Writing about war: Jung, Much Ado About Nothing, and the Troy novels of Lindsay Clarke

Arguably, in a time of war literature, and indeed all writing, is saturated with deep psychic responses to conflict. So that not only in literary genres such as epic and tragedy, but also in the novel and comedy, can writing about war be discerned. C.G. Jung, Shakespeare and Lindsay Clarke are fundamentally writers of war who share allied literary strategies. Moreover, they diagnose similar origins to the malaise of a culture tending to war in the neglect of aspects of the feminine that patriarchy prefers to ignore. In repressing or evading the dark feminine, cultures as dissimilar as ancient Greece, the 21st century, Shakespeare's England and Jung's Europe prevent the healing energies of the conjunctio of masculine and feminine from stabilising an increasingly fragile consciousness. In the Troy novels of Clarke, Answer to Job by Jung and Much Ado About Nothing by Shakespeare, some attempt at spiritual nourishment is made through the writing. [From the Publisher]

Astonishing apples: visualising the novel

This paper explores the developing relationship between fictional and visual representations. The impact of visual art on the novel as mimetic is an issue that writers have engaged with and written about from the mid-nineteenth century to the present day, often raising the question of the art/life dialectic and how it has evolved through the novel’s exploration of ideas. From painting, photography, cinema, television and newer digital visual cultures writers have sought to involve themselves in a critical examination of the impact of changes in these forms on other art form and on wider society. How do these visual forms affect what it means to be an artist, a writer, a human being? The paper takes the work of Paul Cezanne as a starting point in the history of representation. Writers such as Rainer Maria Rilke, theorists such as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and other artists like Picasso, have been influenced by, or responded to, Cezanne’s work and to Cezanne’s writings on art and his letters to his great childhood friend, the novelist Emile Zola. By discussing the creative practice of writing a novel this paper will examine questions of how the novel can, and should, respond to the impact of visual culture’s seeming dominance over other art forms. It also explores what impact new forms of visual culture have had upon the mimetic and formal aspects of the novel and how the novel works as representational, especially in relation to representations of human consciousness. [From the Author]