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：孙艳萍（浙江大学副教授）
时 间：2025年9月30日10：00-11：30
地 点：浙江大学紫金港校区东1-B309
讲座题目
With Automatic Hand: Bloomsbury and Literary Modernism
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 addresses the emergence of what I will call a prosthetic sensibility in writers associated with the Bloomsbury group in the 1920s, to ask how this moment in the passage of literary modernism helps us to address the relation now between literature, life, and automation.It does so by attending to key moments in landmark modernist texts by Woolf, Beckett, Joyce and Eliot, all of which turn around the experience of automation, of prosthetic estrangement. The lecture reads these iconic moments together, to explore the ways in which the modernist imagination approaches automated prosthetic experience. How, it asks, do these writers give expression to a prosthetic distance between consciousness and its technologised extensions? And how does a modernist imagination seek to overcome or inhabit that distance? The answer to these questions, it suggests, helps us to grasp the relation between prosthetic modernism in the earlier twentieth century, and the prosthetic condition as it determines experience now, a century later.
浙江大学世界文学跨学科研究中心
2025年9月21日
