Professor Ben Hutchinson from the Department of German will be giving his Inaugural Professorial Lecture on Friday 21 February at 6pm.
Entitled ‘Creatures Facing Backwards’: Modernity, Literature and Lateness, Ben’s lecture will consider the consequences of viewing modern European literature not as that which is new, but as that which is ‘late’. Inverting the usual teleological perspective of literary history, it will explore the extent to which the adjectives ‘modern’ and ‘European’ can be taken to imply what one might term, with Paul Valéry, the ’embarrassment’ of lateness. If the various theories of lateness, Spätheit, or tardiveté have changing inflections at different times and in different languages, they can all be understood as an expression of the modern’s continuing quest for legitimacy. Using examples drawn from major figures of 19th- and 20th-century literature, the lecture will explore both the implications of coming after a past perceived as more meaningful and the sense that it is this very lateness that constitutes the particularity of the ‘modern’.
The lecture is organised by the Kent Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (KIASH).
For more details, please see: www.kent.ac.uk/secl/events