With many apologies: due to unforeseen circumstances, Marina Warner’s Annual Lecture, “Viral Spiral: Multiple Shape-Shifting from Ovid to Covid”, due to be delivered tonight at 6.15pm UK time, has had to be postponed to a date to be confirmed.
We apologise for any inconvenience.
Very best wishes from the CCL
Welcome back to the CCL for the Spring term events, and happy 2023!
A reminder of the two events scheduled for this week:
On Thursday 19 January 2023, at 6.15pm, Marina Warner gives the inaugural Annual Lecture ‘Viral Spiral: Multiple Shape-shifting from Ovid to Covid‘. Click on the title for more information and links to register to attend (in person or online).
On Friday 20 January 2023, at 6pm, the London Beckett Seminar also resumes, hosting Dr Marco Bernini (Durham University), with a talk on “Beckett and the Apparent Self: Awakenings, Predictions, Protentions”
To attend, please register by email.
A reminder of two events scheduled for this week:
The next seminar in the Auto / Bio / Fiction series is this Thursday, 15 December 2022, at 5.30pm (London time):
Laura Cernat, ‘Portraits of the Artist’s Wife in a Slanted Mirror: Reader, Mother, Lover, Sorceress’ and Varsha Panjwani, ‘The Many Lives of Judith Shakespeare: Feminist Life-Writings’.
Click here for more information and to register (registration is required to receive the zoom link).
On Friday 16 December 2022, at 6pm, the London Beckett Seminar will host Prof Pascale Sardin (Université Bordeaux Montaigne), with the paper “Feelgood Godot? A Discussion of Emmanuel Courcol’s Un triomphe(The Big Hit)”.
To attend, please register by email.
A reminder of the events scheduled for this week:
The next seminar in the Sing in Me, Muse series is this Thursday, 8 December 2022, at 6.00pm (London time):
Sophie Corser, ‘Imagined Authors: Reading the Homeric Question in Joyce’s Ulysses’
The talk will be in person at Goldsmiths (Lewisham Way, New Cross, London SE14 6NW), in the Professor Stuart Hall Building, Room 326, and will be followed by a reception (room 314). We shall also stream the event for those unable to attend in person. A link will be sent shortly before the start.
Click here for more information and to register.
A reminder of two events scheduled for this week:
The next seminar in the Auto / Bio / Fiction series is this Thursday, 17 November 2022, at 5.30pm (London time):
Hywel Dix, ‘Autofiction and Cultural Memory’ and Hanna Meretoja, ‘Metanarrative Life-Writing: Intersections of Life and Narrative in Autofiction and Biofiction’.
Click here for more information and to register (registration is required to receive the zoom link).
On Friday 18 November 2022, at 6pm, as part of the London Beckett Seminar, Dr Michael Krimper (Gallatin School of Individualized Study, New York University) will present the paper “The Insurgent Art of Failure: Beckett, Sade and the Lost Volume of Transition”.
To attend, please register by email.
A reminder that the first seminar in the Sing in me, Muse: The Classical, the Critical, and the Creative is tonight at 5.30 GMT.
Poet Abigail Ardelle Zammit will read from her work in progress #wearedaphne and discuss how she has adopted hybridity and erasure as a vehicle for dissent. Her dialogue with Ovid’s Metamorphoses employs the violence of the blackout technique as literary tool and political commentary, selecting and obscuring words from Ovid’s tales – most noticeably from Daphne’s transformation into a tree – to retell the events leading to and following the assassination of the controversial Maltese investigative journalist Daphna Caruana Galizia.
Click here for more information and for the booking link – registration is required to receive the zoom link to attend.
A reminder that the first seminar in the Auto / Bio / Fiction series is today at 5.30pm UK time:
Michael Lackey, “Zora Neale Hurston and Thomas Mann: Moses Biofictions as Political Interventions” and Jenny Rademacher, “Derivative Lives: 21st Century Spanish Biofictions in Speculative Times”. Click here for more info and for the booking link – registration is required to receive the zoom link (please register by 5pm)
The programme of the London Beckett Seminar has been published on our website. The next seminar will take place tomorrow, 21 October, at 6-7pm (BST):
Dr Hannah Simpson (The University of Edinburgh), “Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance”
To receive a link to attend, please email londonbeckettseminar@gmail.com.
Details below, with our best wishes – enjoy it!
Dr Hannah Simpson (The University of Edinburgh), “Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance”
Samuel Beckett’s plays have attracted a striking range of disability performances—that is, performances that cast disabled actors, regardless of whether their roles are explicitly described as “disabled” in the text. What is it about Beckett’s stage plays that attracts disability performance? What does a performance that translates a Beckett script in explicitly disabled terms do to our understanding of that text, or to our understanding of Beckett’s work more broadly? Or, more specifically: what do such performances reveal about these playtexts’ persistent concern with the conditions of embodied existence, and with the impaired body and mind?
