Conferences
Annual EMC Conference | Memory: 1500-1800 | February 25, 2005
The program will include ten panelists representing a variety of disciplines, as well as talks by the following invited speakers:
Marvin Carlson, Professor of Theater and Comparative Literature at the City University of New York
Carolyn Lougee Chappell, Professor of History at Stanford University
Richard Helgerson, Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara
For more information, please visit the conference website.
EMC Undergraduate Conference | Memory | May 20, 2005
South Hall 2635, 2:00 PM – 4:00 PM.
We will be hearing from Melody Tavokoli about the website that she designed in the fall on Anne Finch’s poetry and from participants in the center-related English 10s on the ways in which memory was incorporated into their courses.
Events
Fall Colloquium | Peter Stallybrass & Jayne Lewis | November 5, 2004
South Hall 2635, 1:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Peter Stallybrass (University of Pennsylvania), “Technologies of Memory and Erasure in Hamlet”
After seeing the Ghost, Hamlet says:
Remember thee?
Ay, thou poor ghost, while memory holds a seat
In this distracted globe. Remember thee?
Yea, from the table of my memory
I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,
All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past,
That youth and observation copied there,
And thy commandment all alone shall live
Within the book and volume of my brain,
Unmixed with baser matter. (1. 5. 95-105)
The questions I will be asking are: what kinds of writing can one “wipe away”? On what kinds of surface are they written and with what kinds of instrument? How do the material conditions of writing and erasure shape both our images and practices of remembering and forgetting from Plato to Freud and Derrida?
Jayne Lewis (UC Irvine), “‘Pictures Laid in Fading Colours’: Locke, Radcliffe, and the Shifting Spectra of Memory”
The paper looks at the relationship between eighteenth-century constructs of the literary and Lockean memory, both of which are built around a culturally useful model of spectrality that is ultimately challenged via Radcliffe in late c-18 gothic fiction. The first part of the paper is a reading of Locke’s proto-gothic description of memory (and, more accurately, of forgetting) in the Essay. I try to link that description to contemporary apparition narrative, whose unique symbolic and epistemological designs I believe Locke used to develop a fundamentally literary model of mind in its retentive mode . The second part of the paper briefly casts the history of the early novel as a perpetuation of that model, with gothic writing intervening in the latter part of the 18th century to exaggerate the complicity between the two. I’ve focused here on Radcliffe’s enactment of a purely literary memory in her fictions, tracking the disproportionately large part played by conspicuously inaccurate memory and even amnesia. In linking literate experience with forgetting as opposed to recollection, Radcliffe undermines the Lockean model even though that model underpins her narrative and descriptive techniques. The third and final part of the paper identifies an emergent and alternative model of memory in Radcliffe’s work, one drawn from contemporary watercolor aesthetics. This mode of memory begins, rather than ends, in obscurity, and is identified with transformation and desire as opposed to inscription and the transmission of a collectively available, culturally unifying past. I do not however use the word “sublime.”
Daniel Woolf Lecture | February 11, 2005
“From ‘hystories’ to the historical: Key Transitions in Thinking about the Past, 1500-1700″
South Hall 2635
Professor Daniel Woolf is in the Department of History and Classics and Dean of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta, Canada. The event will be held in the English Department Seminar Room (SH 2635).
Everett Zimmerman Seminar | John Barrell | April 5, 2005
“Cottage Politics”
South Hall 2635, 3:00 PM
John Barrell from The University of York will be presenting a lecture entitled “Cottage Politics” at the first annual Everett Zimmerman seminar. His talk will look at the art of the picturesque, at caricatures, and at various kinds of popular prints, as well as at literary texts in Britain in the 1790s; and it will ask what happened to the idea of the cottage as an idealised place of retirement and privacy when the cottage started being used as an image in anti-revolutionary propaganda. The event will be preceded by a lunch in the EMC. The talk will be held in SH 2635 at 3 pm.
Laurie Shannon Lecture | April 21, 2005
“Acteon’s Coat”
South Hall 2635, 2:00 PM
Laurie Shannon is Associate Professor of English at Duke University, where she specializes in English Renaissance thought and writing. She is the author of Sovereign Amity: Figures of Friendship in Shakespearean Contexts, and is a graduate of Harvard Law School who uses her legal training as one of her tools in the analysis of Elizabethan life. Her talk will address the philosophical place of animals as the underwriters of “Man” in the early modern milieu, when Elizabethans made surprisingly ambiguous attempts to distinguish humans from animals.