Seminar 11: Bad Sex: Beckett and Coetzee

Thursday 12 July 2007 -  4.30pm-5.30pm (please arrive in good time)

Lecture Theatre 18
Building EA
Parramatta Campus
University of Western Sydney

Admission is Free but Bookings are Essential

The Writing and Society Group at the University of Western Sydney and the Department of English at Macquarie University in association with the ‘Literature and Sensation’ conference of the Australasian Association for Literature present:

Derek Attridge: ‘Bad Sex: Beckett and Coetzee’

Speaker:
Derek Attridge (University of York, UK)

Convenor:
Anthony Uhlmann (University of Western Sydney)

Convenor's Introduction

J. M. Coetzee's depictions of the sexual act are among the more peculiar features of his novels, from Eugene Dawn's grim account of sex with his wife in Dusklands to Paul Rayment's one-legged encounter with the blind Marianna in Slow Man. The writer who probably influenced Coetzee more than any other, Samuel Beckett, also specialized in descriptions of sex that break with all the erotic or pornographic conventions that usually govern such matters. In this talk, I will ask what is going on in these scenes and what they tell us about the connection between the two writers.

Derek Attridge is Professor of English at the University of York (UK). His publications include: Well-weighed Syllables: Elizabethan Verse in Classical Metres (Cambridge, 1974), The Rhythms of English Poetry (Longman, 1982), Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (Cornell and Methuen, 1988; reissued by Routledge, 2004), Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction (Cambridge, 1995), and Joyce Effects: On Language, Theory, and History (Cambridge, 2000). He is the co-author of Meter and Meaning: An Introduction to Rhythm in Poetry (Routledge, 2003) and is also the editor or co-editor of Post-structuralist Joyce (Cambridge, 1984), Post-structuralism and the Question of History (Cambridge, 1987), The Linguistics of Writing: Arguments between Language and Literature (Manchester and Routledge, 1987), The Cambridge Companion to James Joyce (Cambridge, 1990; second edition, 2004), Acts of Literature by Jacques Derrida (Routledge, 1992), Writing South Africa: Literature, Apartheid, and Democracy 1970-1995 (Cambridge, 1998), and Semicolonial Joyce (Cambridge, 2000). Publications appearing in 2004 included The Singularity of Literature (Routledge), which won the 2006 ESSE Book Award, J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading: Literature in the Event (Chicago and Natal), and, as editor, James Joyce's 'Ulysses': A Casebook (Oxford). Forthcoming in 2007 is How to Read Joyce (Granta). Among his research interests are South African literature, Joyce, deconstruction and literary theory, and the performance of poetry.

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