Beci Carver
Biographic Data
| ID | 3947634 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Beci Carver |
| GIVEN NAMES | Beci |
| FAMILY NAME | Carver |
| SIGNATURE | CARVER B |
| AFFILIATIONS | Department of English and Film, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9554-2627 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 0 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 14 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2007 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 0 |
The Last Line
The Last Line 'i would be eight people each inhabiting each other's dreams walking through corridors of glass framed pages telling each other the final lines of letters' 1Literature is good at manipulating interruptions.Caesurae, commas, non-terminal sentences, interim end-stopped lines, pauses to rhyme, and ellipses have all become, over time, well-known playthings.Indeed, if as Frank O'Hara suggests , one kind of wish a poet might have is to co…
‘Scot‐free flip‐top’ or Ish 2b
The phrase 'Scot-free flip-top' comes from J. H. Prynne's late modernist long poem Snooty Tipoffs (2021), 1 where it already has a slapstick ring, and in the vicinity of a special issue on Chaplin it may easily acquire a Chaplinish quality.Cut to the Chaplin of The Circus (1928) in the role of impromptu funambulist, edging across the highwire with the help of a propman's pulley, then suddenly, without his knowing it, cut free from the cable and r…
Inimitability
This essay reads the familiar concept of literary influence as a fantasy of proximity to those whose beauty resides in their unavailability—in an ease of phrase, grace of thinking, brilliance, music outside the common round and impossible to produce oneself. It is a melancholy irony of literary traditions that they should expand through the attempted retrieval of voices permanently lost. Keston Sutherland writes in Meditations (2024): “It hurt hi…
Technology and Literature
Whereas previous books have explored how literature depicts or discusses scientific concepts, this book argues that literature is a technology. It shows how literature has been shaped by technological revolutions, and reveals the essential work that literature has done in helping to uncover the consequences of new technologies. Individual chapters focus on how specific literary technologies – the development of writing, the printing press, typewr…
Out of the blue
A couple of years ago a friend presented me out of the blue with a gift: a little brown, blank envelope, and inside it Prynne's newest poem at the time, Dune Quail Eggs. Any book given as a gift may feel like it belongs to the moment of its giving, but this one seemed to represent a special case, not just because of its surprisingness, but because the object itself in its particularity so obviously influenced the rhythm of my discovery of it. The…
Tennis as literary technique
How might a novel play tennis? In a New York Times essay on Roger Federer, David Foster Wallace reflects on how the climactic topspin lob that won Wimbledon for Federer in 2006 was a product of narrative, reliant on a sequence of bluffs, building up to a final unreturnable shot whose genius lay in its ‘unimaginable angle.’ Tennis becomes fiction here, both in the sense that the final shot is unreal and that it is Rafael Nadal’s imagination that i…
Death by capitalism in Eliot's The Waste Land
This article is an attempt to construct a socialist Eliot, whose familiarity with German economic policy in the 1910s and 1920s exposed him to a version of socialist economics that caught his imagination. In this essay, I focus on the year that preceded Eliot’s breakdown, when a number of significant mergers transformed British banking, concentrating the industry’s power and wealth among a nucleus of ‘Big Banks’. I understand Eliot to have witnes…
Nabokov’s American gut
Edmund Wilson wrote to Nabokov on 14th January 1946: ‘I hear from people who have seen you that you are becoming stout, optimistic and genial – in other words, Americanized’. The rumour was true: Nabokov’s relocation to America in the 1940s seemed to act in conspiracy with the swelling of his gut, such that by the time he achieved international fame as an anglophone American writer, his body had transformed. I will propose in this article that Na…
Introduction
Dickensian stuffing
No description available
Chucking in Evelyn Waugh
For Tony Last in Waugh's Handful of Dust (1934), the world divides itself into ‘chuckers’ and ‘non-chuckers’; he commiserates tipsily with a new friend: ‘you feel low because your girl’s chucked, and I feel low because mine won’t chuck.’ To ‘chuck’, in Waugh’s writing and in early-to-mid twentieth-century slang more generally, was to abandon a commitment – whether a marriage, a party, or a choice of hat. One could chuck anything or anyone. And th…
Untraffic in Los Angeles
Introduction
London as a waste of space in Eliot's The Waste Land
Over the last three decades the word ‘waste’ in The Waste Land has attracted a considerable degree of attention, and with good reason. After all, by choosing to name his poem ‘The Waste Land’ as opposed to ‘The Wasteland’ Eliot prefaces the text with an insistence on abject matter: the space he describes belongs in an explicit sense to the objects it contains or accumulates. Thus in a seminal essay Maud Ellmann concentrates on empty bottles and c…
