Department of English

Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University

2202441  British Fiction from the Twentieth Century to the Present

Puckpan Tipayamontri

Office: BRK 1106

Office Hours: M 1–3 and by appointment

Phone: 0 2218 1780

puckpan.t@chula.ac.th

Literary Exhibition

For the final paper, you will be curating an online exhibition for the course 2202441 British Fiction from the Twentieth Century to the Present. There are two components to the final paper (e-mailed to me): 1) the exhibition design, items and labels (if available, provide link to its online presence), and 2) the paper. Here is an opportunity to look at the overall picture of British fiction from the last century to the present, and to focus specifically on a work, a period, or a topic within that literary span to tell the story of this remarkable creative production that has influenced the world, continues to do so, and is also influenced by the outrageously diverse and dynamic world in turn.

This final project is also an opportunity to assess the course. What has been skipped and skimmed over that needs more careful attention? What real world events could have been taken advantage of in the learning experience that was missed? What resources (audio, film, live theater, author invitations, guest speakers, virtual museums, online library collections, literary festivals, debate, conferences, tours and research) could be used that haven't? What aspects of the texts need further illustration and explanation? How might an audience or a reader be encouraged to read, learn, participate, to think creatively and critically, or to contribute their questions or knowledge? What kinds of viewing and learning experiences do you want audiences to have? How will you map out the exhibition experience in digital space and over time? Do you want audience interaction and if so, how to provide and perhaps document it?

Scroll down for sample exhibitions with curator notes to get your juices going.

Quick View

• 5–7 pp. (exhibition text + paper)
  
• MLA style format and citation
• Due Monday, May 24 by 4:00 p.m. (Word file of the paper and exhibition design (plus URL link if applicable) received in my e-mail inbox.)

  
Your Digital Literary Exhibition

The exhibition design component of your final paper demonstrates your vision. It basically provides the display element of your concept and can be attached to your paper component as an appendix. This includes

• A plan or diagram of your exhibition (map of the exhibit, showing its layout or structure, with items listed; this can simply be a chart on a page of Word document)
  
• An introductory text (≤ 300 words)
• 6 items
• 6 labels for each of the items (≤ 100 words each)
• Optional: Instead of the exhibition plan, you can send the link to or attach the fully digitized exhibition itself (Word, PowerPoint, PDF, web page, etc., whatever form suits your purposes). One option is to use the Chula application services to convert and host your exhibit. Like your diary, your Word documents can contain various media content and be hyperlinked and shared via your Chula Office 365 cloud storage space. The Chula VPN (virtual private network) service allows you to access these applications and services as if you are working on a campus device, enabling all available features and capabilities, like Adobe Acrobat's PDF editing software.
  

Some questions to ask yourself as you plan your exhibition on British Fiction.

• Which parts of the British Fiction texts we have studied benefit illustration and enquiry in six items? Inspiration for this might come from your Happiness Habitat study; you can design your findings for that into a six-item exhibit, or be inspired to look at more than one work on an observation that emerged from that exploration.
  
• Which six items shall I choose? How will each item illuminate a different aspect of an idea or issue that the text(s) address or an argument that I am making about the text(s)?
• What types of items and in what medium might these be: photograph, painting, illustration, manuscript, letter, audio clip, video clip, object/artifact? What combination will engage the viewer as well as present provocative ideas in the text(s) and about the text(s)?
  
• How will I organize and describe the items to elucidate the text(s) and support my argument about their collective meaning and significance?
• How long do I want the audience to spend with the exhibit? How long on each item?
• What title should I give my exhibition so that it sparks their curiosity and prepares them to discover British fiction and investigate it further in your created space?
• How will my introduction to the exhibit stimulate the audience to enjoy the material I have curated in a thoughtful way?
  
• How will I receive feedback from the audience or assess their engagement?

Some information and tips on writing exhibition texts.

