EAC Manchester: Hillis Miller at Lancaster

Description: Department of English and Creative Writing

J. HILLIS MILLER:

The Theory to Come

An International Symposium

Keynote Speakers:

J. Hillis Miller (University of California at Irvine)

Dragan Kujundžić (University of Florida)

Friday 1^st June 2012

LANCASTER INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ARTS

LANCASTER UNIVERSITY

Department of

Linguistics and English Language

PROGRAMME

9. 30 am Welcome and Opening Plenary

Dragan Kujundžić (University of Florida)

‘”Like the beginning of an interminable waterway:” J. Hillis Miller and the Theory to Come

10. 30 am Tea and Coffee Break

10. 45 am Panel Session 1

Sally Bushell (Lancaster University)

‘”An Encounter with the Unmappable’: or Treasure Island and Cartographic Silence’

Andrew Tate and Simon Marsden (Lancaster University)

'Nineteenth-Century Literature and the Disappearance of God'

Michael Greaney (Lancaster University)

'Conrad's Strangers'

12. 00 pm Lunch

1. 30 pm Panel Session 2

Sarah Dillon (University of St Andrews)

'"Talking about the same questions but at another rhythm": Deconstruction and Film'

Charlie Gere (Lancaster University)

‘Hillis Miller, Luther Blissett, and the Politics of Friendship in the Age of Facebook’

John Schad (Lancaster University)

‘Our lives, Mrs. Dalloway’

2.45 pm Tea and Coffee Break

3. 00 pm Closing Plenary

J. Hillis Miller (University of California at Irvine)

‘Why Literature Still Matters to Me’

4. 30 pm Close

SPEAKERS

J. Hillis Miller is Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature and English at the University of California at Irvine. Before going to Irvine, Hillis Miller taught at The Johns Hopkins University and Yale University. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a member of the American Philosophical Society. He is the author of many books and essays on nineteenth- and twentieth-century English, European, and American literature, and on literary theory. His most recent books are For Derrida (2009), The Medium is the Maker: Browning, Freud, Derrida and the New Telepathic Ecotechnologies (2009), The Conflagration of Community: Fiction Before and After Auschwitz (2011) and Reading for Our Time: Adam Bede and Middlemarch Revisited (2012).

Dragan Kujundžić is Professor of Film and Media Studies, Jewish, Germanic and Slavic Studies, at the University of Florida. He is the author of numerous articles in critical theory, deconstruction and literary criticism. He has edited Deconstruction, A Merry Science (1985), Khoraographies for Jacques Derrida on July 15, 2000 (2000), Who or What—Jacques Derrida (2008) and two volumes on J. Hillis Miller, J (2005) and Provocations to Reading (2005). His other publications include monographs Critical Exercises (1983), The Returns of History (1997) and Tongue in Heat (2003). He has also edited volumes on Walter Benjamin, and Mikhail Bakhtin. He is currently working on the new monograph, Ghost Scriptum and on a book based on his recent film (2011) The First Sail: J. Hillis Miller.

Sally Bushell is Reader in British Romanticism and Co-Director of The Wordsworth Centre in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University. Her primary research interests are in Wordsworth, textual criticism and the study of poetic process and the long poem. She is author of Re-Reading the Excursion (2002) and Text as Process: Creative Composition in Wordsworth, Tennyson, and Dickinson (2009) as well as co-editor of the Cornell Edition of The Excursion (2007). Current research is on literary place as embodied in empirical literary maps as well as larger ideas of Literary Cartography and the ways in which we read and map literary space.

Sarah Dillon is Lecturer in Contemporary Fiction in the School of English at the University of St Andrews. She is author of The Palimpsest: Literature, Criticism, Theory (2007) and editor of David Mitchell: Critical Essays (2011). She is Series Editor of Gylphi Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays and has published widely in the fields of modern and contemporary literature and philosophy. She is currently completing two books: Dancing with Derrida, an investigation of the question of "woman" in Jacques Derrida's work and contemporary fiction and film, guided by the trope of dance; and Venturing Derrida (co. ed. Sarah Jackson), a collection of new essays by the next generation of Derrida scholars.

Charlie Gere is Reader in New Media Research in the Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Arts, Lancaster University. He is the author of Digital Culture (2002), Art, Time and Technology ( 2006), Community without Community in Digital Culture (2012), and co-editor of White Heat Cold Technology (2009), and Art Practice in a Digital Culture (2010), as well as many papers on questions of technology, media and art. In 2007 he co-curated Feedback, a major exhibition on art responsive to instructions, input, or its environment, in Gijon, Northern Spain.

Michael Greaney is Senior Lecturer in English at Lancaster University. He is the author of Conrad, Language and Narrative (2002) and Contemporary Fiction and the Uses of Theory (2006), and is currently working on representations of sleep in modern fiction.

Simon Marsden is a Teaching Fellow in the Department of English & Creative Writing at Lancaster University. His research focuses on the intersections of literature, theology and the philosophy of science in the long nineteenth century and beyond. He is the author of the forthcoming monograph Emily Brontë and the Religious Imagination (2013).

John Schad is Professor of Modern Literature at Lancaster University. He is the author and editor of many books on Victorian and Modern Literature, literary theory and religion. His documentary novel, The Late Walter Benjamin, comes out in May 2012 and Hostage of the Word: Readings and Writings 1993-2013 is published early next year.

Andrew Tate is Senior Lecturer in English and Associate Director of the Ruskin Research Centre at Lancaster University. He has published widely in the field of nineteenth-century literature and contemporary literature and theology. His books include Douglas Coupland (2007), Contemporary Fiction and Christianity (2008) and, co-authored with Arthur Bradley, The New Atheist Novel (2010).

FURTHER INFORMATION

LOCATION:

This symposium takes place in the Auditorium of the Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Arts Building, Lancaster University. Please see the map of Lancaster University campus, below, for directions: the LICA Building is number 4.

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