The Djuna Barnes Research Seminar

The Djuna Barnes Research Seminar

Thursday 1st December 2011,

6.00-8.00

Senate House, Bloomsbury: Room 270 (Stewart House)

"I, Dr Matthew Mighty O'Connor, ask you to think of the night the day long..."

Dear all,

As we begin to prepare for The First International Djuna Barnes Conference to be held next year, The Djuna Barnes Research Seminar will be asking how well we know Barnes and what assumptions we make about her work. Taking a short break from hosting monthly papers from invited speakers, the Research Seminar will instead spend the next sessions rereading Barnes’s most famous text, Nightwood (1936), chapter by chapter. As always, we welcome postgraduates, academics and enthusiasts interested in the work of Djuna Barnes, her contemporaries, or issues relating to twentieth century literary culture, politics and aesthetics.

Initially meetings will not be framed by specific critical issues or secondary reading, though these will of course be part of the discussion. Instead, we want to see where a direct encounter between the group and Barnes' prose takes us. To quote Malcolm Bowie's marvellous gloss on the ethos of critical theory, we will 'read slowly, read again, read against the grain.' Hopefully everyone will bring their own critical ideas to a collective endeavour to challenge assumptions, see the writing afresh, and provoke friendly debate.

In the second of these sessions, on Thurs 1st December, we will continue our discussion of chapter 1, 'Bow Down'; we suggest also rereading chapter 2, 'La Somnambule', as we may begin looking at that too. Those planning to attend the Seminar should read the expanded, annotated Nightwood: The Original Version and Related Drafts, edited by Cheryl Plumb, if possible, although the Faber and Faber edition will be sufficient.