Sebastião Salgado, Genesis, International Center for Photography Chris Jordan, Running the Numbers, 2006–present

Sally Pierce, "Writing Exhibition Texts," Director of the Arts Carleton College, 30 Jan. 2020.     Introductory or orientation labels set up the organization and tone of the exhibition…Quick, clear orientation is a very important feature for visitors, but many people will not stop to read a long introduction because they are being drawn into the exhibit by many competing sights, objects, and sounds…     Beverly Serrell, Exhibit Labels: An Interpretive Approach An introduction placed near the entrance is a useful way to unite and provide context for an exhibition, but brevity is the key.  It is recommended that introductions be limited to 150 words or less, as is the case with the examples below. "Best Practices in Museum Exhibition Writing (2004)," Museum-Ed Is there a good opening line that draws me in? Is there a clear thread that connects the ideas? Does the writing use stories, quotes, and other colorful devices that humanize the objects and their makers? Am I given both the necessary information and a possible pathway or two for an imaginative response? Is each word important? Exhibit writing is a creative act – albeit one that occurs within very strict limitations – and sometimes those very limitations seem to generate clever and beautiful results. [...] I appreciate exhibit labels that take risks and experiment with techniques. I look for a positive tone of voice, one that respects the reader; that uses culturally sensitive and up-to-date language. I like it when the label poses a question, to help me look closer.

Some information and tips on writing labels.

Chris Jordan, Cans Seurat, 2007 James Luna, The Artifact Piece, 1987, Museum of Man, San Diego

Anna Faherty, "What Makes a Great Museum Label?," MuseumNext, 2 Sep. 2020. The best museum labels do more than provide information. A great museum label takes its reader on a revelatory journey, reframing perceptions along the way and provoking a lasting reaction. [...] Effective museum labels anticipate and answer visitors’ unspoken questions about the artwork or object they accompany. At the same time they forge emotional connections with those visitors. It’s obvious, then, that anyone writing gallery or exhibition labels needs detailed knowledge in two areas: the objects themselves and the visitors who will be looking at them. Plus, they need a clear goal that defines what they hope visitors might think, feel or do in response. A well-worded label meets the visitor in familiar territory, using concepts and terminology that feel like second nature, before revealing a new, and relevant, perspective. In just a sentence or two, a good object label equips visitors with the tools to look back at the object and draw their own new conclusions about it, conclusions that will be influenced as much by each visitor’s unique experiences as by the museum’s words. "Exhibition Labelling," Museums and Galleries of NSW Not sure what to write on your labels? Here are a few things to consider. Basic information structure • Artist / maker • Title • Date • Medium/materials • Dimensions • Provenance or collection • Description How much information? Your label will be read by people without any prior information and by those who are well versed on the subject, so choose language that is clear, concise, integral and avoids jargon. Select information that provides contextual significance about the object and its place in the exhibition. Keep the order of information consistent and include key things of interest about the artwork to give important story line information. Be aware of audience fatigue and use a 70–80 word count on individual artwork labels and 100–200 words for introductory panels. A standing read time of 10 seconds is also the average time given by audiences to any one label, so once you have written it, test it to know the most important information is included. Katya Lopatko, "Museum Wall Text: To Read or Not to Read?," The Art Gorgeous, 7 Nov. 2018. And now, the cons. 4) It’s hard to absorb a piece on a deeper, holistic level when your brain is busy analyzing the medium, composition, social and historical context, etc. etc. You did enough academic talking about art in college. Now, just let the work speak to you. 5) 90% of wall text is either already super obvious (“the painter uses a warm palette to create a sense of warmth”… tell me something I don’t know) or someone’s subjective opinion about the artist’s intention. And tbh, you don’t need a PhD to figure that out… just look at the work!

The Paper
The 2–4-page paper component is an argument for your British Fiction exhibit design. The online exhibition design needs to be fully remote-learning enabled.

• Explain your rationale for the exhibit that you have curated.
• Indicate which work(s) of the course and which aspects or sections of the work(s) you have have chosen to investigate and illuminate.
• Explain why this particular aspect of or issue in the work(s) needs your proposed exhibit treatment.
• What do you hope to achieve with your exhibition? What is not observed or covered in individual lay reading or in the course that you aim to fix with your curation?
  
• Why is your angle or focus interesting and how does it inform the text(s) and fit into the course/study of British fiction as a whole?
• Justify the collection of items that you choose to show.
• Identify the six selections (objects, media, activity, etc.) for your exhibition.
• Illustrate why they are effective choices to illustrate and inform the issues and text(s) or passage(s) you have in mind. Show what they reveal, clarify or enlighten about the text.
  
• Explain what you hope the audience will learn or scrutinize from the six curated items. What questions will you raise, what answers will you provide, what discussion do you want to happen and why?
  
