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Helen Charman
Helen Charman is a writer and academic based in Glasgow. Her first book, Mother State – a political history of motherhood — is forthcoming from Allen Lane in 2024. She teaches in the English Studies department at Durham University.

Articles Available Online


Attachment Barbies: On Watching Grey’s Anatomy

Essay

March 2023

Helen Charman

Essay

March 2023

In August 2022, ABC announced that Ellen Pompeo, currently the highest-paid actress on American network television, was leaving Grey’s Anatomy, the show on which...

Book Review

May 2021

HOLDING THE ROOM: ON HOLLY PESTER’S ‘COMIC TIMING’

Helen Charman

Book Review

May 2021

The last poem in Holly Pester’s first collection COMIC TIMING (Granta, 2021) is called ‘Villette’; it shares its title...

Trying to figure out what marks contemporary literature as contemporary is a deceptively complicated job because the concept of contemporaneity at stake is itself complicated Those complications are sustained by the unqualified way that the word contemporary seems to refer to both a quality of being with (con) in time (temp), in the colloquial sense of something being ‘of its time’, and to simultaneously identify our current moment as a historical period, a period that we’re historicising as we live it because one of the qualities that distinguishes it from previous periods is an obsession with now-ness[1] Within discussions of the arts, this doubling has been theorised at greatest length by those studying visual culture (usually vis-à-vis contemporary art, which John Douglas Millar has rightly pointed to as contemporary culture’s placeholder – its unelected parent category), not least because premonitions about post- and post-post-modern life put forward during the late-twentieth century were most popularly obsessed with the growing presence and influence of images[2] All such forethoughts focussed critical approaches to twenty-first century culture in terms of the visual: what can be seen (the visible) and ways of seeing it (visibility and our visualisations)   On the surface of contemporary life, the compression of multi-megapixel cameras into networked smartphones that feed data-streams like Instagram via one-click apps suggest those premonitions were well founded What excites me and some other poets who have been at the forefront of the Conceptual Writing scene is a simple observation that problematises such premonitions and the visual bias they ground In short, although the surface of life is constantly being flooded with images, its depths, structures, flows and our interactions with them have proved to be more dependent than ever on written language, not least because all computational data is a kind of emic, alphanumeric code The really new features of twenty-first century life are reforming life under the surface – in relational networks that we only have limp metaphors to describe, like ‘the cloud’ – and so we need to read everything and anything legible below the surface in ways that go beyond seeing

Contributor

November 2017

Helen Charman

Contributor

November 2017

Helen Charman is a writer and academic based in Glasgow. Her first book, Mother State – a political history...

Essay

May 2020

Where do I put myself, if public life’s destroyed? On reading Denise Riley

Helen Charman

Essay

May 2020

How do you read someone who doesn’t always want to be read? This is a question I used to...

Sally Rooney’s ‘Normal People’

Book Review

October 2018

Helen Charman

Book Review

October 2018

Reading Sally Rooney’s second novel Normal People is a compulsive experience. After the navy blue Faber & Faber proofs were sent out in early...
Rendering intimacy impossible, deploy lifeboats (mark yourself safe) Not listening as such, more waiting to speak, above all mark yourself, it’s so important to be safe Carry on, they demand, we’re not reeling / we are reeling Is this the place for a fountain reference? Probably ‘What first attracted you to your wife, sir?’ ‘Her delicacy / her ankles / her hatred of the Tories’                  Alive twice over but that’s a whole life gone too                you know I’m sorry, he holds his hands up, I’m                sorry, he backs away: my conscience couldn’t                keep company with your body I say, your body?                it just made me think: it’s only a nine month stay   The next time you lay a hand on me, I’ll make a perfect gleaming dive into the Thames Aren’t you glad / to be here? I am
Electioneering

Prize Entry

November 2017

Helen Charman


READ NEXT

feature

Issue No. 17

Ada Kaleh

Alexander Christie-Miller

feature

Issue No. 17

When King Carol II of Romania set foot on the tiny Danubian island of Ada Kaleh on 4 May...

Interview

January 2017

Interview with David Thomson

Leo Robson

Interview

January 2017

David Thomson — the author of dozens of books, including an account of Scott’s expedition to the Antarctic and...

Interview

March 2014

Interview with John Smith

Tom Harrad

Interview

March 2014

In 1976, whilst still a student at the Royal College of Art in London, John Smith made a short...

 

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