Core Course lectures

Recent decades have seen a new interest in literary form. Poets of the later twentieth century renewed the practice of traditional poetic forms, making the villanelle, the sestina, and the sonnet resonate new concerns with politics and the present. In response, beginning in the 1990s scholars of English and American literature worked to correct at once the blindness to form that had marked some new historicist and psychoanalytic criticism, and the failure of earlier formalists (the Russian Formalists, the American New Critics) to fully theorise the relation between form and the world (history, politics) or form’s ethical charges. The body of scholarship published to date has demonstrated the way close reading allied with careful attention to questions of history, politics, or ethics can illuminate literary texts. But it is surprisingly opaque or contradictory when it comes to the central term. What is form? Or, better: why does it seem so self-evident yet prove so elusive? If we cannot agree what it is, how can we define its relation to the world outside the text?

The lecture will address these questions through close analysis of art from the Middle Ages. It will examine first a medieval Latin text (translations provided) in a mixed form (prose/poetry) that recounts how prime matter was shaped to make the world. An analogous act of shaping matter produced the lecture’s second object of analysis: a palace floor of terra cotta tiles that recounts the story of Tristan. The final object will be a set of chess pieces, carved from deer antler into the ‘abstract’ forms adopted from Islamic models. The lecture will therefore push New Formalist criticism beyond the modern Anglophone canon to which is has usually been limited, to consider the literature and visual media of another language and time.

This lecture will explore the value of the contemporary field of biosemiotics for both a general building of bridges between biological science and the humanities as well as for specific, novel approaches and practices within literary theory and criticism. It will examine the theoretical and intellectual-historical hinterland of biosemiotics along with the methodological problems it faces as a discipline seeking to establish itself within the life sciences and upon a firm footing that would be acceptable within more mainstream biology. The various forms of critique that this nascent subdiscipline aims at this mainstream will also be explored as will its comparative positioning in relation to other similar areas or theoretical developments within contemporary biology. 

Memory study has emerged over the past three decades as a cross-disciplinary area that draws on a range of fields including history, anthropology, philosophy and psychology. Rooted in contemporary political concerns (and notably the tendency of state-endorsed memory to project exclusive narratives of the past), the area also plays an increasingly important role in literary and cultural analysis as creative artefacts are themselves acknowledged as reflections of the ways in which societies represent and process the past. Central to the field of memory studies is the work of French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs, whose analyses of collective memory suggested that narratives of the past are not individual phenomena but should be understood instead as socially constructed and transmitted from generation to generation. Halbwachs's approach came under increased pressure in the later twentieth century when French historian Pierre Nora - through the concept of the 'lieu de mémoire' or 'realm of memory' - identified a fragmentation of traditional practices of commemoration and suggested the need to identify objects, sites or phenomena around which memory nevertheless continued to crystalize. The session takes Nora's intervention as a starting point and invites a reflection on the ways in which a theory developed in the specific national niche of the bicentenary of the French Revolution in 1989 has achieved a broader applicability and translatability. It offers an opportunity to critique Nora's perpetuation of a national memory that deliberately ignores the afterlives of both slavery and colonialism and posits in its place the need to identify modes of remembering that are actively transnational, diasporic or 'travelling', in that way reflecting traces of multiple histories and foregrounding their cross-cultural entanglements. The lecture outlines also a series of alternative models of memory - palimpsestic, multidirectional, agonistic - that provide ways of understanding the contemporary crisis in coming to terms with the past, and also offer tools for studying the dynamics of memory in a range of cultural artefacts. Exploring concepts such as the 'memory-trace' (proposed by Martinican writer Patrick Chamoiseau), it suggests means of recovering different narratives of the past that defy official prescription and permit alterative voices to emerge. The session concludes with a focus on debates regarding the decolonization of memory practices, suggesting that alternative paradigms of remembering are emerging across scholarship and creative practices from the Global South. There will be an opportunity to reflect on the implications of the material studied for literary and cultural analysis, e.g., through consideration of selected passages from W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (London: New Directions Books, 1998). 

