Spring Term 2013: Session 4

'Caring' for the Environment: Notes Towards a New Materialist Critique

Dr Adeline Johns-Putra

(Surrey)

6-8pm, Wednesday 27th February

Room G35, Senate House, Bloomsbury

This talk offers a theorization of the ethic of care that is often invoked in the name of environmental sustainability and specifically eco-feminism: care for the nonhuman environment enfolded with a concern for our human descendants. I consider this environmentalist ethic of care through the ontological project of new materialism currently associated with the work of Karen Barad and Timothy Morton, among others. Attending to the new materialist tendency to discuss ontology as agency and to conceive of being in terms of becoming, I propose that care too has to be discerned as always becoming, that it is to be considered—to invoke Heidegger—not as ontic but as ontological. And yet, pace Heidegger, I suggest that, in an environmental ethics of care, care is more fruitfully thought of not as a condition for ontology (as in Heidegger’s Sorge or “worry”) but as itself deserving of ontological query. In other words, care is not the means by which agency and action occur; it is itself agential. Such a reconsideration of care has profound implications for current environmental care ethics and its representation in contemporary literature, in which the conceptualisation of care as static, grounded and stable often results in unproductive discussions about who cares more (men or women?) and what objects of care should be prioritized (human or nonhuman? future or current generations? charismatic or uncharismatic? mega or microfauna?).

Suggested preparatory reading

Karen Barad, 'Posthumanist Performativity: Towards an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter', Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 2003, 28.3, 801-831, available

here.

Dr Adeline Johns-Putra is Reader in English Literature and English Subject Leader at the University of Surrey. She is author of Heroes and Housewives: Women’s Epic Poetry and Domestic Ideology in the Romantic Age (Peter Lang, 2001) and The History of the Epic (Palgrave, 2006). Her current research takes her Romanticist interests in another direction, that of landscape and the environment, both in the nineteenth century and in contemporary literature. She was co-investigator, with geographer Professor Catherine Brace, on the AHRC-funded network, ‘Understanding Landscape through Creative Auto-ethnographies’. With Professor Brace, Adeline has co-edited an interdisciplinary volume of essays entitled Process: Landscape and Text (Rodopi, 2010). She is now part of a major interdisciplinary project, funded by the European Social Fund. Called ‘From Climate to Landscape: Imagining the Future’, the project involves ecologists, geographers and literary scholars in comparative analyses of scientific, social and cultural imaginings of climate change. Adeline is currently co-writing a monograph, with Dr. Adam Trexler, on contemporary literary representations of climate change.

All are welcome to attend.

Spring Term 2013: Session 3

LATOURISM:

5 Bruno Latours

In collaboration with the Contemporary Fiction Seminar

5 short papers exploring different aspects of Latour’s thought

6-8 PM, Wednesday 6^th February

Council Chamber, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, Charles Clore House, 17 Russell Square    

Speakers:

Mark Blacklock

Hallvard Haug

Daniel Rourke

Tony Venezia

Andy Weir

All are welcome to attend.

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.

Spring Term 2013: Session 1

 

'Enduring Consolations'

Dr David James

(Queen Mary, University of London)

6-8pm, Wednesday 23rd January

Senate House, Room G35 (Ground Floor)

In a now often-quoted NYRB essay contrasting Joseph O’Neill with Tom McCarthy, Zadie Smith raised a number of concerns about the prevalence of what she termed ‘lyrical realism’ in the novel today, a mode that she herself had previously adopted (in On Beauty) but which nowadays she regards with some suspicion for its susceptibility to nostalgia and for its propensity to comfort readers. This tendency for lyrical realism to offer forms of solace is doubly damaging when the writer in question is dealing with matters of terrorism, war and trauma – as O’Neill does in Netherland. And Smith therefore concluded that while she ‘has written in this tradition and cautiously hope[s] for its survival’, she maintained that ‘if it’s to survive, lyrical realists will have to push a little harder on their subject’. But what does pushing harder entail? Smith seems to suggest that it means refusing what Iris Murdoch famously saw as the false consolations of form – the smoothing away of difficult issues by means of a highly wrought, consciously artistic language. 

This paper returns to Murdoch’s contention, originally set out in ‘Against Dryness’ (1961) in order to call into question those reservations about consolation that appear to unite Murdoch and Smith across time. In re-evaluating both the pertinence and pitfalls of Murdoch’s notoriously schematic distinction between ‘journalistic’ and ‘crystalline’ registers of modern fiction, the talk traces the re-emergence – or what could be described as a ‘renaissance’ – of the latter mode, bringing together writers as different as Paul Harding, Colum McCann, Ian McEwan, and O’Neill himself. Charting their respective renovations of crystalline narration, the paper delineates a shared impulse to synchronize the consolatory force of form with a more interrogative, reflexive, and dynamic sense of fiction’s capacity to stage ethical scenarios and invite politically responsive readings. 

