Dear All,

We're delighted to announce the WMA Reading Group schedule for this term - Eve Poirier will be leading the sessions. The details are below:

Please note: in the run-up to this year's MindGrad conference, we will also be using this reading group to have some pre-reading sessions on the work of the keynote speakers. These will be valuable sessions for PG students to attend to familiarise themselves with the keynote speakers' work ahead of the conference. More details on this will be announced in due course.

WMA reading group: Montaigne on MEEP (Mind, Epistemology, Ethics & Political Philosophy)

Where/When: Cowling Room (S2.77), Tuesdays 16:00-17:00 in even weeks, starting in week 2.

A message from Eve: This term in the WMA reading group we will look at some Montaignian takes on topics in Mind, Epistemology, Ethics and Politics. Suitable for Montaigne beginners and experts, everyone is welcome. I will be reading from Donald Frame’s translation, of which there are hard copies available in the library. Get in touch with me (eve.poirier@warwick.ac.uk) if you need help finding the readings or want a digital copy.

We will meet in the Cowling Room (S2.77) at 16:00 on Tuesday in even weeks, starting on the 16^th. I promise it will be relatively light-hearted and fun, so please don’t be afraid to come along and discover the joys of Montaigne 😊 

Schedule:

Week 2 – Intro to Montaigne: Judgement, Personality, Humankind (and Chess!)

‘To the Reader’ (p. 2 in the Frame translation)

‘Of Democritus and Heraclitus’ I. 50. (pp. 266-268)

Week 4 – Knowing Facts, Learning Virtues

‘Of Pedantry’ I. 25. (pp. 118-129)

Week 6 – Justice and Dirty Hands

‘Of the Useful and the Honourable’ III. 1 (pp. 726 at least up to p. 736)

Week 8 – TBC

Week 10 – TBC

Caroline Summers (Warwick SMLC)

5:30pm - 7pm, Tue, 30 Jan '24 Location: Ramphal R3.41

Narrative afterlife: translating lived experience into literary texts

Literary studies is fond of the metaphor of an ‘afterlife’ to describe the enduring resonance and visibility of an author’s work long after they have died. Meanwhile, in Translation Studies, the term has a more specific meaning, rooted in Walter Benjamin’s exploration of the concept in his 1923 essay ‘The Task of the Translator’. Benjamin tells us that true translation is the point at which ‘a work, in its continuing life, has reached the age of its fame. […] In [translation], the original’s life achieves its constantly renewed, latest and most comprehensive development’. Thus, for Benjamin, translation is a form that embodies something not otherwise captured in the original text. The possibility of translation is something that both is inherent in the essence of an original and contributes to its transformational fulfilment of self: it is at once a remainder of the past and a projection of the future.

Building chiefly on the work of Bella Brodzki (2007), who frames the text as a ‘literary invigoration’ of memory, this paper reads the literary narrative as a ‘translation’ of experience and asks what Benjamin’s reading of afterlife might teach literary studies more broadly about the relationship between the stories we live and those that we read or write. Exploiting the intersection between literary narratology and a sociological understanding of experience as narrative, the paper draws on literary accounts of German Reunification (1989/90) to explore how these texts create a space in which the spectres of experience can enjoy a long afterlife.

In collaboration with the Warwick Workshop for Interdisciplinary German Studies