BRITISH ACADEMY LITERATURE WEEK 9-12 MAY 2011

in association with the Institute of English Studies, University of London

All events are free and open to the public, but registration is required.
See below for the registration forms

MONDAY 9 MAY

VENUE: The UnderGlobe, Shakespeare’s Globe, Bankside, London SE1 9DT 

6.00pm

Shakespeare Poetry Hour with actors from Shakespeare’s Globe

Introduced by Professor Jonathan Bate FBA (University of Warwick)

What is an audience? When do individuals become a group? How do (or should) audiences behave? This arrangement of episodes from plays by Shakespeare and others explores the ways in which audiences respond, interpret, interact, interrupt – and occasionally disrupt – plays. Dr Elisabeth Dutton directs actors from Shakespeare’s Globe in a creative piece that will make you rethink the relationship between actors and spectators. These extracts from Shakespeare’s plays will be brought to life by Globe actors in the perfect setting of the UnderGlobe exhibition space.

7.15pm

Mind the Gap: Making Meaning in the Theatre

The 2011 British Academy Shakespeare Lecture by Professor Laurie Maguire (University of Oxford).  Introduced and chaired by Sir Brian Vickers FBA (Institute of English Studies)

Drama, in Martin Meisel’s neat definition, is the ‘management of audience expectation’. This lecture will explore some of the ways in which Shakespeare’s plays cue and manage audience expectation, response, and understanding. Laurie Maguire will look at how audiences process plot and emotions, how they interpret character and language, and how Shakespeare and his contemporaries train audiences to ‘read’ plays. A key component of the lecture will be the changing status of character criticism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.  Considering Shakespeare’s characters as if they are real people with motivations has long been outlawed in academic circles; yet character remains a consistent point of entry for audiences. One aim of the lecture will be to effect a rapprochement between these two constituencies.

THIS EVENT IS NOW FULLY BOOKED.

TUESDAY 10 MAY

VENUE: The British Academy, 10-11 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AH

6.00pm

Contemporary Satire – Part of a Great Tradition?

Craig Brown and Posy Simmonds in conversation with Professor John Mullan (University College London)

Is contemporary satire any more biting and cruel than the satire of the Elizabethans or the Augustans? John Mullan leads a discussion on the nature of modern satire with the acclaimed parodist and Private Eye diarist Craig Brown and the cartoonist and illustrator Posy Simmonds.

 7.15pm

Pope's Ethical Thinking

The 2011 Chatterton Lecture given by Dr Christopher Tilmouth (University of Cambridge)

Alexander Pope discerned in his verse satires ‘more of morality than wit’, yet his work has been thought antipathetic to some of 18th-century Britain’s most enduring strains of ethical reflection. Reappraising Pope’s often noted complicity with those whom he otherwise attacked, this lecture asks what part Shaftesbury’s polite wit, Mandeville’s cynicism, and Augustan sentimentalism played in the poetry of England’s greatest satirist. What, too, can Pope teach us about the relationship between literature and ethics?

THIS EVENT IS NOW FULLY BOOKED.

WEDNESDAY 11 MAY

VENUE: The British Academy, 10-11 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AH

6.00pm

Phantasmagoria

Professor Marina Warner FBA (University of Essex) in conversation with Professor Hermione Lee FBA (University of Oxford)

This ‘in conversation’ event takes as its starting point Marina Warner’s book Phantasmagoria, which she discusses with Hermione Lee. Reviewing it in 2006, Hilary Mantel described it as an exploration of: “the words we find for the things that aren’t quite there... the ways that the dead live: on film, in wax, in those Victorian spirit photographs, so clumsy that nowadays they wouldn’t fool a child. It takes us from Dante to JK Rowling, Peter Pan to Jean-Paul Marat, Aristotle to Magritte. It is about fog and smog and celestial clouds, doppelgängers and vampires, magic lanterns and Rorschach blots...” They will explore these technologies of the invisible and their presence in fairy tale and magical literature.

7.15pm

Many-coloured Glass, Aerial Images and the Work of the Lens: Romantic Poetry and Optical Culture

The 2011 Warton Lecture given by Professor Isobel Armstrong FBA (Birkbeck, University of London)

Isobel Armstrong focuses on the Romantic poets’ fascination with the lens-made and projected images that the modern world has come to think of as the virtual image.From the rainbow colours of the spectrum; to the starry universe of the telescope; to the ghosts, phantasms and spectres of the phantasmagoria - this was a moment when ‘high’ science and popular spectacle met. This meeting found its way deep into the imaginations of poets. Their questioning of the simulacra around them and their daring experiments with a language of reflection and refraction is the theme of the lecture.

THIS EVENT IS NOW FULLY BOOKED.

THURSDAY 12 MAY

VENUE: The Beveridge Hall, Senate House, University of London, Malet Street, London WC1E 7HU

6.00pm

Shakespeare's Cultural Impact

Pane discussion with Professor Kate McLuskie (Director of the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford), Catherine Bunting (Arts Council England), and Professor Russ McDonald (Goldsmiths)

No figure in English literature has had greater impact than William Shakespeare. Kate McLuskie and Catherine Bunting analyse with Shakespeare expert Russ McDonald the Shakespeare phenomenon, how it can be measured and what it tells us about our modern culture and its relationship with the past.

7.15pm

Biography on the Stage

Panel discussion with Michael Pennington, Professor Jonathan Bate FBA (University of Warwick) and Professor Mary Luckhurst (University of York), chaired by Professor Robert Hewison (City University London)

This discussion, chaired by the drama critic and academic Robert Hewison, will explore the various challenges involved in building plays and performances around biography. Jonathan Bate, author of the play The Man from Stratford talks from a writer’s perspective, Michael Pennington will discuss from the actor's viewpoint the differences between playing "real" and fictional characters on stage and Mary Luckhurst, playwright, director and author of Playing for Real: Actors on Playing Real People, will add her varied experience.

If you wish to attend please register for Thursday's events :

For further information, please contact the British Academy events team on 0207 969 5246 or email events@britac.ac.uk