University of St Andrews
English Research Seminar Series
Paper Titles and Abstracts
Semester 2 2008/09
Wednesday 25th February
Don Paterson (St Andrews University)
‘The Empty Image: A New Model of the Poetic Trope’
Recent developments in cognitive science and linguistics mean that we must radically reassess our old ways of thinking about poetic metaphor and metonymy. DP will propose a new model for their discussion and analysis, and suggest that 'the image' no longer has a place in our critical vocabulary.
Don Paterson is a Reader in Creative Writing at the University of St Andrews. He was born and schooled in Dundee, where he was employed as Creative Writing Fellow at the University from 1993 to 1995. He has worked as a writer, guitarist, and composer, and has been Poetry Editor at Picador/Macmillan since 1997. His collections of poetry include Nil Nil (1993), God's Gift to Women (1997), and Landing Light (2003); he has also published two collections of aphorisms, The Book of Shadows (2004) and The Blind Eye, and two books of translated versions - The Eyes (1999), after the poetry of Antonio Machado, and Orpheus (2006), after Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus.
Wednesday 4th March
Dr Shafquat Towheed (Open University)
‘Vernon Lee’s Scientific Reading and Response: Evidence for Marginalia and Commonplace Books.’
The author of over 40 books on a range of subjects from aesthetics to music, and from fiction to literary criticism, the Anglo-Florentine novelist and critic Vernon Lee (pseud. Violet Paget, 1856-1935) was responsible for introducing the term empathy into English literary usage and was widely considered to be one of the leading public intellectuals of her era. But Lee was not just a remarkably prodigious writer; she was also an exceptionally voracious reader, and for much of her life, she kept a meticulous record of her own reading. She read in four European languages (English, French, German and Italian) and in an impressively wide range of disciplines: literature, philosophy, aesthetics, art history, history, economics, religion, politics, music and anthropology, but perhaps most importantly, she read both intensively and extensively in a wide range of scientific subjects – psychology, evolutionary science, biology, genetics and eugenics, scientific methodology, and the ethics and philosophy of science.
As well as keeping 12 volumes of commonplace books recording considered responses to her reading during the period 1887-1900 (often as the first step towards a published response), and 26 volumes of pocket notebooks covering the years from 1926-1935, Lee was also an extraordinary annotator of books that she owned. Of the c.430 books in her library that survive (housed in the British Institute in Florence), over 300 are marked, many with detailed and highly involved marginal glosses that constitute a considerable investment in the act of reading and/or re-reading. This paper will explore the evidence of reading, close engagement and response of scientific writing offered by these remarkably rich records. Drawing upon this extraordinary archival resource and the data from it currently being entered into the Reading Experience Database, this paper will offer an overview of Lee’s reading of scientific books, closely examine some of the extant evidences of reading, map the range of her scientific reading in the period, and draw together some tentative conclusions (including trends) from the collated data. In doing so, I want to draw our attention once again to the centrality of reading scientific works in Lee’s intellectual life. Reading in scientific fields enriched Lee’s knowledge and thinking not just in science itself, but also, I will argue, in her critical conceptualisation in a wider range of other non-scientific fields.
Dr Shafquat Towheed is Lecturer in English at the Open University, where he is also Project Supervisor for The Reading Experience Database, 1450-1945 (RED). He is the editor of The Correspondence of Edith Wharton and Macmillan, 1901-1930 (Palgrave, 2007), of New Readings in the Literature of British India, c.1780-1947 (Ibidem Verlag, 2007), of the forthcoming Broadview Edition of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four (2009), and with Mary Hammond, co-editor of Publishing in the First World War: Essays in Book History (Palgrave, 2007). He is the current chair of the SHARP DeLong Book History Prize committee, and is presently writing a book on Vernon Lee’s reading. With Katie Halsey and Rosalind Crone, he is editor of the forthcoming The History of Reading in Routledge’s Readers in Literature series.
Wednesday 11th March
Professor Lukas Erne (Université de Genève)
‘The Popularity of Shakespeare in Print.’
