‘Are You Local?’: Alienation in The League of Gentlemen
By Dr Eileen Pollard
This paper (link below) utilises the ideas behind Bertolt
Brecht’s alienation device (Verfremdungseffekt)
to explore how The League of Gentlemen
challenges contemporary constructions of the ‘local’. It considers the link
between the discomfort of alienation for audiences and the impossible position
the local occupies in British culture now. Through analysing the strange and
estranging inhabitants of Royston Vasey in the television series, I consider
how this grotesque representation of the local prompts a re-evaluation of it as
a positive force.
Several scenes concerning the ‘Local Shop’ are used to demonstrate how both the local and the ‘outside world’ are simultaneously made strange in order to thwart audience expectations; even, or perhaps especially, those established by the series itself.
I conclude with the suggestion that by distancing the audience from the local, The League of Gentlemen instigates a rethinking of any assumption of it as grounded. Instead, its political, economic and cultural construction is one that alienation helps to expose.
To listen to the paper:
Several scenes concerning the ‘Local Shop’ are used to demonstrate how both the local and the ‘outside world’ are simultaneously made strange in order to thwart audience expectations; even, or perhaps especially, those established by the series itself.
I conclude with the suggestion that by distancing the audience from the local, The League of Gentlemen instigates a rethinking of any assumption of it as grounded. Instead, its political, economic and cultural construction is one that alienation helps to expose.
To listen to the paper:
Citation:
Eileen Pollard, ‘“Are You Local?”: Alienation in The League of Gentlemen’, Notes on Literature: For Readers and Writers, www.notesonliteraturechester.blogspot.co.uk [accessed Day Month Year].
About the Author:
Dr Eileen Pollard is Lecturer in English, Department of English, University of Chester. She is programme leader of MRes Storytelling.
On BA (Hons) English Literature, she teaches/lectures on the modules: Studying Literature; Approaches to Literature; Contemporary Literature; Fiction; Reading Contemporary Fiction and Film Through Theory; Chester Retold; Renaissance Literature; Modernism and After; Dissertation.
On MA Modern and Contemporary Fiction, she teaches on the modules: Novel Histories; Popular Fiction; Research Methods.
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