Ticekts available through the Warwick Arts Centre

This event celebrates the publication of Gonzalo C. Garcia's novel and Tania Ganitsky's new book of poetry. Garcia is a Creative Writing Teaching Fellow and Ganitsky is a PhD candidate in Philosophy and Literature, both at Warwick. This joint launch will offer students and academics the opportunity to engage and be familiarized with contemporary Latin-American literature. The authors will discuss their work with Rosalind Harvey, an acclaimed literary translator of Latin-American and Spanish literature who teaches translation in the Hispanics Department. The event will provide an opportunity to reflect on creative writing, multilinguism, translation, and the differences between or reasons for recurring to narrative and poetry. It will also be a celebration of literature bringing people from different geographies and fields of knowledge closer.

Tickets available through the Warwick Arts Centre box office (free tickets available for students)

Please join us for the next CRPLA Seminar on Tuesday 30 January between 5.30-7pm. We are delighted to host Dr Audrey Wasser (Miami University of Ohio), who will speak on 'Reading Between the Real and the Rational: On Pierre Macherey's Theory of Literary Production'.

Alison Gibbons (Sheffield Hallam): 'Uses and Abuses of Reading Life: Morality, Fictionality and the Trial of Ahmed Naji'

"...they are accusing me as if I were the fictional character in the novel. Whatever the fictional character is doing in the novel, the prosecution is dealing with it as if it were my personal confessions. If the court gives us a verdict and if the court agrees that this is literature, this is a novel, I think this will have a huge effect on the freedom of expression in Egypt"

These are the words of Egyptian journalist and novelist Ahmed Naji, speaking in January 2016 (RNW Media 2016) about his prosecution by the state for 'violating public modesty'. The case went to trial with Naji acquitted in December 2015. Subsequently, though, the prosecution appealed; Naji was re-tried at a higher court and found guilty in February 2016, then sentenced to the maximum two-years in prison. Since then, Naji's case has been taken up by PEN International and high-profile novelists such as Zadie Smith have written in support. In December 2016, Naji's sentence was temporarily suspended and he was released from prison, subject to retrial. His case has captured the public interest, yet is indicative of more widespread suppression of free speech in the Arabic world. This paper analyses Ahmed Naji's trial in its socio-political context, considering the legal arguments, public discourse surrounding the case, and style of the translated except.

Speaker: Tina Röck (Dundee). Title: 'Husserl's Reply to Meillassoux. A Phenomenological Way Into Speculative Realism'

Talk by Professor Michael Denning (Yale University). This year's lecture explores the soundscape of "modern times", the musical and cultural revolution triggered by the worldwide recording of vernacular musics between the development of electrical recording in 1925 and the outset of the Great Depression in the early 1930s. The musical styles and idioms etched out onto shellac disks reverberated around the world, igniting the first great battle over popular music, becoming the sountrack of decolonisation and remaking our musical ear.

6.30pm - Drinks Reception

7.00pm - Talk

Michael Denning is William R Kenan Jr Professor of American Studies at Yale Univesity. He is the author of Noises Uprising: The Audiopolitics of a World Musical Revolution (2015) and Culture in the Age of Three Worlds (2004).

See also Inscriptions, an exhibit at Warwick University Library showing work by Peter Larkin, Howard Skempton and Simon Lewty, 20 April - 2 May 2018

https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/research/currentprojects/poetryatwarwick/conferences/larkin/inscriptions

Organised by the Warwick Philosophy and the Arts MA Student Committee

The University of Warwick’s postgraduate Philosophy and the Arts programme invites you to the Thinking Art one-day graduate conference on 3 May 2018, where we will be joined by Professor Matthew Kieran (University of Leeds), Gianluca Lorenzini (University of Warwick), Daisy Dixon (University of Cambridge), Jennifer Hankin (Loughborough University) and Samantha Groenestyn (University of Vienna).

Matthew Kieran is Professor of Philosophy and the Arts at University of Leeds. He was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship in 2012 to start work on a long-term project on creativity. Professor Kieran will deliver a talk on The Character of Creativity which will develop aspects of his recent work on the nature of creativity and what it is to be a creative person (in particular thinking about the nature of creative virtue). Professor Kieran's broader interests range over art, psychology and ethics. He is the author of many articles and books, including Revealing Art (2005).

Conference program:

"Art theory, philosophy of art and intentionality” by Gianluca Lorenzini (University of Warwick)

"Metaphor in art” by Daisy Dixon (University of Cambridge)

"The experience of utopia within contemporary installations” by Jennifer Hankin (Loughborough University)

"Geometry and painting” by Samantha Groenestyn (University of Vienna)

“The Character of Creativity” by Professor Matthew Kieran (University of Leeds)

We look forward to seeing lots of you there. If you have any queries please contact us at m.caldarini@warwick.ac.uk

A Greek Poetry and Poetics Network/CRPLA workshop for postgraduate students with David Fearn (Warwick), Sarah Nooter (Chicago), Pauline LeVen (Yale), Josh Billings (Princeton), Felix Budelmann (Oxford) and Tom Phillips (Oxford)

In conjunction with the Mead Gallery exhibit of Piper's work (1 May - 21 June 2018)

Speakers: Louise Campbell, Michael Hatt, Darren Pih and Frances Spalding

Speakers: David Constantine, Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei, Peter Lamarque, Anna Christina Ribeiro, and Karen Simecek.

