Academic Sessions: Glasgow 2010
AAH Annual Conference 2010
15 - 17 April, University of Glasgow
Reading to Attention
Session Convenors:
Sharon Kivland, Sheffield Hallam University, Institute of Germanic and Romance, Studies, University of London, sharonkivland@wanadoo.fr
Forbes Morlock, Syracuse University London and the, Institute for Creative Reading, forbes.helix@btopenworld.com
A return to reading. A new attention to reading.
In a variety of formats, this session asks what it is to read attentively. It wants—after attention’s own roots—to see what reading can stretch to.
A reader is on duty, and set free. Reading is at the core of all the disciplines of the arts and humanities, but its centrality to research is not measured. Part of this immeasurability lies in reading’s pleasures—the pleasure of the activity, our pleasure in its objects. These pleasures, though, are inseparable from its disciplines, its rigours.
Hence, the call to attention.
Too often, ‘reading’ is interpretation, reaching through the text or image/object to something inside or behind or beneath it, imagining that what is latent will be of greater interest or importance that what is manifest. This session invites practitioners of all sorts to return to the light, to the words on the page, to the surface of the image, to the form of the object (whatever form it takes).
Specifically, its four coordinated sections include presentations that address—in various form—what it is to read, to attend to the word or the image/object. The fourth section will return us to practice in the form of a reading group.
Speakers:
Graham Allen (University College Cork)
Reading as Escapism.
Ahuvia Kahane (Royal Holloway, University of London)
Philology and the Image of the Future.
James Hellings (University of Teeside)
The Love of Thought or The Importance of Being Admired.
Esther Leslie (Birkbeck, University of London)
Words Rise Up
Robin Lydenberg (Boston College, USA)
Reading Lessons from Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragi-Comic.
Seph Rodney (The London Consortium)
Reading the Reader
Christopher Bamford (University of Manchester)
Wildly Attentive
Juan Cruz (Liverpool John Moores University)
Translating with strangely genuine expression
J. P. McMahon (University College Cork)
An Acconci Dictionary
Forbes Morlock (Syracuse University London) and Sharon Kivland (Sheffield Hallam University)
Reading to Attention. Attentive Reading (Reading Group)