Talk - Memory, Miniaturization, and the Transformative Energy of Fairy Tales

Professor Maria Tatar, The John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literature, Harvard University. Thursday 01 December 2016, 17:00 - 18:30 Faculty of Education, 184 Hills Road, Cambridge, CB2 8PQ, DMB, Room GS5

"Fairy tales may be simple stories but they also give us the expression of complex thought. On the one hand, they offer up stark enactments of binary oppositions and cultural contradictions, with encounters between predator and prey, beauties and beasts, or primal innocence and cannibalistic cruelty. At the same time, their surfaces conceal layers of cultural memory saturated with historical meaning. This talk will draw on Walter Benjamin’s essay on the storyteller to understanding the cultural repetition compulsion that drives us to keep retelling “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Beauty and the Beast,” and other fairy tales."

Maria Tatar is without doubt one of the world’s leading authorities on children’s literature, fairy tales and folklore. She was born in Hungary, but her family moved to the USA in the 1950s, when Maria was a child. She grew up in Highland Park Illinois, which she refers to in her 2014 Lowell Lecture for the Boston Public Library (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WR10oa8hq18). Maria went from Highland Park High School to Denison University in Ohio, and from there to graduate study at Princeton. On completing her doctoral work, Maria joined the faculty of Harvard University where she is now the John L. Loeb Professor of Germanic Languages and Literatures, and Chair of the Committee on Degrees in Folklore and Mythology. She also shares her love of wonder tales and children’s literature with a wider audience through her Breezes from Wonderland blog (http://blogs.harvard.edu/tatar/). Her extensive list of publications includes _The Hard Facts of the Grimms' Fairy Tales_ (1987), _Off with Their Heads! Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood_ (1992), _Enchanted Hunters_ (2009), and _Secrets Beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives_. (2004).

http://talks.cam.ac.uk/talk/index/68717

Blog posts - Animals in Literature and History

Group members might be interested in this ongoing series of blog posts on Animals in Literature and History, featuring everything from sporting cats to medieval wolves, via eighteenth-century sharks.

CFP - “Can It Be?”: Representations of Science in 21st-Century Fiction

As the third millennium progresses, science and technology more than ever govern human lives, and the topic of science and/in fiction shows no signs of decline, neither in terms of artistic production nor as an area of critical inquiry. As several critical accounts of the field of 21^st century literature note, writers address contemporary issues such as environmental catastrophes and international conflicts, the proclaimed turn to precarity and the future of the planet and of humanity. Yet, at the same time, writers also appear disposed to look back, continuing to make the past and issues of time, history and temporality dominant concerns. But the question arises of what this turn to the past means in view of our narrative engagement with technology, projections of the future and its place in human life today and in times to come: (how) can it be that literature set in the 19th and 20th centuries imitates earlier styles and techniques and engages with technologies that once had a frightening impact but have become part of our reality long ago? How do these trends relate to the typically speculative view of science fiction? What happens to the characteristic orientation towards futuristic science and settings and, on the other hand, to conceptions of realism? Considering, for instance, the booming genres of Neo-Victorian fiction, adaptations and re-tellings, (how) can it be that upon entering the new millennium, writers seem to find greater imaginative stimulus in the past than in the present and the future?

The edited collection of essays aims to address current directions in fictional science narratives in different media. It brackets questions of scientific accuracy and the well-trodden path of the ‘two cultures’ debate to explore what modes, forms, and genres emerge and dominate in the 21^st century. Aside from tracing new and old boundaries between kinds of knowledge, modes of narration and perceiving reality, and between facts and fiction, the ethical dimension of the question ‘can it be’ might include narrative representations of risk, fear, and cultural assumptions about scientists and the research enterprise.

We invite contributions that address 20^th century developments from a 21^st perspective, as well as theoretical reflections on new trends and movements, surveys and close readings of narratives, including novels, drama, film, young adult fiction, and graphic fiction.
Papers may deal with (but are of course not limited to) the following topics and interrelations:

• Science and genre, e.g. the historical novel, thriller, satire, fantasy, dystopia, transrealism, and life-writing
• Science and ethics
• Science and religion, secularism
• Science and/as terror
• Science and (post)human identity
• Science – still between fascination and fear?

Please send 300-500 words abstracts to Dr Nina Engelhardt (nina.engelhardt@uni-koeln.de) and Dr Julia Hoydis (julia.hoydis@uni-koeln.de).

