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Events 2011

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  Events 2012

Marion Hansel's Dust

A screening of the film adaptation of J.M. Coetzee's
In the Heart of the Country

 

Friday
23 September 2011
13:00

Venue: A116
(Arts Building, UCT)

The Sympathetic Imagination in
J.M. Coetzee's Summertime

Hilmar Heister
Humboldt University

Monday
19 September 2011
13:00

Venue: A116
(Arts Building, UCT)

J.M. Coetzee's Age of Iron and the Poetics of Resistance

Eckard Smuts
UCT

in the seminar room on the 3rd floor of the Otto Beit Building,
next to the Postgraduate Bursary Office.

Friday
2 September 2011
13:00 - 14:00

TB Davie Seminar Room
Level 3, Otto Beit Building
Upper Campus, UCT.

The 8th Annual Literature & Ecology Colloquium

Coastlines and Littoral Zones

12-14 August 2011

Cape Town, South Africa
(The Grail Centre, Kleinmond)

Southern African and African literatures are rich in representations and explorations of our extensive coastlines, their associated waters and denizens. Yet this zone and its symbolisms are thus far almost entirely absent from our literary critical studies. This colloquium seeks to begin to fill this gap. While the emphasis is on the Southern African region, coastal studies of other regions, especially with African and comparative perspectives, are welcome. "Literature" is to be regarded as including all genres, including non-fiction. The colloquium also seeks to draw in the scientific community, to begin an environmentally fruitful conversation between ecology, literature, and related disciplines.

The following topics are suggestions only:

The sea as presence and motif in Southern African literatures
Littoral zones and bioregional theory
Incoming and outgoing sea journeys as motif
Coastal journeys in early travel literature
The role of islands in our literatures
Adamastor revisited: Camoens to the present
Ships, shipwrecks and the ecology of shipwreck narratives
The beach and swimming as locale and metaphor
Fishing, fishermen and fishing literature
Littoral animals as presence and metaphor (both marine and landbased)
Seabirds as poetic motif
Littoral communities in literature
Estuaries as locale and metaphor in SA poetry and fiction
Coastal urbanisation and ports as presence and motif
Littoral zones and literary tourism
Littoral science, archaeology and ecology in and out of literature
The South African coast as integral to both the Atlantic seaboard and
Indian Ocean littoral systems


Deadline for 250-word abstracts: 1 April 2011

Please submit as an e-mail attachment to sa.ecolit@gmail.com

Coetzee, the Cape & the Colonial Archive:
Exploring Dusklands via Summertime

Kai Easton
SOAS

Thursday
11 August 2011
13h00-14h00

Centre For Humanities Research
UWC

Since Coetzee's emigration in 2002, his writing post-Disgrace has shown only traces of the Cape. With Summertime we come full circle: we are back in the Cape, with a fictionalized version of the author at the time of the writing of his first novel, Dusklands (1974).  The paper looks at the ways in which we might read Dusklands via Summertime - and raises questions about auto/biography, the colonial archive, and the significance of the Cape in Coetzee's own archives.

Kai Easton teaches colonial and postcolonial writing at SOAS. She has previously taught at the universities of Sussex and Rhodes and, from 2004-06, held a Mellon postdoctoral fellowship in English at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

The Politics of Selfhood in J.M. Coetzee's Summertime

Eckard Smuts
University of Cape Town

Monday
8 August 2011
13h00

Venue: A116
(Arts Building, UCT)

Reports by Donald Powers:
1. On this symposium
2. On a reading by JM Coetzee at Out of the Archive

Into the Archive:
Coetzee and His Precursors

University of Leeds
United Kingdom

28th June 2011

 

 

Plenary: Dr Carrol Clarkson (University of Cape Town, ZA)
     
Speakers: Prof. Derek Attridge
Dr Lucy Graham
Dr Patrick Hayes
Dr Andrew van der Vlies
Dr Samuel Durrant
Prof. Chull Wang
Mr Peter Bergsma
(University of York, GB)
(Stellenbosch University, ZA)
(St John’s College Oxford, GB)
(Queen Mary, University of London, GB)
(University of Leeds, GB)
(Chonbuk National University, KR)
(Vertalershuis|Translators’ House, NL)

 

Second Call for Expressions of Interest

J. M. Coetzee's appearance at the Samuel Beckett: Out of the Archive conference in York this June is a timely point to reconsider the dynamics of what Coetzee, one of the more challenging of Beckett's literary heirs, himself has called 'literary paternity', by means of a one-day conference. The organizers are happy to invite expressions of interest from the academic community at large to participate in the symposium to be held at the University of Leeds on the 28th June.