The Shakespeare reception of the last quarter century has emphasised the view of Shakespeare as a consummate ‘man of the theatre’. As a result, thanks to the work of Andrew Gurr, Roslyn Knutson, Richard Dutton and others, we have a fairly clear sense today of Shakespeare’s place within the theatrical culture of his own time. Yet while we know much about ‘the Shakespearean stage’, we still lack a fully contextualised history of the ‘Shakespearean page’, a history, that is, which places Shakespeare squarely within the textual and bibliographical culture of his own time. This paper proposes to investigate one component of such a history by assessing the popularity of Shakespeare in print during and shortly after his lifetime.
Professor Lukas Erne is Professor and Chair of the English Department at the University of Geneva. He has taught at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, the University of Neuchâtel, and, as Visiting Professor, at Yale University. He is the author of Shakespeare’s Modern Collaborators (Continuum, 2008), Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge UP, 2003) and Beyond ‘The Spanish Tragedy’: A Study of the Works of Thomas Kyd (Manchester UP, 2001), and the editor of The First Quarto of Romeo and Juliet (Cambridge UP, 2007) and Textual Performances: The Modern Reproduction of Shakespeare’s Drama (Cambridge UP, 2004).
Thursday 12th March
Professor Stuart Sillars (University of Bergen)
‘Illustrating Shakespeare.’
TBA
Wednesday 18th March
Professor Robert Eaglestone (Royal Holloway University of London)
‘The Holocaust and the ‘Public Secret’.’
Hannah Arendt to Karl Jaspers, 1947: ‘What, after all, has in the meantime become more natural and obvious than to ask every German we meet: Which of us did you murder?’
Jaspers to Arendt: ‘Most Germans, 99.9%, did not commit such murders, not even in their thoughts. However, as we sometime experience here, the fact that so many of the 0.1% are still among us can lead us, when we are physically face to face with an unfamiliar person, to ask that hidden question.’
Arendt to Jaspers: ‘You say 0.1% at most. Perhaps I am completely mistaken, but that strikes me as a very small percentage and would correspond to 70,000 people….’
This debate over percentages turns really over the issue of ‘the public secret’, what is known but not said. The aim of this paper is to investigate the theoretical structure of this, and to show, that, perhaps, it is made more clearly manifest in the arts, especially in literature. Two cases spring to mind: Ishiguro’s/ Never Let me go/ and Coetzee’s/ The Lives of Animals/. Both these draw, implicitly, on the Holocaust, and illuminate the context of these genocidal events as well as our contemporary experiences. Both of these, as well as Arendt’s and other’s reflections on Nazism reveal how the public secret both shapes and deforms the ‘public sphere’.
Professor Robert Eaglestone is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought at Royal Holloway, University of London, where he is Director of Royal Holloway’s Holocaust Research Centre. He is the author and editor of several books and articles on British and European literature, literary theory and philosophy as well as on the Holocaust and other genocides. His work has been translated into five languages. He is the Editor of the Routledge Critical Thinkers series. He is currently a Fellow-in-Residence of the Flemish Academic Centre for Science and the Arts.
2pm Wednesday 25th March
Professor Laura Marcus (Edinburgh University)
‘Symphonies of the Modernist City’
This talk explores the relationship between the literary and filmic 'city symphonies' of the 1920s, with a particular focus on the work of Virginia Woolf, and on two films of the 1920s: Strand and Sheeler’s 'Manhatta' and Joris Ivens' 'Regen' ('Rain'). It looks at the significance of 'rhythm' in Woolf's writings on city and cinema, and at the ways in which film-makers incorporated poetry into their city films.
Laura Marcus is Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature at Edinburgh University. A specialist of early cinema as well as English literature, she is author of:
Auto/biographical Discourses: Theory, Criticism, Practice (1994); Virginia Woolf: Writers and their Work (1997, new edition 2004) and The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period (2007). She has edited a number of volumes, including (with Lynda Nead) The Actuality of Walter Benjamin (1993/1998); (with James Donald and Anne Friedberg) Close Up 1927-1933: Cinema and Modernism (1998); Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams: New Interdisciplinary Essays (1999); Mass-Observation as Poetics and Science (2001) and (with Peter Nicholls) The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature (2005).
