23 July 2011
Birkbeck hosted the first international symposium on the work of the celebrated author Tom McCarthy. The author himself gave an exclusive reading from his work in progress, and participated in a question and answer session at the end of the day. The event was organized by Dennis Duncan.
Tom McCarthy's novels explore the themes of repetition and duplication, failed transcendence, the notion of matter, and transmission, and his work has been shortlisted for both the Man Booker Prize and for the Waterstone's UK Author of the Year.
The conference featured prestigious speakers, including the philosopher Professor Simon Critchley (New School, NYC) and Professor Andrew Gibson (Royal Holloway).
Dr Mark Blacklock was a Birkbeck postgraduate student at the time, and presented a paper. He commented before the event: 'Having the opportunity to present a paper at a symposium that's immersed in what is happening in English literature almost as we speak is terrifically exciting. Doing so as part of a roster containing thinkers whose books cast long shadows in their fields is a wee bit intimidating but it's difficult to imagine a more constructive scholarly experience, and it's typical of the liveliness of the Birkbeck English Department that this is happening here’.
The symposium forms the basis for a forthcoming book from Gylphi Press in their Contemporary Writers: Critical Essays series. It was filmed by London Consortium TV, with the footage available via the website of Birkbeck’s Dandelion journal.
On the evening on Friday 22 July, Tom McCarthy also introduced a screening in the Birkbeck Cinema of the McCarthy-scripted film Double Take (2009).
Programme
Panel 1: Sound
Holly Pester (Birkbeck): Beats, Heaps and Scruff-Matter: The INS Black Box
Transmitters and their Process-Based Dispersal of Poetry as Signal
Henderson Downing (Birkbeck): Crypt Craft Crackle: Nothing Here Now but the Recodings
Dr Jane Lewty (Amsterdam): C.Q., So-Called: Tom McCarthy‘s Radio Locus
Panel 2: Space
Dr Julia Jordan (Sussex): Without Repetition or Deviation: Tom McCarthy‘s Errant Inclinations
Dr Gill Partington (Birkbeck): Fictional Spaces versus Real Worlds
Mark Blacklock (Birkbeck): ‘Strange diagonal which was thought to be so pure’: calculating the square root of Tom McCarthy‘s geometric injunction
Chair: Dr Laura Salisbury (Birkbeck)
Panel 3: Criticism & Context
Dr Eric Langley (UCL): ‘Earth to moon-rocket. Are you receiving me?’: McCarthy‘s Adventures of Tintin
Dr Laura Salisbury (Birkbeck): McCarthy‘s Brain Matter
Prof Andrew Gibson (Royal Holloway): New Inhumanisms: Tom McCarthy and Speculative Realism
Chair: Dr David James (Nottingham)
Panel 4: In Conversation
Dr Daniel Lea (Oxford Brookes)
Prof Peter Boxall (Sussex)
Prof Simon Critchley (New School, NYC)
Chair: Dr Sebastian Groes (Roehampton)
Tom McCarthy: Reading & Q&A
Image by Txerra Cirbian under a CC BY-NC-SA license.
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