Event overview
On the essay as dialogical mode of reading and thinking and on the relationship between lived experience, storytelling, and critical theory in British cultural studies
Lellida Marinelli, “Reading, writing, being writerly selves through essayistic practice. Deborah Levy’s trilogy on writing and Jeanette Winterson’s Art Objects.”
The paper will focus on ‘essayism’ as a dialogical, protean, literary mode of reading and thinking manifesting itself in diverse literary forms and expressions. The essay is undefinable by definition, but it is a “literary region” with paths that cross other well-known genres such as autobiography, memoir, and literary criticism.
Deborah Levy’s ‘living autobiography’ (Things I Don’t Want to Know (2013), The Cost of Living (2018) and Real Estate (2021)) is an example of the self-discovery and affirmation of a “writerly self” and of how such discovery, by means of an essayistic mode of thinking, enriches an autobiographical narration that plays with structure and perspective. Jeanette Winterson’s Art Objects (1995) is a collection of metaliterary essays on literature, writing, and the experience of art. While they are two different forms of metaliterary essayism, both deal with key questions of what it means to be a writer.
Levy’s and Winterson’s ideas on writing are embedded in acts of reading and reading-through other voices (most prominently, Virginia Woolf), including researching ‘a writerly voice’; construing ‘female characters’; and the relevance of spaces for writing in Levy or the idea of writing as transformation, which can happen through a very close listening of the “subtle sound of prose” in Winterson.
Elisa Russian, “Landscapes with Social Figures: On the Autobiographical Mode of British Cultural Studies“
In this paper, I examine the relationship between lived experience, storytelling, and critical theory in British cultural studies—a field that features, in Raymond Williams’s words, several “hybrid[s] of autobiography and argument.” I analyze the narrative and rhetorical function of social figures, particularly the working-class mother, within three essays that belong to this tradition: The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of Working-Class Life (1957), by Richard Hoggart; Landscape for a Good Woman: A Story of Two Lives (1986), by Carolyn Steedman; and Respectable: The Experience of Class (2016), by Lynsey Hanley.
Hoggart, Steedman and Hanley recount the forms of social mobility they experienced as intellectuals from working-class backgrounds. By foregrounding the figure of the mother, these authors both reflect on the distance that separates them from their family’s milieu and reassert the validity of the values inherent in their upbringing.
Through a discussion of the literary and theoretical genres on which these writers rely and of the genealogical ties that bind them, I suggest that saying “I” in historically- and sociologically-oriented texts is often instrumental in countering existing theoretical frameworks.
Further information on the seminar and the speakers
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 6 Feb 2025 | 5:30pm - 7:15pm |
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