Inventions of the Text 2012-3

We are currently organising the series for 2012-3. More details will be posted soon.

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

Dr Peter Howarth,Queen Mary,University of London speaking about New Modernist Studies

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

New Modernist Studies

 Dr Peter Howarth

Queen Mary, University of London

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Thursday, 26^th April 2012

5:00 – 6:30 pm

Department of English Studies, Hallgarth House Seminar Room

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ABSTRACT

Recent surveys of the 'New Modernist Studies' all confirm that one of its major trends is to attack the usual oppositions between an autonomous, formally distinctive modernist work and the cultural setting of modernity. The 'New Modernist Studies' has repeatedly shown how so-called rebellious works depend on the market and the mass media, and that the dynamics which used to privilege the work against its 'background' are actually visible in the general field of modern life. In this light, modernist form no longer looks as distinctive or interesting as it once did. Frank Kermode's Romantic Image (1957) was one of the first books to turn against New Critical accounts of modernist form, by arguing that the would-be autonomous modernist 'image' was subtly complicit with the alienated cultural conditions it was supposedly resisting. But the way in which his argument is framed suggests that a residue of organicist thinking is also present in the anti-formalism of the 'New Modernist Studies'. This paper will suggest that Kermode's theatrical model offers an alternative to both; the idea that modernist form might be making art from the cultural conditions of its mediation, circulation and distribution.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Peter Howarth is Senior Lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of British Poetry in the Age of Modernism (CUP, 2005) and The Cambridge Introduction to Modernist Poetry (2011).

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

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

Third seminar of the term!

 The Enemy Within: The Function of the Witch-Queen in Old Norse Literature

David Varley, Durham University

 22nd February 2012
5:00 - 6:30
Hallgarth House Seminar Room 

ABSTRACT

The paper will examine Old Norse presentations of the witch who is married into a royal family: she is culturally 'other' yet brings her alien power into the centre of society, and her actions serve to weaken or destroy the royal dynasty and the community that surrounds it. The focus will be on the figures of Drífa, Hvít, Snæfríðr and Gunnhildr in Ynglinga saga, Hrólfs saga kraka and Haralds saga hárfagra, but other material will be drawn in.

It will be demonstrated how the literary representation of the Witch-Queen reflects the anxieties of society, including the non-royalist society of commonwealth Iceland, concerning masculine authority and feminine challenges to it. The paper will examine the manner in which the situation of an ideal royal bride is inverted: rather than being a powerful support for the king and a provider of heirs, the Witch-Queen saps his power, enfeebles his masculinity and weakens his line. She is a literary creation that acknowledges the vulnerability of masculine dynastic hopes and serves as a means of expressing the negative possibilities of the complex sexual politics surrounding royal power. It will, furthermore, be demonstrated that the evolution of her character can be traced back to the trollish figures of the Norse mythic background. It will be argued, in conclusion, that the solution offered by the literature is that a king must be in a position of sexual liberation and dominance in order to resist successfully the influence of what the Witch-Queen represents.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

 David Varley is a PhD student working in the field of Old Norse. He received a BA (First Class) in English Language and Literature from the University of Leeds in 2009, when he was also awarded the Canon Purvis Prize for gaining the highest overall third-year score among students in the School of English. In 2010 he received an MA (Distinction) in Medieval and Renaissance Literary Studies from the Department of English Studies, Durham University, where he was awarded the McKinnell Prize for the highest achieving medievalist at Masters level.

David's undergraduate dissertation examined the use of animal symbols in conceptualising aspects of death in Eddic poetry and saga literature, and his MA dissertation examined the representation, function and impact of regal witches in saga literature. Building on these studies, at PhD level he is working more widely on the representation and negotiation of female power in Old Norse texts, with special emphasis on the fornaldarsögur (sagas of ancient times) and konungarsögur (kings' sagas). In particular he is seeking to establish connections between the scenarios of mythological material and the construction of social reality in the sagas.

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Forthcoming seminars in the series: 22 February: David Varley (Durham University)
13 March: Professor Laura Marcus (University of Oxford)
26 April: Dr Peter Howarth* (Queen Mary, University of London)

*PLEASE NOTE CHANGE OF DATE!
9 May: Professor Rachel Bowlby (UCL)
23 May: John Clegg (Durham University) and Kaja Marczewska (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
To contribute a paper, please email: inventionsofthetext@gmail.com