Kate McCloughlin
Saturday 26th September - 14.30
Kate is a Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Harris Manchester College. She has recently been awarded a Major Research Fellowship by the Leverhulme Trust for her project on the history of silence in English. Literature and silence may seem a paradoxical subject, but in its treatment of silence, ‘literature penetrates the most profound aspects of our existence: our relationship with Nature and the divine; our understanding of what makes a self; our most powerful and intimate feelings of love and grief; our sense of wonder’.
Silence: A Literary History traces silences over twelve centuries of English literature, from the solitary states of exile on icy seas described in Anglo-Saxon poems to searches for silence in our own Age of Pings. This pioneering work of 'big' literary history encompasses exalted states of blissful union with the divine and with the natural world, the deep hushes of intimacy, spell-binding silent scenes on stage, encrypted expressions of same-sex love, the great literary epics of inarticulable grief, the game-changing idea of silence within the mind, the failure of words in the face of two World Wars, the hilarious awkwardness of some social silences, the echoing absence of lost voices, and silences as a powerful form of protest.
