PRIVACY
The 35th British Academy Conversazione
Professor Anthony Nuttall, FBA
and
Professor Karen Spärck Jones, FBA
at the British Academy on Thursday 2 May 2002
Speakers
Professor Anthony Nuttall, FBA
Professor of English
University of Oxford
According to literary theories accepted uncritically by many modern
students, the author is dead - rather the source of a work is reconstrued
as a nexus of literary conventions. Similarly, a text is no longer a
stable, unified object, but is seen as an indefinite field of
interpretations made by the reader. Professor Nuttall argues that these
relationalist propositions are generally implausible. In particular, what
happens when modern students read Shakespeare? Where people in our time
take pleasure in the supposed evaporation of a prior individual identity
and its replacement by a tissue of constructions, Shakespeare is conversely
excited by the thought of a kind of ultimacy at the level of the private
individual.
Professor Karen Sparck-Jones, FBA
Professor of Computers and information
University of Cambridge
Privacy: What's different now?
Modern technology makes it possible to record, preserve, collate,
reconstruct and use detailed facts about individuals on a scale and in a
style quite different from the past. With modern technology, data is
voluminous, not sparse; is permanent, not transient; and is detached, not
tied to the individual's own observation. How do these developments change
the reality, or the perception, of privacy for the individual? How, in
particular, do they change the reality or perception of privacy for daily
life, not just in legal situations or relations to authority?
Tea will be served at 4.45pm and the meeting will start at 5.15pm until
7.45pm, followed by a buffet supper. You are welcome to attend the meeting
free of charge, and to bring guests. Graduate students are always welcome.
All those attending are warmly encouraged to stay to supper afterwards,
when there will be an opportunity to meet the speakers and continue
discussion with other members of the company in an informal setting.
(Supper, including wine, costs £11.00 per person).
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