Student profiles
Rupert Smith
Twitter: @RupSmit
Email: r.smith28@lancaster.ac.uk
Website: https://www.linkedin.com/in/rupert-smith-actor-writer/
Thesis Title
Institution
Supervisors
Prof. John Schad
Prof. Alison Findlay
Research Summary
My creative writing project is an experimental hybrid novel written within the cracks of Shakespeare’s King Lear; it is a creative-critical piece fascinated by the complexities of genre-fluid fiction as a container for poetics, and tests the boundaries of generic literary conventions of prose, poetry, and all that lies between: memoir, monologue, autofiction, vignette, and reportage.
Research Interests
As a writer/performer, my interests bridge the gap between silence and the possibility of speech (written and oral/performative), and how we recount personal history in the face of trauma; this extends to absence, disappearance, and exile, giving voice to those ‘unwritten’ through creative risk-taking; ‘cultural poetics’: tracking what might be glimpsed at the margins of writing; how new mythologies may be derived from ancient texts; King Lear and the environmental humanities.
Publications
Conference Papers:
GCRE 2023, Earth’s Lamentation: Ecological Grief and the Paradox of Hope, Yale University, March 2023
Errant Symposium, ‘Decentering and Disorientation in Shakespeare’s King Lear’, Lancaster University, April 2023
Radical Creative Writing Symposium, ‘Infinite Textualities Always on the Move’, University of Salford, June 2023
Performance:
Hidden Door Festival – ‘Houseless Poverties and Unfed Sides’ (Spoken Word), Edinburgh, June 2023