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Events 2012

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  Events 2013

UCT English Department Research Seminar

Literature and Public Value: A Dialogue

Derek Attridge
University of York

Peter McDonald
St Hugh's College, Oxford

Wednesday
20 March 2012
13h00 - 14h30

Venue: A116
(Arts Building, UCT)

 

Coetzee Collective Colloquium

 

Wednesday
13 March 2012

Venue: A116
(Arts Building, UCT)

 

11h00-13h00

David Attwell (York) will be speaking about the manuscripts of
Waiting for the Barbarians, and Hermann Wittenberg (UWC) will be talking about Coetzee's film scripts. Derek Attridge will be the discussant.

 

13h00- 13h45

Lunch
Light refreshments will be served.

 

13h45 - 14h15

Informal discussion about The Childhood of Jesus: Donald Powers (UCT),
Peter McDonald (St Hugh's), Hedley Twidle (UCT), Derek Attridge (York) and David Attwell (York).

 

14h15 - 15h45

Kai Wiegandt (Berlin) on Barthes, Boas and Myths in Dusklands;
Kai Easton (SOAS, London) on Scenes from Provincial Life.

 

 

UCT English Department Research Seminar

Reading and Teaching World Literature from the Cape

 

Meg Samuelson

Hedley Twidle

Victoria Collis-Buthelezi

 

Tuesday
12 March 2012
13h00 - 14h30

Venue: A116
(Arts Building, UCT)

 

A report on this event by Donald Powers

J.M. Coetzee

reads from new work


J.M. Coetzee will be reading from new work at UCT on 21 December.

 

Attendance at the reading is by e-mail invitation only,
and the invitation is not transferable.


Friday
21 December 2012
17h00
(guests to be seated by 16h45)

Venue:
Leslie Social Sciences Building
Lecture Theatre 2D
(to be confirmed)

Kindly give an expression of your interest in attending to
Colleen Jeftha before Friday, 14 December.
Email: colleen.jeftha@uct.ac.za
Telephone: 021 650 5160

The venue has 340 seats only;
seating will be allocated on a first-come, first-served basis.

 

 

JM Coetzee: An Illustrated Lecture

David Attwell
York

David Attwell will be giving what promises to be an utterly fascinating talk on J.M. Coetzee's manuscripts at Kalk Bay Books in Cape Town. The talk proceeds from his recent visit to the Harry Ransom Centre in Texas, where Coetzee's manuscripts are held. Please note that there will be a charge of R80 to attend this event, and that booking is essential. All of the proceeds will go to the library of the Masiphumele informal settlement.

Friday
2 November 2012
19h00

Venue:
Majestic Village, 124 Main Road, Kalk Bay
(Opposite Cape to Cuba restaurant)

Reservations:
http://www.kalkbaybooks.co.za/author-events-detail.php?id=303

 

 

Call For Papers

The Great Escape Artists

Piotr Jakubowski
Adam Mickiewicz University
Poznan, Poland

Our proposal is directed to writers, literary critics and scholars. Michael K is both the starting and the main reference point for written reflection on the following issues:

  • Michael K as seen from political/ethical or philosophical point of view;
  • Cultural/social oppressions and tactics for escaping them;
  • Resistance to recognition, interpretation, (auto)biographical story; being "above and beneath classifications";
  • Michael K and other Originals in literature, movies, theatre, history etc.;
  • Phantasms of "stony" existence; stone as a symbol, metaphor or allegory;
  • Absurdity and mystery as threats to social conventions and axioms of reason;
  • The „Ethics of the Prophet”: the relation between literature and The Other.


DOC format   PDF format

The general questions we would like to pose are: Who was/is Michael K? What were/are his "life" and "times"? Who would be contemporary Michael K? What are the causes, paths and chances to succeed in their escapes? We would like to explore together but not exhaust (if that were possible) the interpretative potential of the novel called The Life & Times of Michael K.

We hope that you will find our proposal inspiring and worth your creative effort. We will be waiting for your applications for the project until July 25th 2012. The deadline for sending papers (written in English, French or German) is September 20th 2012. (The publication will be in Polish but we plan to prepare an English version as well. The editors have the right to reject the texts and abbreviate them in agreement with their authors).

Further details are available in both PDF and DOC format.

For more information please contact:

Piotr Jakubowski
pjakubowski@ymail.com

Małgorzata Jankowska
helga1982@wp.pl

Zoë Wicomb and the Translocal:
Scotland and South Africa

a major international conference to be held at

University of York
13-14 September 2012

 


Poster in PDF format

Zoë Wicomb and the Translocal: Scotland and South Africa is the third and final event in a series of conferences focussed on the award-winning Scotland-based South African author. The conference will offer a rare opportunity to hear readings by Wicomb herself, as well as J.M. Coetzee, Elleke Boehmer, Brian Chikwava, Patrick Flanery, Michael Cawood Green, and Abdulrazak Gurnah. In addition, there will be academic papers by leading scholars in the field, including Dorothy Driver, Derek Attridge, David Attwell, Nadia Davids, Sam Durrant, Kai Easton, Shaun Irlam, and Meg Samuelson.

Hosted by the University of York’s Departments of English and Related Literature and History, this cross-disciplinary conference considers the attention to and interrogation of home and belonging, space and place found in Wicomb’s work, and will be of interest to those who work on contemporary British and World literatures, as well as colonial and contemporary British and African history.

