English Graduate Conference 2012: Recent Episodes
Oxford University
A selection of recordings from the English Graduate Conference, University of Oxford, 1 June 2012. The conference theme was Return to the Political: Literary Aesthetics and the Influence of Political Thought and featured student presentations and a panel discussion on the topic 'What is a Classic?'. The conference concluded with a keynote address from Booker prize winning author Ben Okri.
Panel discussion talk on 'Book as Object' for the Oxford English Graduate Conference 2013.
Baroness Helena Kennedy QC, draws on her experience as a trustee of the Booker Prize and as a judge for many other literary prizes to offer a response to the question, 'What is a Classic?'.
Judith Luna, the Senior Commissioning Editor at Oxford World's Classics, draws on her practical involvement in re-launching the Oxford World's Classics series in 2008 to give a publisher's take on the question, 'What is a Classic?'.
Dr Ankhi Mukherjee, Wadham college, Oxford, speaks to the question 'What is a Classic?' by examining the residual influence of the Eurocentric literary canon in the age of world literature and emergent formations of canons and classics.
Erin Nyborg draws parallels between Michael Faber's 2002 novel The Crimson Petal and the White and Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre. She argues that Faber has appropriated narrative elements in order to rewrite the ending of Jane Eyre, already a feminist classic, in explicitly feminist terms.
In this talk, Sophie Duncan examines suffragists' interactions with Shakespeare and his works, as performers, directors, consumers and critics. Suffragist readings of Shakespeare variously cite Shakespeare's feminism as a source of authority, justifying their right to vote, and attack Shakespeare's patriarchal impulses in a manner that anticipates second-wave feminist, cultural materialist readings of the plays by half a century.