The Humane Reader:
Friendship and Literature -- July 6th, 2010. University of Bristol
This one-day conference aims
to explore critically productive ways of talking about the nature and role of
friendship in the creation and enjoyment of literary texts.
Speakers include: Peter
McDonald, Christopher Ricks, Helen Small, Mark Vernon, Cedric Watts
The conference's plenary
lecture with Ricks and Vernon has been made a 'Bristol Festival of Ideas
Recommends' choice and BBC Radio Bristol will be broadcasting an interview with
both speakers shortly before the conference.
Further details, including
online registration, at http://web.me.com/postrestant/THR
. Details just of the Ricks and Vernon plenary at
web.me.com/postrestant/Friendship. 'Earlybird' prices and concessions until
28th June.
Speakers details:
Peter McDonald
Author of many books of criticism
and poetry, and editor of the forthcoming Longman three-volume edition of W.B.
Yeats. (Wikipedia: 'he is an author, university lecturer and critic. He is
widely regarded as one of the most incisive, and controversial, critics of
contemporary poetry'.) He also runs Tower Poetry, as part of his role as the
Christopher Tower Student and Tutor in Poetry in the English Language.
http://www.towerpoetry.org.uk
Representative works of criticism: Mistaken
Identitites: Poetry and Northern Ireland (1998); Serious Poetry: Form and
Authority from Yeats to Hill (2002)
Christopher Ricks
One of the most distinguished critics of his
generation. He is William M.
and Sara B. Warren Professor of the Humanities
and Co-Director of the Editorial Institute, Boston University, a recipient of
the Andrew W.
Mellon Foundation's Distinguished Achievement
Award for significant contributions to the humanities, and was Professor of
Poetry at the University of Oxford (2004-2009). (Wikipedia: 'known as a
champion of Victorian poetry; an enthusiast of Bob Dylan, whose lyrics he has
analysed at book length; a trenchant reviewer of writers he considers
pretentious; and a warm reviewer of those he thinks humane or humorous. Hugh
Kenner has praised his "intent eloquence", and Geoffrey Hill his
"unrivalled critical intelligence". W.H. Auden described Ricks as
"exactly the kind of critic every poet dreams of finding."') Most
recently he has published True Friendship (2010). There is a Guardian Profile at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/jan/29/poetry.oxforduniversity
Representative
works of criticism: The Force of Poetry (1984); Essays in appreciation (1996)
Helen Small
Fellow of
Pembroke College, Oxford, her chief areas of research interest are in the value
of the humanities, the nature of the public intellectual, and the relationship
between literature and philosophy. The Long Life (2008), her second monograph,
won both the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize and the Truman Capote Award for Literary
Criticism.
Representative
works of criticism: Love's Madness: Medicine, The Novel, and Female Insanity,
1800-1865 (1996); The Long Life (2008)
Mark Vernon
Writer,
broadcaster and journalist, his work appears regularly in The Guardian, TLS,
Evening Standard and on the BBC. His studies began with a degree in physics,
followed by two degrees in theology, and a PhD in philosophy. He is an honorary
Research Fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a founding
member of The School of Life.
http://www.markvernon.com
Representative works: After Atheism: Science, Religion,
and the Meaning of Life (2007), The Meaning of Friendship (2010)
Cedric Watts
Research Professor of English at the University of
Sussex, and distinguished authority on, and prolific editor of, Conrad and
Shakespeare, as well as author, with John Sutherland, of Henry V: War Criminal?
and other Shakespearean Puzzles (2000)
Representative works of criticism: ‘“A Bloody
Racist”: About Achebe’s View of Conrad (1983); Hamlet (1988).
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