• Discuss the flow or organization of your exhibit to show how they reflect your concept of what learning and reading British fiction should be, and how they encourage audience engagement with the work's ideas/themes/topics.
• Consider your experience of planning and curating an exhibition for this course with an aim to help make reading a selection of British fiction informative and fun for audience who may be unfamiliar with the literature.
• How has having a space to focus on, investigate, research about, learn from a literary selection of your choice, and to create your own learning aid/tool for others been for you?
• What task or mission have you set yourself in designing your exhibition on British fiction? What questions did you ask yourself about what you want to showcase, explain, and have others experience?
  
• What new things have you encountered? What problems have you run into and how have you solved them?
• What limitations and advantages have you found in creating an online literary exhibit?
  

Sample Exhibitions

Explore some of the following exhibits and think about the items and engagements to illuminate British fiction texts that you can provide in your own. Note that our six-item course literary exhibit is much smaller and more focused in scope, with an emphasis on illuminating the text rather than on the life and work of the writer.

Items and Highlights	Exhibition Curator Notes	Peer Comments/Guest Book
'Dulce et Decorum Est': A Close Reading Items Wilfred Owen, poetry manuscripts, 1911–18, British Library John Keats, manuscript of "The Eve of St Mark," 1820, British Museum Library Jessie Pope, Jessie Pope's War Poems, 1915, British Library The Hydra, Nov. 1917, British Library W. H. R. Rivers, "An Address on the Repression of War Experience," The Lancet, 2 Feb. 1918, British Library	Santanu Das: Today, the manuscript of 'Dulce Et Decorum Est' teases us with its combination of meaning and materiality as we find his 'large and sloping' hand thinking and feeling its way through the shape and sound of words with many crossings-out and revisions into his 'charred' senses. At one point, Owen replaces the word 'clawing' with 'haunting'. The poem itself is a 'haunting', marked as much by his memories of the front as by his growing sense of duty as a war-poet: 'My subject is War and the Pity of War. The poetry is in the pity'. Yet, in a paradox characteristic of the First World War, the war-haunted document is also an ode to literary friendship forged at Craiglockhart.
An Introduction to Animal Farm   Items George Orwell, "I like animals," quote. Dennis Collings, Photograph of Orwell feeding Muriel the goat, 1939, UCL Library George Orwell, Domestic diary, May 1939, UCL Library George Orwell, "Impenetrable Mystery," review of Assignment in Utopia by Eugene Lyons, 9 Jun. 1938, New English Weekly, Sonia Brownell Orwell estate T. S. Eliot, letter to Orwell rejecting Animal Farm, 13 Jul. 1944, Faber and Faber, British Library	John Sutherland: George Orwell is famous as a political writer, essayist, thinker and, supremely, novelist. One can easily overlook another consistent feature in Orwell’s life—his desire to be a small-holding farmer of an old-fashioned ‘English’ kind. It crops up in rather odd ways. Living in London during the Second World War, for example, he kept chickens in the backyard (his wife, Eileen, rather resented getting up at dawn, after a night of air-raid alarms to feed them). His longest-lasting residence was a cottage in Wallington, near London, where he kept chickens, goats and geese (a fowl he particularly liked).
Angela Carter: Gothic Literature and The Bloody Chamber   Items Angela Carter, "The Cabinet of Edgar Allan Poe," draft essay on Poe and his short story "The Fall of the House of Usher," c. 1983, Estate of Angela Carter Charles Perrault, "The Fairy Tales of Charles Perrault," translated by Angela Carter, 1977, Estate of Angela Carter Angela Carter, typescript draft of "The Sadeian Woman," c. 1977, Estate of Angela Carter Angela Carter, manuscript notes and drafts of The Bloody Chamber, British Library	Greg Buzwell: Like every great author of Gothic fiction, Angela Carter was blessed with an intensely vivid and extremely dark imagination. Gothic imagery permeates all of her work but nowhere more so than in The Bloody Chamber (1979), a collection of tales that delights in moonlit forests, graveyards, isolated castles, locked rooms, guttering candles and the howling of wolves in the night. The stories in The Bloody Chamber primarily have their origins in fairy tales, but Carter gave these old and much-loved narratives a radical twist, providing a feminist perspective to stories in which the female characters were young, demure and helpless or else old, haggard and witch-like. As Carter commented in her essay ‘Notes from the Front Line’, ‘I am all for putting new wine in old bottles, especially if the pressure of the new wine makes the old bottles explode’. Carter also took inspiration from Gothic literature’s rich heritage, adapting themes and motifs from classic tales of terror and giving them her own uniquely individual slant.
