen and Potsdam) and external partners. My role within the project will be a praxis-based investigation of how performativity functions within digital text apparatuses. This will involve the development of new works of digital text in collaboration with Random House digital publishing, Echo Network Productions and others. This project comes off the back of the ELMCIP project (Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity in Practice). This was a three-year European-funded project researching e-literature and networked communities in which I was a Principal Investigator. My outcomes included:

1. Falmouth Conference/workshop at Arnolfini, Bristol. This specifically addressed the relationship between e-literature and performance, performativity across the digital environment and the location of the body in digital text performance.

2. Curation of performances at Remediating the Social, the final conference in Edinburgh (December 2012).

3. Editing an issue of Performance Research Journal dedicated to e-literature and performance in the European context.

4. A survey of e-literature performance contexts.

For more information see www.elmcip.net

Current research/forthcoming outputs

•    On Performance Writing. Journal of Writing in Creative Practice (editor). October 2013

•    ‘The Fetch’. Live digital performance. Centre Pompidou, Paris. ELO conference. September 2013

•    ‘Does Digital Literature Need a Theory of Language?’ Conference paper. ELO conference Paris September 2013

•    ‘Taptoe’. Digitally augmented drumming/writing performance with Adam Loveday-Edwards and Thanos Polymeneas-Liontiris. Fascinate Conference. Falmouth University. September 2013

•    Writing & Poor Techno-Theatre. Weekend workshop at 4 Days performance festival. Arnolfini Bristol. September 2013

•    'On First Hearing Oswald's Homer'. Book chapter in Soundings: Critical Essays on Alice Oswald. (Publisher and date tbc)

Recent outputs

•    'Offshore of Writing - E-literature and the Island' in Dicthung Digital, peer-reviewed online journal. Winter 2012

•    ‘Digital Text and Performance Writing’. Invited public lecture.Teatro y Cibercultura lecture series. University of Granada. April 2012

•    '...ha perdut la veu: Some reflections on the composition of e-literature as a minor literature' in the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, vol. 4.1. October 2011 (issue co-edited with Dr Maria Mencia)

•    'Trac|tExt|ract' - performance/paper at E-Poetry, SUNY Buffalo, New York. May 2011

Selected earlier outputs

•    'Whisper Wire' - Collaborative multimedia performance with J.R. Carpenter, Inspace, Edinburgh. International Conference on Interactive Storytelling. November 2010

•    'E-composition|decompostion. Performance and Perlection' - Cybertext Yearbook - online peer-reviewed journal, August 2010

•    'Performance Writing - new developments'. Interventions: Literary Practice at the Edge Conference. Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada. February 2010

Membership of learned societies, subject associations

•    Society of Authors

•    PEN International

Editorial boards

Journal of Writing in Creative Practice

Supervision of research degrees

Val Diggle, PhD student, Falmouth University
David Devanny, PhD student, Falmouth University
Shelley Hodgson, PhD student, Plymouth University (tbc)

Other matters of research relevance

•    Publication of The Decadent Sportsman, Dedalus Books. October 2012

•    Ongoing development of business-facing, practice-based arts courses in collaboration with AIR, Falmouth, Banff Centre for the Arts, Canada, Brighton University, Goldsmiths and Ashridge Business School.

MFA development and supervision

Phil Stenton

Phil Stenton is Professor of Pervasive Media and Associate Dean for Research & Enterprise at the School of Media and Performance at University College Falmouth. Prior to this position, Phil was Director of Research at the Pervasive Media Studio. 

Phil has a PhD in Psychology from the University of Sheffield. He has 20 years of research management experience in the UK and the US. In 1984 he was a visiting professor at UC Berkeley, before joining BT and eventually HP Labs. Until 1999 he managed a department in HP Labs working in mobile and appliance computing. He followed that with a temporary assignment to as R&D lab manager within an HP product division in the US. There, he set up a research lab to develop e-services technology.

