Wordsworth, Autobiography, and the "Spots of Time"
Speaker: Professor Jeremy Tambling
Research Professor in English at SWPS University, Warsaw
Moderator: Dr. Chia-jung Lee
Associate Professor, Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, National Sun Yat-sen University
Date: 23 April (Wednesday)
Time: 13:10-15:00
Venue: Room 3005 (3rd Floor, the College of Liberal Arts Building)
Abstract: This paper looks at Wordsworth's The Prelude (1805, published 1850) as perhaps the first autobiography written in English, and as asking what memory is, and how it works in relation to time. I look at Wordsworth discussing 'spots of time' (Book 12.208, 1850), and think too of his interest in both the timely, (note the phrase 'a timely utterance' - the 'Intimations' Ode), and the untimely. The latter is registered in the 'Lucy' poems, in the noting the sudden and unexpected, and in such words as 'shock'' and 'surprise' which are prevalent in his texts), and in his fear of being out of time. Such disconfirmations of identity mark the beginnings of modernity, and describe present discontents and make memory traumatic; here I draw on Derrida on Freud's concept of Nachträchlichkeit (delayed reaction) to discuss the significance of autobiographical writing within modernity.
Bio: Professor Jeremy Tambling is currently a research Professor in English at SWPS University, Warsaw, and was Professor of Comparative Literature in Hong Kong University, and Professor of Literature in Manchester University. He is author of several books on many aspects of literature and critical and cultural theory, and of numerous articles; his latest book being The Death Penalty in Dickens and Derrida: The Last Sentence of the Law (Bloomsbury 2023).
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