Event overview
Goldsmiths Literature Seminar
Angela Carlton (Goldsmiths)
'Reconstructing Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon as a Modern Female Epic'
Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941) is considered West’s Opus Magnum and covers her epic journey through the history, mythology and consciousness of the South Slavs between the wars. West’s goal was to discover whether the organisation of the South Slavs into a unified state was possible considering their rocky history of violence, misadministration and the diverse range of identities, religions and symbolisms that make up the region. Cavour said, “now there is an Italy but we have not yet got Italians” and my essay aims to understand how mythology and historical traditions can construct a unified national identity. But the focus of my investigation is to uncover where women fall into this construction. Throughout the text women are repetitively described as icons and bait to be used to symbolise and protect nation. The text is interesting both for the revelations it makes and the questions it raises about women’s identities within Yugoslavia and also for how Rebecca West as the protagonist, author and foreign outsider digests and is perceived within these landscapes and cultures. At a critical point within the text, Constantine, West’s guide, describes the differences between English men and Slavic men, and mentions women’s status as an outside limbo beyond cultural expectations, “because you are a woman, and so you have no very definite personality” (90). Nonetheless, women appear throughout the text as motivations directly influencing nation-building and cultural identity. My reading of West’s text as a modern female epic with West as the hero sacrificing self to comprehend questions of nation and order ultimately argues that women can only be epic heroes when their journeys are critical of homeland traditions, because as women they are constructed as nationless.
Marc Farrant (Goldsmiths)
'‘Stirrings Still’: Samuel Beckett’s Radical Atheism'
Samuel Beckett’s work has often been associated with what Steven Connor has termed “a contemporary aesthetics of the inexhaustible.” As such, Beckett’s oeuvre has served as the literary correlate of a return to ethical and religious discourses in literary theory, and seen as exemplary of an ‘ethics of alterity’. I will argue that not only is an ethics of alterity contradictory in itself, but Beckett’s politics of time performs an important literary critique of these contemporary philosophical dogmas.
This paper draws on the recent ‘radical atheism’ of Martin Hägglund to argue that Beckett’s work advances a temporality of “infinite finitude”, which far from eschewing any kind of limit instead reconfigures the condition of life as survival, rendering each moment as inscribed with its own succession. Beckett’s work plays out our infinite exposure to this condition of finitude as the very possibility of our desires, actions, and decisions; a hyperpolitical logic which politicises our every moment, making ‘the contemporary’ both ‘our time’ and radically disjunctive. Similarly, just as Beckett’s aesthetics seem inexhaustible, Beckett is also often taken to mark the exhaustion of literary aesthetics itself. For writers such as J.M. Coetzee and Paul Auster, as Peter Boxall argues, “to inherit Beckett’s legacy is to occupy a time that is after the end and before the beginning.” Beckett’s literary thinking thus opens new ways by which to engage with contemporary discourses on ethics, life, and the real, as well as serves as lens by which to rethink the temporal and political exigencies of ‘contemporary’ literature.
For more info, contact Tanguy Harma
tharm009@gold.ac.uk
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 19 Mar 2015 | 6:30pm - 8:00pm |
Accessibility
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