The University of Glasgow
Inaugural Lectures
Saturday 2 December 2006, 2.00-5.30 pm
The Lectures will be held in the Sir Charles Wilson Theatre, 1 University
Avenue, Gilmorehill, Glasgow University.
The lectures will be followed by a Reception in the Research Club, 2
University Gardens, 5.30-8.00pm.
The School of English and Scottish Language and Literature in the Faculty of
Arts
Invites you to the inaugural lectures of
Professor Nigel Leask, Department of English Literature
The Regius Chair of English Language and Literature
'Crossing the Shadow Line: Burns, Scottish Romanticism and the English
Literary Canon'
Despite recent studies relating the emergence of modern English criticism to
the university curricula of the Scottish Enlightenment, Scottish literature
from Ossian to Sartor Resartus has often itself been cast as 'an
intermittent, shadow anachronism, a temporal as well as a spatial border of
Romanticism'. In this lecture, drawing on post-colonial notions of 'border
crossings' in the context of post-Union Scotland, I will re-examine
Anglo-Scottish literary relations in the 19th century. Focusing on the
afterlife of Scotland's greatest Romantic poet, Robert Burns, I examine
biographical narratives and critical revisions (on both sides of the border)
by Dr James Currie, William Wordsworth, Sir Walter Scott, Francis Jeffrey,
Lord Byron, Thomas Carlyle, as well as the Irish poet Tom Moore. I conclude
with an assessment of the criticism of Professor John Nichol, Glasgow's
first Regius Chair of English Language and Literature (appointed in 1862).
The lecture casts a fresh light on the 19th-century genesis of English
literary studies, and makes a case for their continuing importance in the
post-devolutionary Scottish University.
The Regius Chair was established in 1862. Eminent occupants have included
John Nicol, A.C. Bradley, Sir Walter Raleigh, Peter Alexander and Stephen
Prickett.
{Tea and coffee will be served at 3.30 pm}
Professor Alan Riach, Department of Scottish Literature
The Chair of Scottish Literature
'Once Upon a Time in the West of Scotland: Edwin Morgan, Modernity and Myth'
The trajectory of modern Scottish poetry may be described as a movement from
MacDiarmid to Edwin Morgan, or from a late nineteenth-century ethos to the
early twenty-first century world Morgan's work inhabits and inspires even
now. This trajectory, however, cuts across various intersecting lines and
orbits which lead towards a redefinition of the subject in which both these
poets and their contemporaries can be most comprehensively read: Scottish
literature. This lecture opens an examination of the idea of Modernity in
the context of Scottish literature and asks how these ideas have evolved,
from MacDiarmid to Morgan and into the contemporary scene. The question then
arises whether the ostensibly objective, dissective anaysis endorsed by
literary critical practice matches the challenge proposed by the redefined
subject of study: Scottish literature in its practice as a scholarly
discipline, in the national teaching curriculum at all levels, at tertiary
level internationally, and as the most neglected area for scholarly
research. What, then, of the myth of national identity and literary quality
proposed by the study of a national literature in its full historical file?
The lecture will draw to some conclusions about such myths, such identities
and the necessary prisms in the manger faith suggested by 'Once Upon a Time.'
The Chair of Scottish Literature was established in 1995 and its first
occupant was Professor Douglas Gifford.
RSVP Pat Devlin, Dept of English, 5 University Gdns, Glasgow G12 8QQ,
tel.0141 330 5296.
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