Phil has served on a number of UK and European funding committees, interview panels and review boards and he was also director of the DTI's City & Buildings Research Centre which carried out the Mobile Bristol programme that engaged participants from across the creative and IT industries, educationalists, schoolchildren and members of the public.

Phil is a member of the Studio's Advisory Board and a Director of Calvium Ltd, a new start-up building on 70 years combined research experience at HP Labs.

Dr Dario Llinares

Academic interests

I attended Sheffield Hallam University between 1999 and 2002 studying Film History, Theory and Criticism. The course not only enhanced my fascination with all things cinema but introduced me to a wide range of cultural theory. After completing the BA I enrolled on an MA in Cultural Studies at Leeds Metropolitan University. This course deepened my interest in cultural and social theory, particularly structuralism and post-structuralism, notions of discourse and power, gender theory and links between representation and identity, which have influenced my teaching and research ever since. My MA thesis, entitled 'Contemporary Cinema and the Representation of Masculinity in Postmodern Society', interrogated expressions of masculine 'crisis' in films such as Fight Club, American Psycho and American Beauty.

After completing the MA, I began studying for a PhD at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies (CIGS) at the University of Leeds. The Centre provided a challenging and exciting environment for postgraduate study and also gave me a grounding in gender theory and methodogy which informed my project.

Supervised by Professor Ruth Holliday (Director of Studies at CIGS) and Dr Denis Flannery (Senior Lecturer in American Literature), my thesis focused on cultural constructions of masculinity, developing ideas around how the media produces idealised iconographies and mythologies around particular masculine forms. I wanted my project to interrogate this process, how it worked, how discourses of power and gender hierarchies emerge, and how such meanings shift over time. I decided to focus my analysis on one specific image of idealised masculinity: The Astronaut. Each chapter deals with a different media form - photography, journalism, literature and film - and examines the textual and contextual dynamics which have served to embed the astronaut as an iconic figure in the cultural imaginary. I completed my viva on 27 November 2009 and graduated in July 2010. My thesis was published by Cambridge Scholars Press in August 2011 as a single authored monograph entitled The Astronaut: Cultural Mythology and Idealised Masculinity.

Throughout my PhD study I lectured on a part-time basis in Media, Communications and Culture (Leeds Metropolitan University), Gender Studies, Cultural Studies and Sociology (University of Leeds), and Television Studies (University of York). In my role as Senior Lecturer in Film at Falmouth, I teach on Criticism, Analysis, Theory (Level 1), Film, Postmodernity and New Media (Level 2) and British Cinema (Level 2).

Recent outputs

I co-organised a conference with Dr Zoe Thompson and Dr Fiona Philip entitled 'Austere Cultures/Cultures of Austerity: Reactions to the Erosion of Critical Spaces', which took place at Leeds Metropolitan University, 8-9 September 2011.

I co-edited a special edition of Journal of European Popular Culture (September 2012) and an edited collection which published the best work from the conference.

Current projects/forthcoming outputs

I am engaged in a range of ongoing research projects. I am also writing an article on representations of violence, masculinity and the prison as an arena of cinematic spectacle, focused on two British films: Hunger (McQueen, 2008) and Bronson (Refn, 2009) and am preparing to write a article on non-military heroism for a collection edited by Dr John Price.

Dr John Hall

John Hall is a poet, teacher and essayist.

He was born in the country now called Zambia in 1945 and moved to England in 1958, where he has lived ever since, mostly in Devon. His first poems to meet the attention of other writers appeared in The English Intelligencer in 1966. His first collection, Between the Cities, was published by Grosseteste in 1968. A number of other collections appeared between then and 1981.

A period of 'not writing', discussed in his 1992 article, 'Writing and Not Writing', followed. He began to produce visual poems, particularly from the mid 1990s.

He was a school teacher for five years (1971-1976) before moving to Dartington College of Arts (now part of Falmouth University), where he has worked in different capacities ever since. In the early years he was closely involved in the development of the Art and Social Context degree. He was Vice Principal Academic (or equivalent) between 1990 and 2002. He led the group that planned the Performance Writing degree for a 1994 start. In 2002 he took early retirement to be re-employed as Associate Director of Research.

