"Following the trial of Madame Bovary, Flaubert wrote to one of his correspondents that, with the excitement and the scandal out of the way, he was glad to be returning to his quiet life in which sentences themselves were his greatest adventures. Flaubert’s concept of writing as a repeated daily exploration of techniques and forms was described by Barthes in ‘Littérature et métalangage’ (1959) as a new ‘conscience artisanale de la fabrication littéraire’. Flaubert himself saw his work as tedious and repetitive, and compared it to the activity of one of the characters in Madame Bovary whose hobby was to produce endless numbers of serviette rings on a lathe, for the mere sake of it. But the art of banality characterizes not merely Flaubert’s retreat from the world or his daily focus on his craft; it is central, too, to his artistic vision and his poetics. Flaubert’s uniqueness as a writer comes from the unremitting investigation of the dullness and dreariness of ordinary lives, and he finds his preferred subject matter in repetitiveness, mediocrity, failure or stupidity. This paper will look afresh at Flaubert’s fascination with the banal and the ordinary, at his paradoxically innovative representation of what is inherently unoriginal, and at his corresponding fascination with recycled language and text. Focussing on specific examples, it will seek to elucidate how Flaubert achieves such expressiveness and resonance with such modest materials and with language that is often understated, unremarkable or even unliterary."

This talk is aimed at both a specialist and a non-specialist audience. Quotations from Flaubert’s work will be accompanied by translations.

We are experiencing a wave of Greek mythological movies: Clash of the Titans, Percy Jackson--The Lightning Thief (2010); The Immortals (2011); Percy Jackson--The Sea of Monsters, Wrath of the Titans (2012). Why? Perhaps because all of these portrayals of an Olympus-governed world enact the same revolution: the gods are now an embattled military faction, reliant upon mortal heroes. There are many recent 'turning-points' from which Greek myth's metamorphosis and resurgence may have begun. Within the industry, these include 300 (2006), Clash of the Titans (1981), and Star Wars (1977). But perhaps the real 'turning-point' happened in a different medium altogether, namely video games, and especially the massively popular God of War franchise.

"Theodoor Poelman (Theodorus Pulmannus, 1507-1581) was an Antwerp cloth merchant whose hobby was collecting medieval manuscripts of the Latin classical authors and preparing their texts for publication. Most of his editions were printed by Christophe Plantin, the major European printer-publisher of the later sixteenth century. Much of Poelman's library and archive survives in the Plantin-Moretus Museum in Antwerp."

"The ancient Egyptians must have experienced emotions much like our own, but can we do anything better (or more useful for serious lines of research) than guess at their feelings? Cultures, ancient and modern, vary in the ways in which they construct and exploit emotions: Egyptian representational art and writings (letters, religious and wisdom literature, stories), over a time-span of three millennia, all marshal emotions, but in strikingly diverse ways. This lecture explores the rewards of attempting to track the role of the emotions through different facets of ancient Egyptian culture."

Chris Shilling (Professor of Sociology, University of Kent) argues that, although we sometimes express our emotions out loud, the particular types of sounds we make when doing so are not biologically determined. In this talk, I take the example of romantic love and try to establish that, in the case of this emotion, there exists just such a determination. There is good reason to doubt that there are many universals of grammar, but are there universals of tone? Evidence indicates that our prehistoric ancestors both experienced emotions and communicated them with the sounds of music. Distinctive tonal contours are not arbitrary or merely conventional; they are cross-cultural. Illustrations will be drawn mainly from the Great American Songbook.

Shakespeare’s plays are known for their verbal intricacy and aural richness, and for their capacity to create soundscapes in which relentlessly articulate speaking parts talk themselves into theatrical life. In the modern theatre, however, performers and audiences have become as accustomed to the signifying power of the spaces between the words as to the vitality and musicality of the words themselves.
Listening to the ways in which actors have shaped the gaps, breaks, pauses and silences that punctuate Shakespeare’s texts, this lecture- performance, devised in collaboration with Accidental Collective, explores how the orchestration of the said, the unsaid, and sometimes even the unspeakable, enables the making and the unmaking of ‘character’ on the contemporary stage. 

False Memoir Syndrome
Sue Vice

In this paper, I will consider what seems to be a recent plethora of false Holocaust testimonies. These are of two different kinds: entirely fictional, and partially embellished. Under the former heading fall Binjamin Wilkomirski’s Fragments (1995), Bernard Holstein’s Stolen Soul (2004) and Misha Defonseca’s Surviving with Wolves (2004); under the latter Deli Strummer’s A Personal Reflection of the Holocaust (1988) and Herman Rosenblat’s Angel at the Fence (which was scheduled for publication in 2009 but withdrawn), as well as Martin Gray’s earlier augmented work, For Those I Loved (1971).

I will ask whether these texts should be considered as part of a general cultural study of false memoirs (such as James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces and Margaret Jones’s Love and Consequences), and if false and embellished Holocaust testimony does fall into a separate category. It may be true that Holocaust fakes are created by a particular climate of publication and marketing, and that they may raise concerns about the possibility of Holocaust denial. However, these inauthentic works also cast light on Holocaust literature and testimony in general, in terms of what readers expect of such works and whether Holocaust testimony is a literary genre which can be imitated like any other. I will conclude by arguing that these false memoirs are in fact very useful texts which allow us to consider what happens as the Holocaust passes from an event in living memory to one that is firmly in the past.