The Call of Literature:
Theology, Philosophy and Literature in Conversation
Power of the Word International Conference VI
28 June - 2 July 2021, on-line
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Marta Gibińska
Prof. dr hab. Marta Gibińska worked until 2012 at the Jagiellonian University; at present she teaches at the Jozef Tischner European University in Krakow, Poland. She specialises in Shakespeare studies and translation studies. Her publications include, among others, Functioning of Language in Shakespeare’s Plays. A Pragma-dramatic Approach (1989), and Polish Poets Read Shakespeare (2000). She has published extensively on theatrical history of Shakespeare in Poland and on Polish translations of Shakespeare. She is a member of the Polish Shakespeare Society, Deutsche Shakespearegesellschaft, the International Shakespeare Association, and the European Shakespeare Research Association.
Further publications:
'Enter Shakespeare: the contexts of early Polish appropriations'. In 400 Hundred Years of Shakespeare in Europe, ed. A. Luis Pujamte and Ton Hoenselaars. London: Associated University Presses 2003, pp. 54 – 69
'Politics of Theatre versus Politics of (Non)state: Shakespeare in the Repertoire of Polish Nineteenth-Century Theatres'. In The Shakespeare International Yearbook, vol.7 (2007), ed. Graham Bradshaw and Tom Bishop. Special Section ed. Tetsuo Kishi, pp.219-232
'The Street, the Lovers, and the Tragedy: Town as Space in Romeo and Juliet and Othello'. In Images of the City, ed. Agnieszka Rasmus and Magdalena Cieślak,.Cambridge Scholars Publishing 2009, pp.102-112
'Poetry is Music – The Sonnets in Poland'. In William Shakespeare's Sonnets For the First Time Globally Reprinted. A Quatercentenary Anthology 1609-2009; ed. Manfred Pfister and Juergen Gutsch. Dozwil TG Schweiz: Edition SIGNAThUR 2009, pp. 505-516
'Bottom thou art translated'. In Shakespeare without Boundaries, ed. C. Jansohn, L. Cowen Orlin and S. Wells. Newark: Delaware Press 2010 , pp.283-291
'Man in Time: Shakespeare's Sonnet 30 and a Deconstruction of Consolation'. In (In)hospitable translations: Fidelities, Betrayals, Rewritings, ed. M. Nicolaescu and S. Corneanu. Editura Universitatii din Bucuresti 2010, pp. 87 - 99
'Memory of Tragedy in Early Modern Culture'. In Literaria Praguensia. Studies in Literature and Culture, ed. Martin Prochazka et.al., Prague: Charles University 2013, pp. 26-42
'Shakespeare on Stage in Europe since the late Seventeenth-Century – Growing with Technology, Art, and Politics 1848-1945'. InThe Shakespearean World, ed. Jill L. Levenson and Robert Ormsby. London: Routledge 2017, pp.46-51
'Word made Flesh made Word: on the Poetic Force of Macbeth'. In Poetic Revelations, ed. Mark S. Burrows et al. London: Routledge 2017, pp. 98-106
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David Jasper
David Jasper is Professor Emeritus in the University of Glasgow where he was Professor of Literature and Theology. He was for may years Distinguished Overseas Professor in Renmin University of China, Beijing. He has published widely in the field of literature and theology and was the founding editor of the Oxford journal Literature and Theology. He is an Anglican priest and is Canon Theologian of St Mary's Cathedral, Glasgow.
Robert Fraser
Robert Fraser is Professor Emeritus of English at the Open University, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the Royal Asiatic Society and the English Association. He previously lectured at the University of Cape Coast in Ghana and the University of Leeds under the poet Geoffrey Hill. He then taught for several years at Royal Holloway, University of London, where the college’s famous collection of Victorian paintings inspired his original poetry sequence The Founder’s Gift: Impressions from A Collection, published by the college in 2017. In 2020 musical settings of these poems composed by Mollie Carlyle, Andrew Moore, Sofia Kerroubi Garcia, Peter Bourne, Daisy Henson and Emma Pascoe were performed in the college’s stately Picture Gallery in a series of three well-attended public concerts.
After Royal Holloway, he was Director of Studies in English at Trinity College, Cambridge. He is the author of twenty-seven published books, including The Chameleon Poet: A Life of George Barker, Spectator Book of the Year for 2002, and Night Thoughts: The Surreal Life of the Poet David Gascoyne which in May 2012 topped the Independent’s chart of new biographies. His The Making of the Golden Bough and Sir James Frazer and the Literary Imagination, both commissioned for the 1990 centenary of Frazer’s classic work on myth, featured that year in Radio 3’s The Priest of Nemi, and his book Proust and the Victorians: The Lamp of Memory (1994) featured in 2003 in Radio 4’s In Our Time. He has also published widely on African and Third World literature. Of his 2018 memoir Pascal’s Tears or How Not to Murder One’s Wife, Dr Rowan Williams, Former Archbishop of Canterbury, remarked “It does so much at different levels – simply evoking a very remarkable relationship and a very remarkable person, but then also pushing us up against some of the hardest ethical questions imaginable, always with humanity and humility, with depth but without solemnity.” 2020 saw the publication of his After Ancient Biography: Modern Types and Classical Archetypes, a comparative study of the art of life-writing across several periods. His novel The Quality of the Light: A Novel in Five Paintings was published on June 8th, 2021. He lives in London and Oxfordshire: when in the former, he teaches biography writing at the CityLit.
