In ‘Works Loved’ sessions, we invite you to share a text that you enjoy or has been important to you. We’ll each share a text: this could be a poem that convinced us not to drop out as an undergraduate, a novel that suggested we might need to do an MA to understand it, or an essay that launched the idea of postgraduate study. Academia can often feel overwhelming, with multiple pressures competing for our time and headspace. This seminar is about remembering why we got into this business in the first place – namely, the ‘love’ (and we can discuss this term) we feel for the books, poems, and ideas that make up our discipline.
There’s no advance reading for Works Loved – just come along with your chosen text, and be ready to read from it, tell us why it matters to you, and discuss it and other texts. All varieties of text are welcome – and if yours isn’t something you can easily read from, just come and tell us about it instead.
What to bring:
We invite any format or genre, and people have brought film clips, audio recordings, and artworks in past sessions – these are all very welcome! In terms of length, if you plan to read aloud we recommend anything from a couple of sentences to a full paragraph or page. If you’d prefer not to read, that’s fine too: you could bring printouts to hand around, or just describe the text you have in mind.
Thanks to Rona Cran who first introduced this format for a session – it has brought a lot of joy!
Image: Cecil Touchon, Fusion Series #2174