Our subtitle, "Coetzee and His Precursors", itself upholds this principle of textual reconsideration, alluding - via Borges - to one of Coetzee's most prominent creative influences, Franz Kafka. In his essay 'Kafka and His Precursors', Borges writes:

In critical vocabulary, the word precursor is indispensable, but one should attempt to purify it of all connotation of polemic or rivalry. The fact is that each writer creates his precursors. His labour modifies our conception of the past, as it has to modify the future.

The relevance of this to Coetzee's fiction is profound: because of and through his writing, Coetzee's more recognizable sources - among which Beckett, Cavafy, Defoe, Dostoevsky, Eliot, Joyce, Kafka, Keats, Nabokov, Pound, Rilke - have come to receive both renewed attention and significant reconsideration. The aim of the symposium is thus to consider the impact Coetzee's creative reworking of these and other writers has on our readings of them.

For that reason, the organizers have brought together outstanding scholars and translators of Coetzee's work to speak, in 'countervoice' with the delegates, about their views on this theme and the interesting implications and new terrain it presents. Each speaker has been asked to prepare a 5-10 minute presentation, abstracts of which will be distributed among the delegates prior to the conference. The delegates will then be expected to respond to the speakers' points, drawing on their own work and range of creative and critical sources. Delegates will not be required to submit paper abstracts or deliver papers. Rather, delegates will be expected to respond to the presentations as opportunities to generate truly collaborative knowledge, generated itself in the dialogue of different minds thinking to a single purpose. Moving away from the traditional speaker-centred papers approach, we envisage a polyphonic delegate-driven engagement with the specific ideas generated by the speaker.

To this end, we are asking prospective delegates to prepare 250-300 word biographies that include mapping out their interests in Coetzee and his precursors. Postgraduate students and early career scholars are particularly encouraged to apply. Successful applicants will be notified within a fortnight. Biographies should be sent to the conference email address coetzeeandhisprecursors@gmail.com by no later than Friday the 13th May, 2011. (Note the extended deadline.) Further questions are welcomed at this email address as well. More information will regularly be communicated on coetzeeandhisprecursors.wordpress.com.

Organizing committee:

 
Arthur Rose
Reshma Jagernath
Sarah Pett
Michael Springer
(University of Leeds)
(University of Leeds)
(University of York)
(University of York)
   

Related PDF documents:

CFP (60 kB); Poster (1.6 MB)

The Unbearable Lightness of Discourse

Henrik Keeler
University of Oslo

Wednesday
25 May 2011
13h00

Venue: A116
(Arts Building, UCT)

On Stupidity and Coetzee

Natalie Pollard
University of York

Monday
16 May 2011
13h00

Venue: A116
(Arts Building, UCT)

Disgrace in the Age of Multiple Identities:
Feminism and the Politics of Subtraction

Kari Jegerstedt
University of Bergen, Norway

Monday
9 May 2011
13h00

Venue: A116
(Arts Building, UCT)

A Mere Footloose Vagrant:
Narrative wreckage and the problem of Home
in Michael K

Sarah Pett
University of York

Monday
18 April 2011
13h00

Venue: A215
(Arts Building, UCT)

 

The Coming Into Being of Literature:
How J.M.Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year
Thinks Through the Novel

Ben Ogden
Rutgers

Friday
25 March 2011
13h00

Venue: A116
(Arts Building, UCT)

The Master of Petersburg and History

Kai Wiegandt
Free University of Berlin

Tuesday
1 March 2011
13h00

Venue: A116
(Arts Building, UCT)

Why Not To Teach Coetzee

Rita Barnard
University of Pennsylvania

Wednesday
23 February 2011
13h00

Venue: A116

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