final seminar of the year

Please join us for the final seminar of the year:

Possible and Fictional Worlds

 Professor Jonathan Hart

Durham University

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Wednesday, 30^th May 2012

5:00 – 6:30 pm

Department of English Studies, Hallgarth House Seminar Room

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ABSTRACT

Whereas the possible world of literature, or what Aristotle called poetry, is a fictional world and is a representation of, or alternative to, the actual world, history is about the actual world, no matter how many possibilities it considers and how literary its technique. Even if in theory it is difficult to distinguish between the fictional and historical, the possible and the actual, context does matter, and an event that has actual existence is taken to be different from one that is possible or part of an alternative world. The realized and the putative are experienced differently in practice but are difficult to distinguish in theory.  To understand fictionality, an interdisciplinary approach is necessary. In this context, literary theorists have been interested in fiction, and philosophers have been concerned with the ways fictional texts challenged notions of logic and semantics. This moment of the meeting (sometimes uneasy meeting) of the possible and fictional worlds debate connects with my own interest in the texture and contexture of literary texts as well as the relation between word and world, poetry and history.  Fiction may be a possible impossibility. There is one actual world made of many. Metafictional experiments expand our view of worlds. As a method, which demonstrates variety among its proponents, fictional world theory has expanded our heterogeneous methodology. We now have more tools and choices in coming to terms with actual and possible worlds, with the nature of fiction.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Before joining Department of English Studies, Durham this academic year, Professor Hart taught at University of Alberta, Canada. His teaching and research areas are Shakespeare and Renaissance/early modern studies; comparative literature and comparative history; theory and historiography; colonial and postcolonial studies; Canadian culture; early comparative American studies (especially the ‘Atlantic world').

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

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

Inventions of the Text: Texts in Progress

Please join us for the second Easter Term seminar in the series:

Parental Stories in Dickens's Great Expectations

Professor Rachel Bowlby

UCL

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Wednesday, 9^th May

5:00 – 6:30 pm

Department of English Studies, Hallgarth House Seminar Room

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ABSTRACT

Parenthood is a neglected topic in comparison with other elemental attachments (the passions of childhood or erotic love). But recent radical changes in typical family forms and in procreative possibilities (new reproductive technologies) expose the mutability and multiplicity of 'parentalities', creating new kinds of parental story and new questions about parenthood. Why do people want (or not want) to be parents? How has the 'choice' enabled by contraception changed the meaning of parenthood? Today, the positive choice to seek and have a child as a matter of personal fulfilment is accepted as valid for men as well as women, individuals as well as couples. But there are also antecedents to the contemporary orientation, sometimes in classical
texts where the parental story has up till now been side-lined. This lecture will look at one example of this phenomenon, Dickens's Great Expectations.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Professor Rachel Bowlby is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Northcliffe Professor of English at UCL. She has been awarded a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship from 2011-13.Since Just Looking, which was about novels about women and the culture of department stores, Rachel Bowlby has written several more books on consumer culture, including Carried Away: The Invention of Modern Shopping, about the history of self-service and supermarkets. Shopping with Freud explored some connections between psychoanalysis and consumer psychology, a field of research that began at the same time as psychoanalysis. Two more books have also looked at changing psychological and literary notions of selfhood: Still Crazy After All These Years: Women, Writing and Psychoanalysis and, most recently, Freudian Mythologies: Greek Tragedy and Modern Identities. She also has a long-standing interest in literary theory, and has translated a number of books by contemporary French philosophers, including Derrida’s Of Hospitality and Paper Machine.

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