472 research outputs found
"fl: Reflexions on Life Abbreviated" - Nicholas Royle
No full textIl est un peu difficile de rendre compte de l’intervention de Nicholas Royle du jeudi 7 novembre tant la forme de celle-ci était inattendue. Celle-ci s’intitule « fl : Réflexions on Life Abbraviated » et il faut attendre la fin pour comprendre réellement ce que signifient ces deux lettres que Royle prononce « fle ». Ainsi commence-t-il par nous parler de son père afin de procéder à une définition de « fl ». Son père, qui, lorsque son fils lui demanda ce qu’il était, répondit « flourished »...
Imaginary Intimacies: Death and New Temporalities in the Work of Denise Riley and Nicholas Royle
No full textIn The Severed Head: Capital Visions (2014), Julia Kristeva understands there to be two forms of relation to death in contemporary culture. The ‘imaginary intimacy with death, which transforms melancholy or desire into representation and thought’ is opposed in Kristeva’s work to ‘the rational realization’ of the act of capital punishment, the former epitomizing ‘vision’ in contrast to the ‘action’ of the latter. This essay proposes that Kristeva’s idea of an ‘imaginary intimacy’ with death can be read in the context of contemporary literary responses to the death of a loved one by Denise Riley and Nicholas Royle. In particular, this essay addresses the relationship between death and new temporalities in Riley’s essay Time Lived, Without Its Flow (2012), her recent collection of poems Say Something Back (2016), and Royle’s Quilt (2010). The non-linear models of time found in Riley’s and Royle’s works are contextualised via the attempts in phenomenology to theorise the relations between temporality and finitude, as well as via Stephen J Gould’s work on geological time. For Riley, the experience of the death of her son brings with it an ‘altered condition of life’ in which time takes the form of ‘a-temporality.’ Questioning the limits of the sentence, and collapsing the narrative boundaries between the living narrator and the deceased father, Quilt traverses the boundaries between experience lived and an experience impossible to claim. Through such an analysis the essay explores the capacity of experimental works to harbour new non-linear temporalities that reflect on the relation between temporality and finitude in the contemporary
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Veering: a theory of literature
No full textIn this powerful analysis of the perceived demise of theory and rise of creative writing in literary and cultural studies, Nicholas Royle meddles with our ideas about theory, autobiography, and literature. He explores the writings of Montaigne, Dryden, Wordsworth, Coleridge and Nabokov, as well as Lucretius, Freud, Bloom, Guy Debord, Cixous, Barthes, Derrida and Nancy
The Blind Short Story
No full textThis is a specially-commisioned volume of essays on the topic of blindness and the short story, edited by Timothy Clark and Nicholas Royle, drawing on work from an international range of scholars. The volume seeks to intervene in current debates on the nature of the short story in theory and practice, providing a new critical and creative perspective through its attention to figures of blindness in both writing and reading. Besides co-editing the volume and co-authoring the editorial, Royle also contributes an essay, entitled 'Spooking Forms'. The final, supplementary essay in the collection, Cixous' 'The Unforeseeable', was first delivered as a lecture as part of the on-going Inventive English project at the University of Sussex, in June 2004
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The Blind Short Story
No full textThis is a specially-commisioned volume of essays on the topic of blindness and the short story, edited by Timothy Clark and Nicholas Royle, drawing on work from an international range of scholars. The volume seeks to intervene in current debates on the nature of the short story in theory and practice, providing a new critical and creative perspective through its attention to figures of blindness in both writing and reading. Besides co-editing the volume and co-authoring the editorial, Royle also contributes an essay, entitled 'Spooking Forms'. The final, supplementary essay in the collection, Cixous' 'The Unforeseeable', was first delivered as a lecture as part of the on-going Inventive English project at the University of Sussex, in June 2004
10/12/2020: « Animisms», avec la participation de Peter Boxall, Jemma Deer et Nicholas Royle.
No full textLa première session du séminaire Politique de la Littérature, “Animisms” organisée par l’Université de Paris et l’Université de Lille, a accueilli Jemma Deer (Département de l’Environnement à Université d’Harvard), Peter Boxall (Département d’anglais à l’Université du Sussex) et Nicholas Royle (Département d’anglais à l’Université du Sussex). La clé de voûte de ce séminaire était la rencontre de la littérature et de l’analyse critique («critical thinking»). Jemma Deer nous a présenté son ..
