The Literary and Critical Theory Seminar

Spring Term: Session 4

2012-02-29T10:57:00.012Z

Coming to terms with the digital

A discussion on representations of the digital in contemporary American culture

6-8pm, Wednesday 7th March

Senate House, Room 261

This session will take the form of a seminar introduced and led by Zara Dinnen (PhD candidate, Birkbeck). The title of the session is a play on the title of a 2011 Guardian article by the American author and critic, Laura Miller. The article, 'How novels came to terms with the internet', thinks through some of the reasons why digital culture (particularly the Internet) is so conspicuously absent from recent American fiction -- (excl. SF, or SF-themed novels). The aim of this seminar is to expand and reify the terms Miller calls to account. The central question being asked then is, how is American culture representing its own encounters with the digital? Up for discussion are what the terms of this question actually denote; how might we begin to define and limit such terms as: ‘American culture’, ‘digital era’, ‘digital culture’, ‘contemporary America’, ‘new media’? Whilst no definitive answers are likely please come and join the discussion!

Suggested reading:

Kirschenbaum, Matthew G., Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008). PDF of the introduction available here.

Miller, Laura, 'How novels came to terms with the internet,' Guardian (15th Jan 2011). Available here.

Worden, Daniel, 'Late Postmodernism' [a review of Phillip E. Wegner's book Life Between Two Deaths, 1989-2001: U.S. Culture in the Long Nineties (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009)]. Available here.

Spring Term: Session 3

2012-02-14T15:19:00.009Z

Examined Life

DVD Screening

6pm, Wednesday 15th February

Senate House,

*** Room G35 (please note room change) ***

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

—Socrates

Examined Life pulls philosophy out of academic journals and classrooms, and puts it back on the streets...

In Examined Life, filmmaker Astra Taylor accompanies some of today’s most influential thinkers on a series of unique excursions through places and spaces that hold particular resonance for them and their ideas.

Peter Singer’s thoughts on the ethics of consumption are amplified against the backdrop of Fifth Avenue’s posh boutiques. Slavoj Zizek questions current beliefs about the environment while sifting through a garbage dump. Michael Hardt ponders the nature of revolution while surrounded by symbols of wealth and leisure. Judith Butler and a friend stroll through San Francisco’s Mission District questioning our culture’s fixation on individualism. And while driving through Manhattan, Cornel West—perhaps America’s best-known public intellectual—compares philosophy to jazz and blues, reminding us how intense and invigorating a life of the mind can be. Offering privileged moments with great thinkers from fields ranging from moral philosophy to cultural theory, Examined Life reveals philosophy’s power to transform the way we see the world around us and imagine our place in it.

Featuring Cornel West, Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor.

All are welcome to attend.

Spring Term: Session 2

2012-01-19T23:14:00.020Z

'Reflections on a Future Nostalgia: Exploring Andrei Tarkovsky's Film Image and its Expansion through Contemporary Art'

Dr Kristen Kreider (Royal Holloway)

6-8pm, Wednesday 1st February, Senate House, Room 261 (2nd floor)

'Time is a state: the flame in which there lives the salamander of the human soul.'-- Andrei Tarkovsky, Sculpting in Time

In this seminar we will explore Andrei Tarkovsky’s theory and practice of the film image, ultimately suggesting its expansion through contemporary art practice. How does Tarkovsky’s film image generate a complexity of meaning through its relation to the artistic symbol, the poetic image, time, place and the viewer? In doing so, how does it evidence a nostalgic impulse? How can one identify the critical and creative potential of this nostalgic impulse? Finally, how do certain contemporary art practices, expanding the complexity of meaning in Tarkovsky’s film image in order to exploit this critical and creative potential, indicate the futurity inherent in Tarkovsky’s ‘nostalgic’ film image? This exploration will take the form of a paper and film screening of Gorchakov's Wish (Kreider + O'Leary, 2011).

Dr. Kristen Kreider is a Lecturer in Creative Writing (Poetry) at Royal Holloway, University of London. Since taking this position in 2008, she has sought to promote an interdisciplinary, socially engaged approach to contemporary poetry and poetics, and to encourage a rigorous dialogue between creative and critical practice. Situating her own research in the expanded field of contemporary writing and text-based art practice, Kristen is currently completing a monograph entitled Poetics and Place: The Architecture of Sign, Subjects and Site (I.B. Tauris, forthcoming).