Faces of Frida   Items "Huipil," Appearances Can Be Deceiving, Museo Frida Kahlo Renata Blaisten, "The Blue House," What Was Frida's Life Like?, Collecion Blaisten Didier Schulmann, "Letter to Nickolas Muray,"1939, Frida Kahlo in Paris "Diary page on the meaning of colors," A Peek at Frida Kahlo's Diary, Museo Dolors Olmedo Highlights and Features The Hidden Meanings in Frida Kahlo's Paintings, by Google Arts and Culture, words by Rebecca Fulleylove (Art Camera enables detailed exploration of the works)	Jesús Garcia: It's a true global effort. Frida's name kept coming up as a top contender when we started to think of what artist would be the best to feature in a retrospective. There's so much of her that was not known and could still be explored from an artistic perspective and life experience.
Virginia Woolf: Art, Life and Vision   Items George Charles Beresford, Virginia Woolf, National Portrait Gallery Vanessa Bell, Virginia Woolf, c 1912, National Trust Gisele Freund, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, 1939, IMEC Images Black Book, 1940, Imperial War Museum (a list of people to be arrested and imprisoned in the invasion of Britain by Nazi Germany; both Woolf and her husband are listed) Virginia Woolf, last letter to Vanessa Bell, British Library Virginia Woolf's walking stick, New York Public Library (found in 1941 by Leonard Woolf on the banks of the River Ouse the day Woolf went missing) Highlights and Features Audio Tour Illustrated Timeline "A Room of One's Own" (competition and blog; Inspired by Virginia Woolf’s seminal 1928 essay, A Room of One’s Own, the National Portrait Gallery invites you to share photo portraits of you or friends in the rooms and spaces that mean something to you.) Virginia Woolf and Her Circle at Garsington: Photographs by Lady Ottoline Morrell (taken from the exhibition)	Frances Spalding: This exhibition introduces you to aspects of Virginia Woolf's life and work, more or less in a chronological order, but it also contains awareness of new interests in her work and hopefully introduces things that you won't have heard of before.
Agatha Christie: Unfinished Portrait   Items Photographs of young Agatha Christie at her home Ashfield, Torquay, Devon, c. 1895, Daily Mail, Jul. 2019. Photographs of young Agatha Christie at her home Ashfield, Torquay, Devon, c. 1897, Jersey Evening Post, 3 Jul. 2019. Photograph of young Agatha Christie playing mandolin, c. 1898, The Shorely, Sep. 2019. Photograph of Agatha Christie in dancing class at Torquay, International Agatha Christie Festival, May 2017. Photograph of Agatha Christie surfing, Artnet, 18 Jun. 2015. Bankside Gallery	Alice Graham: In order to put this exhibition together, I worked very closely with the Agatha Christie archive and with Agatha Christie's grandson. It was very important to really understand the character of Agatha and bring that out through the exhibition, so there was a lot of work done in trying to understand her character before we even began. I had the privilege of searching the archive for photographs to represent her entire life and also looking through all her papers, her letters, everything she wrote really, if it's in her private archive to put quotes together with the pictures. So the idea is you feel like Agatha is actually showing you around the exhibition. I've become very fond of Agatha through the process of curating this exhibition. She was such a fun lady, and she's sort of like the grandma we all want really. You know she had this amazing career, but actually, behind the scenes, she was loving and great fun.
Joseph Conrad: Twixt Land and Sea	Katarzyna Jakimiak and Elzbieta Szymanska: The title of the exhibition, derived from a collection of Conrad's short stories Twixt Land and Sea (1912), is meant to serve as a metaphor. However, it does not intend to refer only to life choices of the writer and places where his characters function. The title opens the space between the land and the wide sea for dreams, feelings, moral choices, remembrances and—above all—the art. Conrad will guide you through this realm with fragments of his works and letters.
The Powerful Potato
Football Boots: The Evolution of Soccer in Footwear
Q?rius
Sounds of the Arctic
Tolkien: Maker of Middle Earth

Below are exhibition designs under construction. Share your ongoing project, if you like, and give feedback to other projects being developed. E-mail me your link, notes and comments so I can post them here.

Exhibitions in Progress

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Last updated May 23, 2021