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CATEGORIES:Violence and Conflict Graduate Workshop\, Faculty 
 of History
SUMMARY:‘We were film-minded’: Media-ting the London Blitz
  in the fiction of William Sansom\, Henry Green an
 d Patrick Hamilton - Beryl Pong (Murray Edwards)
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20100519T173000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20100519T190000
UID:TALK24548AThttp://talks.cam.ac.uk
URL:http://talks.cam.ac.uk/talk/index/24548
DESCRIPTION:‘War supplies the artistic gratification of a sens
 e of perception that has been changed by technolog
 y\,’ Walter Benjamin writes.  My paper will examin
 e the matrix of inter-animating forces between art
 \, technology\, and war though the use of cinemati
 c perception in the fiction of three civilian writ
 ers who lived in London during the Blitz.\n\nOpeni
 ng with an introduction to the socio-historical co
 ntext of film in the 1930s and 1940s\, I will look
  at the increasing popularity of the filmic medium
  and the rise of the documentary form.  I will the
 n consider the ways in which it affected the liter
 ature of the day\, creating what recent scholarshi
 p has called a style of ‘cinematic writing.’  Fina
 lly\, I will trace the turns that film-conscious w
 riting took in the wartime fiction of William Sans
 om\, Henry Green and Patrick Hamilton.  All three 
 writers depict self-consciously media-ted subjects
  who see the London Blitz through the metaphor of 
 a camera eye—the ‘cinema of the mind\,’ to quote f
 rom one of Sansom’s short stories.  \n\nWhat does 
 it mean to experience and witness wartime through 
 the lens of a camera?  What is achieved by compari
 ng the seeing subject to a mechanical apparatus?  
 What does it mean to be literally ‘film-minded’?  
 Analyzing the writers’ divergent use of the film m
 etaphor\, I consider how seeing like a camera is\,
  by turns\, an objectifying defense mechanism\, a 
 mode of experience grounded in propagandistic clic
 hés\, and a commentary on the use and abuse of fil
 m for political violence.  Ultimately\, I address 
 the larger question of how literature might repres
 ent authentic experience in an age where the categ
 ory of experience itself was under question\, both
  by the leveling pressures of war\, and by the tur
 bulent progress of media and technologies of perce
 ption.\n
LOCATION:Graduate Union Lounge\, 17 Mill Lane\, Cambridge
CONTACT:Christian Schlaepfer
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