Workshop: Far from the Madding Crowd: Friday, 24th July with Helen Hagemann

Prose Workshop with Helen Hagemann, Friday 24th July. Class to read two chapters of "Far from the Madding Crowd" by Thomas Hardy. Writing exercises and discussion will revolve around "landscapes."

1.00pm - 3.00pm: Room 3, Upstairs, FAC North Wing
OOTA $20 - NON-OOTA $25


Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) is Thomas Hardy's fourth novel and his first major literary success. It originally appeared anonymously as a monthly serial in Cornhill Magazine, where it gained a wide readership. Critical notices were plentiful and mostly positive. Hardy revised the text extensively for the 1895 edition and made further changes for the 1901 edition.
^PLOT
Gabriel Oak is a young shepherd. With the savings of a frugal life, and a loan, he has leased and stocked a sheep farm. He falls in love with a newcomer six years his junior, Bathsheba Everdene, a proud beauty who arrives to live with her aunt, Mrs Hurst. Over time, Bathsheba and Gabriel grow to like each other well enough, and Bathsheba even saves his life once. However, when he makes her an unadorned offer of marriage, she refuses; she values her independence too much, and him too little. Feeling betrayed and embarrassed, Gabriel's blunt protestations only foster her haughtiness. After a few days, she moves to Weatherbury, a village some miles off. When next they meet, their circumstances have changed drastically. An inexperienced new sheepdog drives Gabriel's flock over a cliff, ruining him. After selling off everything of value, he manages to settle all his debts but emerges penniless. He seeks employment at a hiring fair in the town of Casterbridge. When he finds none, he heads to another such fair in Shottsford, a town about ten miles from Weatherbury. On the way, he happens upon a dangerous fire on a farm and leads the bystanders in putting it out. When the veiled owner comes to thank him, he asks if she needs a shepherd. She uncovers her face and reveals herself to be none other than Bathsheba. She has recently inherited her uncle's estate and is now wealthy. Though somewhat uncomfortable, she employs him.
THE LANDSCAPES OF THOMAS HARDY

Thomas Hardy continues to draw very different sorts of readers and Far from the Madding Crowd is now a major film by Thomas Vinterberg (2015). As academics have written Hardy's view of scenery and "inert settings" is to consider the landscape as ambient space. Looking at visual and acoustic details in Hardy's fiction and poetry, there is a "mutual dependency between background and characters" as well as a consideration of "small things" (insects and noises). Many passages from the fiction show their deployment of sensory features. He uses this same method when he moves to the encompassing idea of landscape as a realm of reciprocal movements. The fluidity of space in which very different objects appear to resemble each other. In this company, Hardy's technique appears both Victorian and modern; the effects of his description range from the realistic and microscopic to the surreal. Metaphors in both poems and novels equate objects the way Morandi's images do; they show, in other words, that two separate entities are "acted on by the same forces". "The scenes displayed are delusive" and "evanescent, reflecting the dubieties and complexities of our habitual ways of seeing and conceptualizing".
Hardy's settings for all his major novels is the south and southwest of England. He named the area "Wessex" after the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom that existed in this part of that country prior to the Norman Conquest. Although the places that appear in his novels actually exist, in many cases he gave the place a fictional name. For example, Hardy's home town of Dorchester is called Casterbridge in his books, notably in The Mayor of Casterbridge. In an 1895 preface to the novel Far From the Madding Crowd he described Wessex as "a merely realistic dream country".
The actual definition of "Hardy's Wessex" varied widely throughout Hardy's career, and was not definitively settled until after he retired from writing novels. When he created the concept of a fictional Wessex, it consisted merely of the small area of Dorset in which Hardy grew up; by the time he wrote Jude the Obscure, the boundaries had extended to include all of Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Hampshire, much of Berkshire, and some of Oxfordshire, with its most north-easterly point being Oxford (renamed "Christminster" in the novel). Cornwall was also referred to but named "Off Wessex". Similarly, the nature and significance of ideas of "Wessex" were developed over a long series of novels through a lengthy period of time. The idea of Wessex plays an important artistic role in Hardy's works (particularly his later novels), assisting the presentation of themes of progress, primitivism, sexuality, religion, nature and naturalism; however, this is complicated by the economic role Wessex played in Hardy's career. Considering himself primarily to be a poet, Hardy wrote novels mostly to earn money. Books that could be marketed under the Hardy brand of "Wessex novels" were particularly lucrative, which gave rise to a tendency to sentimentalised, picturesque, populist descriptions of Wessex – which, as a glance through most tourist gift shops in the south-west will reveal, remain popular with consumers today.

^{References:  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_from_the_Madding_Crowd
                     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Hardy%27s_Wessex}
                    

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The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins: Prose Workshop 10th July

The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins: Prose Workshop with Helen Hagemann @ the Fremantle Arts Centre, Friday 10th July 1pm-3pm.  Reading an extract from the novel, together with writing exercises and discussions on train journeys.

Venue:  Room 3, Upstairs, North Wing
Cost:  $20 OOTA - $25 NON-OOTA

The Girl on the Train (2015) is a best-selling novel by British author Paula Hawkins. The novel debuted at number one on the The New York Times Fiction Best Sellers of 2015 list (the combined print and e-book list) dated February 1, 2015, and remained in the top position for 13 consecutive weeks as of the list dated April 26, 2015. By early March 2015 the novel had sold over 1 million copies, and 1.5 million by April. Many reviews referred to the book as the next Gone Girl, a popular 2012 novel, which the publishers were happy to highlight.
The film rights have been acquired by Dreamworks for Marc Platt Productions.  

When Paula Hawkins first arrived in London, at 17, she spent a lot of time staring into other people’s houses from the District Line. She’d grown up in Zimbabwe and had never been on public transport until she made her first journey on the overground stretch from Putney Bridge to Earls Court. The experience of winding past back gardens and open windows was ‘completely alien’ but somehow reassuring. ‘There’s an odd sense of connection you have when you go past the same house each day,’ she says. ‘I had just arrived in London and hardly knew anyone. I often wondered: “What would I do if I saw something sinister?” Still, like a lot of overnight successes, Hawkins put in a lot of groundwork. She grew up in suburban Harare, where her father was an economist, and had what she calls an idyllic childhood — ‘tennis courts, swimming pools’ — only realising the inequities of post-colonial Zimbabwe as she got older. She moved to England in search of better opportunities in 1989 and graduated from Oxford with a degree in politics, philosophy and economics. She then spent 15 years as a financial journalist. Her most recent post was at The Times (which entailed a ‘horrific’ Clapham-Wapping commute), but while she liked the atmosphere of the newsroom, she says she was never a ‘natural newshound’. Even now she jokes that research is not her strong point and imagines her police procedural details in the book are all wrong: ‘Sometimes it’s interesting, sometimes I’d just rather make it up.’

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