As a pracitioner, Kristen collaborates with architect James O’Leary. The work of Kreider + O’Leary engages with the particularities of a given site – be this a physical, architectural location or more abstract locus of creative intent – in order to open up meaning. The work takes on many forms including performance, installation and time-based media and has been exhibited in the UK as well as internationally in Europe, Australia, Japan and the United States.

http://www.kreider-oleary.net/

Recommended Reading/Viewing

- Tarkovsky, Andrei. ‘The Film Image’ (exct). Sculpting in Time: Reflections on the Cinema. Trans. Kitty Hunter-Blair. Austin: U of Texas Press, 1986. 104-24.

- Tarkovsky, Andrei, dir. Nostalghia (1983).

All welcome.

Spring Term: Session 1

2012-01-14T01:36:00.008Z

Edward Said: The Last Interview

DVD screening

6pm, Wednesday 18 January

Senate House, room 261

Filmed within three days in 2002, just one year before his death at the age of 67, Edward Said: The Last Interview is a compelling portrait of a man who was not only a strong advocate of the Palestinian cause, but an accomplished teacher, literary critic, writer and musician. After living for more than ten years with a fatal strain of leukemia, which he was diagnosed with in 1991, Said refused interviews.

However, former student D.D. Guttenplan along with director Mike Dibb convinced him otherwise. This no-frills documentary does not include archival footage to contextualize the speaker and his life; it simply records the casual conversation between Said and British journalist Charles Glass that weaves in and out of Said’s childhood, writing, life as an academic, involvement with Yasser Arafat, and his strong opinions on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. (electronicintifada.net)

All welcome.

2nd Session (15 November)

2011-10-31T09:16:00.007Z

The Prison-House of Agency:

Neoliberal Hegemony and Popular Aesthetics in Britain and the US

Dr Jane Elliott

(King's College London)

6-8pm, Tuesday 15th November

Stewart House, room ST271 (2nd floor)

Dr Jane Elliott is Senior Lecturer in late 20th and 21st Century Literary and Cultural Studies. She is also Humanities Editor for The Public Intellectual journal. Dr Elliott's research focuses on post-1945 fiction, contemporary theory and the novel during and after postmodernism. Her recent publications include Theory After 'Theory', co-edited with Professor Derek Attridge (London: Routledge, 2011) and the monograph Popular Feminist Fiction as American Allegory: Representing National Time (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2008).

Her current research explores the conjoined aesthetic and political developments that have emerged since the turn of the 21st-century and the waning of the postmodern moment. Dr Elliott is currently working on a monograph that explores the intersection of neoliberal microeconomics, popular aesthetics and the Left theorization of agency in a variety of American and British novels and films, from the novel and film Never Let Me Go to the horror franchise Saw to Hurricane Katrina documentaries.

Recommended Reading:

Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave, 2004). Chapter 11, "28 March 1979," pp. 267-289.

Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Chapter 2, "Freedom," pp. 61-97.

Laurent Berlant, ‘Cruel Optimism: On Marx, Loss and the Senses’, New Formations 63 (Winter 2007/2008): pp. 33-51.

All are welcome to attend.

1st Session (October 18th)

2011-05-31T12:12:00.000+01:00

Seeing Socialism: The Aesthetics of the Plan and the Transparency of Politics

Dr. Alberto Toscano
(Goldsmiths, University of London)

6-8pm, Tuesday 18th October
Senate House, Room 264 (2nd Floor)

Dr. Alberto Toscano is Senior Lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London, and is perhaps best know for his numerous translations of the work of Alain Badiou. A cultural critic and a philosopher, Dr. Toscano has published books on the philosophical problem of individuation -Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation between Kant and Deleuze (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2006)- and on the different readings and misreadings of the concept of fanaticism -Fanaticism: The Uses of an Idea (New York: Verso, 2010)-, as well as authoring articles on a diverse number of topics.

His recent work, from which this talk stems, is on the contemporary status of what Fredric Jameson refers to as 'cognitive mapping.' The project, which is soon to be published as a co-authored book entitled Cartographies of the Absolute (Zero Books), considers contemporary representations of capitalism in film and the visual arts. He is currently working on the relationship between art, political aesthetics and socialist planning, both in the revolutionary art of the 20s and 30s and in later critical debates about communism and 'transparency.'

Recommended reading:

Clark, TJ, Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), Chapter 3.