Drawing on my new monograph, Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance, this talk addresses these questions with reference to historic and contemporary disability performances of Beckett’s work, and a new theorising of Beckett’s “disability aesthetic”. Hanna Marron as Winnie (Happy Days, dir. Michael Guvrin, 1985), Harold Pinter as Krapp (Krapp’s Last Tape, dir. Ian Rickson, 2006), Nabil Shaban and Garry Robson, and Dan Moran and Chris Jones as Hamm and Clov (Endgame, dir. Robert Rae, 2007, and Joe Grifasi, 2012), Jess Thom as Mouth (Not I, dir. Matthew Pountney, 2017), and Tommy Jessop and Otto Baxter as Vladimir and Estragon (Waiting for Godot, dir. Sam Curtis Lindsay and Daniel Vais, 2018): these productions emphasise or rework previously undetected indicators of disability in Beckett’s work. More broadly, they reveal how Beckett’s theatre compulsively interrogates alternative embodiments, unexpected forms of agency, and the extraordinary social interdependency of the human body.
HANNA SIMPSON is Lecturer in Drama and Performance in the Department of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. She previously served as the first Rosemary Pountney Junior Research Fellow in British and European Theatre at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford. She is the author of Samuel Beckett and the Theatre of the Witness: Pain in Post-War Francophone Drama (Oxford University Press, 2022) and Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). She is also Theatre Review Editor for The Beckett Circle and welcomes contact from anyone interested in reviewing for us.
Dear Colleagues and Friends,
Despite the difficulties of last year and the departure of some great colleagues, the CCL is alive and kicking, and about to kick off with a fantastic programme of events for 2022-23.
Our first CCL Annual Lecture will be given on 24 November 2022 by Marina Warner, with the title “Viral Spiral: Multiple Shape-shifting from Ovid to Covid”. You can attend in person (and have a drink with us afterwards!) or watch it online – click on the title to read more about it and book.
Two regular series of events will run in parallel through the academic year, during term time:
The Auto / Bio / Fiction series aims to put in dialogue (and possibly in dispute) different interpretations and practices of biofiction, autofiction and neighbouring genres and art forms, and discuss the questions raised by these forms and their critical and textual encounters.
We start on 27 October 2022 with Michael Lackey and Jenny Rademacher, and hope to see many of you there. Click on the links for more details and to register. All events for this series will be online, on Thursdays at 5.30pm (UK time).
The Sing in Me, Muse: The Classical, the Critical, and the Creative series will bring together scholars and students from a variety of disciplines with creative writers and other artists, to examine how the literary and material cultures of ancient Greece, the Near East and Rome have been adapted and rewritten at later times and other places.
We start on 3 November 2022, in collaboration with the Goldsmiths Writers’ Centre, with Maltese poet Abigail Ardelle Zammit. Abigail will read from her work and talk about her #wearedaphne project, which retells, through erasures of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the assassination of Maltese investigative journalist Daphna Caruana Galizia.
This event will be online, but several of the other talks in this series will be in person, too. All are on Thursdays, either at 5.30 or at 6pm. Click on the links to find out more and register.
On 24 March 2023, we’ll join forces with the Decadence Research Centre to host a day symposium on Decadence and the Fairy Tale – look out for more details soon.
Following the success of the first Spectacular Orientalism conference last June, on 27-28 April 2023 we will host the second Spectacular Orientalism conference, organised in collaboration with the Society for European Festivals Research, and focusing this time more specifically on Asia and the Far East. The deadline to propose papers is 17 December 2022, and all details can be found on the Call for Papers page.
And given the success of our May 2022 Postcolonial Theatre series, look out for the announcement of the May 2023 Postcolonial Theatre Series.
Looking forward to seeing you in person or online for any or all of the occasions above (and the further delights that are being planned and will be announced in due course…),
With warmest wishes,
Lucia, Clare, Marie-Claude and Isobel
A reminder that the Conference Spectacular Orientalism in Early Modern Europe (1529-1683) will take place on 8-9 June:
Day One: The Public Stage (8 June 2022, 1:45-5.00pm, BST)
Day Two: Festivals (9 June 2022, 2.00-5.10pm, BST)
These two half-days of talks and discussion will explore new perspectives on the representation of the Orient in early modern European art and performance between 1529 and 1683, the period framed by the two sieges of Vienna by Ottoman armies. The conference will examine different settings in which the Orient was imagined and talked about. In particular it will interrogate various types of public display common in early modern societies, in which the self-projection of power and identity was often interwoven with the spectacle of the Other: courtly and public festivals, civic ceremonies and rituals, etc. It will also consider staged productions, notably operas and ballets, whose multisensorial character added to the inherent orientalist tendency towards display, while heightening the attraction of the exotic for their audiences.
Find out more about the conference, read the programme, the abstracts, and book (registration is free but it is required to receive the link to attend).
Please note that the programme was amended on 3 June.
The Conference is organised by the CCL in collaboration with the Society for European Festivals Research.
