Patrick Crowley opnar fyrirlestraröð Bókmennta- og listfræðistofnunar

12. október 2021

Veröld – Hús Vigdísar (stofa 8)

Patrick Crowley, forseti tungumála-, bókmennta- og menningardeildar Háskólans í Cork, heldur opnunarfyrirlestur fyrirlestraraðar Bókmennta- og listfræðastofnunar Háskóla Íslands, í stofu 8 í Veröld þriðjudaginn 12. október kl. 12:00.

Patrick Crowley er prófessor við Háskólann í Cork og hann sérhæfir sig í rannsóknum á nútíma- og samtímamenningu hins frönskumælandi heims. Hann hefur unnið að rannsóknum á fagurfræðilegum formgerðum – aðallega innan bókmenntanna – samhengi og afbyggingu þeirra. Hann hefur gefið út fjölda verka, þar með talið Pierre Michon: The Afterlife of Names, sem kom út árið 2007; Mediterranean Travels: Self and Other from the Ancient World to Contemporary Society, sem hann ritstýrði ásamt Noreen Humble og Silvia Ross; og Postcolonial Poetics: Genre and Form sem hann ritstýrði ásamt Jane Hiddleston, en þær komu báðar út árið 2011. Nánar um Patrick Crowley.

Fagurfræði, andspyrna og nýlenduhyggja

Í þessum fyrirlestri verður sett fram sú kenning að hægt sé að nýta fagurfræði sem aðferðafræði í andspyrnu við nýlenduhyggju og kannað hvaða möguleika slík andspyrna hefur til að móta og hafa áhrif á samtíma okkar. Fjallað verður um skáldsagnaritun og listsköpun sem aðferð til að gera upp nýlenduarfleifð og takast á gagnrýnan hátt á við það pólitíska kerfi sem hún hefur leitt af sér. Meðal annars verður fjallað um skáldsöguna Nejma eftir Kateb Yacine sem kom út á sjálfstæðisbyltingarárum Alsírs (1954–1962).

Anti-colonial aesthetics, temporalities, and Algerian revolutions

This paper is part of a wider publication project that seeks to unsettle the politics of time that has fastened the anticolonial enterprise to the past. Along with my co-editor, Carlos Garrido Castellano, we propose to mobilise and repurpose anticolonial aesthetics and praxis as an ongoing radical creative repertoire with the potential to shape our global contemporaneity. My contribution focuses on a particular national example, that of Algeria and begins with the observation that in the wake of Algeria’s ‘black decade’ of violence in 1990s, references to a star (or nedjma in Arabic) came to be inscribed and contextualised within a diverse range of novels and artistic production. Its function varies but seems in every case to prompt a reflection on Algeria’s revolutionary past and its uncertain present. A range of novelists draw upon the symbolic power of the star and its centrality to a symbolic condensation of the nation and its revolutionary struggle given form by Kateb Yacine in his novel Nedjma (1956) published during the Algerian war of independence (1954-62). In juxtaposing these two periods – the one anticolonial and the other post-colonial – we can reflect on how the aesthetics and creative processes of the earlier period are reworked in order to prompt agency. In this way, such novels suggest that anticolonial aesthetics can serve not only to think about decolonization but about the failures, if not the failure, of the post-colonial state. At the same time, the post-colonial state continues to draw upon that same symbolic reservoir to reassert its political legitimacy and to pacify a radical collective project. How writers and artists rework, resist or appropriate the aesthetics of Algeria’s revolution, creating a dialectic of past and present is central to this paper but also to the recent popular movement, or hirak, what has brought the question of aesthetics and revolutionary temporalities back into the public space.

https://www.hi.is/vidburdir/patrick_crowley_opnar_fyrirlestrarod_bokmennta_og_listfraedastofnunar

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Please find out more on our upcoming conference on crime fiction:

NOIR IN THE NORTH

on the website: https://conference.hi.is/noirinthenorth/

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In memoriam: Michael Sheringham

                                                                    

It is with great sadness that we announce the death of Professor Michael Sheringham, who died peacefully at home on Thursday, 21 January 2016. He was Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and Professor of French Literature at the University of Kent from 1974 to 1995, and Professor of French at Royal Holloway, University of London from 1995 to 2004, before his appointment to the Marshal Foch Chair of French Literature at the University of Oxford where he was a fellow of All Souls College from 2004 until his retirement in 2015. Michael Sheringham made a profound impact on the field of modern French literature and culture with works on French autobiography, everyday life, and a wide range of contributions on modern and contemporary poetry and prose fiction, Surrealism, and most recently on memory and the archive. Selected publications include Everyday Life: Theories and Practices from Surrealism to the Present, 2006 and French Autobiography: Devices and desires. Rousseau to Perec, 1993. He was a constant source of encouragement and inspiration to our Centre for Studies in Memory and Literature and was happy to serve on the board of directors. We offer our sincere condolences to his family and friends.

