Inventions of the Text: Texts in Progress

Please join us for the forthcoming seminar featuring two papers on: 

Reading the Internet:

Google and the Decline of Obscurity

John Clegg, English Studies, Durham

&

A work of art in the age of digital reproduction: contemporary limits of literary (mis)appropriation

Kaja Marczewska, English Studies,  Durham

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23^rd May 2012

5:00- 6:30

Department of English Studies, Hallgarth House, Hallgarth St., Durham

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ABSTRACTS:

Google and the Decline of Obscurity

The rise of Google over the last decade has led to a substantial change in how we approach and apprehend poetry. My paper examines this change through the prism of George Steiner’s work on ‘contingent’ and ‘ontological’ difficulty. How has contingent difficulty been employed by poets over the last century, and for what purposes? How have readers responded, and how will the practice of reading change in an era in which contingent difficulty continues to decline? And what does Geoffrey Hill make of all this?

BIO

John Clegg is a PhD student in the Department of English at Durham, working on the Eastern European context of several contemporary English poets. His first poetry collection, Antler, was published by Salt in May 2012.

A work of art in the age of digital reproduction: contemporary limits of literary (mis)appropriation

This paper looks at the influence new technologies have on the way we currently approach concepts of originality, appropriation and plagiarism. Does the ease of accession and appropriating information online shift our understanding of what it means to plagiarise? Or are the margins of what is considered a creative activity gradually expanded to include the artistic potential the Internet offers? The talk will focus on two recent literary controversies, Michelle Houellebecq’s The Map and the Territory (2010) and Helene Hegemann’s Axolodtl Roadkill (2010), to address these questions and offer an overview of the contemporary legal an literary debate on limits (of lack of thereof) of textual appropriation/adaptation/plagiarism.

BIO

Kaja Marczewska is a PhD student in the Department of English at Durham. Her research is funded by Durham Doctoral Scholarship and focuses on concepts of authorship, originality and plagiarism in contemporary literature.

Forthcoming seminars in the series:

30 May: Professor Jonathan Hart (Durham University)

CANCELLED: 6 June: Dr Sarah Wasson (Edinburgh Napier University) [please note that due to unforeseen circumstances this seminar had to be cancelled.]

For more information, find us on facebook, follow us on Twitter (@inventionsSem) or check our blog: inventionsofthetext.blogspot.com

Professor Laura Marcus on Writing in the Cinema

Please join us for the final Epiphany Term seminar in the series:

Writing in the Cinema

 Professor Laura Marcus

Oxford University


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Tuesday, 13^th March 2012

4:30 – 6:00 pm

Elvet Riverside, ER149

ABSTRACT

This talk examines the ways in which the representation of authorship in film bears on the relationship between the visual and the verbal, the image and the word, which has been the ground of longstanding aesthetic debate. It looks at films and texts in which the transition between book and film, word and image, is foregrounded, thematically and through formal strategies. In a significant number of recent films, the writer, and often the screen writer, becomes a central figure, creating or created by his or her verbal/textual imaginings. This bears on the question of the primacy of the word or the image in cinema, and on the relationship between the word and the filmic world. The paper illustrates this discussion with examples from a range of films, including early Dickens' adaptations, Smoke (scripted by Paul Auster), and the recent film Howl.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

 Laura Marcus is Goldsmiths' Professor of English Literature at Oxford and a Fellow of New College. She has published widely in the fields, of auto/biography, modernist literature and culture, and literature and film. Her book publications include Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice; Virginia Woolf: Writers and their Work, The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period, and, as co-editor, The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature.

Forthcoming seminars in the series:

26 April: Dr Peter Howarth (Queen Mary, University of London)        

9 May: Professor Rachel Bowlby (UCL)

23 May: John Clegg (Durham University) and Kaja Marczewska (Durham University)

30 May: Professor Jonathan Hart (Durham University)

6 June: Dr Sarah Wasson (Edinburgh Napier University)

For more information, find us on facebook, follow us on Twitter (@inventionsSem) or check our blog: inventionsofthetext.blogspot.com