The Literature in a World Context Research Group is a new postgraduate-led working group whose aim is to foster the interchange, presentation, and inspiration of ideas amongst those approaching world literatures in a comparative register which attends to their cultural specificity. We are currently exploring the theme of the relationship between the intellectual and literature, moving from the issue of life-writing to the question of the challenge to the subject posed by the contemporary European and postcolonial novel. The forum is open to all.
Blog
Follow the blog associated with the group: http://palimps.blogspot.com/.
Associated Network
The group is linked with the Scottish Word and Image Group based at the University of Dundee.
Contact Details
If you are interested in our activities please contact: Samira Nadkarni
Programme for the Session February 2012 - June 2012
This semester continues an ongoing discussion on the theme of embodiment as it relates to our various research projects.
All sessions will be held on Wednesdays between 2 -4 pm in NK7 unless otherwise indicated.
22nd February: Informal get together to discuss the coming semester.
14th March: Samira Nadkarni, ‘“The text itself is now deviant”: Authority and Intimacy in Donna Leishman’s Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw.’
21st March: Chris Heppell, ‘"Outside In": the artificial ecologies of Stephen Gill's in-camera photograms.’
23th March (4-6pm, MR302): Panel discussion on embodiment by Dr. Laura McMahon (panel chair), Dr. Katherine Groo and Dr. Andrea Mura. A screening of “The Love Life of the Octopus” (13 mins) will be included. (Drinks and nibbles provided.)
18th April: Charlotte Stevens, PHD candidate, University of Warwick, ‘Performing Fan Readings of Archival Bodies: Memory and Star Trek.’
2nd May (2-4pm, Library Meeting Room 3): Prof. Matthew Pateman, Professor of Popular Aesthetics, Kingston University, ‘Disembodied Desires: Lolita, Lyotard and Libidinal Naming’
16th May: Katarzyna Maria Mika, ‘Mosaic of Ashes: Poetic responses to 9/11.’
30th May: Francesca Sanchez-Ortiz, ‘Broken bodies and fractured narrations: Visual and poetic texts on the Juarez femicides.’
Programme for the Session October 2011 – December 2011.
Given our previous focus on life writing, memory, trauma and violence, we’ve now begun to discuss what we mean when we speak of a bodied experience. This leads us to questions of the body as canon, as representation, as experience, as well as the body as physicality or materiality. Given the scope of this discussion, the session will be extended into the coming term as well.
All sessions will be held on Wednesdays between 2 -4 pm in NK9.
Schedule of Events:
5th October: Introductory meeting for new members.
12th October: Reading Group: Hélène Cixous’ ‘Coming to Writing’. Discussion led by Chris Heppell. (pdf available by email request.)
26th October: Francesca Sanchez, ‘Chicano/a Representations of Food and the Body in Josefina Lopez’s Real Women Have Curves.’
9th November: William Blake Anderson, "With Our Eyes Fixed On The Body": Violence and Abjection in Northern Irish Adaptations of Homer.
23rd November: Reading Group: "The Art of Environmental Language", from Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics by Timothy Morton. Discussion led by Chris Heppell. (pdf available by email request.)
7th December: Leslie Drury, ‘Mother Bunch and her Tower Toppling Fart: Alewives and Embodiments of the City in Early Modern London’ (Work in Progress.)
14th December: Samira Nadkarni, ‘A Literature beyond Language?: Examining the Reading Experience of Hypertext’ (Work in progress.)
Programme for 2010/11
Semester One
All sessions on Thursdays 2pm Committee Room 2 except the welcoming party and visiting lecture which will take place on a Friday 4pm.
- 16 September
Reading group led by Greg Herman, Jorge Semprún, "The Cattle Truck" - 1 October
Welcoming party for new postgraduate students (University Office Court Room, part of Translating Cultures) - 7 October
Work-in-progress, Nerea Arruti "1968 as Event in Spanish Life-writing: a Journey from San Sebastian to Paris via Barcelona" - 22 October
Visiting Lecture, Bart Moore-Gilbert (Professor of Postcolonial Studies and English, Goldsmiths) "On the Politics of Genre in relation to Postcolonial Life-writing" - 11 November
Reading group led by Greg Herman, Jorge Semprún, "The Cattle Truck" - 25 November
Michael Syrotinski, "The Place of the Literary in Contemporary Africa" - 9 December
Work-in-progress Chris Heppell "On Halldor Laxness's 'The Atom Station'"
Programme for 2011
Semester Two
All sessions on Wednesdays 2 -4 pm in the Seminar Room of the Humanities Manse.
- 16th Feb – Informal Get together to discuss the coming semester.
- 9th March – Dr. Shane Alcobia-Murphy, ‘Snared by Words’: Trauma and the Shoah in the Poetry of Medbh McGuckian.
- 23rd March – Prof. Michael Syrotinski, The Place of the literary in contemporary Africa.
- 6th April – Keir Elder, PHD candidate, University of Dundee, Politics, Cinema and Violence in Scottish novels of the 1930s. (Work in Progress.)
- 20th April – Dr. Christopher Murray, University of Dundee, Autobiographix - Life Writing and War in Comics and Graphic Novels (Maus, Barefoot Gen, Palestine, and Persepolis).
- 4th May - William B. Anderson, Uses of narrative violence and the language of conflict in The Romans in Britain by Howard Brenton and The Saxon Shore by David Rudkin (Work in progress)
- 18th May – Heather Mydosh, Bataille and the Static Image.
- 1st June – Greg Herman, Sartrean ideas of freedom and the Holocaust. (Work in Progress) Summarising of content and get together
Organising Committee
- Chris Heppell (Centre for Modern Thought and Film and Visual Culture)
- Greg Herman (French and Francophone Studies)
- Samira Nadkarni (Centre for Modern Thought)
- Francisca Sánchez (Hispanic Studies)