John Hall is Professor of Performance Writing at Falmouth University and visiting professor at York St John University

Some work of John Hall's  apropos my interest in signage:

DIVERSITY OF RESPONSE

Murfin

On my wandering through the net to uncover a suitable reading list for this proposed PhD in Performance Writing I have come across the following piece adapted from The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms by Ross Murfin and Supryia M. Ray. Copyright 1998 by Bedford Books. I can find no image of Supryia M Ray.

My main reason for bringing this up is the lingering cogitations prompted by my upset expressed in yesterday’s item. Was I seeking to explain a diversity or divergence of responses to a literary work? Was my evaluation of another’s evaluation made entirely without prejudice?

DEFINITION OF READER-RESPONSE CRITICISM

Reader-response criticism encompasses various approaches to literature that explore and seek to explain the diversity (and often divergence) of readers' responses to literary works.
 Louise Rosenblatt is often credited with pioneering the approaches in Literature as Exploration (1938). In her 1969 essay "Towards a Transactional Theory of Reading," she summed up her position as follows: "A poem is what the reader lives through under the guidance of the text and experiences as relevant to the text." Recognizing that many critics would reject this definition, Rosenblatt wrote, "The idea that a poem presupposes a reader actively involved with a text is particularly shocking to those seeking to emphasize the objectivity of their interpretations." Rosenblatt implicitly and generally refers to formalists (the most influential of whom are the New Critics) when she speaks of supposedly objective interpreters shocked by the notion that a "poem" is cooperatively produced by a "reader" and a "text." Formalists spoke of "the poem itself," the "concrete work of art," the "real poem." They had no interest in what a work of literature makes a reader "live through." In fact, in The Verbal Icon (1954), William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley used the term affective fallacy to define as erroneous the very idea that a reader’s response is relevant to the meaning of a literary work.
 Stanley Fish, whose early work is seen by some as marking the true beginning of contemporary reader-response criticism, also took issue with the tenets of formalism. In "Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics" (1970), he argued that any school of criticism that sees a literary work as an object, claiming to describe what it is and never what it does, misconstrues the very essence of literature and reading. Literature exists and signifies when it is read, Fish suggests, and its force is an affective one. Furthermore, reading is a temporal process, not a spatial one as formalists assume when they step back and survey the literary work as if it were an object spread out before them. The German critic Wolfgang Iser has described that process in The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (1974) and The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (1976). Iser argues that texts contain gaps (or blanks) that powerfully affect the reader, who must explain them, connect what they separate, and create in his or her mind aspects of a work that aren’t in the text but are incited by the text.
 With the redefinition of literature as something that only exists meaningfully in the mind of the reader, and with the redefinition of the literary work as a catalyst of mental events, comes a redefinition of the reader. No longer is the reader the passive recipient of those ideas that an author has planted in a text. "The reader is active," Rosenblatt had insisted. Fish makes the same point in "Literature in the Reader": "Reading is . . . something you do." Iser, in focusing critical interest on the gaps in texts, on the blanks that readers have to fill in, similarly redefines the reader as an active maker of meaning. Other reader-response critics define the reader differently. Wayne Booth uses the phrase the implied reader to mean the reader "created by the work." Iser also uses the term the implied reader but substitutes the educated reader for what Fish calls the intended reader.
 Since the mid-1970s, reader-response criticism has evolved into a variety of new forms. Subjectivists like David Bleich, Norman Holland, and Robert Crosman have viewed the reader’s response not as one "guided" by the text but rather as one motivated by deep-seated, personal, psychological needs. Holland has suggested that, when we read, we find our own "identity theme" in the text by using "the literary work to symbolize and finally replicate ourselves. We work out through the text our own characteristic patterns of desire." Even Fish has moved away from reader-response criticism as he had initially helped define it, focusing on "interpretive strategies" held in common by "interpretive communities"—such as the one comprised by American college students reading a novel as a class assignment.
 Fish’s shift in focus is in many ways typical of changes that have taken place within the field of reader-response criticism—a field that, because of those changes, is increasingly being referred to as reader-oriented criticism. Recent reader-oriented critics, responding to Fish’s emphasis on interpretive communities and also to the historically oriented perception theory of Hans Robert Jauss, have studied the way a given reading public’s "horizons of expectations" change over time. Many of these contemporary critics view themselves as reader-oriented critics and as practitioners of some other critical approach as well. Certain feminist and gender critics with an interest in reader response have asked whether there is such a thing as "reading like a woman." Reading-oriented new historicists have looked at the way in which racism affects and is affected by reading and, more generally, at the way in which politics can affect reading practices and outcomes. Gay and lesbian critics, such as Wayne Koestenbaum, have argued that sexualities have been similarly constructed within and by social discourses and that there may even be a homosexual way of reading.