Stites, Richard, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), Chapters 7 and 8.

Michelson, Annette (Ed.), Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov (London: Pluto Press, 1984), Dziga Vertov's film manifestos.

All are welcome to attend.

Session 2: Excrementality (Tuesday 7th June)

2011-05-30T19:06:00.000+01:00

‘Excrementality’ in the movies: Can Hollywood be ‘incoherent’?

Dr. Dan Varndell (Southampton and Winchester)

6-8pm, Tuesday 7th June
Senate House, room G37 (ground floor)

Every Hollywood movie, asserts Andrew Britton, in whatever genre, “must at least allow for a conservative reading" (1991:201). However, since Robin Wood coined the term "excremental city" to describe so-called "incoherent" texts (like Taxi Driver) that refuse any meaning (conservative or otherwise), Film Theory has been guilty of ignoring certain "excremental" readings of popular cinema. “Postmodernity", write George Ritzer and Douglas Goodman, “is "in" the modern in another sense altogether. It is something like the food of the modern, but that part of the food that is indigestible, which cannot be easily incorporated into the system of modernity" (2002:151n). After well over a century of forms, perhaps cinema is no longer the modern machinery through which our postmodern desires are indulged.

This seminar seeks to explore cinema as a model for cultural repression using the metaphor of the flushing toilet, and investigates Hollywood "incoherence" as its excremental remainder, provoking several questions for discussion: Can Hollywood films be incoherent, or must they always allow for a conservative meaning? Can Wood's cinematic excrescences be considered the postmodern "bones" stuck in the throat of the modern itself? This provocation encourages an open and fluid discussion of excremental Hollywood, inviting cinematic examples from big-budget Blockbusters to Vietnam War films to engage fully the question of where our cultural waste really goes in the movies.

Recommended reading:

- Corrigan, Timothy, 1991. "The Incoherent Text", in A Cinema without Walls: Movies and Culture After Vietnam (New Brunswick & New Jersey: Rutgers University Press), Chapter 2 - "Illegible Films: Texts Without Secrets," pp. 51-79.

- Wood, Robin, 1986. "Illegible Films: Texts without Secrets", in Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (New York, Chichester & West Sussex: Columbia University Press), Chapter 4 - "The Incoherent Text: Narrative in the 70s," pp. 46-55.

All welcome, any discipline.

N.B. Those of a mild disposition should note that toilet humour is probable.

Session 1: Interculturalism (Wednesday 25th May)

2011-05-14T17:30:00.000+01:00

Interculturalism

Wednesday 25th May, 6-8pm

Senate House, room 104 (first floor)

**PLEASE NOTE ROOM CHANGE**

"Interculturalism and performance is perhaps the most talked about and controversial cultural practice of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, characterising at best a sharing and mutual borrowing of the manifestation of one theatre practice by another. At worst it features the annihilation of indigenous pre-modern practices by a rapacious ‘First World’ capitalism." - Brian Singleton, 2003.

"[P]rocesses of exchange between cultures have been going on at least since the onset of modernity and, as a result, cultures permanently undergo change and transition. This situation renders any attempt to draw a clear line between ‘ours’ and ‘theirs’ futile. Yet, this is not to say that differences between cultures do not exist. The differences are simply not fixed and given once and for all; they are permanently generated anew." - Erika Fischer-Lichte, 2009.

A heated controversy around intercultural performance has dogged theatre scholarship since the 1970s. Recently, however, there has been an attempt to move away from the term ‘intercultural’ and all it connotes. But what exactly is interculturalism and why has it been so contentious?

This session will begin with a presentation by Emer O’Toole (RHUL). Engaging with contemporary examples of theatre practice, she will ask whether intercultural tensions are truly dissolving or if they are being swept conveniently under the carpet. Emer is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Drama and Theatre at Royal Holloway. Using postcolonial theory, her thesis tackles the intercultural debate by suggesting that there is a relationship between rights of representation, the socio-political effects of a performance, and collaborators’ agency.

Recommended Reading

Schechner, Richard, "A Reply to Rustom Bharucha," Asian Theatre Journal, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Autumn, 1984), pp. 245-253.

Bharucha, Rustom, "A Reply to Richard Schechner," Asian Theatre Journal, Vol. 1, No. 2 (Autumn, 1984), pp. 254-260.