Wednesday 15th April
Professor Simon Jarvis (Cambridge University)
‘How To Do Things With Tunes: Alexander Pope and the prosodic intelligence’
The talk investigates the paradox that the single obvious feature conferring superiority upon Pope over all his contemporary rivals was his matchless excellence in versification; yet that such excellence was often declared to be among the poet's less important accomplishments. It will argue that it is a mistake to take such declarations at face value, and suggest both that a powerful disavowal of the supposedly merely 'mechanical' parts of poetry-making was at work in early eighteenth-century critical talk, and that such disavowals have survived into our understanding of Pope's verse today. Instead this paper will start from the principle that technique is how art thinks. It will attempt to develop an account of Pope's 'prosodic intelligence' as a mode of (pleasurable) thinking in its own right.
Wednesday 22nd April
Professor Kay Redfield Jamison (John Hopkins University)
‘The Consequences of Writing a Memoir about Madness’
Memoir writing is interesting not only for the process involved, but for the predictable and not so predictable consequences of the public exposure which follows. Writing a memoir about madness, especially if one is a professor of psychiatry, has additional consequences. Responses to "An Unquiet Mind" were many and complicated: from colleagues, they ranged from compassion and encouragement to criticism and silence. Students and professionals with mental illness expressed a deep level of concern about the consequences of seeking treatment or talking openly with their clinical supervisors or professors. Public response ranged from support and appreciation to religious and political tirades.
Professor Kay Redfield Jamison is Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and co-director of the Johns Hopkins Mood Disorders Center. She is also Honorary Professor of English at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She is co-author of the standard medical text on manic-depressive illness, which was chosen in 1990 as the most outstanding book in biomedical sciences by the American Association of Publishers, and author of Touched with Fire, An Unquiet Mind, Night Falls Fast, and Exuberance. Dr. Jamison has written more than 100 scientific articles about mood disorders, suicide, creativity, and lithium. Her memoir, An Unquiet Mind, which chronicles her own experience with manic-depressive illness, was cited by several major publications as one of the best books of 1995. It was on The New York Times bestseller list for five months and translated into twenty languages. Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide was a national bestseller and selected by The New York Times as a Notable Book of 1999. Her most recent book, Exuberance: The Passion for Life, was selected by TheWashington Post, The Seattle Times,and The San Francisco Chronicle as one of the best books of 2004 and by Discover magazine as one of the best science books of the year. Dr. Jamison is the recipient of numerous national and international scientific awards, including a MacArthur Award.
Wednesday 29th April
Professor Michael Alexander (Honorary Professor, St Andrews)
The George Jack Memorial Lecture
'Poetic Language in T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets’
‘Let me disclose the gifts reserved for age
To set a crown upon your lifetime's effort.’
An examination of the poetic forms and linguistic strategies which Eliot adopted for his last major poem. The lecture will refer closely to the text of Four Quartets, and will be illustrated by readings of the poem recorded by Eliot in 1946.
Michael Alexander was Berry Professor of English Literature at the University of St Andrews from 1985 to 2003. He is known for his Penguin verse translations of Old English poetry, and for A History of English Literature (2nd edn 2007). Yale University Press published his Medievalism: The Middle Ages in Modern England in 2007.
Thursday 7th May
Professor John Kerrigan (Cambridge)
Andrew Lang Lecture
‘Shakespeare, Oaths and Vows’
The language-world of early modern England was thick with oaths and vows, from casual profanity in taverns to the solemn undertakings of those marrying or accepting public office. Moralists urged the seriousness of oaths, casuists advised on how to undo them. There were religious, legal, and philosophical debates about what it meant to swear and how firmly one should keep a promise. The literature of the time reflects the prevalence of oaths and vows and the arguments about their status. But Shakespeare was exceptional in the density, depth and subtlety with which he explored these issues. His plays and poems are full of oaths and vows doing structural, psychological and verbally minute, inventive work. This lecture will seek to rectify scholarly neglect of the topic, highlighting Shakespeare's awareness of the paradoxes of oath-taking and vowing and their potency in performance. The aim is not just to elucidate a key element of his artistry but to understand more fully his general construction of human experience.
Professor John Kerrigan is Professor of English 2000 at the University of Cambridge. Among his books are Revenge Tragedy: Aeschylus to Armageddon (1996), which won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism, and Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603-1707 (2008). He is currently completing a book on British and Irish poetry since the 1960s.