Iris Pearson

College Lecturer at @UniofOxford @engfac (form, feeling, modern & contemporary literature, experimental criticism, magical realism, Latin American literature)

[Iris Pearson @irispearson03]

Today, we're thrilled to announce the publication of 'What is Creative Criticism? A Field Report on a Colloquium', an experimental record of the event. Huge thanks to all our contributors, and to https://t.co/exhcazRsDy for giving us a platform for this very exciting cluster.

[Iris Pearson @irispearson03]

What is Creative Criticism? A Field Report on a Colloquium: Oxford, June 2024.
Co-edited by Joe Moshenska & Iris Pearson.

https://t.co/IM2tpfQr29

[Iris Pearson @irispearson03]

A year ago today, Joe Moshenska and I held 'What is Creative Criticism? A Colloquium' in Oxford, interrogating the liveliness or flimsiness of categories that we apply to academic writing.

[Iris Pearson @irispearson03]

Squeaked in this review before the end of the year! Had a blast reading and thinking about Ross Wilson’s ‘Critical Forms’, and the fruits are here; thanks to RES for the space.

https://t.co/3y06qnnQLr

[Ankhi Mukherjee @AnkhiMukherjee9]

So proud of @marthaswift_,who gloriously defended her DPhil today. Examined by the formidable @ellekeboehmer and Anna Bernard (KCL), Martha’s is a superb dissertation on American autofiction and its fantastic worldmaking in the works of Nicole Krauss, Téa Obreht, and Ruth Ozeki.

[Iris Pearson @irispearson03]

… Even the prose itself cannot face up to the shattering.

[Iris Pearson @irispearson03]

A Madrid book haul: two contemporary Latin American novels which experiment with narratives which follow a single day, whether one night while a man waits for his wife to return from her drawing class, or one bizarre day ft a gastroenterologist, hairdresser, and a missing finger.

[Iris Pearson @irispearson03]

… rather than the pathetic continuation of a character whose life will be changed irreparably when the end of the night arrives. In the final pages of Zambra’s novel, Julian stages his wife’s return, and walks Daniela to school as if nothing has happened…

[Iris Pearson @irispearson03]

Perhaps some optional models for creative critical practice.

[Iris Pearson @irispearson03]

A ‘Plums’ follow-up: I accidentally ended up face to face with Picasso’s ‘Las Meninas’ series this morning (I didn’t realise they were in Barcelona!). It’s Picasso’s mode of response to Velazquez which McLoughlin channels as she responds to Williams…

[Iris Pearson @irispearson03]

… Do they experiment with artistic reputation, riding on the coat tails of Velazquez, hijacking his familiarity with audiences to decorate Picasso’s own reputation? (Does this have to be bad; is there more productive language for this relationship?)…

[Iris Pearson @irispearson03]

Available at https://t.co/RiS70gXaet !

[Iris Pearson @irispearson03]

I read Kate McLoughlin’s ‘Plums’ (2011) before I went away: a sequence of poems in response to William Carlos Williams’s ‘This is Just to Say’. It includes morsels like this one:

[Iris Pearson @irispearson03]

It strikes me that McLoughlin’s response, as it continues the brief poem’s thinking but remains within its brief style, neither satisfies the imagists nor provokes them. It’s a careful critical balancing act of form & content.

[Iris Pearson @irispearson03]

… as well as the relationship between these pieces & Becca Rothfeld’s takedown of the contemporary minimalist novel in ‘All Things Too Small’. And wondering why ‘Pond’ counts as a collection short stories, not a novel.

[Iris Pearson @irispearson03]

Then Claire-Louise Bennett’s ‘Pond’, read by water among Portuguese vineyards. This masterful volume reminds me why I love prose: how it can be both tidy and provocative, simple and catastrophic…

[Iris Pearson @irispearson03]

… will feel vertical and oppressive, like a gloomy repast from the underworld’) reminds me of Shirley Jackson’s ‘We Have Always Lived in the Castle’. Thinking about varieties of isolation in those two novels, and perhaps in Olga Tokarczuk’s ‘Drive Your Plow’…