Wednesday October 18th 2-4pm Lecture Room 7 Arts Building
The first seminar of Ekphrastic Encounters – the newly established interdisciplinary discussion/research forum on new forms and approaches to ekphrasis – will be led by John Fagg, Senior Lecturer in America Literature and Culture, who has written extensively about the interface between word and image. In the seminar, John will introduce ekphrasis in general – beginning with a very familiar example of ekphrastic poetry – and then focus on the way that the politics of writers and their moments shape ekphrastic poems. Below is some suggested reading and viewing for the seminar.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus,c. 1560. Oil on canvas, 73.5 cm × 112 cm, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels
W. H. Auden, “Musee des Beaux Arts” (1938)
Alexander Nemerov, “The Flight of Form: Auden, Bruegel, and the Turn to Abstraction in the 1940s,” Critical Inquiry 31.4 (Summer 2005), pp. 780-810” Critical Inquiry 31.4 (Summer 2005), pp. 780-810
Joseph Mallord William Turner, Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) (1840).
David Dabydeen, Turner (1994)
Abigail Ward, “David Dabydeen and the Ethics of Narration” in Caryl Phillips, David Dabydeen and Fred D’Aguiar: Representations of Slavery (2011)
[Content note: J.M.W. Turner’s painting Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) (1840) and David Dabydeen’s long poem Turner (2002) address the violence, including sexual violence, of slavery and in their depiction and discussion of slavery and racism contain traumatic text and images].
If you wish to participate in the seminar on-line then contact Jon Stevens, jxs1209@student.bham.ac.uk and he will forward a link