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Mother: a memoir
No full text'A tender and graceful study of parents and children, and a finely judged and measured attempt to capture the flitting, quicksilver shapes of what we keep and what we lose: the touch, the tone, the gaze of the past as it fades. It is a moving and beautifully achieved memoir, and a testament to the writer’s skill and generosity of spirit.'—Hilary Mantel Before the devastating ‘loss of her marbles’, Mrs Royle, a nurse by profession, is a marvellously no-nonsense character, an autodidact who reads widely and voraciously—from Trollope to Woolf, Tennyson to Foucault—swears at her fox-hunting neighbours, and instils in the young Nick a love of reading and of wildlife that will form his character and his career. In this touching, funny and beautifully written portrait of family life, mother-son relationships and bereavement, Nicholas Royle captures the spirit of post-war parenting as well as of his mother whose dementia and death were triggered by the tragedy of losing her other son—Royle’s younger brother—to cancer in his twenties. At once poetic and philosophical, this extraordinary memoir is also a powerful reflection on climate crisis and ‘mother nature’, on literature and life writing, on human and non-human animals, and on the links between the maternal and memory itself
Mother: a memoir
No full text'A tender and graceful study of parents and children, and a finely judged and measured attempt to capture the flitting, quicksilver shapes of what we keep and what we lose: the touch, the tone, the gaze of the past as it fades. It is a moving and beautifully achieved memoir, and a testament to the writer’s skill and generosity of spirit.'—Hilary Mantel Before the devastating ‘loss of her marbles’, Mrs Royle, a nurse by profession, is a marvellously no-nonsense character, an autodidact who reads widely and voraciously—from Trollope to Woolf, Tennyson to Foucault—swears at her fox-hunting neighbours, and instils in the young Nick a love of reading and of wildlife that will form his character and his career. In this touching, funny and beautifully written portrait of family life, mother-son relationships and bereavement, Nicholas Royle captures the spirit of post-war parenting as well as of his mother whose dementia and death were triggered by the tragedy of losing her other son—Royle’s younger brother—to cancer in his twenties. At once poetic and philosophical, this extraordinary memoir is also a powerful reflection on climate crisis and ‘mother nature’, on literature and life writing, on human and non-human animals, and on the links between the maternal and memory itself
Dream Treatment: On Sitting Down to Read a Letter from Freud
No full text This text seeks to analyse a dream in which Freud writes to the author. Particular attention is given to the notion of treatment and, in a memorable phrase from Hélène Cixous, ‘how to treat the dream as a dream’. Royle draws on diverse references (Donald Trump, Hugh Laurie, Howard Jacobson, Wallace Stevens, Jacques Derrida and Cixous), and focuses on a range of Freud's writings (a letter to Thomas Mann, The Interpretation of Dreams, ‘A Disturbance of Memory on the Acropolis’ and ‘A Note on the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis’), in order to explore the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature. Particular attention is given to free association, deferred effect and the epistolary. </jats:p
L’expérimental comme fidélité au spectre : Quilt de Nicholas Royle
No full textThis article offers a reading of the euphemised forms of experimentation hosted by the contemporary novel through the category of afterwardsness or deferred action, through which anterior forms of experimentation can be envisaged. It addresses Nicholas Royle’s Quilt (2010), and more particularly the formal and ethical reconfigurations that it performs. The narrative renews the conventions of elegiac discourse through the means of a poetics of trauma that prises the text open, exhibits the modalities of its reconfiguration and evinces a preference for vulnerable form. In Quilt, one of the main modalities of reconfiguration lies in the dialogue between fiction and theory, according to the powers of what the author, in the eponymous theoretical study, has called “veering.” In so doing, Royle provides a practice of experimentation as faithfulness to trouble, which calls on the reader to perform consideration or attentiveness as a prelude to dispossession. For him, faithfulness to the spectre of experimentation that haunts modern and contemporary literature goes along with a poetics and an ethics of vulnerability
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