Supplementary Reading

Fischer-Lichte, Erika, "Interweaving Cultures in Performance: Different States of Being In-Between," New Theatre Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 4 (November 2009), pp. 391-401.

All are welcome to attend.

Uncertainty Symposium: Saturday 11th June 2011

2011-04-20T16:56:00.000+01:00

Uncertainty: Theory in the 21st Century

A Postgraduate Symposium

Saturday 11th June 2011

Centre for Creative Collaboration, 16 Acton Street, London, WC1X 9NG

Keynote speakers: Professor Martin McQuillan (Kingston) and Professor Mark Currie (QMUL)

'Symbol of Uncertainty', John Gilbert

‘The most harrowing contemporary fears are born of existential uncertainty’

– Zygmunt Bauman

We enter the second decade of the 21st Century less certain than ever about who ‘we’ are, where we are heading, or what kind of a society we want to be. This interdisciplinary symposium aims to interrogate the role of theory – literary, political, philosophical and sociological – in an uncertain time. In doing so, it hopes to render the very concept of uncertainty uncertain: that is, to place it under examination in a way that might help us think our way into a more ethically responsible future.

Provisional Programme

9.00: Registration and welcome

9:50: Opening remarks

10.00: Keynote 1: Professor Martin McQuillan (Kingston)

11.00: Break

11.15: Panel 1: Rethinking Criticism: Theoretical Uncertainty

‘Uncertainty and Alan Kirby’s digimodernism’, Joe Barton (Newcastle)
‘Theory Without Words: The Invisible Influence of Practical Criticism’, Angus Brown (Oxford)
‘In the key of K: identifying states of knowing and not-knowing in relation to aphoristic and disconnected writing styles’, Naomi Wynter-Vincent (Sussex)

12.30: Lunch (own arrangements)

13.30: Panel 2: Representation and Uncertainty

‘The Ethical Space of Mourning, Post-Terror’, Allan Rae (Stirling)
‘Millennium Approaches: Apocalyptic Representations of the HIV/AIDS Epidemic’, Chisomo Kalinga (KCL)
‘Fear of the Unstageable’, Karen Quigley (KCL)

14.45: Break

15.00: Keynote 2: Professor Mark Currie (Queen Mary, University of London)

16.00: Break

16.15: Panel 3: Beyond Endings: Embracing Uncertainty

‘Environment and humanity: a path towards an uncertain relationship’, Marco Bernardini (Reading)
‘Pataphysics and the Integral Reality of String Theory’, Marc Özses, (Sussex)
‘Towards the End of Now: Obsolescence and Futurity in Literary Study’, Aaron Hanlon, (Oxford)

17.30: Closing remarks

Registration is free, but places are limited. Please email us by Friday 3rd June if you would like to attend.

Session 5: Animals (Tuesday 29th March)

2011-03-17T20:04:00.000Z

'Breathing the Same Air: Posthuman and Preanimal'

Dr. Steven Morrison
(Independent Scholar)

Tuesday 29th March, 6-8pm, Senate House, Room 102

"There is no scientific evidence whatever to support such a view [that somehow man is the ultimate triumph of evolution] and no reason to suppose that our stay here will be any more permanent than that of the dinosaur. . . . But although denying that we have a special position in the natural world might seem becomingly modest in the eye of eternity, it might also be used as an excuse for evading our responsibilities. The fact is that no species has ever had such wholesale control over everything on earth, living or dead, as we now have" (David Attenborough)

If posthuman and posthistorical man is an animal like any other, need this animal worry about the preposthuman and preposthistorical mess? Steven Morrison, independent scholar and Homo sapiens, will be worrying out loud about the sustainability of distinctions between human and animal with reference to extracts from the following:

Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal, trans. Kevin Attell (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).

John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (London: Granta Books, 2003).

All are welcome to attend.