This lecture will look at various understandings of 'centres', 'peripheries' and 'semi-peripheries' in literature and culture. It will present multiple theories of world or global literature, examining the ways in which literary spheres (not defined in any hermetically closed way) in different cultural and geographical locations interact with and influence one another. In doing so, it will also open questions of hierarchies and power relations, discussing the connections between political or economic power and cultural forms of hegemony. The theoretical framework for these discussions will partly overlap with key questions from postcolonial theory, including a focus on concepts such as 'mimicry' and 'hybridity'. The lecture will also pay close attention to translation. Illustrative examples of 'center-periphery/semi-periphery' relations in literary and cultural history will come from Central and Eastern Europe - in particular, from Poland and Russia. 

In literary criticism, 'history' is often considered the opposite of 'theory'. Many scholars in the field take Derrida's 'il n'y a pas d'hors-text' ('there is no outside-text') as an injunction to ignore the historical reality in which a work of literature or philosophy was produced and received. History and context, for them, are part of the 'transcendental signified' supposedly debunked by (poststructuralist) theory. Even the less theoretically minded frequently treat history as little more than 'background' and draw on it selectively, when it suits their interpretive purpose.   
My aim in this lecture is to break down the dichotomies - textual foreground/historical  background, close reading/contextual analysis, etc. - that define so much literary and cultural analysis and to make a case for the inevitable, inextricable historicity of literature. I will do so by examining the work of several theorists who have elevated context to 'co-text' and highlighted the extent to which the written word is historically situated, mediated, constituted. These theorists have emphasized both the 'pastness' and the otherness of seemingly timeless, canonical, universally relevant works. Drawing on Marx as well as Nietzsche, they have explored the ways in which specific material conditions, power relations, and intellectual debates shape the meaning of a text.   
My lecture will address the following questions: What does it mean to read a text historically or 'in context'? What particular methods does such a reading require? What conceptions of textuality and historicality inform it? What are the heuristic gains of such an apporach? What are its potential pitfalls, e.g., does it run the risk of reducing complex works of literature or philosophy to the material conditions in which their authors were working, to mere ideological statements, or tokens of the zeitgeist? Does historicization render a text less relevant to the present? 

This session explores the main tenets and implications of the spatial turn in the humanities, as well as the way in which they have shaped the subdiscipline of geocriticism in literary studies. The ‘spatial turn’ refers to a paradigm shift in social and cultural theory throughout the second half of the twentieth century, which was prepared by philosophers such as Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault, and consolidated through the work of several thinkers within the domain of human geography (Edward Soja, David Harvey, Doreen Massey, Derek Gregory). It implied a recalibration that problematised the intellectual predominance of time and historicity as the explaining factors of social and cultural processes and advocated, instead, a heightened attention towards their spatial dimensions. However, this change in perspective also hinges on a thorough redefinition of the concept of space itself: rather than a blank canvas or a neutral container, it is conceptualised as a complex and dynamic medium through which power relations fundamentally shape social life – in line with the Marxist inspiration of many of these approaches, space holds a little-acknowledged but crucial strategic importance for the expansion of capital and becomes, in this sense, one of the most important battlegrounds for social change. Although this paradigm shift concerns space in its most general and transhistorical sense, contemporary processes such as accelerated globalisation and time-space compression played a key role in the emergence of this renewed scrutiny. The aforementioned insights are central to a set of theoretical and critical practices that have been brought together, mainly through the work of Bertrand Westphal and Robert T. Tally, under the common denominator of ‘geocriticism’. Geocriticism focuses on how spatiality shapes literary practices, and centrally relies on these critical approaches to examine the social relations that resonate in and emerge through the interface between text and world. In the session, we will address the ideas and debates that have arisen from these evolutions, as well as some of their ramifications, particularly those highlighting the mobile, urban, volumetric and geological aspects of space. 

The term ‘cognitive approaches’ refers to a relatively new area of literary critical enquiry, which draws inspiration from the cognitive and affective sciences. The lecture class will provide an overview of this rapidly-emerging field, and will consider both the opportunities and the challenges presented by interdisciplinary work. First, we shall examine the formative influences, from the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in cognitive linguistics. We will also seek to differentiate between the various approaches to cognition which co-exist, at times uneasily, in the broader scientific field. In a second step, we will think together about how insights from linguistics, psychology and neuroscience can and have stimulated outstanding literary analysis.