Abstract

You are very warmly invited to join us at the first meeting of the Queens’ Arts Seminar in Easter term, and the last one of the year!

Nick Chapin of Trinity, an advanced PhD student in the Faculty of English, will be presenting a paper on ‘Practical Criticism & the Genealogy of Reading’.

As ever, the paper will be accompanied by wine and followed by friendly discussion.

*Please note the location: DD47 in Cripps Court at Queens’*

We hope to see you there! All are welcome!

Abstract: This paper will present a broad introductory discussion of the history of reading as a critical concept in Anglophone literary thought. Centering around the work of I.A. Richards at Cambridge in the 1920s, it will examine both the critical origins of the ‘turn to reading’ as well as its relationship to the strange history of twentieth-century criticism that followed, in which turns—and returns—to reading become a paradigmatic yet perplexing critical trope.