ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions Masterclass: Dark Materials In Literature and Criticism

“Dark Materials In Literature and Criticism”
ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions Masterclass led by Ewan Fernie (University of Birmingham)

Date: Friday, April 17, 2015
Time: 10:00 – 4:00pm (Sessions will be 10:30-12:30 & 2:00-4:00)
Venue: Room 471, Global Change Institute (Bldg 20), UQ St Lucia campus
RSVP: uqche@uq.edu.au, or (07) 3365-4913 by Friday 10 April

All welcome, but numbers are limited so please RSVP by the date indicated

Morning tea at 10:00am and lunch at 1:00pm is provided.

This forum for discussing the ways in which dark and recalcitrant aspects of human life feature in literature and criticism is intended to open up questions of literary-critical values, method, idiom and form, as well as to bring into focus some problematic but interesting ideas about sex, gender, ethics and religion and some of the ways they intersect.

Readings:

  • Jonathan Dollimore, ‘Introduction to the Third Edition’, Radical Tragedy (2004), pp. xiv-xxxvii
  • Ewan Fernie, from ‘The Possessed’, The Demonic: Literature and Experience (2012), pp. 218-52
  • Kevin Hart, ‘Dark Retreat’, Young Rain (2009), pp. 70-79
  • Kevin Hart, ‘Colloquies’, Morning Knowledge (2011), pp. 12-22

Ewan Fernie is Chair, Professor and Fellow at the Shakespeare Institute, University of Birmingham, Stratford-upon-Avon, where he co-convenes the pioneering MA in Shakespeare and Creativity and helps run the collaboration with the RSC at The Other Place. He is General Editor (with Simon Palfrey) of the Shakespeare Now! series, and his latest critical book is The Demonic: Literature and Experience. Fernie also writes creatively. He led the AHRC grant-winning project which culminated in Redcrosse: A New Poetic Liturgy for St George’s Day that was performed in major UK cathedrals and by the RSC, and published in 2012. He is currently completing a Macbeth novel (also with Palfrey), and beginning to develop a play with Katharine Craik and the RSC called Marina, as well as seeing through the press a volume of essays edited with Tobias Döring on Shakespeare and Thomas Mann. Fernie’s present critical project is a book entitled Shakespeare’s Freetown: Why the Plays Matter. But he also has a developing interest in the part played by Shakespeare in the nineteenth-century reformation of industrial Birmingham, and in particular in the work and life of the radical preacher and lecturer George Dawson.