Events

Dr. Simon Alderson - Cygnet Communications Ltd (https://www.cygnet.com.hk/about.html) Abstract For a number of reasons, the English ballad and popular song have always stood in an uncomfortable relationship with traditional literary history. This is partly because ballads and songs have mostly lacked the features of single authorship, educated readership, and mainstream printing and publishing validation that […]

Dr. Miles Link - Department of English, Fudan University Abstract After Adam and Eve’s temptation in John Milton’s biblical epic Paradise Lost, the Earth is drastically altered to reflect humans’ fallen state. The planet is knocked off its axis, animals turn on one another, and the character of existence itself changes: from now on, life on […]

Professor Isobel Armstrong - Department of English and Humanities, Birkbeck, University of London (http://www.bbk.ac.uk/english/our-staff/emeritus-staff/isobel-armstrong) Abstract Generally dominated by the Aesthetic Movement and Decadent poets, mainly male, in critical discussion, I suggest that late nineteenth-century poetry was more varied and experimental than our customary frameworks suggest. I work with late-century Darwin to provide another model for […]

Professor Johan van der Auwera - Department of Linguistics, University of Antwerp (https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/staff/johan-vanderauwera/my-website/) Abstract The talk reports on a typological study of negative indefinites, i.e., the counterparts to standard English nobody and nothing, in Englishes, primarily the New Englishes, and in English Creoles. Particular attention goes to "Negative Concord" ("NC"), i.e., the exponence of negation through both a […]

Dr. Johan Siebers - Religious Studies Unit, Middlesex University London (https://www.mdx.ac.uk/about-us/our-people/staff-directory/profile/siebers-johan) Abstract One of the most conspicuous aspects of the Dao De Jing is its negative view of language. Language is unable to express the full nature of being, the Dao, which is, rather, open only to an intuitive, direct and ineffable, spontaneous and creative […]