Spring Term 2013: Session 2

'Problems with Trauma Theory'

Professor Tim Armstrong 
(Royal Holloway, University of London)

6-8pm, Wednesday 30th January

Room G35, Senate House, Bloomsbury

Tim Armstrong is Professor of Modern English and American Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. His main research areas are Modernism, American literature, literature and technology, the body (including such areas as sexology, bodily reform, cinema, and sound); and the poetry of Thomas Hardy. He is author of Modernism, Technology and the Body: A Cultural Study (1998), Haunted Hardy: Poetry, History, Memory (2000), Modernism: A Cultural History (2005), and, most recently, a book on slavery as cultural metaphor, The Logic of Slavery: Debt, Technology and Pain in American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012) and is now writing a study of modernist localism. He also has a long-term project on the literature and culture of risk and disaster from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. He co-edits the Edinburgh University Press series Topics in Modernism and co-organizes the London Modernism Seminar. |

 
All are welcome to attend.

Summer Term: Session 2

Dangerous Dead Women and the Practice of Criticism

Professor Catherine Belsey
(Swansea University) 

Wednesday 16th May, 6-8pm
Senate House, Room 104 (First Floor) 

***PLEASE NOTE ROOM CHANGE***

From the Icelandic sagas to The Woman in Black, women may prove more menacing in death than they were permitted to be in life. Are ghost stories concerning the malevolent return of the oppressed best read as evidence of misgivings on the part of a misogynist culture? Or is a deeper anxiety perceptible? And how far are current critical practices open to a genre of fiction that registers a sense of something beyond what culture gives us to know?

 
Catherine Belsey is Professor of English at Swansea University. Her work and influence on the contemporary landscape of literary criticism is such that Textual Practice dedicated a Special Issue to her work (24:6, 2010). She is perhaps best known for her works Critical Practice (Routledge, 1980, 2002) and Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2002), but her extensive body of work encompasses such subjects as Tragedy, Desire, Milton, Shakespeare, Feminism, and Theory. Her most recent books include Culture and the Real: Theorizing Cultural Criticism (Routledge, 2005), Why Shakespeare? (Palgrave, 2007), Shakespeare in Theory and Practice (Edinburgh University Press, 2008), and A Future for Criticism (Blackwell, 2011), in which she proposes a new direction for critical practice that emphasises the pleasures of fiction and the way it engages readers. 

This is a free event. 

All are welcome to attend.