Deadline for submission of abstracts: 01.02.2017.
Notice of acceptance: 01.03. 2017.
Deadline for submission of papers (7000 words): 01.01.2018

Talk - 'The Anthropology of the Humanities'

David Clifford, Tuesday 29th November 2016, 6pm, Paston Brown Room, Homerton College

The study of the humanities has been challenged in recent years to validate its value, both in the academy and in wider society. Various scholars have taken up this challenge; my paper seeks to address a further dimension. English scholars in particular face demands to justify their subject, on the very reasonable grounds that the transferable skills the study of English claims to provide are no less provided by other subjects.I will review some of these scholars' arguments; mine, however, focuses on scientific and anthropological claims about the role played by language in human evolution, development and social organization over the last 100,000 years. It won't in itself be an argument for improved public funding, I'm afraid, but I hope to argue for the ancient, long-term benefits of language, and how this enhances what we gain from studying it like this, for society and for human civilization in general.

Dr David Clifford is Fellow in English, Homerton College

Blog post - Dinosaurs, Evolution and Faith

Group members might be interested in this blog post by Richard Fallon on Henry Neville Hutchinson.

Call for articles - 'The "Heart" and "Science" of Wilkie Collins and Contemporaries'

Deadline for Abstracts: 28th February 2017; Deadline for Articles: 31st May 2017

‘“Why can’t I look into your heart, and see what secrets it is keeping from me?”’

The protagonist of Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science (1883), surgeon Ovid de Vere, laments the difficulty in deciphering hidden emotions and secrets. Yet the language suggests his medical background, striking a note with the novel’s supposedly anti-vivisection message and highlighting contemporary debates into the nature of experimental medicine, observation and epistemology. What is the best way of uncovering secrets, and what part does knowledge of the body play in this? Can medical training benefit from a thorough understanding of emotion? And does gender play a part in this? Issues of ‘heart’ and ‘science’ reverberate across Collins’s work, from the Major’s collection of women’s hair in The Law and the Lady (1875) to Ezra Jenning’s solution to the crime of The Moonstone (1868). This conference takes as its focus the proliferation of “heart” and “science” throughout Collins’s work.

We welcome both abstracts and full article submissions on, but not limited to, the following topics:

• Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science (1883) and/or any of Collins’s work
• The Body: As a scientific subject, as a site of emotion, bodily representations, and the body in forensics, news reportage and the home.
• The Victorian origin of disciplines: Collins as an interdisciplinary figure, the divide (or not) of “heart” and “science”, the definition of sensation in literature and/or science.
• Medicine and anatomical science: vivisection, taxidermy, anatomical atlases and the nineteenth-century doctor and/or scientist.
• Psychology and psychiatry: the physicality of mental illness, hysteria, the asylum, treatment and therapeutics.
• Gender: the gendered body, representations of gender, the gendered connotations of “heart” and/or “science”.
• Sensation: As genre, as sense or emotion, as subjective.
• Detection: forensics, interrogation, the body as clue, the science of detection, and crimes of the heart.
• Relationships: Romantic, familial, or otherwise.
• Neo-Victorian Approaches to “Heart” and “Science”
• Work by other contemporary sensation writers

Submissions are not limited to papers on Wilkie Collins’s Heart and Science but to “heart” and “science” at work in the full range of Collins’s fiction. The WCJ are also interested in related authors and sensation fiction more broadly, hence papers on authors such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Charles Reade, Charles Dickens, Ellen Wood, Florence Marryat and other sensation writers will also be considered. Interdisciplinary perspectives are welcome.

Email abstracts to jo.parsons@falmouth.ac.uk and V.Burke@pgr.reading.ac.uk by 28th February 2017.

Cam magazine - science and literature

An interesting selection of works on Dr Suchitra Sebastian's 'Shelfie' for edition 79 of the Cambridge alumni magazine (pp. 44-45).

Article - "The science fiction that came before science"

The Atlantic discusses Cavendish, Godwin, et al.

Early Science and Medicine Seminar

On Tuesday, 22 November, Daniel Margócsy (HPS Cambridge), will speak about 'Reading Vesalius 700 times: the problem of generation and the reception history of De humani corporis fabrica' at 5pm. Everyone is welcome for tea and biscuits from 4:45.

Seminar Room 1, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Free School Lane.

Organised by Lauren Kassell and Dániel Margócsy.

Gillian Beer - Untangling Alice

A preview of Gillian Beer's forthcoming book, Alice in Space, is in the latest issue of Nature (£).