All Souls College Oxford 11-13 January 2016

 

What forms can do: Attending to the real in 20th and 21st century French literature

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Collective Memory and Collective Recollection

Dmitri Nikulin
The New School for Social Research, New York

Gimli 301, Miðvikudagur 16. september kl. 12.00 – 13.15

One of the most widely used concepts in the current vast and interdisciplinary field of memory studies is that of collective memory, which goes back to Maurice Halbwachs, whose thesis consists in that personal memory is always inscribed into, and is understood from, collective or group memory. Through a critical discussion and close reading of Halbwachs’ works and with reference to the distinction between memory and recollection, I argue for the introduction of the concept of collective recollection as the process of the reasoned and critical reconstruction of the past through a joint effort of a social or political group.

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Dmitri Nikulin is professor of philosophy at The New School for Social Research in New York. He has written  on ancient and modern philosophy, philosophy and history of science, philosophy og imagination and dialogue among other things. His most recent works are The Other Plato (SUNY Press, 2012) and Dialectic and Dialogue (Stanford, 2010).

Noir in the North

16-17 November 2016

University of Iceland

The Killing, Wallander, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Miss Smilla’s Sense of Snow – Nordic Noir has been a dominant part of global detective fiction, film and television in the past two decades. But what are the parameters of this genre, both historically and geographically? What is noirish and what is northern about Nordic Noir? This conference invites proposals which either investigate the specifics of noir in a particular text or which interrogate more broadly the notion of Nordic Noir.

Can Nordic Noir be used to identify, for example, some aspects of the work of other Nordic authors, such as Halldór Laxness, Isak Dinesen or Vilhem Moberg? What is the relationship between earlier Scandinavian crime fiction, such as that by Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, and Nordic Noir? How does work like the Shetland novels by Ann Cleeves fit within the parameters of Nordic Noir? What part has translation played in the history and global circulation of Nordic Noir?

More broadly, the conference will address the following questions: How does Nordic Noir challenge the traditional critical histories of noir? What new genealogies of noir can complicate the Anglo-American dominance of noir? Are there geographical limitations to noir and how does it function transnationally? Where does the north begin for noir? What are the peripheral boundaries in the East and West? Does noir complicate traditional literary histories modeled on geographical boundaries? What specific images of the north are associated with Nordic Noir? How do sex and gender operate in Nordic Noir? What is Nordic noir’s relationship with particular national pasts, identities, or collective and cultural memory? What connections are there, for example, between Nordic Noir and Continental existentialism, European Romanticisms, or fin-de-siècle literatures?

This major international conference will consolidate work to date on Nordic Noir and seek to deepen our understanding of the genre, both in relation to traditional histories, but also in drawing on new theoretical and geographical understandings.

The Crime Studies Network, in collaboration with the Centre for Studies in Memory and Literature at the University of Iceland and with the University of Newcastle, will host Noir in the North in Reykjavik in November 2016. This conference is held in conjunction with the Iceland Noir Crime Fiction Festival (17-19 November).

Individual proposals for 20-minute papers/3 x 20 minute paper panels are invited. We welcome proposals on novels, films, television series, graphic novels and other forms. Send a short title, a 250-word proposal, and a 100-word biographical note to noirinthenorth@gmail.com by 15 November 2015. Applicants will be notified of acceptance by 15 January 2016.

Keynote Speakers

Val McDermid

Yrsa Sigurðardóttir

Bruce Robbins (Columbia University)

Mary Evans (London School of Economics)

Conference Organisers

Stacy Gillis (University of Newcastle)

Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir (University of Iceland)

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The Trouble with Memory II

Irish-Icelandic Memory Studies

Programme 13 -14 March 2015

Aula

1^st floor Main Building

Friday 13 March

8.30 – 8.50 Registration

8.50 – 9

Welcome – Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir and Daisy Neijmann

9 – 10.30

The Middle Ages I:

Jürg Glauser, Universities of Zurich and Basel; Pernille Hermann, Aarhus University; Stephen Mitchell, Harvard University: Old Norse Memory Studies

Gísli Sigurðsson, The Árni Magnússon Institute : Memory of Ireland in the different versions of the Book of Settlement

