Mardi 9 avril 2024 18h Salle 126 Saint-Charles 1
"Silences Within and Without the Self. D. H. Lawrence and T. S. Eliot"
Kate McLoughlin (Professor of English Literature, University of Oxford)
Aldous Huxley called the Twentieth Century ‘the Age of Noise’. The novelist D. H. Lawrence and the poet T. S. Eliot both listened beyond the noise, to the silence. Lawrence heard the silences of the body, of power teetering on the brink of fascism. Eliot heard the silences of spiritual emptiness and of union with the divine. Both writers turned to non-western religions—Buddhism, Hinduism, the religion of the Aztecs—for illumination. This talk explores the mystical, thunderous and serene silences that permeate their prose and verse.
Lien zoom : https://univ-montp3-fr.zoom.us/j/93372170178?pwd=aytFL3FjZlpWdzN6OEZOd1o4RVNJQT09
Bio (https://www.english.ox.ac.uk/people/professor-kate-mcloughlin) :
I am both a specialist in post-1900 literature with a particular expertise in war writing and a trans-historicist.
Currently, I am writing a literary history of silence, funded by a Major Research Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust. Over eleven centuries of English Literature, silence has had many guises and many hiding-places. My book will guide readers on a tour taking in the silent states of exile on icy seas described in Anglo-Saxon poems, the hushed intimacy of medieval lullabies, exalted states of blissful union with the divine, the tongue-tied lovers of the Renaissance, spell-binding silent scenes in Shakespeare, encrypted expressions of same-sex love, reason-based reticence, the Romantic sublime, the surprising silences of the garrulous realist novel, the great epics of inarticulable grief, wordless communings with Nature, Modernist depictions of interiority, the failure of words in the face of two World Wars, experiments with visual and acoustic silences in contemporary prose, poetry and drama, and searches for silence in our own Age of Pings. In the process, I am excavating the intellectual and cultural ideas behind silence and trying to work out how literary silences are formally created.
In tandem with this literary history, I am editing an anthology of poems about and evoking silence, Silence Please, for Bodleian Publishing. I am also thinking about methodologies for theorizing textual silences. With the historian Suzan Meryam Kalayci and the Ritblat Professor of Mindfulness and Psychological Science, Willem Kuyken, I convene the Silence Hub (SH), an inter-disciplinary, public-facing network for scholars interested in silence. In 2017, I held a Knowledge Exchange Fellowship at the Oxford Quaker Meeting, beginning to learn about silence, spirituality and poetry.