The Salon: 1st June 2011

The summer holidays, Salonblog readers! Is there a more glorious time of year? Who could possibly feel ambiguous about those hazy days of idleness and sunshine? The amorphous and unstable nature of holiday time?

Well, postgraduate students, obviously. Because while the descending quiet in the university library after the exam period ends is a wonderful thing, how do you maintain your impetus and measure your progress when the campus becomes as quiet? How do you structure your research without regular term times and lesson plans and meetings? How, when you get right down to it, do you survive without the Starbucks in the Student Union Square being open? It's a dilemma.

The Salon on Wednesday 01st June will be therefore be an open discussion focusing on the issues of 'Staying motivated over the summer'. We'll be looking at the issues of research progress and structure during the 'long vacation', and exploring the possible resolutions and support structures available to postgraduate students. We also hope to follow up this directed discussion with a more general talk about prospective Salon meetings and activities. The Salon Summer Trip is still on the table (and you thought I was using the Cliff Richard picture for my own amusement!), and we've had already had some interesting suggestions and submissions for next academic year's Salon schedule. We will be meeting this Wednesday from 1pm to 3pm in ATT 202 (Attenborough Second Floor SR 202), and, as ever, all are welcome.

Welcome back, O, best beloved readers, to The Salon blog! As I'm sure many of you will already know from Julie Ives' e-mail updates, tomorrow (May 4th) is our monthly meeting of The Salon, the postgraduate research group for the Department of History of Art and Film at the University of Leicester, at which we discuss ongoing research, share resources, and eat an unfeasible amount of biscuits. Tomorrow's meeting will be held in ATT 203 (Attenborough Second Floor SR 203) from 1pm to 3pm, and everyone is welcome to attend. We would love to hear from you if you have any suggestions for future presentations, speakers, or trips, and if you'd like to share your own research, then you can either turn up at The Salon (first Wednesday of every month, 1-3pm) or contact us at The Salon e-mail address, tothebourgeois@gmail.com. We are also still looking for people who would like to get involved with the committee, so please get in touch if you're interested.    

Before I announce this month's presenter and presentation topic, I'd like to extend The Salon's thanks to Conny Bailey for her fascinating talk last month on the wood carvings that came out of the Northern German town of Hildesheim, ca. 1500 -1540, and their possible influences and provenance, and also to the speaker the month before that, Marion Martin, for her revealing discussion of J.M.W Turner's later work within a social and critical context, with particular reference to the painting, 'Jessica' (shown below). 

The presenter at The Salon tomorrow will be Victoria Byard, and title of her paper is "Borderlands: audience, aesthetics and adolescence in Granada Television's 'The Owl Service'". There is a short abstract for the paper attached below.

"I doubt if you could find any piece of realistic fiction for adolescents that says a quarter as much about adolescence as Alan Garner's The Owl Service," said Penelope Farmer almost a decade after its publication in 1967. Long before that, Garner's book of the appropriation of the individual, adolescent subjectivities of Gwyn, Alison, and Roger by a repeating mythic pattern was awarded the Carnegie Medal and the Guardian Award, and in 1969 was made into a television series by Granada Television.

This paper will examine how adolescence is represented and related across the two media of text and television, and also how the boundaries between adolescence and adulthood are destabilised by Garner's use of narrative temporalities. It will also investigate how mythopoeia intersects with spaces of nationality, class and gender, and how the approach described by John Ellis as 'textual-historical' can draw out the tensions of the text by relating it to its specific historical context. However through Garner's deliberate trans-historicising of his text through the cyclical and consuming schema of mythology, The Owl Service's standing as a historical text is complicated as are the relationships and concepts of adolescence.

Looking beyond the text, I will argue that Granada used The Owl Service to challenge notions of how programming aimed at younger viewers should be produced and presented. I will also suggest that Granada in developing the series pushed the boundaries of programming for children and young adults both in terms of its aesthetic qualities and broadening the appeal of the channel's new weekend output, particularly amongst a growing teenage audience.

We hope to see you all tomorrow for discussion, biscuits, and a presentation involving a picture of a stuffed black bear wearing a top hat and a monocle. You'll never know whether that last bit was true unless you come along to 

The Salon: Wednesday 4th May 2011 1pm-3pm         ATT 203 (Attenborough Second Floor SR 203)