THE LITERATURE OF LONDON
Sometimes a hellish, seething metropolis of smog and corruption (Blake), other times a wondrous, romantic landscape of domes and spires (Wordsworth’s Westminster Bridge); London in literature is a city of many faces. Explore the mixed representation of our capital in both poetry and prose down the ages at this day school on 18 January at Madingley Hall. A theatre, a labyrinth, a monster, a prison… what is it to you? This course at the Institute of Continuing Education will look at medieval poetry and contemporary short stories plus the work of Dickens and Woolf. The day costs £75: light lunch and refreshments included.
BEFORE EAST IS EAST
The seminal film East is East, about an Anglo-Pakistani family living in Salford, led the way for other British Asian films to break into the mainstream in the 1990s and beyond. But before lots more had fallen under the radar. This lecture at the Alison Richard Building on West Road digs out some of those British Pakistani films from the previous decade to discuss race on screen, the idea of homeland and how cinema represents culture and community. Open to all and free to attend, the lecture will be taken by Hamza Beg, MPhil in South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge. It takes place 19 January, 4pm.
THE MANNEQUIN: A CULTURAL DISORDER
Cambridge University’s Dr Rod Mengham, Reader of Modern English Literature and Curator of Works of Art, will give a free talk on 14 January about the Fitzwilliam Museum’s current exhibition, Silent Partners. Entitled The Mannequin: A Cultural Disorder, it will concentrate on artists who use mannequins to focus attention on the way Western culture has manipulated our attitudes towards women and children in disturbing ways. He will open with an example from Henry James’s Rose-Agathe in which a female mannequin – a silent, unquestioning, decorative object – is mistaken for a real woman and go on to discuss the Chapman Brothers, J M Barrie and other writers and artists and their depiction of women and children. The talk takes place at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Gallery 12 and 13, at 1.15pm.
