Session 5: Environmental Disappointment (Wednesday 8th December)

Our next session will take place on Wednesday 8th December in room G35 in Senate House from 6-8pm. We will be looking at two extracts focusing on responses to ecological issues, one from Politics of Nature: How to bring the Sciences into Democracy (2004) by Bruno Latour and one from The Politics of Climate Change (2009) by Anthony Giddens.

Politics of Nature (London & Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004).

The Politics of Climate Change (London: Polity Press, 2009).

As optional further reading, Latour includes a very short section at the end of the book entitled 'Summary of the Argument (for Readers in a Hurry...).'

We welcome postgraduates from all disciplines.

Session 4: Speaker: Dr Simon Glendinning (Wednesday 24th November)

For our next session, we are thrilled to welcome as a guest speaker Dr Simon Glendinning (LSE), who will be giving a talk entitled 'The Deepest Wounds: On Blows to Narcissism'.

The session will take place on Wednesday 24th November in room G35, Senate House, between 6 and 8pm. All are welcome to attend.

Simon is Reader in European Philosophy at the London School of Economics, and Director of the LSE Forum for European Philosophy. He realised he could make a career in philosophy when he spent two hours successfully untangling the twisted strings of a stunt kite. Wittgenstein says that 'philosophy unties knots in our thinking; hence its results must be simple, but philosophizing has to be as complicated as the knots it unties'. Simon has a BPhil and a DPhil in Philosophy from Oxford University and has been exploring knots for a living since 1994. He is still not clear whether philosophy is a complicated education for grown-ups or just a simple occupation for grown-ups who never made it beyond childhood.

DVD Screening: 'Democracy and Disappointment: Alain Badiou and Simon Critchley in Conversation' (Monday 15th November)

We are holding an extra session on Monday 15th November, during which we will be screening Democracy and Disappointment: Alain Badiou and Simon Critchley in Conversation. This will be followed by a short discussion. The session will take place in room G35, Senate House, from 6-8pm. All are welcome to attend.

Session 3: The Politics of Disappointment (Wednesday 10th November)

Our next session will take place on Wednesday 10th November in room ST276, Stewart House, from 5.30-7.30pm (please note the slightly earlier than usual start time). We will be looking at two extracts by Simon Critchley: one from Infinitely Demanding (2007), and one from the Preface, Preamble, and Introduction to Very Little... Almost Nothing (second edition, 2004). You can download the extracts by following the links below:

Infinitely Demanding (London: Verso, 2008)

Very Little... Almost Nothing (Oxford: Routledge, 2005)

As optional further reading, we also suggest 'Lecture 1' of Very Little... Almost Nothing, entitled 'Il y a', which is avalable for download below:

'Lecture 1: 'Il y a''

We welcome postgraduate students from all disciplines.

Session 2: Professor Andrew Gibson (Wednesday 27th October)

For our second session of the year, we are delighted welcome as a guest speaker Professor Andrew Gibson (Research Professor of Modern Literature and Theory, Royal Holloway, University of London), who will be presenting a paper entitled 'Intermittency and Disappointment: Jambet, Rimbaud and the Melancholic-Ecstatic Conception of Historical Time'.

The session will take place on Wednesday 27th October in room G34, Senate House, from 6-8pm. All are welcome to attend.

Professor Gibson is the author of a number of books on contemporary theory and fiction, including Beckett and Badiou: The Pathos of Intermittency (Oxford University Press, 2006), Joyce's Revenge: History, Politics and Aesthetics in Ulysses (Oxford University Press, 2002; paperback 2005), and Postmodernity, Ethics and the Novel: From Leavis to Levinas (Routledge, 1999), as well as two volumes in Reaktion's A Critical Life series: one on Joyce (2006) and one on Beckett (2010). He was recently elected to the Conseil Scientifique of the Collège International de Philosophie at the Université de Paris. The Collège was founded in 1983, by Jacques Derrida among others, and has been much associated with names that include Jean-François Lyotard and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Current directors include Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin. He will serve for the next three years.

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.

Fourth Session: Criticism and Crisis

Our fourth session will take place on Thursday 25th March in room GSB2, 2 Gower Street, between 1 and 3pm. We will be looking at an extract from Slavoj Žižek's First As Tragedy, Then As Farce (London: Verso, 2009).

Discussion points will be as follows:

- Is it ideology, stupid?

- Within global capitalism, is choice ever choice at all?

- 'The best indicator of the Left's lack of trust in itself is its fear of crisis.' Do you agree?

- How can critical theory and/or literature respond to crisis?

Third Session: Ecocriticism

Our third session will take place on Thursday 11th March in room GSB2, 2 Gower Street, between 1 and 3pm. The texts that we will be discussing are as follows:

- Chapter 1 of Ursula K. Heise's Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

- Hubert Zapf's chapter, "The State of Ecocriticism and the Function of Nature as Cultural Ecology", in Catrin Gerstof and Sylvia Mayer (eds), Nature in Literary and Cultural Studies: Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2006).

The questions for this week's discussion are as follows:

What is ecocriticism?

Is there an over-emphasis on the concept of 'interconnectedness' in ecocriticism?

Is Heise right to suggest 'eco-cosmopolitanism' as a way of re-envisioning globalisation from an ecological perspective?

Is Heise's idea of 'deterritorialisation' the solution to the problem of the global versus the local in ecocriticism? What does this mean for literature?