The scholar who quit the University of Essex last year in protest against a system in which she said “academics are subjugated to the managers” has been awarded one of the world’s most prestigious scholarly prizes.
Dame Marina Warner, now professor of English and creative writing at Birkbeck, University of London, was named on 12 March as the 11th winner of the Holberg Prize, established by the Norwegian parliament in 2003 for scholars who have “made outstanding contributions to research, either within [the arts and humanities, social sciences, law and theology] or through interdisciplinary work”.
The novelist, who will receive prize money of close to £400,000, said she was “very surprised” to be ranked in the company of scholars she had long admired. From the time of the books that made her famous – Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (1976) and Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism (1981) – her own work was largely supported by journalism and conducted outside the academy, not least because she “had a very high opinion of academics and never thought of myself as very academically strong, though I was good at languages, and always very interdisciplinary”.
Despite a few visiting positions, it was only in 2004 that Dame Marina became a full-time academic as professor of literature, film and theatre studies at the University of Essex. Yet, after what she described as “the university’s extraordinary volte-face” in 2014, she resigned in protest at a new teaching load she saw as incompatible with the already agreed research commitments that made up 70 per cent of her contract.
Dame Marina told Times Higher Education that the general trend within universities was “not fostering the sustained thinking which is necessary for any kind of book. It’s too cut up, there are too many strains and demands, too many boxes and tables and figures”. She remains a passionate advocate for humanistic education. She has become increasingly interested in forced migration and hopes to use some of the money from the Holberg Prize to help to create communal cultural spaces in refugee camps that currently provide only “food, shelter and water, the basic necessities, in a minimal way”.
More generally, Dame Marina said she was keen to promote alternatives to “the business model of universities”. This was something she first came across, she recalled, in New Zealand, “where there were thousands of Chinese and Singaporeans doing business studies in English”.
“I thought it was a marvellous opportunity to teach the history of culture to a captive audience of students, to open up the grounds between us in what has become an international language. Were they taught a single class of literature? Nothing! They were just taught pure business studies,” she said.
“It’s not just some aesthetic thing, it’s about ethics. You can’t understand business studies if you don’t understand what it is to make a contract, which you can understand from a Greek tragedy or a Dickens novel far better than you can from a sheet in a ledger.”Despite her books, Warner never thought of
Marina Warner on the disfiguring of higher education
2014年3月23日 星期日
Essex大學的文學‧電影‧戲劇系， 有此大師
"Essex大學的文學‧電影‧戲劇系， 有此大師，真是不簡單，值得校友驕傲:
http://www.marinawarner.com/home.html"啟示: 系所必須大力整併: 建築與工業設計；"工業工程與經營資訊"和企管系；中文系、外文系、歷史系；化學與化工.......
http://www.marinawarner.com/home.html"啟示: 系所必須大力整併: 建築與工業設計；"工業工程與經營資訊"和企管系；中文系、外文系、歷史系；化學與化工.......
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marina_Warner
She was a professor in the Department of Literature, Film and Theatre Studies at the University of Essex from 2004 until her resignation in 2014.[11] She took up a Chair in English and Creative Writing at Birkbeck College, University of London in September 2014. She is currently a Fellow of All Souls College Oxford and Chair of the judges of the Man Booker International Prize 2015.[12]
Harvard University Press"As universities are beaten into the shapes dictated by business, so language is suborned to its ends. We have all heard the robotic idiom of management, as if a button had activated a digitally generated voice. Like Newspeak in Nineteen Eighty-Four, business-speak is an instance of magical naming, superimposing the imagery of the market on the idea of a university – through ‘targets’, ‘benchmarks’, time-charts, league tables, ‘vision statements’, ‘content providers’. We may laugh or groan, depending on the state of our mental health at the thickets of TLAs – three-letter acronyms, in the coinage of the writer Richard Hamblyn – that accumulate like dental plaque."
‘Stranger Magic’ by Marina Warner
By HAROLD BLOOM
Published: March 23, 2012
At 65, the British scholar Marina Warner is a veteran magus, and an adept mythographer of the vast global traditions of magic, metaphor and myth. Also an accomplished novelist, she augments her learning with her narrative skills. As a fan of her prolific enterprise for the last quarter-century, I regret that I have never met her, so delightful is her verve.
Will and Frances Brundage/Blue Lantern Studio — Corbis
From "The Arabian Nights," circa 1893.
STRANGER MAGIC
Charmed States and the Arabian Nights
By Marina Warner
Illustrated. 540 pp. The Belknap Press/Harvard University Press. $35.
