Reading and Reception Studies Seminar 

A seminar organized by the Research Project on The Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe (RBAE)

Convenor: Dr Elinor Shaffer FBA <Elinor.Shaffer@sas.ac.uk>

Research Project Director and Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies (IGRS), University of London

Topics relating to reading and reception studies are considered in this seminar, which takes place in the Schoolof Advanced Study and Clare Hall, Cambridge, under the auspices of the RBAE Research Project. The informal sessions considerboth critical approaches (all varieties of reader-response theory and critical reception in books, periodicals and the work of other authors) and material approaches (history-of-the-book topics relating to publication, distribution and circulation). Translation is also a major concern. Case studies of all kinds are welcome. The seminar is also hospitable to those working on Europeanauthors in Britain.Papers need not be confined to Europe. There will be opportunities to publish and to contribute to the Research Project, togive a paper to a seminar, or simply to air ideas and discuss work-in-progress with other interested parties.

Meetings are held on Tuesdays from 5.30-7.30pm, in the School of Advanced Study, second floor, Stewart House, 32 Russell Square, London WC1 (unless otherwise indicated). Anyone interested in participating should contact Dr Elinor Shaffer at the above e-mail address. Other Colloquia and Seminars are held at Clare Hall, Cambridge (indicated in green), the IGRS, and at European venues.

Listed below are also events organized by the IGRS Working Group for the Reception of German/Austrian/Swiss Literature in Britain, of which Dr Shaffer is also convenor.

Please note that during the rewiring of Senate House the Project Seminars will be held in Stewart House, at the entrance to the Senate House car park.

 

 

All are welcome!

 

SUMMER TERM 2007

 

Thursday, 26 April

5.00-7.00 pm, The Alb Room, Clare Hall, Herschel Rd, Cambridge

Prof. Tatjana Jukić (Zagreb)

Ashenden times Murder on the Orient Express:

British Agents and the Programming of Literary History

 

Tuesday, 8May

5.30-7.30 pm, Room ST276, Stewart House

Dr Catherine Boyle (KCL)

Translation, Cultural Transmission and the Research Imperative:

From the ‘Golden Age’ Theatre of Sor Juana to Contemporary Latin American Theatre

 

Tuesday, 22 May

5.30-7.30 pm, Room ST276,Stewart House

Prof. Charles Martindale (Bristol)

Dryden’s Ovid, the Classic, and Aesthetic Translation

 

Tuesday, 5June

5.30-7.30 pm, Room ST276,Stewart House

Seng Ong (Cambridge)

TheCritical Reception of the first English Translation of the Chinese Penal Code(1810)

 

 

 

 

SPRING TERM 2007

 

Tuesday,16 January

5.30-7.30pm, Room ST269, Stewart House
Prof. Theo D’haen (Leiden, Louvain)
T. S. Eliot's reception in Dutch literature, reflected in the work of Martinus Nijhoff

Tuesday, 30 January

5.30-7.30 pm, Room ST273, Stewart House
Dr Evgenia Sifaki (Athens)

Browning and Cavafy: Historical Frames and Lyric Persistence

 

Tuesday, 13 February

5.30-7.30 pm, Room ST276, Stewart House
Prof. Ginette Roy (Paris X Nanterre)
Responding to Criticism: D. H. Lawrence's Career as a Poet

 

Tuesday, 27 February

5.30-7.30 pm, Room ST273, Stewart House
Robert Chandler (London)
Fooling About Dying: Andrey Platonov and Samuel Beckett


Thursday, 15 March

5.00-7.00 pm, The Meeting Room, ClareHall, Herschel Rd, Cambridge
Dr Helena Sanson (Clare College)
Women and the Battle for Grammar: Italy 16th-19th century

 

- further Spring Term event -

Thursday,8 March

5.30 for 6 pm, Room ST273

Prof. W. E. Yates (Exeter)

Nestroy's Versions of English Comedies

Seminar at the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, as part of the programme of

theWorking Group on the Reception of German/Austrian/Swiss Literature in Britain

 

 

AUTUMN TERM 2006

 

 

Tuesday,24 October

17.30-19.30,Room ST276, Stewart House
Dr Gillian Dow (University of Southampton)
The Reception of Madame de Genlis's Adèle et Théodore in Britain

Tuesday, 7 November

17.30-19.30,Rooms ST274-275, Stewart House
BCLA Graduate Seminar on ReadingAcross Boundaries

for the full programme scroll to the end of this listing


Tuesday, 21November

17.00-19.00, The Meeting Room, Clare Hall, HerschelRd, Cambridge
Dr Tom Toremans (Brussels)
The Double Genitive of Carlyle's Reception

