Kazuo Ishiguro

The award of the Nobel Prize for Literature 2017 to Kazuo Ishiguro, prompted Tencent - China's largest social media site - to contact Dr Barry Lewis, who has published widely on the Anglo-Japanese novelist. Read the interview here.

Kazuo Ishiguro

First World War conference

Helmuth von Moltke

Several members of the Department of Culture will be taking part in an academic conference to be held at the university on the 5th and 6th April 2014. The First World War and Its Global Legacies: 100 Years On will explore the impact of this first truly global war on the history, culture, philosophy, language and politics of the century following it. The conference programme includes over twenty papers by scholars from as far afield as Russia, Algeria and the USA. Topics include landscapes and the imagination; computer games; colonial education in British West Africa; media representations of veterans of the Great War. Amongst the keynote speakers will be Professor Maggie Andrews, Professor Tim Kirk, Dr Martin Hurcombe and Kate Adie (writer and broadcaster). Sunderland's Dr Angela Smith will be giving a keynote talk entitled ‘Sympathy and Suspicion: State Surveillance of British Widows of the First World War’. Six other Department of Culture members will also be giving papers.

• Arwa Ebrahim: 'The Impact of the First World War on the Middle East and its Effect on Arab Women'.
• Dr Barry Lewis: 'Rechewing the Cud: Sebastian Barry's A Long Long Way and the Irish Experience of the First World War'.
• Dr Kath Kerr-Koch: 'From Apokatastasis to Deconstruction: The Legacy of the First World War in the Transfiguration of Modern Thought'.
• Janet Pearson: 'Drifting into the Abyss: Twilight Consciousness in Hermann Broch’s The Sleepwalkers'.
• Dr Fritz Wefelmeyer: '"Overcome by Horror". Helmuth von Moltke, Chief of German General Staff 1906-14, in his letters and memoirs'.
• Fadi Elhusseini: 'The Great War, the Middle East and Islam'.

English Research Seminar

Dr Barry Lewis (Sunderland University) will conclude this semester's series of English research seminars on Wednesday 4th December at 5pm with a talk entitled '"Song is the Magic Cape": Thomas Pynchon's Influence on Popular Music'. Staff and students from all faculties are welcome. The venue is Priestman 313.

Pynchon and popular music

In August Dr Barry Lewis gave a paper at the International Pynchon Week held at Durham University. Barry spoke about how Thomas Pynchon's engagement with popular music is close to obsessive. He has written liner notes for albums by Spike Jones and Lotion; bands such as Benny Profane and Yoyodyne have raided his works for their names; and he has even provided an Amazon ‘playlist’ for the music mentioned in 'Inherited Vice'. What is less known is the small canon of popular songs that have been inspired by his works. The most famous of these, perhaps, is 'Sailing to Philadelphia', a duet between Mark Knopfler and James Taylor that neatly encapsulates the relationship between Mason and Dixon, the eponymous subjects of a 1997 novel by Pynchon. Knopfler described this song as "my three-minute take on a three-year book". There are many other such transformations from printed word to recorded song, and these were explored in the Durham talk.

Barry will be giving a talk on Pynchon and popular music at the English Research Seminar on Wednesday 4th December 2013.

Barry Lewis on Richard Powers

Dr Barry Lewis (English) has published an essay in Ideas of Order: Narrative Patterns in the Novels of Richard Powers, edited by Antje Kley and Jan D. Kucharzewski (Universitätsverlag Winter, 2012). This volume in the American Studies Monograph series, which emerged from a conference on Powers that was held at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in November 2010, aims at establishing a critical approach to Powers’ oeuvre which acknowledges and investigates the implications of the distinct poetics of his novels.

In 'Vertical Perfection, Horizontal Inevitability: The Gold Bug Variations', Barry focuses on Powers’ third novel from 1991 and the reading strategies required to unravel the text’s polyphonic narrative structure which echoes the numerical symmetries of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Goldberg Variations. Frequently referencing Powers’ other novels, Lewis explores the simultaneously mimetic and metafictional narrative of The Gold Bug Variations as a complex interrelation of self-reference and world-reference.