"WHY WE DON'T WRITE POEMS ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE" - MATTHEW GRIFFITHS

Join us for the second of our "The Uses of Literature" series for a talk that explores how climate change is employed to expose age old poetic concerns, and calls for a new account of the cultural significances of this massive anti-glacial effort on the part of humanity.

FIRST SEMINAR: "GENRE AND DISCIPLINE" - ALASTAIR RENFREW

Join us for the first in our "The Uses of Literature" series:

ABSTRACT
Against the background of the ubiquity of ‘interdisciplinarity’ and now endemic concerns about ‘the profession’, this paper seeks, first, to retrace the history of the professionalization of Literary Studies in the twentieth century, proceeding from the rise of so-called Russian Formalism in the Soviet 1920s. The broad purpose of this brief retrospective is to isolate ...certain particular ways in which institutional factors have influenced the evolution of discipline and to highlight the sense in which, for the humanities at least, the cloak of interdisciplinarity has concealed a state of ‘war’. The second part of the paper involves a return to the selected point of origin – ‘Russian Formalism’ – in order to suggest a corrective reconceptualisation of the ways in which humanities disciplines in general might be viewed. This will entail a revisionist view not only of Formalism itself, but also of the ways in which genre has been conceived in Literary Studies. In an echo of the ways in which a Bakhtinian (Barthesian) conception of the ‘war of languages’ implies a re-conceptualisation of literary genre, the objective is to examine how genre can be deployed in order to understand – and defuse – the ‘war of disciplines’.

BIO
Alastair Renfrew taught at the universities of Strathclyde and Exeter before coming to Durham as Reader and Head of Russian in 2007. He is Director of Research in the School of Modern Languages & Cultures and has recently become Editor of the journal Slavonica. His main area of research specialization is critical and literary theory, with particular emphasis on the Soviet 1920s. He has published widely on Mikhail Bakhtin and the so-called Russian Formalists, including the monograph Towards a New Material Aesthetics (Legenda, 2006) and the recent collection Critical Theory in Russia and the West (Routledge 2010). He is currently completing an introduction to Bakhtin for Routledge Critical Thinkers. He has also taught and published on Russian and Soviet Cinema, Russian and Scottish Literature and is currently developing a project on the history of political violence in Russian literature and culture.

MICHAELMAS TERM PROGRAMME

We're delighted to announce the programme of Inventions of the Text events for the upcoming term. All sessions are held at the seminar room at Hallgarth House, Hallgarth Street, Durham. We begin at 6pm, and sessions are generally followed by drinks and discussion afterwards at the Victoria.

Wednesday 20th October 2010 (note amended date)
"Discipline and Genre"
Alastair Renfrew
(School of Modern Language and Cultures, Durham University)

Wednesday 27th October 2010
"Why We Don't Write Poems About Climate Change"
Matthew Griffiths
(Department of English Studies, Durham University)

Wednesday 10th November 2010
"Knowledge in Creative Writing"
Andrew Crumey
(School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, Newcastle University)

Wednesday 1st December 2010
"Wither Deconstruction?... Whither Deconstruction?"
Maebh Long
(Department of English Studies, Durham University)

Speakers later in the series will include Vic Sage (University of East Anglia), Richard Walsh (University of York) and James Annesley (University of Newcastle).

INVENTIONS OF THE TEXT 2010/11: "THE USES OF LITERATURE"

Inventions of the Text is a fortnightly staff-student forum run by postgraduate students from the Department of English Studies at Durham University. It is an opportunity for postgraduate students and staff to present their research in the form of a 20-minute paper, and to contribute to lively discussion on key issues raised.

How to contribute
Please send an email indicating your interest, together with an abstract of 100-200 words to
inventionsofthetext@gmail.com.

"The Uses of Literature"
Our theme for this year’s series is “The Uses of Literature”. Literature and literary study is being forced to justify itself as never before. New higher education funding proposals have brought fears about the effects of socio-economic impact assessment on research in the arts and humanities. Traditional claims for literature as “the best that has been thought or said” have been replaced by a more sceptical attitude about literature’s social and cultural power – its role can now only be provisional. Literary critics and theorists are also in the firing line. The academic Left, it has been argued, is “rotten with theory”. Ever-suspicious, is has been criticised for finding its own gloomy diagnosis in every text – often at the expense of the text itself. Literature as a form of knowledge has apparently been outstripped by the natural and social sciences. What’s more, the future of the book itself is uncertain, with digital media threatening to usurp its old print counterpart.

