Showing posts with label Xavier de Maistre. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Xavier de Maistre. Show all posts

Tuesday, 11 October 2011

Summary of October Meeting




Tristram charts the plots of the first four volumes of
Tristram Shandy, 1762 (vol. 6, ch. 40, p. 152).


Thank you to everyone who turned up for Friday’s reading group, we hope you enjoyed the discussion. For the curious who didn’t make it, here’s a brief summary:

After some appropriately nomadic wandering from Lipman building to Squires building in search of a suitable room, we watched Penny Grennan’s short film A Journey Around my Life with a glass of white wine (Helen forgot the red). We then pondered the distinction between charts and maps, the influence of Laurence Sterne and Descartes on de Maistre, and the complex fusion of seriality and plot in Penny’s film. There was also a healthy debate about the economy of travel theory proposed by Georges Van Den Abbeele and how perhaps nomadic cultures (and even rambling texts) are difficult to assimilate to the A to B kind of travel that he favours. This led to a consideration of a changing or multiple sense of ‘home’. We also discussed ennui, walking, typographic margins and textual spaces, and the securing of national boundaries arising from the French Revolution. Quite a mixture!

The next meeting will be Friday 18th November, when Laurie McKee will introduce some Robin Hood texts which we will be comparing to Derrida’s theory of hospitality. Red wine will be available, and keep your eyes peeled for a confirmation of the room, as our usual one seems to be missing a computer. If you want to plan ahead even further, the 2011/12 schedule can be found here. Laurie’s extracts will be circulated in early November.

In the meantime, keep checking our ‘Useful Pages’ tab - it's regularly updated with related links and CFPs.

Wednesday, 5 October 2011

A Journey Around my Life


We are very excited to announce that Penny Grennan's short film, A Journey Around my Life, will be shown as part of the reading group on Friday. The film neatly brings us from the theme of the last academic year, 'Objects', to that of this year, 'Spaces', via Xavier de Maistre. Unfortunately Penny can't attend this month's meeting, but we look forward to viewing and discussing her work. Image courtesey of Penny Grennan.

Wednesday, 21 September 2011

Confirmed Dates

Lipman 121 is booked for the following dates, all Friday afternoons at 4:30pm:

October 7, 2011 (led by Helen Williams, on Xavier de Maistre and Jenny Mezciems)
November 18, 2011 (led by Laurie McKee, on Robin Hood, hospitality and Derrida)
December 9, 2011 (led by Dr Clare Elliott, on Walden and perhaps Emerson's 'Nature')
January 20, 2012
February 17, 2012
March 16, 2012 Now changed to March 23, 2012
May 18, 2012

Clare has kindly offered to lead the December session and we are keen to plan next term's meetings as soon as possible, so please get in touch with ideas. And feel free to spread the word. Non-Northumbria readers can be added to the group's mailing list by contacting
spacestheory@hotmail.co.uk.

We’ll be in touch soon with the extract of Jenny Mezciems’s journal article, but in the mean time here is the primary reading for 7th October: Xavier de Maistre (1795),
A Journey round my Room (Philadelphia: Carey, 1829). We will be focusing on pp. 1-25.

Monday, 19 September 2011

New Reading Group for the New Academic Year

Following the success of last year's reading group 'Objects in Theory' we welcome readers to 'Spaces in Theory'. The new theme for 2011/12 reflects Northumbria's interest in issues of space, illustrated by the taught MA course Literature and Place and the AHRC-funded research project Locating the Hidden Diaspora.

In these sessions we engage with familiar and lesser known theorists alongside a range of literary and nonliterary primary sources. Last year, for example, we read Don DeLillo through Heidegger and Walter Benjamin through Jean Baudrillard, and this year we'd like to cover a similar breadth of periods and disciplines. We hope, above all, to bring people together from across the arts and social sciences in a friendly and informal setting.

Helen Williams will lead October's session, introducing Xavier de Maistre's Journey Round my Room and accompanying theory text, Jenny Mezciems's '"'Tis Not to Divert the Reader": Moral and Literary Determinants in Some Early Travel Narratives'. The November meeting, led by Laurie McKee, will consider some Robin Hood texts with reference to Derrida's Of Hospitality. Extracts will be circulated in advance. The sessions are not confined to the advertised texts; we merely use them as starting points for discussion.

Please get in touch if you have any ideas for December's session. You would simply give a very brief introduction to your chosen theory text (perhaps from the list below) and primary text, image or clip.

Possible themes include but are not limited to: adventure, the vagrant and the picaro; migration, exile and exile narratives; utopia; domesticity and country house poetry; travel and travel writing; borders and liminality; transnationalism and postcolonialism; the exotic; cartography; nationhood and regionalism; the theatre and the stage; nature and the pastoral; exhibiting and exhibition space; botany and landscaping; mobility and stasis; homelessness.

Readers are welcome to attend just one or all sessions. Refreshments (alcoholic and nonalcoholic) will be provided, followed by the customary trip to the Carriage. Do check this page for updates.

Possible Theory Texts

Extracts of theory should be 2000 words or less.

Bakhtin, Mikhail, ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the novel’, in The Dialogic Imagination (Austin: U of Texas P, 1981) pp. 84-258. Available here: http://books.google.com/books?id=JKZztxqdIpgC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=chronotope&f=false.

Barney, Darin David, The Network Society (Cambridge: Polity, 2004), esp. ‘Network Society’, pp.1-33. Available in Northumbria library: 303.4833/BAR.
Bourdieu, Pierre, Logic of Practice (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), esp. chap. 3 ‘Structures, Habitus, Practices’, pp. 52-26. Available in Northumbria library: 301/BOU.
Buell, Lawrence, The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1995), esp. ‘Pastoral Ideology’, pp. 31-52.
Davidson, Ian, Radical Spaces of Poetry (Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2010), available in Northumbria library: 821.914/DAV.
Felski, Rita, and Susan Stanford Friedman, Comparison, special ed. of New Literary History, 40 (2009), available at: http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/new_literary_history/toc/nlh.40.3.html.
Foucault , Michel, ‘Of Other Spaces, esp. section entitled ‘Heterotopias’.

Frank, Joseph, ‘Spatial Form in Modern Literature: An Essay in Two Parts’, The Sewanee Review, 53 (1945), pp. 221-240.

Lefebvre, Henri, The Production of Space, (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), esp. ‘Social Space’, pp. 73-79. Available at: http://books.google.com/books?id=SIXcnIoa4MwC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false.
McDowell, Linda, Gender Identity and Place (Cambridge: Polity, 1999). Available in Northumbria library: 301.412/MACD.
National Trust Historic Houses and Collections Annual (National Trust, 2011) http://www.spectator.co.uk/supplements/National-Trust-Historic-Houses-Collections-2011/#/0/.
Thoreau, Henry David, Walden (1854). Available online: http://thoreau.eserver.org/walden00.html.