Special One-off Seminar: Professor Monika Fludernik

'Stylistic Issues in Dickens From a Cognitive Approach'

Professor Monika Fludernik

(University of Freiburg)

3-5pm, Monday 24 June

Room 246, Senate House, Bloomsbury 

Dickens is one of the foremost craftsmen of English style and uses a wide variety of techniques and devices in his novels. The lecture will look at Dickens' language from a stylistic and cognitive perspective, analysing Dickens'  style from the standpoint of its relevance to perception, cognition and cognitive processes. Among the aspects of Dickens'  language treated there will be metaphor, syntax and tense. Cognitive issues will be examined on the level of the narrator's discourse as well as on the level of characters' psyche.

Monika Fludernik is professor of English literature and culture at the Albert Ludwigs University of Freiburg, Germany, and is renowned for her contribution to the field of literary theory, particularly that of narratology. Her Towards a ‘Natural’ Narratology (1996) was the co-winner of the Perkins Prize of the Society for the Study of Narrative. She won the Landesforschungspreis Baden-Württemberg (State Research Prize) in 2001 and has been a corresponding member of the Austrian Academy of Sciences since 2000 and of the Academia Europaea (London) since 2008. Besides narratology and the linguistic approach to literature, her interests include postcolonial issues, eighteenth-century aesthetics, law and literature, and medieval and Renaissance studies. She is currently working on a study of prison settings and prison narratives. A larger project deals with narrative structure in English literature between 1250 and 1750.

This special event will be the final Seminar of the year. All are welcome to attend.

Summer Term: Session 1

Biosemiotics and the Book of Nature: Realism, Nominalism and Science Beyond Nihilism and Gnostic Earth-Hatred

Professor Wendy Wheeler (London Met)

Image by randomtruth via flick

6-8pm, Wednesday 2nd May, Senate House, Room 264 (2nd Floor)

Wendy Wheeler is Professor of English Literature and Cultural Inquiry at London Metropolitan University. Her research interests are in contemporary fiction, in literary and cultural theory, and in the ways in which these can inform aesthetic, social and political thought. She is also interested in potential meetings between the arts and sciences. In particular, in evolutionary systems theory (‘complexity’), ecocriticism, ecophenomenology, and biosemiotics, as providing new ways of thinking about human knowing and creativity in terms both of philosophical theory and also creative praxis. 

Wendy is on the Editorial Board of New Formations, and is joint journal Editor. She is also on the Advisory Board of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment (ASLE-UKI), and on the Advisory Board of its journal Green Letters. Her next monograph, The Human Telos: Biosemiotics, Creativity, Ecocriticism is forthcoming from Lawrence and Wishart and her recent publications include the edited volume Biosemiotics: Nature/Culture/Science/Semiosis (Open Humanities Press, 2011) and the monograph The Whole Creature: Complexity, Biosemiotics and the Evolution of Culture (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 2006).

Recommended Reading:

 Seminar Handout (updated)

Wendy Wheeler Introduction to Biosemiotics: Nature/Culture/Science/Semiosis