Professor Rachel Falconer
Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature
Yale (BA, Classics, 1984)
Oxford (BA, MA, English, 1986)
Oxford (DPhil, 1989)
Room 2.24, Jessop West
1 Upper Hanover Street
Sheffield
S3 7RA
Internal extension: 28461
Phone number: +44 (0)114-222-8461
Fax: +44 (0)114-222-8481
email : r.falconer@sheffield.ac.uk
I first came to Sheffield in 1993, after two years teaching English literature at the Charles University in Prague. Partly influenced by my experiences in Eastern Europe, my research interests began to shift from classical and early modern to contemporary literature. I now write about modern and contemporary texts, but generally from a comparative perspective which takes in other languages, periods or cultures. Bakhtin's idea that voices (or texts) are inter-illuminated through dialogue is one that appeals to me, and I try to use it as an organising principle for my research.
In 2005, I published a study of narratives of descent into Hell (katabasis) in post-1945 literature, called Hell in Contemporary Literature. This book draws on Bakhtin to define Hell as a distinctive chronotope, or set of time-space coordinates, in which the image of a human being is fashioned out of a transformative journey, culminating in an encounter with absolute Otherness. Contemporary Western notions of 'Hell' combine literary, psychological, political and religious ideas. The book examines the dynamics and tensions of descent and recovery, and the role narrative can play in this process. There are discussions of books by Malcolm Lowry, Sarah Kofman, Primo Levi, W.G. Sebald, Anne Michaels, survivors of mental illness, Gloria Naylor, Marge Piercy, Alice Notley, Alasdair Gray, Francis Ford Coppola, Salman Rushdie.
I became interested in crossover literature for its lightness, as a balance to the interest in Hell. By light I don't mean 'light-weight' but something closer to what Calvino describes in his essay on Lightness, i.e. a flexibility and nimbleness of mind and imagination, often celebrated in fiction for children. In 2008/9, I published a study about the recent, meteoric expansion of children´s literature into mainstream culture and adult publishing. Entitled The Crossover Novel: Children's Literature and its Adult Readership, this book analyses the millennial phenomenon of kiddultery (adults engaging in youth culture) and suggests several reasons for this contemporary fascination with adolescence and emergent subjectivity. Texts by J K Rowling, Philip Pullman, Mark Haddon, David Almond, Geraldine McCaughrean, C.S. Lewis and others are analysed within the framework of a broader cultural study.
In 2009, I initiated a series of cross-disciplinary events, including talks, performances and workshops, exploring many different ways in which research and creativity in the arts and sciences overlap, and can inter-illuminate each other. For details, please see the Arts-Science Encounters homepage:
http://www.shef.ac.uk/english/arts-science/
Currently I am interested in representations of memory, consciousness and creativity in modern and contemporary literature, and the relation of these to contemporary research in psychology and neuroscience. I would be happy to consider PhD thesis proposals on any aspect of 20-21C narrative fiction, including those mentioned above, as well as contemporary fiction which reinterprets classical or Renaissance literature or myth for the present day.
Movie trailer by Tomáš Míka (2010)
Undergraduate Teaching
- Lit 367: Literature of Descent: journeys into the underworld from Virgil and Dante to Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie
- Lit 210: Crossover Literature: contemporary fiction for children and adults
- Lit 301: Modern Literature: fiction, poetry and drama of the early twentieth century
- Lit 303: Contemporary Literature: fiction, poetry and drama from 1945 to the present
- Lit 304: Critical and Literary Theory: introduction to theories of narrative
Postgraduate Teaching
- Lit 6060: Theory of Narrative: advanced study of theories of narrative (alternating with)
- Lit 6360: Memory, Trauma and Narrative: literary theory and narrative fiction centred on questions of memory, trauma and identity.
Supervision to date:
- Early Modern Literature
- Katabatic Narrative (psychological, imaginary, or historical descent journeys)
- Modern and Contemporary Women’s Fiction
- Magic Realism
- 20-21C Crossover (children's and adult) Fiction
- Narrative Theory
- Bakhtin Studies
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