A stellar line-up of writers will be reading at the University of York's Humanities Research Centre on Friday 14th September, as part of the Zoë Wicomb and the Translocal: Scotland and South Africa conference: Elleke Boehmer, J.M. Coetzee, Brian Chikwava, Patrick Flanery (nominated for the Guardian First Book Award 2012), and Michael Cawood Green. The readings will take place in the Bowland Lecture Theatre (Berrick Saul Building) from 15h45. Please note there is a £5 charge if you're not attending the conference. Seating is limited to 150: get there early!

For more information:
http://wicombandthetranslocal.wordpress.com/
Or email us at:
wicombandthetranslocal@gmail.com

Waiting For The Barbarians
on the Stage

Donald Powers
UCT

Donald Powers will present a paper on the recent stage adaptation of Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians. The paper explores the challenges of
translating Coetzee's novel into the medium of theatre.

For anyone who has not had an opportunity to see the play, here is a review of the stage adaptation of Waiting for the Barbarians,
written by Lucy Graham:

http://tinyurl.com/988cdrc

Thursday
13 September 2012
13h00

Venue: A116
(Arts Building, UCT)

You are all very warmly invited to attend.

 

 

L'empreinte a Crusoe

Patrick Chamoiseau

Thursday
30 August 2012
10h00

Venue: LS 1A

 

 

Waiting For The Barbarians

adapted for the stage by Russian director

Alexandre Marine

opens at the Baxter Theatre, Cape Town, on

Thursday
16 August 2012

http://www.baxter.co.za/drama.htm

http://www.iol.co.za/tonight/news/local/the-long-wait-s-been-worth-it-1.1357937#.UCkMnGN25Xc

 

Eros and Instinct in Disgrace

Kai Wiegandt
Freie Universität
Berlin

Tuesday
7 August 2012
13h00

Venue: A116
(Arts Building, UCT)

You are all very warmly invited to attend!

 

 

Department of English Research Seminar
Stellenbosch University

The Shot Tower:
J.M. Coetzee, Dostoevsky and the
Art of Autobiographical Fiction

David Attwell
York University

In this multi-media seminar, renowned Coetzee scholar David Attwell
will preview part of his forthcoming literary biography.

Thursday
19 April 2012
12h00 - 13h00

Yellow/Green Molteno Room (579)
Stellenbosch English Department
Arts and Social Sciences Building

All welcome!

For more info contact Lucy Graham:
lucyg@sun.ac.za

 

 

 

The Sympathetic Imagination
in the Early Works of J.M. Coetzee

Hilmar Heister
Humboldt University

Monday
19 March 2012
13:00

Venue: A116
(Arts Building, UCT)

In The Lives of Animals (1999) J.M. Coetzee introduces his concept of the sympathetic imagination, reformulated and augmented in Elizabeth Costello (2003). Coetzee sketches how literary production and empathy could go hand in hand. My project intends to explicate the concept of the sympathetic imagination more fully than Coetzee has done by taking a closer look at how this concept comes into play in his literature. Complementary to his is the concept of embodiment, also formulated in Lives of Animals. In this presentation I will discuss three early novels by Coetzee and how they illustrate both concepts, albeit in an early stage of development. Coetzee’s first novel Dusklands (1974) delivers to the reader two psychograms of two imperialist minds, that of an early white settler in South Africa and that of an American war strategist for Vietnam. Coetzee’s use of narrative brings the reader close to the protagonists, allowing them to empathetically engage with the perpetrators – this constitutes an early example of what the sympathetic imagination could be understood to be. In the Heart of the Country (1977) will serve as a second example, only now in a slightly more complex situation due to the involvement of more characters in the mental landscape of the protagonist Magda. Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) goes one step further in portraying a moral development of the protagonist. The Magistrate starts out as a bystander to the degradations the Empire subjects its captives to bear, but in the course of the narrative develops a more empathetic stance that forces him to take a stand. All three novels contain an early configuration of embodiment as a central category of character representation, enabling the sympathetic imagination to be effective and incur empathy in the reader. In this context it is helpful to include the latest neuroscientific research on mirror neurons, which are assumed to be the functional basis for empathy. Assuming that literature can induce empathy in the reader, a connection with the activity of mirror neurons is highly probable and worth investigating. Coetzee’s writing provides an excellent setting for the application of this approach, as I will demonstrate in my discussion of his first three novels. - Hilmar Heister

Life & Times of J.M. Coetzee

 

Derek Attridge
York

This talk is simply not to be missed.
Derek will be speaking about John Kannemeyer's forthcoming biography of Coetzee.

Tuesday
13 March 2012
12:00

Venue: A116
(Arts Building, UCT)

Light refreshments will be served.

Please let Shihaam Peplouw know if you'd like to attend,
at shihaam.peplouw@uct.ac.za or by telephone at +27(0)21-650 2836.

A pre-launch panel discussion of

The Cambridge History of South African Literature

will be held by

Derek Attridge
David Attwell
York

Mbongiseni Buthelezi
Hedley Twidle
UCT

Please join us for what is sure to be one of those memorable events in our department.

Monday
12 March 2012
12:00

Venue: A116
(Arts Building, UCT)

Light refreshments will be served.

Please let Shihaam Peplouw know if you'd like to attend,
at shihaam.peplouw@uct.ac.za or by telephone at +27(0)21-650 2836.

Page updated on February 16, 2017 TOP