Inventions of the Text hopes to make a challenging and timely intervention in these debates. We invite papers that reflect on the forms and functions of literature and literary study in its broadest sense. We encourage those that examine the role of literature in its social, cultural and economic contexts and also those that challenge this sense of “crisis”. Should literature have to justify itself at all? Does this emphasis on use value of literature short-change the vital and varied roles of literature in culture?

This year, Inventions of the Text invites you to engage with fundamental questions of why we do what we do.

Topics include, but are by no means limited to:

Prose
The novel in culture
Literary translation & possibilities for a global literature
The novel & the political
Realism & experimentation
Genre mixing & hybrid forms
The novel form in the digital age
New developments in narratology

Poetry
Poetry, creation & value
Poetic knowledge: poetry vs. theory/philosophy
Publishing poetry: the small press & the "little magazine"
Poetry & everyday life
Poetry & the academy

Theory
Literature as literary criticism
Cognition vs. affect
Ideologies of reading
Hermeneutics
Historicism & cultural memory studies

Epiphany Term Programme of Speakers

All seminars start at 6.30 and take place in the Seminar Room at Hallgarth House

Tuesday 26th January Dr. Matthew Bevis (York University) “Counting Tennyson”

Tuesday 9th February Rosie Baker (Russian Dept.) “Internal v. External: A Case of Revolutionary Justice in Lev Kuleshov's 'By the Law' (1926)”

Tuesday 23rd February Stephanie Dumke “Shelley's Relationship to Goethe through the Lens of the Theory of Colours”

Tuesday 9th March Jahnavi Misra “The Idea of Justice in Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss”

Tuesday 16th March Terence H.W. Shih “Cognitive Science: Percy Shelley’s Queen Mab”

Michaelmas Term Programme of Speakers:

All seminars start at 6.30pm

Martin Dubois Tuesday 20^th October (Cambridge):

"Hopkins and The Burden of Security"

Emily Ridge Tuesday 3^rd November (Durham):

"Elizabeth Bowen and The Case of Fiction"

Matthew Hayward Tuesday 17^th November (Durham):

"-isms through Prisms: Lacan, Jameson, Nietzsche and Ulysses"

Donnchadh O’Conaill Tuesday 1^st December (Durham, Philosophy Dept):

"Taming the Wild Profusion of Things: Some Thoughts on the Possibility of Metaphysics"

Natalie Pollard Tuesday 8^th December (York):

"Lyric Violence: An Oppositional Audience with Geoffrey Hill"

New Themes 2009/10

Dear All

Building on the success of the "Inventions of the Text" seminar series, we are currently organising the programme for the academic year 2009-10. We already have several external speakers lined up, and would like to involve as many Durham English Department postgraduates as possible. The seminars provide an excellent forum in which to improve presenting skills, test out ideas, and enjoy stimulating discussions, within the context of a peer group who can offer encouragement, criticism and practical advice. We anticipate a high demand for slots, so if you would like to give a paper, please contact the organisers at inventionsofthetext@gmail.com, sending a title and abstract of 250-400 words. The themes for next year are as follows:

* Theory - "And so the sick mind continues to infinity, creating gaps then dispersing them again, heaping up diverse similarities, destroying those that seem closest, splitting up things that are identical, superimposing different criteria, frenziedly beginning all over again, becoming more and more disturbed, and teetering finally on the brink of anxiety."

Papers are welcome on any related aspect of critical theory, to include:
• genre studies and the liminal text
• periodisation and its relevance to theory
• -isms

* Poetry - "Poetry is that return of the mind upon itself."

Papers are welcome on any related aspect of poetry studies, to include:
• aestheticism and the relationship between art and culture/history
• self-reflection and self-consciousness
• reception theory

* Narrative - "It is clear that a discontinuous structure suits a time of dangers and adventures, [and] that a more continuous linear structure suits a Bildungsroman where the themes of growth and metamorphosis predominate."

Papers are welcome on any related aspect of narratology and prose studies, to include:
• literary structure
• concepts of narrative time
• metamorphosis

Clara Dawson, Eleanor Chatburn, Amy Jordan
Organisers for 2009/10