Events archive
Here you can find details of past events held by the Centre. We will continue to add to this as a resource for students and faculty and to give a sense of what we do.
2019
- We ourselves speak a language that is foreign': One Hundred Years of Freud's Uncanny
21 June 2019
The Oxford Literary Review, in collaboration with the Centre for Creative and Critical Thought at the University of Sussex, organised a one-day conference on Friday 21 June 2019, to mark the centenary of the publication of Freud's ‘The Uncanny’ (‘Das Unheimliche’). Freud's essay is fascinatingly disjointed, suggestive and abrupt in its movements – developments taken up but not concluded, things left unspoken, embedded micro-narratives, aphoristic formulations such as ‘we ourselves speak a language that is foreign’. In an attempt to respond to this, and in the hope that this midsummer's day would be as full as possible, a somewhat unusual structure for the conference was envisaged: there would be no keynote speakers, but rather a good number of short presentations (no more than ten minutes in length, i.e. 1,400 words maximum).
The call for papers ran as follows:
What does it mean to suppose that ‘we ourselves speak a language that is foreign’? A hundred years after the original German publication of Sigmund Freud's ‘The Uncanny’ (‘Das Unheimliche’), how do we read and engage with the question of the uncanny today?
Freud observes: ‘we ourselves speak a language that is foreign [wir selbst Fremdsprachige sind]’. Or more literally, ‘we ourselves are foreign-language-speakers’, ‘we ourselves are foreign-language-ers’. What are we to make of this foreignness of language and of ourselves? What is the relationship between this foreignness and art (especially literature)? What is the relationship between psychoanalysis and translation, psychoanalysis and the uncanny, philosophy and the uncanny? How have such questions been illuminated by writers and thinkers since 1919?
What are we to do with the uncomfortable strangeness, the strange familiarity, the weirdness or waywardness of ‘uncanniness’ today? How might we write or talk about it, in relation to, for example, the human, the non-human and inhuman; language, translation and the untranslatable; politics and justice; the natural and unnatural; mourning and spectrality; climate change and mass extinctions; science and technology; time and history; memory; trauma; poetry and literature; theatre and performance; painting, film and other visual culture; music; magical thinking; biography and autobiography; sport and play; home and family; nation and migration; sex and gender; race and ethnicity; religion and non-religion; animate and inanimate; comedy and humour; secrecy; health and well-being; illness and death?
Papers from the conference have been subsequently published in the Oxford Literary Review as ‘We Ourselves Speak a Language that is Foreign’: One Hundred Years of Freud's Uncanny.
2018
- The Contemporary Novel and Climate Change
12 April 2018
How does or should or can contemporary fiction address climate change? This symposium aims to provide responses to this question and, in doing so, to explore the ways in which climate change is inseparable from issues of environmental damage and destruction, mass species extinction, and the inadequacy and ineptness of current political systems and economic modes of life. ‘The Contemporary Novel and Climate Change’ brings together a small group of academics all of who have recently published novels: Naomi Booth (Sealed), Abi Curtis (Water and Glass), Alex Lockwood (The Chernobyl Privileges) and Nicholas Royle (An English Guide to Birdwatching).
2016
- Literature, Suicide and the Death Penalty
Thursday 10 March 2016
Andrew Bennett (Bristol)
'A Death that One Gives Oneself Sovereignly: Stevie Smith, Sylvia Plath, and Suicide’
Respondent: Peter Boxall (Sussex)Peggy Kamuf (USC)
‘Orwell’s Execution’
Respondent: Sam Solomon (Sussex)
2015
- John Wilkinson and Maud Ellmann
Wednesday 20 May 2015
John Wilkinson, ‘Stone Thresholds: Turning to Stone in Painting and Verse'
Response by J. H. Prynne
Maud Ellmann, 'On Not Being Able To Paint: To the Lighthouse'
Response by Josh Cohen
- Rob Halpern seminar
Tuesday 12 May 2015
Halpern is one of the most daring, risky and original poets now writing in the US. His faculty page at Michigan gives the following polite understatement: 'Halpern’s poetry aims to make palpable the relations between subjective embodiment and social crisis.' In practice this means vivid explorations of the pornographic potential of military violence, adventures in sexual fantasy to the far limit of self-censorship and painful, close scrutiny of the tangled relation of intimacy to imperialism and of queer desire to violence.
- Marjorie Welish seminar
Friday 13 May 2015
A special seminar on the work of American poet, painter and critic Marjorie Welish. Welish responded to questions about her work and joined in a group discussion. After the seminar she gave a reading from her work. Participants were encouraged to read two texts in preparation for the seminar: Welish’s Asylum for Indeterminacy and her interview with Carla Harryman, ‘Of, and/or Through: A Correspondence’.
- Reading by Will Self
Friday 13 March 2015
The acclaimed author and journalist Will Self, in conversation and gave a reading from his tenth novel, Shark.