Small things Tim Armstrong, Royal Holloway University
Talk
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Event details
Centre for Modern Studies Lecture
We all know that the literary canon is a partial construct with a history marred by ideology, inertia and even accident. We also know that its existence as an interpretive focus is one of the things that sets literary study apart from historical research. In this paper I investigate a certain melancholy attached to canonicity, and ask whether (or how) we can move away from it. I begin with John Guillory's distinction between 'major works, minor works, works read primarily in research contexts, works as yet simply shelved in the archive', and meditate on some of the issues thrown up in my recent book Micromodernism.
About the speaker
Tim Armstrong, of Royal Holloway University and Bedford College is the author of Micromodernism: Rethinking Literary Renewal in the Long 1930s. Published in February, it is a book about small groups of artists in Europe the US and the Antipodes, struggling in the wake of the High Modernism of the 1920s to articulate their avant-garde ambitions in terms of politics, personal values, and aesthetic categories.