Suggested preparatory reading

Iris Murdoch,  ‘Against Dryness: A Polemical Sketch’ (1961), repr. in The Novel Today, ed. Bradbury (London: Fontana, 1977), 23–31. (Available online here.)

Zadie Smith, ‘Two Directions for the Novel’, in Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2009), 71–96. (Available online here.)

David James teaches modern and contemporary literature in the Department of English at Queen Mary, University of London. He is author of Contemporary British Fiction and the Artistry of Space (2008), and, most recently, of Modernist Futures (Cambridge University Press, 2012). He has edited a volume of essays The Legacies of Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2011), and guest-edited a special issue of Contemporary Literature on ‘Post-Millennial Commitments’ (due out in February). With Matthew Hart and Rebecca L. Walkowitz, he edits the book series Literature Now for Columbia University Press. He is currently editing The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction since 1945. 

All are welcome to attend.

Spring Term 2013: Programme

After an autumn break, the Literary and Theory Seminar is back in January with a full programme of sessions, and we look forward to welcoming an exciting range of speakers:

Wednesday 23rd January (Room G35)

'Enduring Consolations'

Dr David James (QMUL)

Wednesday 30th January (Room G35)

'Problems with Trauma Theory'

Professor Tim Armstrong (RHUL)

Wednesday 6th February (IALS)

'5 Bruno Latours'

Special Session on Bruno Latour (with the Contemporary Fiction Seminar)

Wednesday 27th February (Room G35)

'"Caring" for the Environment: Notes Towards a New Materialist Critique'

Dr Adeline Johns-Putra (Surrey)

Wednesday 20th March (Room 264)

'Are Critical Theories Conspiracy Theories?' (provisional title)

Dr Devorah Baum (Southampton)

All sessions take place from 6-8pm in Senate House, University of London (with the exception of the Bruno Latour session, which will be in Charles Clore House, 17 Russell Square). Wine will be provided.

Further details will be published in advance of each session. All are welcome to attend. We wish all our attendees a happy Christmas and look forward to seeing you in the New Year!

Summer Term: Session 4

Something Lost: Words and the Voiding of Psychic Reality


Professor Josh Cohen

(Goldsmiths, University of London)


6-8pm, Wednesday 30th May
Senate House, Room G26 (Ground Floor)

In this paper, Professor Josh Cohen brings Freud and Blanchot into dialogue by way of the problem of externalization in psychoanalysis and literature. The passage from the thing to the word set out in the Freudian account of becoming conscious is ironically recapitulated in the Blanchotian account of the becoming of literature. A couple of very short stories by Lydia Davis (not coincidentally the translator of the relevant Blanchot essay) will help adumbrate this predicament.

Josh Cohen is Professor of Modern Literary Theory at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of Spectacular Allegories: Postmodern American Writing and the Politics of Seeing (Pluto Press, 1998), Interrupting Auschwitz: Art, Religion, Philosophy (Continuum Guide to Holocaust Studies, 2003), and How to Read Freud (Granta, 2005). He specialises in contemporary literature and philosophy, and is also a practising psychoanalyst. His forthcoming book, The Private Life (Granta, Autumn 2013), explores the pervasive drive in contemporary life to eradicate the fundamental strangeness of the private experience.

Suggested Reading:

- Sigmund Freud, 'The Ego and the Id', Chapter 2. 
- Maurice Blanchot, 'Literature and the Right to Death,' from The Work of Fire. 

Summer Term: Session 3

In conjunction with the Contemporary Fiction Seminar we present....

Theory Shaping Fiction | Fiction Shaping Theory

A panel of research on critical and creative intersections in contemporary fiction, co-organised by the Contemporary Fiction Seminar and the Literary and Critical Theory Seminar.

All Welcome!

Wednesday 23rd May, 6-7.30pm at the Institute of English Studies, The Court Room (Senate House, First Floor)

Papers from:

Mark Blacklock (Birkbeck): “When is an ellipse not an ellipse? Zero-ing in on Tom McCarthy's Men in Space”

Emilia Borowska (Royal Holloway): “‘Then, the world began’: Kathy Acker, Badiou, Deleuze, and the question of political emergence”

And special guest chair: Dr Emily Horton (Brunel/Westminster)

.

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.