New public lecture: Nicholas Royle

The PACT Division of the EGS has introduced a new format in the context of its “Public Lectures” series. We are undertaking discussions with EGS faculty and other guests on recently published research.  We hope that these encounters will help bring attention to important work pursued in our community. All discussions are being live-streamed on Zoom and they will normally start at 8 pm Paris time/2 pm New York time.

Our next discussion will be devoted to Nicholas Royle’s David Bowie, Enid Blyton, and the Sun Machine.

December 7, 2023

8 pm Paris time/2 pm New York time.

Zoom link can be found HERE

Participants 

Nicholas Royle is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Sussex. He has previously taught at the universities of Stirling (Scotland), Tampere (Finland) and Oxford; and has been visiting professor at the universities of Århus (Denmark), Santiago del Compostela (Spain), Turku (Finland), Manitoba (Canada), and Lille (France). He has published many books, including Telepathy and Literature (1991), E.M. Forster (1999), Jacques Derrida (2003), The Uncanny (2003), Veering (2011), How to Read Shakespeare (2014) and Hélène Cixous: Dreamer, Realist, Analyst, Writing (2020), as well as the novels Quilt (2010) and An English Guide to Birdwatching (2017), and Mother: A Memoir (2020). In addition, he is co-author with Andrew Bennett of three books: Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel (1994), This Thing Called Literature (2015) and An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory (Sixth edition, 2023). His most recent book is David Bowie, Enid Blyton and the Sun Machine. Royle is also a managing editor of the Oxford Literary Review and director of Quick Fictions.

Christopher Fynsk is President of The European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland and a Professor Emeritus at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. His work is closely involved with that of Martin Heidegger, Maurice Blanchot, Walter Benjamin, and several contemporary artists, including Francis Bacon and Salvatore Puglia. His works are Heidegger, Thought and Historicity (Cornell, 1986), Language and Relation: that there is language (Stanford, 1996), Infant Figures: The Death of the Infans and Other Scenes of Origin (Stanford, 2000), The Claim of Language: A Case for the Humanities (Minnesota, 2004), Last Steps: Maurice Blanchot’s Exilic Writing (Fordham, 2013).

Elissa Marder is a Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Emory University. She was a founding member of the Emory Psychoanalytic Studies Program and currently is on the PSP Executive Committee. Her publications include: Dead Time: Temporal Disorders in the Wake of Modernity (Baudelaire and Flaubert) (Stanford University Press, 2001);  The Mother in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Psychoanalysis, Photography, Deconstruction (Fordham University Press, 2012); Time for Baudelaire (Poetry, Theory, History). Eds. E.S. Burt, Elissa Marder, Kevin Newmark. Yale French Studies vol. 125/126 (2014). She has also published essays on diverse topics in literature, literary theory, feminism, film, photography and psychoanalysis. She is currently working on several new projects including a book tentatively titled Poetry By Other Means (on Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin’s Late Writings) and a study of early 19th century French Literature: Revolutionary Perversions.

Michael Naas is a professor of philosophy at DePaul University. He teaches courses in Philosophy and Comparative Literature and conducts research in the areas of ancient Greek philosophy and contemporary French philosophy. His approach to the classics is informed by thinkers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Lyotard, and Levinas. His recent published work includes co-translations of Jacques Derridas The Other Heading (Indiana, 1992), Memoirs of the Blind (Chicago, 1993), Adieu (Stanford, 1999), Rogues (Stanford, 2004), Learning to Live Finally (Melville, 2007), and Life Death (Chicago, forthcoming 2020). He is co-editor of Jacques Derrida’s The Work of Mourning (Chicago, 2000) and Chaque fois unique, la fin du monde (Galilee, 2004), as well as Plato’s Animals: Gadflies, Horses, Swans, and Other Philosophical Beasts (Indiana, 2015). He is the author of Turning: From Persuasion to Philosophy (Humanities, 1994), Taking on the Tradition: Jacques Derrida and the Legacies of Deconstruction (Stanford, 2003), Derrida From Now On (Fordham, 2008), Miracle and Machine: Jacques Derrida and the Two Sources of Religion, Science, and the Media (Fordham, 2012), The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments: Jacques Derrida’s Final Seminar (Fordham, 2015), Plato and the Invention of Life (Fordham, 2018), and Derrida in Montreal: A Play in Three Acts (Montreal, 2019). He has also published numerous articles on themes in ancient and contemporary philosophy in such journals as Philosophy Today, Continental Philosophy, Research in Phenomenology, Mosaic, Epoch, and Paragraph.

Lars Iyer is a novelist and philosopher. He is a Reader in Creative Writing at Newcastle University, where he previously also taught philosophy. Iyer’s philosophical research interests revolve around aesthetics (especially philosophy of literature and philosophy of music) and political philosophy. He has published two books on Maurice Blanchot (Blanchot’s Communism and Blanchot’s Vigilance). After that, he published the “Spurious trilogy” which consists of Spurious, Dogma, and Exodus (all published by Melville House). In 2014, Iyer started another trilogy with Wittgenstein Jr (Melville House); in 2019, Nietzsche and the Burbs (Penguin Random House) followed. My Weil is his sixth novel.

Nemanja Mitrović works as Assistant Dean at The European Graduate School in Saas- Fee, Switzerland. His research interests are literary theory, the relationship between ethics, philosophy, and literature, and the work of Maurice Blanchot. He completed his Ph.D. study at the University of Aberdeen under the direction of Professor Christopher Fynsk (2014). In 2017, he published a reworked version of his doctoral dissertation entitled The (Im)Possibility of Literature as the Possibility of Ethics (Delere Press, Singapore). In 2023, he published his second book, Several Definitives on the Infinitive (MostArt Jugoslavija, Beograd). Together with Maja Bajić, he translated the works of Maurice Blanchot and Jean-Philippe Toussaint.