Tuesday, 5 December

17.30-19.30, Room ST276
Prof. J. B. Bullen (Reading)
Narratives from theReception of Byzantium in Nineteenth-century Europe

- furtherAutumn Term event -

Thursday,16 November

17.30for 18.00, Room ST273

Dr Katrin Kohl (JesusCollege, Oxford)

Exchanging Metaphors: Concepts ofLiterature in German and English Poetics during the Period of Romanticism

Seminarat the Institute of Germanic & Romance Studies, as part of the programme of

theWorking Group on the Reception of German/Austrian/Swiss Literature in Britain

IGRSprogramme: http://igrs.sas.ac.uk/events

 

 

 

 

BCLA Graduate Student Seminar: ReadingAcross Boundaries

 

Aspecial session of the Readingand Reception Studies Seminar

 

Tuesday, 7 November 2006,5.30-7.30 pm

 

The British Comparative Literature Association (BCLA)held its first graduate student seminar as a special session of the Readingand Reception Studies Seminar. The aim of the event was to foster a sense ofcommunity amongst graduate students who are pursuing comparative and/orinterdisciplinary work.  It ishoped that it will become an annual fixture.

 

Dr Elinor Shaffer, FBA, is a founding member of theBritish Comparative Literature Association and its Executive, and long-timeEditor of its yearbook, ComparativeCriticism(Cambridge University Press).

 

Questions regarding the seminar and the receptionshould be directed to Marco Wan <mhmw2@cam.ac.uk>.

 

 

Presenters

 

Viola Brisolin

University CollegeLondon

The Ethics ofNarrative in Nussbaum and Rorty

 

In this paper I focus on some aspects of therelationship between ethics and narrative as they emerge from the works ofNussbaum and Rorty. Both philosophers have placed a strong emphasis on thecommunity-founding values promoted by narrative fiction and have insisted onits role in fostering public rationality and solidarity. The reader'simaginative response to the representational content of narrative fictions iscentral to this ethical project. However, I show how a mechanism ofidentification is postulated that ultimately gives rise to an innercontradiction and has to resort to some sort of apodictic wisdom. The effectsthat certain texts are said to produce are in fact actualised only if they arealready inscribed in the ideal reader from the very beginning. Narrative as ameans to promote solidarity and civic virtues works only insofar as the readeralready shares certain presuppositions, if he or she is already, as Rorty wouldhave it, 'one of us'.

 

 

Anthony Cummins

Universityof Oxford

Emile Zola inlate-Victorian England:a case study in cultural translation

 

'LONDONis in want of a writer like EMILE ZOLA,' the Daily Telegraph declared in 1882, 'but without his unnecessary and offensivegrossness': a contradictory proposition that concentrates our attention on thestakes involved when authors cross cultures. The late-Victorian encounter withZola demonstrates the inadequacy of common critical terms like 'influence' and'reception' as a means of describing the transformations that culturaltranslation inevitably enacts. This paper argues that we cannot talkstraightforwardly of Zola's 'impact' on Britain,without thinking also of the ways that Britainimpacted on Zola.

 

 

Alex Macmillan

Universityof Cambridge

Dante and theEnglish Romantics

 

A few passages of Dante's Divine Comedy became lieux par excellence during the Romanticperiod. Most scholars to date have dismissed the phenomenon, citing therepetitive, limited character of these allusions as evidence that few poets ofthe period had more than a superficial knowledge of Dante. In my paper I makethe case that these allusions were actually made with great care, and that theirsignificance lies in the way they reveal an intense politicization of theaesthetic sphere. Dantesque allusion in Romantic England was not just aliterary fad: instead, it marks the creation of an aesthetic network that wasthoroughly international in its character. Keats, Shelley and Hazlitt invokeDante's poem as though it were a manifesto for this new internationalism.

 

 

Mary Mazzilli

The Schoolof Oriental and AfricanStudies

Gao Xingjian's TheOther Shore between Postmodernism and Modernism

 

Gao Xingjian's plays encompass the borders of Chinesecultural identity, as they can be easily understood within the Western culturalcontext and in particular that of Postmodernism. Gao's theatre bears featuresthat are typically postmodern in terms of both cultural and artistic values,whilst still coexisting with typically modernistic elements. Postmodernism hasbeen mainly regarded as disassociating from the ideals of Modernism and itsvalues, although intellectuals such as Calinescu, McHale, and to some extentFokkema advocate a continuity between Postmodernism and Modernism. Calinescu'sapproach to the postmodernism debate enables an understanding of Gao's works bylooking at the coexistence of modernistic and postmodern aspects in his plays.This paper, therefore, looks at signs of Postmodernism and Modernism in Gao’stheatre and in particular in The OtherShoretaking into account Calinescu's interpretation.