T he University of Hertfordshire Philosophy Department, in association with the F. R. Leavis Society, the New College of the Humanities and Bloomsbury Philosophy are delighted to invite you to a public debate on ‘WHY LITERATURE MATTERS’.
The debate will take place on Wednesday 17 May 2017 from 18:00-20:00 at New College of the Humanities, with panelists Lesley Chamberlain, Greg Currie, Bernard Harrison, Howard Jacobson, Penny Pritchard and Roger Scruton.
About the panelists:
Lesley Chamberlain is a writer of fiction and an independent scholar with a preponderant interest in German and Russian thought. After a degree in Russian and German Comparative Literature at the University of Exeter she took a research degree at Oxford before joining Reuters as a correspondent in Moscow in 1978. Her freelance career as a writer and critic began in 1986, since when she has written for all the major British newspapers, and also The LA Times and The Wall Street Journal. She currently writes occasionally for The New Statesman and The Times Literary Supplement, drawing on her background in European literature and Continental Philosophy.
Professor Greg Currie teaches Philosophy at the University of York where he is Director of Research, Greg teaches and researches on many aspects of the arts: literature, film and painting, the narrative arts and their role in learning, the place of the aesthetic in archaeological explanation, the nature of adaptation, the role of emotion in fiction, and the effect of irony in pictures and in language. Educated at the London School of Economics and the University of California, Berkeley, Greg has taught at universities in Australia, New Zealand and the United States. He joined the Department of Philosophy at the University of York in 2013 and has published a number of articles and books, mostly on the arts and their relation to the mind. His next book is Fiction and Cognition (Oxford University Press, forthcoming).
Professor Bernard Harrison is currently Emeritus E.E. Ericksen Professor of Philosophy in the University of Utah and an Emeritus Professor in the University of Sussex. He is one of a number of analytic philosophers, more numerous now than formerly, whose interests include literature and its relationships with philosophy and the history of ideas. His literary work includes Fielding’s Tom Jones: The Novelist as Moral Philosopher (Chatto, 1975), Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory (Yale University Press, 1991), What Is Fiction For? Literary Humanism Restored (Indiana University Press, 2015), and numerous papers.
Howard Jacobson lists Samuel Johnson, Jane Austen and Dickens among his foremost inspirations, and has written variously about comedy, Australia, Jewishness and love. In 2010 Jacobson won the Man Booker Prize for The Finkler Question, published by Bloomsbury; in 2014, his novel J was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. The Mighty Walzer (1999) and Zoo Time (2013) both won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize. Jacobson’s non-fiction work includes Whatever It Is, I Don’t Like It (2011) a collection of the weekly columns he writes for The Independent. His most recent publications include Shylock Is My Name: a novel (2016) and Pussy (2017), a comic fairy tale which hopes both to explain why Donald Trump won and to provide the “consolation of savage satire”.
Dr Penny Pritchard is an experienced researcher and lecturer in early modern English literature, with particular expertise in the history and literature of English Protestant dissent and the writing of Daniel Defoe. The principal focus of Penny’s research has considered the relationship between different textual genres in seventeenth and eighteenth-century English writing, both those formally considered as ‘literature’ and others, such as funeral sermons and political pamphlets.
Professor Sir Roger Scruton is a widely translated writer and philosopher who has published more than forty books in philosophy, aesthetics and politics. In Beauty (OUP 2009), Scruton explores this timeless concept, asking what makes an object – either in art, in nature, or the human form – beautiful. Among his most recent publications are: The Disappeared (Bloomsbury 2015), Confessions of a Heretic (a collection of essays) (2016), The Ring of Truth about Wagner’s Ring Cycle (Penguin 2016). In his latest book, On Human Nature (Princeton UP 2017), Scruton defends human uniqueness, arguing, against philosophical materialists such as Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett, that human beings cannot be understood simply as biological objects. Professor Scruton teaches in England and America.
A wine reception will precede the event.
If you would like to attend, please register at: https://www.nchlondon.ac.uk/2017/04/07/why-literature-matters/
Registration is compulsory. Places are limited!