TRIPLE: Women, men and language / The Gift / The Climate Crisis and Lit

This exciting session will showcase the range of options available to you within Goldsmiths' English degrees. The session will be split into three parts:

Women, men and language

Whilst early commentators frequently reproduced rather than challenged stereotypes about “women’s language” and “men’s language”, recent studies focus on how speakers use language to “construct” or “style” their gender identities differently, depending on a range of factors, including the situation they find themselves in. In our session today we will think about some of the persistent language and gender stereotypes, and then consider some authentic language use, that is, everyday spoken English which scholars and students record and study to find out about how men and women really speak. Overall, this brief session will give an impression of the study of English language and linguistics from a sociocultural perspective, that is, the study of authentic language use in relation to gender, sexuality, ethnicity, race, social class, age but also situational identities.

The Gift: Narratives of Choctaw and Irish Connection

In the winter of 1847, as the people of Ireland were being struck by a devastating famine, the Choctaw Nation gathered together what meager funds they possessed following their traumatic forced removal from their tribal homelands during the Trail of Tears. Ultimately, they scraped together $710. Rather than buy badly needed resources – food, housing, and clothes – the tribe made the altogether remarkable decision to send the money to Ireland’s starving poor. This taster session will retell that powerful narrative, and will do so in order to examine notions of charity and empathy between the poor, the dislocated and the transient. By examining various cultural landscapes, both then and now, we will consider both historical moments of cultural exchange and contemporary artists’ bid to reflect and honor such occasions. As well as reflecting on cultural exchanges, transatlantic links, charity in the nineteenth century, and the story of the Irish and indigenous communities, the lecture will present the Choctaw gift as a reflection of the ways in which different communities see each other, both politically and culturally.


The Climate Crisis and Literature: Reading the Weather

In this secrtion, we will explore the role that literature can play in helping us understand and engage with the climate crisis. Focusing in particular on the genres of the modern and contemporary novel, the seminar will examine the ways that fiction can help us imagine the imperceptible causes and unforeseen effects of climatic change, and the catastrophic environmental conditions that may be unfolding at a distance from us or that have yet to happen but in all probability will materialise. We will explore the ways that literature helps us to understand how we experience changes to climate and process environmental events psychologically. We will therefore examine the ways in which, in communicating climate change, the novel can persuade us to act, both as individuals and collectively, to slow down this ongoing planetary catastrophe. The seminar will draw on a number of literary texts and textual examples – although it will help if you have read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road – to demonstrate the novel as an archive of a changing climate and to examine its potential to intervene in this crisis.