The English Miscellany

The Place to find Exam Skills at work I hope that your exams (and your results day) have not been as traumatic as mine were at school. I still have minor nightmares about that day! In this blog, I take a look at the reasons behind exam success and failure. If you are coming to this blog having faced disappointment, do not despair. Help is at hand. There is a lot that you can learn in order to improve your performance . This blog will help you to start that journey I will be sharing my pesonal experiences, but you will also find that the research is informed by professional experience, rather than irrelevant educational theories. In my experience of 30 years of teaching English in Schools and in the University sector,  these are the most common reasons for poor results: 1.    Anxiety based on lack of confidence, poor planning and fear of the unknown 2.    Lack of familiarity with past exam questions 3.    Poor me...

Drury Lane Theatre Researchers will find this nineteenth century reference work useful: John Genest, Some Account of the English Stage: From the Restoration in 1660 to 1830. Published in 1832. 10 volumes Individual volumes can be quite difficult to track down. Here are the links to the free Google-scanned copies. Volume 1 Volume 2   Volume 3   Volume 4 Volume 5 Volume 6 Volume 7 Volume 8 Volume 9 Volume 10 Map - Covent Garden A sample of the index/contents is shown below. ABBREVIATIONS IN INDEX. T. R. for Theatre Royal. L. I. F. for Lincoln's Inn Fields. D. G for Dorset Garden. Hay. for Haymarket. G. F. for Goodman's Fields. D. L. C for Drury Lane Company. C. G. C. for Covent Garden Company. EXAMPLES from the INDEX TO THE ENGLISH STAGE. This index appears at the beginning of Volume 1. N B. FOR THE FIRST APP. OF ANY PERFORMER OF CONSEQUENCE, SEE HIS. OR HER. CHARACTERS. ...

National Theatre: Othello Tragedy is like strong acid -- it dissolves away all but the very gold of truth. D. H. Lawrence 'the story depicts also the troubled part of the hero's life which precedes and leads up to his death; and an instantaneous death occurring by 'accident' in the midst of prosperity would not suffice for it. It is, in fact, essentially a tale of suffering and calamity conducting to death.' A.C. Bradley, Shakespearean Tragedy Pathos truly is the mode for the pessimist. But tragedy requires a nicer balance between what is possible and what is impossible. And it is curious, although edifying, that the plays we revere, century after century, are the tragedies. In them, and in them alone, lies the belief-optimistic, if you will, in the perfectibility of man. Arthur Miller, Tragedy and the Common Man Tragedies are always discussed as if they took place in a void, but actually each tragedy is conditioned by its setting, local and global...

Lord Byron (1788-1824) In 1812 Byron's 'Childe Harold's Pilgrimage' sold its run of 500 copies in three days. Byron wrote 'I awoke one morning and found myself famous. Larger edition of 3000 copies were printed and quickly sold out. Byron's publisher  offer to pay him 1000 guineas for The Giaour and The Bride of Abydos. In 1814 The Corsair sold 10,000 copies on the first day of publication. There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, There is a rapture on the lonely shore, There is society where none intrudes, By the deep Sea, and music in its roar: I love not Man the less, but Nature more, From these our interviews, in which I steal From all I may be, or have been before, To mingle with the Universe, and feel What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal. Felicia Dorothea Hemans (1793-1835) Perhaps best known today for writing THE stately Homes of England, How beautiful they stand! Amidst their tall ancestral trees, O'er all the...

The path to publication is arduous! "Publication is a self-invasion of privacy." - - -  Marshall McLuhan You can't publish unless you've written something ... 1. Ban thoughts of failure or rejection; by starting to write you are improving on the blank page of terror 2. Write a rough draft quickly; the quality of the writing should be worked on later 3. Familiarise yourself with an appropriate academic phrasebank 4. Learn to use a range of connectives in order to make your ideas flow 5. Avoid writing marathons - they seldom produce quality outcomes 6. Learn to use short stretches of highly focused writing time 7. Check that your have displaced all potential distractions 8. Identify SMART targets for your short periods of writing: Specific – target a specific area for improvement. Measurable – quantify or at least suggest an indicator of progress. Assignable – specify who will do it. Realistic – state what results can realistically...

Introduction Definitions of the Abject The cast off; the taboo; the unclean; filth The excrescence: mucus, blood (especially menstrual), nails, urine, excrement, vomit The uncanny; the corpse A psychoanalytic and aesthetic theory expounded by Julia Kristeva in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. “On close inspection, all literature is probably a version of the apocalypse that seems to me rooted, no matter what its sociohistorical conditions might be, on the fragile border (borderline cases) where identities (subject/object, etc.) do not exist or only barely so—double, fuzzy, heterogeneous, animal, metamorphosed, altered, abject.” (Kristeva)  "To each ego its object, to each superego its abject". (Kristeva) Outline of the Strengths and weaknesses of the Kristeva's model of the Abject Strengths Appeals to universal sense of disgust when faced with body fluids and waste products Explains popular cultural narrative of horro...

Is the obsession with logic and rationality a limitation imposed on the free flow of writing by the hegemony of patriarchal men? Is it possible to interrogate order and structure in writing has a masculinised project of control; to think of it as a phallocentric, a logocentric project? On first inspection, it is an odd notion that writing is a pre-determined product of the shape of our bodies. But the anatomical difference between the female and the male body has been considered a sufficient criterion throughout most of recorded time -   and across the majority of societies - to constitute a major difference between the sexes. It is a short step from the recognition of difference to the creation of a system of unequal treatment and discrimination. The idea that writing as a cultural production participates in this project, perhaps even perpetuates it, is clearly not far-fetched. This critical feminist approach claims that the body is written into our daily discourse...