Robert Eaglestone: Literature, Ethics and Memory

Date: November 12, 2019 – Tuesday

Time: 8:15-9:45 A.M.

Venue: Room 4115, Building 4, Songjiang Campus

Language: English

Summary:

This lecture draws on the work of Hannah Arendt and Emmanuel Levinas to outline a theory of the relationship between the literary, ethics and a sense of, and engagement with, the past. The aim of my lecture is to explore the ethical responsibility we might have for the past, for memory, and the significance of the literary in this. To do this, I turn to the work of Hannah Arendt – another thinker marked by the Nazi Holocaust as well as by the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. While Arendt is often seen as a champion of ‘natality’, the constant possibility of newness, she is also deeply engaged with thinking through the past, and our responsibilities towards the past, in order to help us build a shared world in the present. For Arendt, this engagement occurs in (at least) three ways. By exploring the three aspects of Arendt’s thought, I aim to supplement – with history, memory and the past - the kind of account of ethics offered by Levinas.

Speaker Biography:

Robert Eaglestone is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought at Royal Holloway, University of London. He works on contemporary literature and literary theory, contemporary philosophy and on Holocaust and Genocide studies.

He is the author of seven books, Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas (1997), Doing English (4th edition 2017), Postmodernism and Holocaust Denial (2001), The Holocaust and the Postmodern (2004), Very Short Introduction to Contemporary fiction (2013), The Broken Voice: Reading Post-Holocaust Literature (2017) and Literature: Why it matters (2019).

He is the editor or co-editor of ten books, Reading the Lord of the Rings (2006), Teaching Holocaust Literature and Film (2008), Derrida’s Legacies (2008), J. M. Coetzee in Theory and Practice (2009), Volume 2 of the Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Literary and Cultural Theory (2011), Salman Rushdie (2013), The Future of Trauma Theory (2013), Brexit and Literature (2018), English: Shared Futures (2018) and The Routledge Companion to Twenty First Century Literary Fiction (2019). His work has been translated into six languages. He is the Series Editor of Routledge Critical Thinkers, which has 41 volumes.