Ásdís Magnúsdóttir, University of Iceland: Time and Memory in the Saga of Grettir

Chair: Úlfar Bragason

Coffee

10.45 – 12.15

The Middle Ages II

Pétur Knútsson, University of Iceland: Líadan and Cuirithir in Laxdæla Saga

Úlfar Bragason, The Árni Magnússon Institute: Creating the Medieval Saga

Ciaran McDonough, National University of Ireland, Galway: “Acht do bhrígh go bhfuaras scríobhtha i sein-leabhraibh iad” (“Because I found them in some old books”): Medieval Memories and Nationalist Intentions in Nineteenth-Century Irish Antiquarianism

Chair: Gísli Sigurðsson

Lunch

13.15 – 14.45

Landscape

Emily Lethbridge, University of Iceland: Icelandic Saga Landscapes as Palimpsest

Hilary Bishop, Liverpool John Moores University: Rationalising Penal Myths: The Memory of Mass Rock Sites in Ireland

Sveinn Yngvi Egilsson, University of Iceland: Landscape and memory: Some points of comparisons between two modern poets in Ireland and Iceland

Chair: Sharae Deckard

15.15 – 17 .15

Heritage:

Lucy Collins, University College Dublin: Reading the Viking Past in Contemporary Irish Poetry

Jón Karl Helgason, University of Iceland: Saints of Poetry: More than just a metaphor?

Charles Dillon, Queen‘s University Belfast: The 18th-century Gaelic elegy and memory

Eilis Almquist: The Power of the Heartfelt Curse. A Medieval Folktale of Protest, with some reflections on its relevance to contemporary Ireland (and Iceland?)

Chair: Fionnuala Dillane

Reception

Conference Dinner

Saturday 14 March

10 – 12

Crisis

Fionnuala Dillane, University College Dublin: Open and Closed Cases: Plotting Time in Contemporary Icelandic and Irish Crime Fiction

Sharae Deckard, University College Dublin: Memory and the Market: Financialization, Irrealist Aesthetics, and the “Boom” Novel in Ireland and Iceland

Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir, University of Iceland: Comparative trauma? The Icelandic financial crisis and global trauma contexts in Álfrún Gunnlaugsdóttir’s Siglingin um síkin (Sailing on the canals)

Anne Fogarty, University College Dublin: “The usual inner throb in me”: Reading Trauma and Memory in Eimear McBride’s A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing (2013)

Chair: Daisy Neijmann

Lunch

13 – 14.30

War

John Brannigan, University College Dublin: ‘In this corner of peace in a world of trouble’: Literary Representations of Neutrality, War, and Occupation in the Islands of the North-East Atlantic in the Second World War

Daisy Neijmann, University of Iceland: Hidden People – Hidden Crimes: Memories of the Allied Occupation in the Fiction of Arnaldur Indriðason

Ásta Kristín Benediktsdóttir, University College Dublin: Deviant independence: A few words on two queer novels by Sjón and Jamie O’Neill

Chair: Gunnþórunn Guðmundsdóttir

Coffee

15 – 16.30

Travel and Round Table Discussion

Eavan O’Dochartaigh, National University of Ireland, Galway: Irish Memory and Arctic Landscape: The Visual Records of William Henry Browne (1821-71)

Sumarliði Ísleifsson, Reykjavík Academy: „Their huts are very much like the Irish“, John Barrow in Iceland 1835

Round Table Discussion

Chair: Ásta Kristín Benediktsdóttir

17 – 19

Humanities Conference Reception

The Trouble with Memory (II)
The Ireland-Iceland Memory Studies Network will host four panels at the Humanities Conference, University of Iceland on 13-14 March 2015. The panels will focus on Irish and Icelandic issues with special emphasis on memory and memorialisation. Subject areas will build on thematic strands that emerged from our last meeting in Dublin, May 2014, and include a) Medieval memory; b) Memory and crisis; c) Memory and landscape; d) Islands and war. Papers are invited which deal with one or more of the above issues, either from a comparative perspective or with an emphasis on one of the two countries. Please send a short abstract (max 250 words) to Gunnthorunn Gudmundsdottir (gunnth@hi.is) and Fionnuala Dillane (fionnuala.dillane@ucd.ie) by 1 December 2014. Applicants will be notified by 15 December.

The Ireland-Iceland Memory Studies Network is supported by the Centre for Studies in Memory and Literature, University of Iceland, The Irish Memory Studies Network, The Humanities Institute University College Dublin and the Humanities Institute at the University of Iceland.