Event overview
Goldsmiths Literature Seminar
In 1833, the theologian Henry Alford, newly ordained as a deacon and working toward his Fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, writes a letter to his betrothed cousin – his ‘best earthly friend’ – entreating her to help him cure a disquieting affliction: intolerance for others in his ‘aristocratic’ university community. Alford figures the moon as a possibility for an interpretive democracy that would countermand the exclusivity of his society at Cambridge. It recurs, throughout his life, as a sort of pharmakon simultaneously attendant on havoc and divinity. He is visited in dreams by an unearthly friend.
One hundred and sixty years later, the philosopher, poet and critic John Holloway writes Civitatula: The Little City, a long poem celebrating Cambridge University’s institutional history. Holloway could afford, and possibly needed, this indulgence – he had spent much of the previous year protesting the award of Jacques Derrida’s Honorary Doctorate of Letters there. Reflecting on the turbulence of 1968, Holloway’s poem suggests an encounter with extra-terrestrials – at an intergalactic flower-show hosted by Cambridge – as tonic to this agitation.
These Cantabrigian X-files, whilst seemingly unconnected, coalesce around an idea of saying otherwise, which is also the saying of the other. In this regard, they come into the orbit of Herman Melville’s scrivener, Bartleby – Derrida’s own other who may himself be extra-terrestrial. Derrida considers Bartleby ‘the secret of literature’; we will see how the very invocation of the Scrivener prompts an uncanny meta-literary revenance, a multitude of writing ghosts disgorged into the moonlight. The resultant pandemonium offers a means of thinking the University space that is radically other to the oikoi experienced by Alford and Holloway.
This piece of critical science fiction considers the potential of literary ‘secrecy’ in space and time, whilst implicitly posing the question of how fantastic we can allow the search for meaning to become.
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 22 Nov 2012 | 6:30pm - 8:00pm |
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