Department research seminar 2006-07
Print version'The Limits of the Literary'
The seminars will take place in room D.11, 2nd floor, East Wing, Strand Campus, and will start at 5.00pm. Further sessions for the Spring semester will be announced in due course.
Wednesday 11th October: Luke Sunderland (KCL), ‘An Ethics of Comedy? The Old French Roman de Renart’
The tragic-heroic model of heroism exemplified by Jacques Lacan’s concept of the ethical act creates a problem for representation, due to its structural impossibility and incompatibility with the symbolic order. This paper will argue that the Roman de Renart finds one possible ‘way out’ of this impasse by reworking the ideal of sacrificial heroism to produce a comic anti-heroic paradigm, where comedy rather than tragedy is the true portrayal of an ethics of fidelity to one’s desire. The Renart thus avoids the ideological closure of the ethical act, and thereby suggests that the limits of the text are always subject to renegotiation, with the eponymous hero emblematic of this radical undecidability.
Wednesday 15th November: Neil Kenny (Cambridge), 'Genres and their limits: contradiction in Montaigne, Léry, and Colletet'
Wednesday 29th November: Francesco Manzini (KCL), ‘Medicine and the Limits of the Literary: Stendhal's Curious Case Histories’
Wednesday 24th January: Simon Gaunt (KCL) ‘Marco Polo’s Literary Frontiers’
Wednesday 28th February: Dr Anne Green (KCL) 'From Train to Text; or how Second Empire steam transport became literary.'
Wednesday 11th October: Luke Sunderland (KCL), ‘An Ethics of Comedy? The Old French Roman de Renart’
The tragic-heroic model of heroism exemplified by Jacques Lacan’s concept of the ethical act creates a problem for representation, due to its structural impossibility and incompatibility with the symbolic order. This paper will argue that the Roman de Renart finds one possible ‘way out’ of this impasse by reworking the ideal of sacrificial heroism to produce a comic anti-heroic paradigm, where comedy rather than tragedy is the true portrayal of an ethics of fidelity to one’s desire. The Renart thus avoids the ideological closure of the ethical act, and thereby suggests that the limits of the text are always subject to renegotiation, with the eponymous hero emblematic of this radical undecidability.
Wednesday 15th November: Neil Kenny (Cambridge), 'Genres and their limits: contradiction in Montaigne, Léry, and Colletet'
Wednesday 29th November: Francesco Manzini (KCL), ‘Medicine and the Limits of the Literary: Stendhal's Curious Case Histories’
Wednesday 24th January: Simon Gaunt (KCL) ‘Marco Polo’s Literary Frontiers’
Wednesday 28th February: Dr Anne Green (KCL) 'From Train to Text; or how Second Empire steam transport became literary.'
