Session 4: Speaker: Professor Robert Eaglestone (Monday 14th March)

'Discourses of Biopolitics, the Human and Mass Murder'

Professor Robert Eaglestone
(Royal Holloway)

Monday 14th March, 6-8pm, Senate House, Room G32

Robert Eaglestone is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is Deputy Director (formerly Director) of the Royal Holloway Holocaust Research Centre, and is the series editor of Routledge Critical Thinkers. He works on contemporary literature and literary theory, contemporary philosophy and on Holocaust and Genocide studies. Robert is particularly interested in issues of ethics, aesthetics and the philosophy of history, and has spent some years working through a series of questions about the legacy of the Holocaust and the Second Word War in these fields. His publications include Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas (Edinburgh University Press, 1997), Doing English (Routledge, 1999; third edition 2009), and The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford University Press, 2004). He has also recently co-edited, with Simon Glendinning, Legacies of Derrida: Literature and Philosophy (Routledge, 2008) and, with Elleke Boehmer and Katy Iddiols, J.M. Coetzee in Context and Theory (Continuum, 2009). He is currently completing a manuscript on the Holocaust and genocide in contemporary literature and culture, as well as a volume of the Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Literary and Cultural Theory (Volume 2: 1966 to Present Day).

All are welcome to attend.

Session 3: Violence (Monday 28th February)

"It is no doubt possible to create conditions under which men are dehumanized ... and, under such conditions, not rage and violence but their conspicuous absence is the clearest sign of dehumanization."

- Hannah Arendt

VIOLENCE

6-8pm, Monday 28th February
Senate House, room 103 (1st floor)

Is violence endemic to the human condition? What role does it play in the contemporary world? Can it ever be justified? And what ethical concerns does it raise for literature, the arts and critical theory?

Our third session this term will be introduced with a 10-minute 'provocation' by Dr Eva Aldea (Westminster and Goldsmiths). Eva's current research focuses on beheadings, including videos of terrorist beheadings. It argues that such violence can be understood as a system of signs, and asks if this is what makes it uniquely human.

The readings are extracts from the following:

• Adriana Cavarero, Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, Trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).
  

• Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (London: Profile, 2009).

All are welcome to attend.

Session 2: Speaker: Professor Derek Attridge (Monday 14th February)

'What Does it Make You Feel?: Responding Affectively to Literature'

Professor Derek Attridge
(University of York)

Monday 14th February, 3-5pm Senate House, room 103 (1st floor)

Derek Attridge has published many influential books on literature and theory, most recently The Singularity of Literature (Routledge, 2004), How to Read Joyce (Granta Books, 2007), and Reading and Responsibility: Deconstruction's Traces (Edinburgh University Press, 2010), as well as the forthcoming co-edited volume Theory After 'Theory' (with Jane Elliot, Routledge, 2010). His interests centre on the language of literature, but radiate in many different directions. Much of his work reflects his long association with the philosopher Jacques Derrida, a selection of whose work he has edited. In The Singularity of Literature, he raises the question of the distinctiveness of literature as a linguistic and social practice, and argues that a crucial element is the response to otherness that characterises both the writing of an inventive literary work and the reading of it as literature. This book is also informed by recent developments in ethics arising from the writings of Emmanuel Levinas. In September 2006 he won an ESSE Book Award for this work.


This session should appeal broadly to students of literature, as well as those from other disciplines with an interest in critical theory.

All are welcome to attend. We hope to see you there!

Literary and Critical Theory Seminar - RELAUNCH

We are pleased to announce that the Literary and Critical Theory Seminar at the Institute of English Studies is being relaunched for the academic year 2010/11. The overarching theme for the Autumn term will be 'Disappointment'. You can find an outline of the term's sessions on the Institute of English Studies' website:

http://www.sas.ac.uk/events/visitor_events.php?page=ies_seminars&func=results&aoi_id=101

Our first session will take place on Wednesday 13th October in room ST276, Stewart House, from 6-8pm. We will be looking at Alain Badiou's Ethics (London: Verso, 2002) and a short extract from Logics of Worlds (London: Continuum: 2009). As optional background reading, we suggest the Introduction to Badiou's Being and Event.

We welcome postgraduate students from all disciplines.