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London as a waste of space in Eliot's The Waste Land
Over the last three decades the word ‘waste’ in The Waste Land has attracted a considerable degree of attention, and with good reason. After all, by choosing to name his poem ‘The Waste Land’ as opposed to ‘The Wasteland’ Eliot prefaces the text with an insistence on abject matter: the space he describes belongs in an explicit sense to the objects it contains or accumulates. Thus in a seminal essay Maud Ellmann concentrates on empty bottles and c…
Untraffic in Los Angeles
Introduction
Chucking in Evelyn Waugh
For Tony Last in Waugh's Handful of Dust (1934), the world divides itself into ‘chuckers’ and ‘non-chuckers’; he commiserates tipsily with a new friend: ‘you feel low because your girl’s chucked, and I feel low because mine won’t chuck.’ To ‘chuck’, in Waugh’s writing and in early-to-mid twentieth-century slang more generally, was to abandon a commitment – whether a marriage, a party, or a choice of hat. One could chuck anything or anyone. And th…
Introduction
Dickensian stuffing
No description available
Nabokov’s American gut
Edmund Wilson wrote to Nabokov on 14th January 1946: ‘I hear from people who have seen you that you are becoming stout, optimistic and genial – in other words, Americanized’. The rumour was true: Nabokov’s relocation to America in the 1940s seemed to act in conspiracy with the swelling of his gut, such that by the time he achieved international fame as an anglophone American writer, his body had transformed. I will propose in this article that Na…
Death by capitalism in Eliot's The Waste Land
This article is an attempt to construct a socialist Eliot, whose familiarity with German economic policy in the 1910s and 1920s exposed him to a version of socialist economics that caught his imagination. In this essay, I focus on the year that preceded Eliot’s breakdown, when a number of significant mergers transformed British banking, concentrating the industry’s power and wealth among a nucleus of ‘Big Banks’. I understand Eliot to have witnes…
Technology and Literature
Whereas previous books have explored how literature depicts or discusses scientific concepts, this book argues that literature is a technology. It shows how literature has been shaped by technological revolutions, and reveals the essential work that literature has done in helping to uncover the consequences of new technologies. Individual chapters focus on how specific literary technologies – the development of writing, the printing press, typewr…
Out of the blue
A couple of years ago a friend presented me out of the blue with a gift: a little brown, blank envelope, and inside it Prynne's newest poem at the time, Dune Quail Eggs. Any book given as a gift may feel like it belongs to the moment of its giving, but this one seemed to represent a special case, not just because of its surprisingness, but because the object itself in its particularity so obviously influenced the rhythm of my discovery of it. The…
Tennis as literary technique
How might a novel play tennis? In a New York Times essay on Roger Federer, David Foster Wallace reflects on how the climactic topspin lob that won Wimbledon for Federer in 2006 was a product of narrative, reliant on a sequence of bluffs, building up to a final unreturnable shot whose genius lay in its ‘unimaginable angle.’ Tennis becomes fiction here, both in the sense that the final shot is unreal and that it is Rafael Nadal’s imagination that i…
‘Scot‐free flip‐top’ or Ish 2b
The phrase 'Scot-free flip-top' comes from J. H. Prynne's late modernist long poem Snooty Tipoffs (2021), 1 where it already has a slapstick ring, and in the vicinity of a special issue on Chaplin it may easily acquire a Chaplinish quality.Cut to the Chaplin of The Circus (1928) in the role of impromptu funambulist, edging across the highwire with the help of a propman's pulley, then suddenly, without his knowing it, cut free from the cable and r…
Inimitability
This essay reads the familiar concept of literary influence as a fantasy of proximity to those whose beauty resides in their unavailability—in an ease of phrase, grace of thinking, brilliance, music outside the common round and impossible to produce oneself. It is a melancholy irony of literary traditions that they should expand through the attempted retrieval of voices permanently lost. Keston Sutherland writes in Meditations (2024): “It hurt hi…
The Last Line
The Last Line 'i would be eight people each inhabiting each other's dreams walking through corridors of glass framed pages telling each other the final lines of letters' 1Literature is good at manipulating interruptions.Caesurae, commas, non-terminal sentences, interim end-stopped lines, pauses to rhyme, and ellipses have all become, over time, well-known playthings.Indeed, if as Frank O'Hara suggests , one kind of wish a poet might have is to co…
Art (10 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · History (7 works) · Literature (7 works) · Aesthetics (4 works) · Art history (4 works) · Citation (4 works) · Library science (4 works) · Modernist Literature and Criticism (4 works) · Sociology (4 works)