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-texte” (“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? 

What does it mean to think like a mountain? Or to see the world from a mushroom’s point of view? Ecocriticism is the term given to a collection of theoretical and creative work which advocate a perspective which encompasses the more-than-human: it overlaps and touches on approaches in philosophy (Object Oriented Ontology – OOO); science studies and anthropology (Actor Network Theory); gender studies (ecofeminism); and the environmental humanities (new materialism). What these approaches have in common is the decentring of the human from any hierarchy of ontology, epistemology, phenomenology, and ethics. Yet, in the Anthropocene era, we cannot ignore the responsibilities of humans in relation to our environment, neither can we claim that all humans are equally responsible for – or equally harmed by – the climate crisis. In the lecture, we will explore the ways in which creative and critical work in the arts and humanities can help to shape the stories, critiques, and perspectives needed to face the future of our environment, and of our place within it. Ecocriticism, in other words, helps us to ask vital questions about how life comes to matter.

Even before the advent of AI, contemporary society has been exposed to an incessant flurry of images and texts that call into question the boundaries between truth and fiction, the factual and the virtual. Modern day political systems have taken full advantage of such relativism, often bending the principle of veracity in order to foster their own agenda. Hannah Arendt (‘Lying in Politics’, 1971) famously denounced this practice with regards to the way in which the Pentagon manipulated information on the Vietnam War, leading to a ‘denial of factual truth’, a process that she labelled as defactualization. Yet, these phenomena have deeper historical, philosophical and literary roots that precede our era and affect the way in which disciplines such as History and Literature have interacted with each other over the centuries. In particular, such overlap rests on a fluid approach to the way in which truth is understood and conceptualized, with Friedrich Nietzsche, one of its modern champions, stating that ‘truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions’. This lecture will focus on the concepts of truth and fiction in relation to their historical development, paying specific attention on how this was shaped by the narrative turn fostered by post-structuralism.

At the root of this methodological shift there are scholars such as Roland Barthes (‘The Discourse of History’, 1967), who proposed a semiotic analysis of the practice of Historiography concluding that the historian constructs a linguistic discourse that, rather than being anchored on the real, produces a series of ‘referential illusions’ (a ‘reality effect’), thus, the final product can be analyzed in the same way in which we would read a novel. This thesis advocates for a rhetorical approach to History and the way in which we write the truth as a text, taking rhetoric as a system of persuasion which considers veracity as a mere accessory to its final goal: generating agreement. Following on this footsteps, Hayden White has been one of the most influential promoters of the narrative turn in Historiography. However, other historians such as Attilio Momigliano and Carlo Ginzburg have strongly opposed his views condemning the ethical and political impoverishment of historical discourse when decoupled from the account of actual events that have shaped the life of communities and the world we inhabit. Rather, Ginzburg proposes a different understanding of rhetoric in which the production of evidence is paramount. From the postmodern to the pre-modern, this approach underpins the bonds between fact and fiction, allowing us also to dwell into the workings of literature and how novelist, from Miguel de Cervantes to Paul Auster, have thread on the problematic line that divides the real from the imaginary. 

Over the past two decades, the purpose of literary studies as a critical project has been the object of much soul-searching. How, so many scholars have asked, did ‘critique’ come to dominate our practices of interpreting literature, our rationales for teaching, our moods and our dispositions as readers? And more to the point, is it possible that we have now had enough of ‘critique’ altogether? Has it simply, as Bruno Latour put it, ‘run out of steam’? Or is it rather the case, to echo Anna Kornbluh, that ‘we have never been critical’ (enough)? This lecture gives an overview of these contentious debates, hinging as they often do on wider questions about the crisis for the humanities, the legitimacy and the future of related disciplines. It explores what scholars tend to mean by ‘critique’ and situates this mode of analysis in a wider tradition of Marxist criticism, especially via the work of Fredric Jameson. 

When Jameson urges literary critics to ‘seek a latent meaning behind a manifest one’—that is, to privilege suspicion and skepticism in their reading, or to read ‘symptomatically’—this task has often been understood as having important political uses: as a way of exposing the occluded workings of power and ideology, of raising our political consciousness. This lecture looks at how those claims and techniques of critique have come under scrutiny. It gestures towards some of the alternative moods and methods that have emerged as part of a wider ‘critique of critique’, or indeed as forms of ‘postcritique’, including: ‘surface reading’, ‘distant reading’, and the ‘descriptive turn’. And it looks at how scholars have attempted to reclaim from ‘critique’ some of those affects and responses to literature that are often deemed ‘uncritical’: identification with characters, enthusiasm or fandom, absorption, literalism, and so on. For reasons we shall explore, the novel has been especially implicated in these polemics. Accordingly, the lecture will take its illustrations from literary fiction and consider how the novel form might variously sanction, prohibit, or model faculties of critical thinking.