Below is a list of Centre for Modern European Literature events for the 2012-13 academic year.
Autumn 2012 lecture series: ‘Cultural Pathologies’
Convened by Dr Larry Duffy and Dr Patricia Novillo-Corvalán
This research-seminar series, ‘Cultural Pathologies’, was organised by Dr Larry Duffy (French) and Dr Patricia Novillo-Corvalán (Comparative Literature). The series aimed to explore intersections between literature, other forms of cultural expression, and medical practice and discourse, and the way in which the interdisciplinary dialogues they generate can contribute to the burgeoning disciplinary field of Medical Humanities. Interconnections between the cultural and the pathological, literature and medicine, and art and healing raise questions concerning the practice of medicine and the contexts in which it operates, and, in particular, provide grounds for the interrogation of the cultural representation of, and engagement with, the subject of illness, medical discourses, and ground-breaking advances in medical science.
Through productive conversations across disciplines, the series sought to explore ways in which illness and medicine are culturally represented and mediated, to examine critical responses to cultural production informed by insights from various branches of medicine, and to discuss the operation of specific discourses of the pathological which have become dominant in the wider culture and society. In anatomising these multiple intersections, the series aimed to promote debate, discussion, collaboration, and further research in this emerging area of study. For further information on the ‘Cultural Pathologies’ series, please contact the convenors: Dr Patricia Novillo-Corvalán or Dr Larry Duffy.
Thursday 11 October 2012: Dr Hannah Thompson (Royal Holloway, University of London), ‘Monsters or Metaphors? Speaking Disability in Nineteenth-Century France’
Thursday 25 October 2012: Dr Emily T. Troscianko (St John’s College, Oxford), ‘The Art and Science of Hunger in Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist”’
Thursday 8 November 2012: Dr Laura Salisbury (Birkbeck, University of London), ‘Fictions of the Brain’
Thursday 29 November 2012: Prof. Rodrigo Quian Quiroga (University of Leicester), ‘Borges and Memory’
Thursday 6 December 2012: Dr Caitriona NiDhuil (University of Durham), ‘Tropes of Dyspepsia: Digestive Figures from Nietzsche to Bachmann’
Thursday 13 December 2012: Prof. Nicholas Saul (University of Durham), ‘Universal Acid: Evolutionary Theory, Literature, and the Limits of a Cognitive Metaphor’
Spring and summer 2013 lecture series: ‘New Staff Series’
convened by Dr Thomas Baldwin and Prof. Shane Weller
Thursday 7 February 2013: Dr Ian Cooper, ‘Les Murray and the Poetry of the Image: Hegel, Barthes, Caravaggio’
Thursday 21 February 2013: Dr Lucy O’Meara, ‘Oulipo and the Uses of Crime Fiction: Georges Perec and Anne Garétta’
Thursday 7 March 2013: Dr Marine Ganofsky, ‘The Libertine Art of Love: An Aesthetics of Suspension’
Thursday 21 March 2013: Dr Katja Haustein, ‘How to Say the You I Love: Roland Barthes’
Thursday 28 March 2013: Dr Heide Kunzelmann, ‘Reading H. C. Artmann with Henri Lefebvre: Protean Tendencies in Post-War (A)Materialist Aesthetics’
Thursday 4 April 2013: Dr Raffaello Palumbo, ‘Notes on Hybrid Novels and Ethical Discourse’
Thursday 16 May 2013: Dr Deborah Holmes (University of Kent), ‘Arthur Schnitzler in Translation: The Viennese Tale’
Thursday 30 May 2013: Dr Francesco Capello (University of Kent), ‘Mirror Cities: Subjectivity and Urban Space in Italian Primo Novecento Literature’
Wednesday 15 May: Prof. Martin Puchner (Harvard University), ‘World Literature and the Creation of Literary Worlds’
Thursday 6 June 2013: Dr Emma Wagstaff (University of Birmingham), ”Time in the Poetry of André du Bouchet’
Wednesday 12 June 2013: Prof. Sarah Colvin (University of Warwick), ‘The Point of Literature, in and outside Prisons’
Postgraduate Research Seminar Series, 2012-13
Convened by Edlira Mandis
This series is designed to highlight the work of our doctoral students.
Thursday 17 January 2013: Edlira Mandis (French), ‘The Broken Bank of My Face-Wall: Abjection and the Kleinian Metaphor of Maternal Containment’
Thursday 31 January 2013: Mathilde Poizat-Amar (French), ‘Walking, Drifting, Writing: The Travels of Victor Segalen and Albert Londres’
Thursday 28 February 2013: Eléonore Sibourg (French), ‘Viral Fantasies: The Example of Syphilis as an Aesthetic Disease in the Work of Huysmans’
Thursday 14 March 2013: Joanne Pettitt (Comparative Literature), ‘Unlucky Devils?: Some Considerations of Moral Luck in Literary Representations of Holocaust Perpetration’
Thursday 9 May 2013: Patricia Hodges (French), ‘Sexual Difference in the Post-Freudian Literary Text’
Thursday 23 May 2013: Nina Rolland (Comparative Literature), ‘Women Musicians: Enchained Bodies in Nineteenth-Century European Literature’