Session 4: Speaker: Professor Robert Eaglestone (Monday 14th March)

2011-03-04T00:44:00.000Z

'Discourses of Biopolitics, the Human and Mass Murder'

Professor Robert Eaglestone
(Royal Holloway)

Monday 14th March, 6-8pm, Senate House, Room G32

Robert Eaglestone is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is Deputy Director (formerly Director) of the Royal Holloway Holocaust Research Centre, and is the series editor of Routledge Critical Thinkers. He works on contemporary literature and literary theory, contemporary philosophy and on Holocaust and Genocide studies. Robert is particularly interested in issues of ethics, aesthetics and the philosophy of history, and has spent some years working through a series of questions about the legacy of the Holocaust and the Second Word War in these fields. His publications include Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas (Edinburgh University Press, 1997), Doing English (Routledge, 1999; third edition 2009), and The Holocaust and the Postmodern (Oxford University Press, 2004). He has also recently co-edited, with Simon Glendinning, Legacies of Derrida: Literature and Philosophy (Routledge, 2008) and, with Elleke Boehmer and Katy Iddiols, J.M. Coetzee in Context and Theory (Continuum, 2009). He is currently completing a manuscript on the Holocaust and genocide in contemporary literature and culture, as well as a volume of the Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Literary and Cultural Theory (Volume 2: 1966 to Present Day).

All are welcome to attend.

Session 3: Violence (Monday 28th February)

2011-02-19T00:18:00.000Z

"It is no doubt possible to create conditions under which men are dehumanized ... and, under such conditions, not rage and violence but their conspicuous absence is the clearest sign of dehumanization."

- Hannah Arendt

VIOLENCE

6-8pm, Monday 28th February
Senate House, room 103 (1st floor)

Is violence endemic to the human condition? What role does it play in the contemporary world? Can it ever be justified? And what ethical concerns does it raise for literature, the arts and critical theory?

Our third session this term will be introduced with a 10-minute 'provocation' by Dr Eva Aldea (Westminster and Goldsmiths). Eva's current research focuses on beheadings, including videos of terrorist beheadings. It argues that such violence can be understood as a system of signs, and asks if this is what makes it uniquely human.

The readings are extracts from the following:

Adriana Cavarero, Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, Trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).

Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (London: Profile, 2009).

All are welcome to attend.

Session 2: Speaker: Professor Derek Attridge (Monday 14th February)

2011-02-01T14:04:00.000Z

'What Does it Make You Feel?: Responding Affectively to Literature'

Professor Derek Attridge
(University of York)

Monday 14th February, 3-5pm Senate House, room 103 (1st floor)

Derek Attridge has published many influential books on literature and theory, most recently The Singularity of Literature (Routledge, 2004), How to Read Joyce (Granta Books, 2007), and Reading and Responsibility: Deconstruction's Traces (Edinburgh University Press, 2010), as well as the forthcoming co-edited volume Theory After 'Theory' (with Jane Elliot, Routledge, 2010). His interests centre on the language of literature, but radiate in many different directions. Much of his work reflects his long association with the philosopher Jacques Derrida, a selection of whose work he has edited. In The Singularity of Literature, he raises the question of the distinctiveness of literature as a linguistic and social practice, and argues that a crucial element is the response to otherness that characterises both the writing of an inventive literary work and the reading of it as literature. This book is also informed by recent developments in ethics arising from the writings of Emmanuel Levinas. In September 2006 he won an ESSE Book Award for this work.

This session should appeal broadly to students of literature, as well as those from other disciplines with an interest in critical theory.

All are welcome to attend. We hope to see you there!

Spring Term, Session 1: Posthumanism (Monday 31st January)

2011-01-18T13:36:00.000Z

Where does the 'human' end and the 'non-human' begin? Have we entered a 'posthuman' age, or were we ever really 'human' in the first place? What implications can a questioning of the 'human' have for gender, race, age, disability and ethics?

The general theme for this term's Literary and Critical Theory Seminars is 'The Idea of the Human', and our first session will be on the topic of 'posthumanism'. It will take place from 6-8pm on Monday 31st January in Senate House, room 103 (1st Floor). The readings are as follows:

Donna Haraway - 'A Cyborg Manifesto', in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181.

N. Katherine Hayles - 'Unfinished Work: From Cyborg to Cognisphere', in Theory, Culture & Society, 2006 vol. 23: 159-166.

The session will begin with a paper by Louise LePage (PhD candidate and Visiting Lecturer in Drama at Royal Holloway, University of London). Louise's project aims to critically explore the identity and form of ‘the human’ in its representations as dramatic characters via an interrogation of its traditional borders with animals, machines, and the nonphysical (mind, ghosts, etc.). Her study adopts Donna Haraway’s cyborg as a trope to open up a posthumanist way of seeing and approaching identity, which re-constitutes the self as composed of multiple parts - natural and cultural - that extend beyond the borders of the skin to formulate an inherently provisional and protean identity and entity.

All are welcome to attend.

