Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature and the Arts

Thursday 12 October, R0.04, 5-7pm

Heather Altfeld and Troy Jollimore: ‘Dreams and Journeys: Two California Writers’

Heather Altfeld is a poet and essayist. She teaches in the Honors Program and for the Department of Comparative Religion and Humanities at California State University, Chico. Altfeld's first book, The Disappearing Theatre, won the 2015 Poets at Work Prize. She is the 2017 recipient of the Robert H. Winner Award from the Poetry Society of America and the 2015 recipient of the Pablo Neruda Prize for Poetry. Her work appears or is forthcoming in Conjunctions Magazine, Aeon, Orion Magazine, Narrative, ZYZZYVA, Poetry Northwest, and others.

Altfeld's second book of poems, Post-Mortem, was selected for the 2019 Orison Prize. Spanning ages and species and cultures, it pays tribute to the passing glory of this planet and all that our hands have made. Eric Pankey writes, "Post-Mortem is a brilliant, baroque, and word-crazed collection of poems. While the primary mode of the poems is elegiac (many taking as their forms obituaries, autopsies, and kaddishes), one cannot help but delight in Altfeld's reverie and in the breadth and depth of her inquiry, her exploration, her katabasis as she leads us like Virgil through a stunning and elaborate posthumous world."

Troy Jollimore is the author of three books of philosophy and four books of poetry, and the editor of the forthcoming book, The Virtue of Loyalty (Oxford University Press, 2024). He received the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry in 2007, and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2013; his third poetry collection, Syllabus of Errors, was selected by the New York Times as one of the ten best poetry collections of 2015. His philosophical work often centers on personal relationships and the emotional phenomena they involve, particularly as related to friendship, romantic love, and various forms of loyalty.

He has also published on topics including admirable immorality, the ethics of terrorism, practical reasoning and the nature of instrumental reason, grief, anxiety, philosophy of poetry, and the philosophical dimensions of depictions of love in such films as Her, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Rear Window, and Vertigo. In his essays and reviews for mainstream nonacademic publications he has addressed topics including relations between religion and science, questions regarding quality of life and competing conceptions of the good life, issues of political resistance and individual conscience in morally imperfect societies, the value of humanities-based education, and the increasing glorification of strictly quantitative, "data-driven" evaluative practices at the expense of qualitative evaluation and appreciation.

Heather and Troy will read from their work, followed by a conversation.

Surrealism, a major movement of late modernism in the 1920s and 1930s, showed an enigmatic parallel with and interest in psychoanalysis as the poets, painters and novelists tried to open a new depth of personal self-understanding. They were “loving Freud madly”: they studied psychoanalysis, Breton and Dalí visited Freud, and they integrated the basic ideas of psychoanalysis into their literary and theoretical discourses. Breton put the dream and automatism at the centre and developed a kind of hysteria-criticism, while Dalí introduced a more radical paranoia-criticism in his theories and creative work. Dalí’s work showed important parallel ideas with the psychoanalysis of the early Jacques Lacan. Dalí in 1938 visited Freud in London and took with him his freshly finished picture “The Metamorphosis of Narcissus”. This major painting is an excellent summary of his paranoia-criticism. The structuring of the picture, and the act of imagining the world through a paranoid-critical method, creates a surrealistic-hallucinatory psycho-analysis, and speaks of Dali’s narcissistic lacks and excesses as well as our own.

Navid Kermani’s novel Große Liebe (2014, Love Writ Large) charts the development of a young teenager’s infatuation with an A-level student in the early 1980s in Germany. The love story is refracted through the adult narrator’s reflections and through readings from Sufi mysticism and Nizami’s 12^th ct. epic poem Lailï and Majnûn. This creates a narrative framework in which (Iranian and Muslim) cultural sources and (West German) cultural memory subtly comment on one another, allowing Kermani to ironically undermine both contemporary masculinity and his narrator’s former self as lover while simultaneously reflecting on the cultural and religious traditions of his own background and their relations to a Western tradition of love. The paper examines Kermani’s ironic narrative construction in the context of his construction of a paradoxical cultural identity.