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Declan Kiberd
Declan Kiberd teaches at Notre Dame, having been Professor of Anglo-Irish Literature at University College Dublin for thirty-thee years. He is author of many books including Inventing Ireland (which won the Irish Times Literature Prize) and Irish Classics (which garnered the Truman Capote Award). Among his recent books are Ulysses and Us: The Art of Everyday Living (2009) and After Ireland: Writing the Nation from Beckett to the Present (2017). He has edited the Student's Annotated Ulysses for Penguin Modern Classics. He was recently inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He writes in Irish as well as English and has been a visiting lecturer in over thirty countries, as well as a member of the Board of Directors of the Abbey Theatre.
Gary Hagberg
Garry L. Hagberg is the James H. Ottaway Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at Bard College, and has also been Professor of Philosophy at the University of East Anglia. Author of numerous papers at the intersection of aesthetics and the philosophy of language, his books include: Meaning and Interpretation: Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Literary Knowledge; Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Aesthetic Theory; and Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness. He is editor of Art and Ethical Criticism and Fictional Characters, Real Problems: The Search for Ethical Content in Literature, co-editor of A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature, and Editor of the journal Philosophy and Literature.His most recent edited volumes include Wittgenstein on Aesthetic Understanding; Stanley Cavell on Aesthetic Understanding; and Narrative and Self-Understanding. Presently completing a new book on the contribution literary experience makes to the formation of self and sensibility, Living in Words: Literature, Autobiographical Language, and the Composition of Selfhood, Hagberg is also writing two new volumes of case studies, one on literary depictions of consciousness, Consciousness Portrayed, and the other, The Mind on Screen, on philosophical films. He has delivered many invited talks and papers at philosophical, literary, and musical conferences around the world.
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POETRY READING EVENT
Edward Clarke
EDWARD CLARKE recently published a collection of poems entitled A Book of Psalms (Paraclete Press, 2020). He presented Clarke’s Psalter, a documentary about writing these poems, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in September 2018. He is also the author of two books of criticism, The Later Affluence of W.B. Yeats and Wallace Stevens (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and The Vagabond Spirit of Poetry (Iff Books, 2014).
ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION
Mark Bosco SJ
Mark Bosco, S.J., Ph.D. is Vice President for Mission and Ministry at Georgetown University, and holds an appointment in the Department of English. A native of St. Louis, Missouri, Fr. Bosco joined Georgetown after fourteen years at Loyola University Chicago, where he was a tenured faculty member with a joint appointment in the Departments of Theology and English. From 2012-2017, he also served as Director of The Joan and Bill Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage at Loyola.
As a scholar, Fr. Bosco has focused much of his work on the intersection of theology and art—specifically, the British and American Catholic literary tradition. He has published on a number of authors, including the writers Graham Greene and Flannery O’Connor. He is also co-producer and co-director of the film Flannery, which won the 2019 Library of Congress Lavine/Ken Burns Prize for Film, and which premiered on PBS American Masters on March 23, 2021.
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Angela Alaimo O’Donnell
Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, PhD is a professor, poet, and writer at Fordham University in New York City and serves as Associate Director of Fordham’s Curran Center for American Catholic Studies. Her publications include two chapbooks and seven collections of poems, most recently, Andalusian Hours (2020), a collection of 101 poems that channel the voice of Flannery O’Connor, and Love in the Time of Coronavirus: A Pandemic Pilgrimage (2021). In addition, O’Donnell has published a prize-winning memoir, Mortal Blessings (2014), a book of hours based on the practical theology of Flannery O’Connor, The Province of Joy (2012), and her biography Flannery O’Connor: Fiction Fired by Faith (2015) was awarded first prize for excellence in publishing from The Association of Catholic Publishers. Her new critical book on Flannery O’Connor, Radical Ambivalence: Race in Flannery O’Connor was published by Fordham University Press in 2020.
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Michael P. Murphy
Michael P. Murphy directs the Catholic Studies program and the Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage at Loyola University Chicago. His research interests are in Theology and Literature, Critical Theory, and Christian Spirituality, but he also writes and engages public media on issues in eco-theology, ethics, and the literary/political cultures of Catholicism. His most recent scholarly works are an edited volume, this need to dance/this need to kneel: Denise Levertov and the Poetics of Faith (2019) and a book chapter, "Childhood and the Terrain of Transformation: A Tale of Two O'Connors" in Literature and Catholicism in the 19th and 20th Centuries (David Torevell, ed.) from 2021. He is currently at work on a monograph entitled The Dirty Realists: Catholic Fiction, Poetry, and Film 1965-2015.