'Derrida' DVD Screening (Monday 10th January)

2011-01-09T00:56:00.000Z

The Literary and Critical Theory Seminar is beginning the Spring term with a DVD screening of Derrida (2002, directors: Kirby Dick and Amy Ziering Kofman).

The screening will take place on Monday 10th January in Senate House, room G34, from 6-8pm. All are welcome to come along!

Here are some details on the film:

"This award-winning documentary gives an intimate portrait of the brilliant, controversial philosopher and intellectual French icon Jacques Derrida, whose theory of deconstruction has deeply influenced the studies of literature, philosophy, ethics, architecture and law, indelibly marking the intellectual landscape of the 20th and 21st centuries.

"Combining extremely rare private footage of Derrida with his reflections on violence, love and death, the film also investigates the concept of biography, exploring the relationship between the public and the private. Provocative, potent and entertaining, Derrida marks an inspired collaboration between philosophy scholar Amy Ziering Kofman and filmmaker Kirby Dick, the director of Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist. The mesmerising score is courtesy of Ryuchi Sakamoto (Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, Gohatto)."

Hope to see you there!

Session 5: Environmental Disappointment (Wednesday 8th December)

2010-12-02T15:15:00.001Z

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)

2010-11-15T22:43:00.000Z

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)

2010-11-13T12:52:00.000Z

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)

2010-11-04T01:20:00.000Z

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)

2010-10-20T12:18:00.000+01:00

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

2010-10-05T15:04:00.000+01:00

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

2010-03-21T21:32:00.000Z

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

2010-03-02T16:23:00.000Z

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?

Second Session: Terror and Trauma

2010-02-15T12:13:00.000Z

Our second meeting will take place on Thursday 25th February in Room GSB2, 2 Gower Street between 1 and 3pm, and we will discuss chapter 2 and chapter 5 of Judith Butler's Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 'Violence, Mourning, Politics,' and 'Precarious Life.'

As optional secondary reading, we suggest Adriana Cavarero's Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, Trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).

The session's key questions will be as follows:

'From the subsequent experience of loss and fragility, ... the possibility of making different kinds of ties emerges' ('Violence, Mourning, Politics', p. 40). Does Butler's theory of mourning and vulnerability provide an adequate ethical response to acts of terror in the West?

'[W]e would be wrong to think that the First World is here and the Third World is there, that a second world is somewhere else, that a subaltern subtends these divisions. These topographies have shifted, and what was once thought of as a border ... is a highly populated site ...' ('Violence, Mourning, Politics', p. 49). Has a shifting of global borders in the early twenty-first century rendered ideas of 'otherness' and 'difference' newly problematic?

'The Other makes an ethical claim upon us ... the Other is the condition of discourse' ('Precarious Life', pp. 138-9). What does Butler mean when she uses the term 'discourse', and does she employ it in an appropriate way?

'The derealization of loss - the insensitivity to human suffering and death - becomes the mechanism through which dehumanization is accomplished. This derealization takes place neither inside nor outside the image, but through the very framing by which the image is contained' ('Precarious Life', p. 148). In what ways can literature and/or critical theory effectively respond to a dehumanising 'derealization of loss'?

First Session: Introduction

2010-02-01T18:30:00.000Z

Our introductory meeting will take place on Thursday 11^th February in Room GSB2, 2 Gower Street between 1 and 3pm, and we will discuss Catherine Belsey’s article “The Death of the Reader” (Textual Practice, Volume 23, Issue 2, April 2009, pp. 201-214). The article can be accessed online at Senate House Library from the computers provided and at most other libraries from the University of London. Hard copies should also be available.

The session’s focus will be on the following:

- Is the reader dead?

- “Critical biography is not an aid to reading but a substitute for it” (p. 212). Is this true?

- Are the “Death of the Author” and the “Death of the Reader” mutually exclusive?

- “Literature can be dangerous” (p. 203). Is reading a political act?

Mission Statement and Archive

2010-02-01T13:42:00.013Z

It was amazing in a way, what he’d said, one sentence, five words, and think of everything it says about everything there is. The sun is a star. When did she realize this herself and why didn’t she remember when? The sun is a star. It seemed a revelation, a fresh way to think about being who we are, the purest way and only finally unfolding, a kind of mystical shiver, an awakening.

