主讲人：Peter Boxall（牛津大学教授，英国国家学术院院士，权威期刊Textual Practice主编）
主持人：杨革新（浙江大学教授）
时 间：2025年9月29日 16:00-18:00
地 点：浙江大学紫金港校区东5一楼青荷吧
讲座题目
Phantom Limbs as Narrative Catalyst and the Realism of the Unreal in Brooke-Rose and Coetzee
主讲人介绍
Peter Boxall is Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy. He has written a number of books on the novel, including Twenty-First-Century Fiction (2013), The Value of the Novel (2015), and The Prosthetic Imagination (2020, winner of the MLA James Russell Lowell prize). He has written books on Samuel Beckett and Don DeLillo, and his edited collections include 1001 Books (2006), volume 7 of The Oxford History of the Novel (with Bryan Cheyette, (2016)), and the Cambridge Companion to British Fiction: 1980-2018 (2019). He has been editor of Textual Practice since 2009. His volume of collected essays, The Possibility of Literature, came out in 2024, and he is currently writing a book on Zadie Smith entitled Life in Fiction.
讲座提要
This lecture proposes that there is a generative relationship between the literary object and the phantom limb, one which helps us to understand the terms in which prose fiction both represents and invents bodies and worlds.It explores this connection, as it develops in late twentieth- and early twentieth-first-century writing, by attending to short fiction by Christine Brooke-Rose (particularly her compelling story “the Foot”), and by J. M. Coetzee (particularly his recent novella The Pole).Both of these works turn around an approach to the phantom limb, as a phenomenon that does not rest comfortably within any of our given ontological or perceptual categories. The phantom limb is not a representation of a limb; it is not a memory of a limb; it is not an imaginary limb; it is not a real limb. It partakes of all these conditions, without fully conforming to any of them. In trying to account for the kind of object the phantom limb is, both writers reach for a form of realism that can approach an object that is at once there and not there, at once real and imaginary. In doing so, they orient themselves to the world that is emerging now, in which the terms in which fictions invent and refer to our newly dawning realities have to be thought again.
浙江大学世界文学跨学科研究中心
2025年9月21日
