Three years and thirty thousand hits

It's been three years since the first post on the Department of Culture Research Blog. Thirty thousand hits later we're still going strong, showcasing the range of high-quality research and scholarship in the department. Many thanks to all those who have contributed - keep it coming!

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Mam or mum?

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In an article published in the journal Sociolinguistic Studies, Dr Michael Pearce   considers how the technological advances associated with Web 2.0 allow people to interact in online ‘communities’ built around shared interests and concerns. Michael's article examines an online messageboard virtually located in North East England, and explores the ways in which participants’ beliefs about and attitudes towards sociolinguistic variation emerge through discourse. He focuses on a single ‘conversation’ about the sociolinguistic variable mam/mum , revealing the language ideologies which inform the sociolinguistic awareness of participants, and concludes by using the concept of ‘late modernity’ as an interpretive frame to help understand what is happening as people appropriate a global technology for local social action. Pearce, M. 2015.  Mam or mum? Sociolinguistic awareness and language-ideological debates online . Sociolinguistic Studies , 9 (1): 115-135.
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Landscapes of evil

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Dr Miguel Gomes (Languages) has published a chapter entitled 'Landscapes of Evil and the Narrative Pattern in Beowulf: The Anglo-Saxon Hero’s Journey through the Labyrinth'. Miguel uses the idea of labyrinth as a symbolic landscape to explain the structure of  Beowulf . He argues that the poem presents an intricate design in which elements such as alliterative patterns, repetitions, variations, recurrent themes and other additions form a maze resembling the journey that the hero himself will have to undertake. To a certain extent, this structure resembles the curvilinear and rectilinear patterns of contemporary decorative art, as seen in the Lindisfarne Gospels or the Book of Kells. Miguel claims that the labyrinth, conceived as a metaphor, a physical and a mental representation, could well be a more comprehensive alternative to previous proposals for the analysis of the poem. He supports this assertion by analysing different passages that connect with the idea of labyrinth, c...
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Post-Now: Synthetic futures in fiction

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We all know that novels are more than just stories; they often tell us about our lives and ourselves. This talk by Guy Mankowski  will consider how writers have taken fiction to its limit by questioning how we live now and how we might live in the future. Guy’s novel How I Left The National Grid examined how, in postmodern culture, subculture and nostalgia offer people some room to shape the world they want to live in. From the future societies described in Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go to the exotic technologies in JG Ballard’s Vermilion Sands , this session will also look at how literary fiction has imagined - and proposed - synthetic futures. Dr Guy Mankowski is the author of four novels: Letters from Yelena (Legend Press) was awarded an Arts Council Literature grant, used in GCSE training material by Osiris in 2015, and adapted for the stage. How I Left The National Grid (Zer0 Books) was written as part of a PhD in Creative Writing and published in the UK, US and Canada...
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