Contact Eileen John (eileen.john@warwick.ac.uk) to register for this event or if you have any questions. This event is made possible by the Humanities Research Centre, the Institute of Advanced Study, and CRPLA at Warwick.

This one day conference will focus on the ways in which the Sublime is re-emerging as a significant aesthetic and ethical category in the 21st century, as profound planetary and social changes force us to re-imagine our relation to the non-human and also to the Earth itself. Contributors will explore new genres of the Sublime by drawing on philosophy, Earth Sciences, and the critical humanities (including decolonial and feminist film theory), as well as cinema, television and the visual arts.

The Sublime emerged as a dominant category of aesthetic praise in the 18th century, and was linked to an appreciation of the immense power of nature, especially in its most terrifying and infinite aspects. This conference will explore the intersections between the Sublime and the Anthropocene, defined as the epoch during which human influence has become a key determinant in material changes on planet Earth and its atmosphere, as well as to the life systems and peoples that the Earth supports. The event will look at ways in which the Sublime operates as an aesthetic category across fine art, film, television and visual media, finding its traces in the construction of place: from the specificity of the Cornish Sublime to the presentation of Earth as a totality in views from outer space. The day will explore the re-emergence of the Sublime in contemporary science fiction, from the construction of the radically unfamiliar in the form of UFOs, to the filmic re-figuring of transcendence, infinity and materiality presented by female characters in contemporary cinema.

In the opening plenary, 'The Sublime of the Sea: From the Infinity of Surface to the Oceans of the Anthropocene', Dr Christine Battersby will explore the origins of the notion of the Anthropocene in the Earth Sciences and the dating of its onset to 1952, alongside classical (18th and 19th century) portrayals of the Sublime. Using examples taken from the visual arts, alongside philosophical analyses of the Sublime, Dr Battersby will outline changes in how we represent infinity, the unbounded, the'awful' and also the unimaginable, especially in relation to ocean depths and the surfaces of the Earth's lakes and seas. The anti-Sublime of plastic detritus and dissolving life forms will also feature in her account.

The afternoon session pursues a different strand in debates around the Anthropocene, following the work of critical humanities scholars who argue that we need to connect anthropogenic climate change to the colonisation of the Americas. In 'Decolonising the Sublime', Dr Rachel Jones will draw on excerpts from Daniel Maximin's essay, 'Les fruits du cyclone' (2006) to ask to what extent the Sublime is bound up with a colonising logic and whether and how it might be de-colonised. Like Dr Battersby, Dr Jones will look back at the history of the Sublime in key 18th century texts as well as at 20th and 21st century re-workings that foreground race, ethnicity and issues relating to the transatlantic slave trade.

The day will feature research conducted within Film and Television Studies, some of which engages directly with the Sublime as a concept, including Laurence Kent on Deleuze and the Sublime in Cinema, and Professor Catherine Constable on the gendered presentation of the Sublime in 2001 and Gravity. Other papers will explore material that resonates with key themes of the day, including Dr Rachel Moseley on 'The Cornish Sublime', Dr Tiago de Luca, who will link the pictorial presentation of the Earth as a totality to the Anthropocene, and Jake Edwards, whose work addresses the conceptual and aesthetic challenges posed by UFOs.

Structure

9.30-11.00 Welcome and opening plenary in room A0.26: ‘The Sublime at Sea: From the Infinity of Surface to the Oceans of the Anthropocene’ Christine Battersby.

11.00-11.30 Coffee break.

11.30-13.00 Panel session I in room A0.26: ‘The Cornish Sublime’ Rachel Moseley, ‘Organs Become Metaphysical: Deleuze’s Sublime Cinema and the Contingency of Thinking’ Laurence Kent, ‘Reading the Unidentifiable: The Case of Ufology’ Jake Edwards.

13.00-14.00 Lunch.

14.00-15.30 Workshop in room A1.27: ‘Decolonising the Sublime’ Rachel Jones.

15.30-16.00 Tea with cake.

16.00-17.15 Panel session II in room A1.27: ‘Totalities and Transcendence in Contemporary Cinema’ Tiago del Luca and Catherine Constable.

NB: Places for the day are limited to 25. Please contact Catherine Constable (c.a.e.constable@warwick.ac.uk) for further information.This event is funded by The Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature and the Arts and The Centre for Exoplanets and Habitability.