Charmed States and the Arabian Nights
By Marina Warner
Illustrated. 540 pp. The Belknap Press/Harvard University Press. $35.
“The Tales of a Thousand and One Nights” is both more and less than a single, complete book. It has no named author or authors, no dates or places of composition and no single national tradition that informs it. You can trace elements of these tales to India, Persia and various Arabian lands, just as the enormous vogue in Europe, from the 18th century on, naturalized them in Voltaire’s “Zadig,” Samuel Johnson’s “Rasselas” and Goethe’s “West-Eastern Divan.” This cavalcade continues in our time, from Borges to A. S. Byatt and Salman Rushdie.
Warner’s “Stranger Magic” is part of that procession of influence, or rather of what Borges encouraged all of us to do in regard to “The Arabian Nights”: “I think that the reader should enrich what he is reading. He should misunderstand the text; he should change it into something else.”
The principle of “The Arabian Nights” is always “something else.” Night by night, Scheherazade (Warner uses the more correct but less familiar Shahrazad) delays the execution ordered for her by an insanely jealous royal husband. This momentary reprieve becomes indefinite because always there is another story left incomplete at dawn. Of all the world’s storytellers, Scheherazade is at once the most fecund and the best motivated.
Warner wisely restricts her commentary to just 15 stories, all of which she begins by retelling in the spirit of a psychopomp guiding us into what the Sufi mystics of Persia called “the imaginal realm,” suspended between the empirical world and the totally visionary. She takes us into “stranger magic” in the hope that we will find ourselves there more truly and more strange. Her choice of narratives gives us jinn and peris (genies and fairies), magicians, speaking talismans and the archetypal figure of Aladdin, master of illusions, of flights and of vanishing acts.
Imaginative literature itself, in Warner’s view, finds its representative in Scheherazade, the muse of all great fantasy writing. Postponing death is one of the motives for metaphor, the desire to be different or elsewhere. Pursuing the enigmas of imaginative desire throughout her career, Warner persuasively redefines “The Arabian Nights” as an overgrown garden of the delights and hazards of desire. Shakespeare, as she knows, is the largest field of such enchantment, with Proust his worthiest modern descendant. Warner quests for contemporary meaning in the major traditions of literary magic and carries with her, back to “The Arabian Nights,” our sore need for another way of knowledge.
Literary knowledge, difficult to define, can redeem some portion of our imaginative poverty in what seems an increasingly tenuous age for deep reading. Warner usefully locates in the Arabian Solomon a prime emblem of literary knowledge in “The Nights.” The biblical king is transcended by a Solomon who is the master of the jinn, unruly spirits that run wild without him. Greatest of mages, the Muslim Solomon, wise beyond wisdom, thus incarnates an absolute knowledge. Many esoteric traditions, including Jewish kabbalah and Hermeticism — ancient Alexandrian and Renaissance — resort to this occult Solomon as the patron of magic and alchemy.
Warner’s “Stranger Magic” harbors many richnesses, of which I find the most beguiling what she names, in her subtitle, “charmed states.” In her introduction she meditates on the use of such enchantments:
“It did not seem enough to invoke escapism as the reason for the popularity of ‘The Arabian Nights’ in the age of reason. Something more seemed to be at stake. Magic is not simply a matter of the occult or the esoteric, of astrology, Wicca and Satanism; it follows processes inherent to human consciousness and connected to constructive and imaginative thought. The faculties of imagination — dream, projection, fantasy — are bound up with the faculties of reasoning and essential to making the leap beyond the known into the unknown. At one pole (myth), magic is associated with poetic truth, at another (the history of science) with inquiry and speculation. It was bound up with understanding physical forces in nature and led to technical ingenuity and discoveries. Magical thinking structures the processes of imagination, and imagining something can and sometimes must precede the fact or the act; it has shaped many features of Western civilization. But its influence has been constantly disavowed since the Enlightenment and its action and effects consequently misunderstood.”
Warner takes an honored place in the sequence of those who have studied what Isaiah Berlin and others have called the Counter-Enlightenment, the speculations that renewed Neoplatonic and Gnostic heterodox versions of ancient wisdom. Her choice of “The Arabian Nights,” as a vital strand in the Counter-Enlightenment, is refreshing, since she shows some of the ways in which storytelling is essential to this kind of knowledge. As a contemporary scholar of myth and magic, she aids immensely in the struggle for literary values that has to be ongoing, whatever the distractions of our moment.