Here are a couple of young American scholars with a view:

A VIEW OF PERFORMANCE ASSESSMENT

I am somewhat perturbed or rather angry and unsettled by persons who hold themselves out as authorities and advisors on performance and presentation yet appear to have little notion of what they are doing.

My annoyance begins with the comment ‘actor turned writer’ or ‘the writer, an established actor…’ It suggests that the writer is perhaps not really a writer, and is merely indulging in some sort of displacement activity, or attempting to rise above his/her station. S/he is only an actor, so we must indulge him/her. I find the statement indicative of a rather narrow process of thinking as well as being stupid. 

I have always understood that producing material for publication was a form of writing and that people who professed to be journalists were themselves writers, or at least understood the meanings of the word. To use the phrase ‘actor turned writer’ in the context that it has been used shows a distinct lack of knowledge and understanding. I assume it is not a term these ‘writer’s’ would use when referring to the likes of William Shakespeare, Harold Pinter, John Osborn and many other ‘actors turned writers’.

So when a writer purports to address another writer’s work and proposes an evaluation of that work, then that assessment should be directed at the work and not the various attributes and additional skills the writer may have. Those additional skills will most likely be reflected in the work in any event, so it is even more important to address the work.

I would like to draw attention to writers who hold themselves out in particular as theatre critics, or journalists with a view of performance and performance theory.  Their work must be informed.

When dealing with a work that has been accepted as an accomplished piece of writing and has been performed many times, the critic’s emphasis is usually on the ‘production’, including the skills or lack thereof of the director, the set and costume designer, musicians, if any, technicians and the actors. In the case of a piece with a notable character it is the actor’s performance that comes under scrutiny – the best Hamlet, the worst Lear, the best Lady Macbeth or Lady Bracknell etc. What is most apparent is that the critic does not have to deal with the writer’ writing except in how great writer’s work has been performed.

Dealing with new material is something else.  If one is going to produce an assessment of a new work for publication then one must pay attention. One must carefully observe and listen. Whilst the observer must have imagination, concentration is the key, and if the mind wanders into pondering on how one is going to write ones assessment whilst looking at the work, then the critic has lost her way. Attempts at cleverness will always fail. Equally, expectation is ruinous to objective critical thought. Preconceived and fanciful notions are an obstacle to clear thinking, and this leads to bad and meaningless critical writing.

I do not suggest that there is anything wrong in expressing a view that a piece of work lacks accomplishment or does not meet a particular standard, but to dismiss a work with nonsensical comment simply to fill a column in a journal because one has nothing to say is a travesty. It is not writing.

F. Mountford

I recently attended a performance of a new play at The Park Theatre, in North London. A number of critics saw the production. Of the published comments one made me wonder if the writer had attended that same performance. In a piece just under 300 words in the Evening Standard, Fiona Mountford (about whom one knows nothing) expresses her own prejudices, boredom with life, and ignorance. She says nothing. She appears neither to have listened nor seen what was going on in the theatre. She exhibits the attention span of a gnat.  However, since the Evening Standard has become a free throw away paper, it is not surprising it proffers throwaway criticism.

Give it up Fiona or go back to school.