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VERSION:2.0
CALSCALE:GREGORIAN
METHOD:PUBLISH
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTAMP:20190130T161302Z
DTSTART:20190313T170000Z
DTEND:20190313T190000Z
SUMMARY:Professorial Inaugural Lecture: Prof. Daniela Caselli\, 'The Mode
 rnist Child'
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DESCRIPTION:The child is a familiar figure in Romantic and Victorian stud
 ies but is much less visible in early twentieth-century literature criti
 cism. This lecture will argue that there is much to gain in revisiting t
 he modernist fascination with the sensorial immediacy of the child\, chi
 ldish play as aesthetic theory\, and generation\, parturition\, and birt
 h control. Perhaps even more importantly\, we have much to learn from th
 e ambivalent dismissal of the figure of the child in the period: in D.H.
  Lawrence’s The Rainbow (1915) the engulfing proliferation of children r
 epresents a fecundity that threatens the growth of the individual\; in V
 irginia Woolf’s The Years (1937)\, the noise made by the working-class c
 hildren is unintelligible\, repulsive and yet extraordinarily beautiful\
 ; and in Samuel Beckett’s The Expelled (1946)\, the narrator bitterly mu
 mbles ‘children\, babies\, I would lynch them all’ to great ironic effec
 t. The fact that children and childhood have rarely figured in studies o
 f literary modernism can be read as a reflection of the disavowal implic
 it in these quotations: if modernist writers can claim to be an energeti
 c corrective to nineteenth-century boredom\, they must disassociate them
 selves from either the child’s sweet-smelling bourgeois domesticity or i
 ts destitute pathos. My lecture will adopt instead a sceptical stance to
 wards modernism’s exceptionalism and put under pressure this opposition.
  I will argue that by looking at a figure that carries out a considerabl
 e amount of silent cultural work we can learn about the paradoxically co
 nvoluted workings of spontaneity\, transparency and presence in early tw
 entieth-century literature.\n\nIt would be helpful for catering purposes
  if you could let Bethany.pedder@manchester.ac.uk know if you will be at
 tending.
STATUS:TENTATIVE
TRANSP:TRANSPARENT
CLASS:PUBLIC
LOCATION:Samuel Alexander Lecture Theatre\, Samuel Alexander Building\, M
 anchester
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