Don DeLillo, Falling Man

Thinking about the present can be a difficult, disorienting and sometimes even dangerous task. Lacking the perspective afforded by hindsight, acts of interpretation can be made extremely problematic: what one assumes in the present to be a self-contained truth may, in time, reveal itself as merely one in a vast number of interconnected historical realities.

The purpose of this reading group is to question the extent to which critical theory in the early twenty-first century has both shaped and been shaped by a contextual ‘framing’ of the present. In doing so, we want to find out is whether today’s theorists, like their more established forebears, can still help to construct the kind of critical language necessary for the establishment of new, more textured understandings of our place in the world. Although the group is aimed primarily at students of English, it is highly interdisciplinary and those with backgrounds in other disciplines are very welcome to attend. All perspectives are valued, and we try to encourage questioning and debate amongst a diverse range of participants, no matter how well-acquainted they may be with theory or the complex terminology that it often employs.

‘Reality is a question of perspective,’ Salman Rushdie wrote in his 1981 novel, Midnight’s Children: ‘the further you get from the past, the more concrete and plausible it seems – but as you approach the present, it inevitably seems more and more incredible’. Using the example of a cinema-goer who slowly moves up towards the screen, his narrator goes on to explain that ‘Gradually the stars’ faces dissolve into dancing grain; tiny details assume grotesque proportions; the illusion dissolves – or rather, it becomes clear that the illusion itself is reality’. What takes place here is a form of radical ‘unconcealment’ that, to borrow DeLillo’s phrase, is not unlike the wide-eyed childhood realisation that ‘the sun is a star’. The very lack of perspective is itself revealed to be a kind of perspective. Moreover, it is precisely this kind of paradoxical understanding of the world – a simultaneous ‘dissolving’ and ‘making clear’ of reality – that critical theory, in dialogue with literature, can help weave into a figurative language for our time.

ARCHIVE: PAST SESSIONS

15/02/12: DVD Screening: Examined Life

01/02/12: Dr Kristen Kreider (RHUL) - ''Reflections on a Future Nostalgia: Exploring Andrei Tarkovsky's Film Image and its Expansion through Contemporary Art'

18/01/12: DVD Screening: Edward Said - The Last Interview

15/11/11: Dr Jane Elliott (KCL) - 'The Prison-House of Agency: Neoliberal Hegemony and Popular Aesthetics in Britain and the US'

18/10/11: Dr Alberto Toscano (Goldsmiths) - 'Seeing Socialism: The Aesthetics of the Plan and the Transparency of Politics'

11/07/11: UNCERTAINTY: THEORY IN THE 21ST CENTURY SYMPOSIUM; Keynote Speakers: Professor Martin McQuillan (Kingston) and Professor Mark Currie (QMUL)

07/07/11: Dr Dan Varndell (Southampton and Winchester) - ''Excrementality' in the Movies: Can Hollywood be 'Incoherent?''

25/05/11: Interculturalism - Speaker: Emer O'Toole (RHUL)

29/03/11: Dr Steven Morrison - 'Breathing the Same Air: Posthuman and Preanimal'

14/03/11: Professor Robert Eaglestone (RHUL) - 'Discourses of Biopolitics, the Human and Mass Murder'

28/02/11: Violence - Speaker: Dr Eva Aldea (Westminster and Goldsmiths)

14/02/11: Professor Derek Attridge (York) - 'What Does it Make You Feel?: Responding Affectively to Literature'

31/01/11: Posthumanism - Speaker: Louise LePage (RHUL)

10/01/11: DVD Screening: Derrida

08/12/10: Environmental Disappointment: Bruno Latour and Anthony Giddens

24/11/10: Dr Simon Glendinning (LSE) - 'The Deepest Wounds: On Blows to Narcissism'

15/11/10: DVD Screening: Democracy and Disappointment: Alain Badiou and Simon Critchley in Conversation

10/11/10: The Politics of Disappointment: Simon Critchley

27/10/10: Professor Andrew Gibson (RHUL) - 'Intermittency and Disappointment: Jambet, Rimbaud and the Melancholic-Ecstatic Conception of Historical Time'

13/10/10: Disappointment with Politics: Alain Badiou

25/03/10: Criticism and Crisis: Slavoj Zizek

11/03/10: Ecocriticism: Ursula K. Heise and Hubert Zapf

25/02/10: Terror and Trauma: Judith Butler

11/02/10: Introductiory Session: Catherine Belsey's 'The Death of the Reader'