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SUMMARY:Life in Ruins - Dr Robert Macfarlane\, University of Cambridge
DTSTART:20120127T173000Z
DTEND:20120127T183000Z
UID:TALK30608@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Janet Gibson
DESCRIPTION:Abstract\n\nAfter 'the destruction of Nineveh'\, warns the Boo
 k of Zephaniah\, ‘the desert owl and the screech owl shall lodge on its 
 capitals\, the raven croak on its thresholds’. For millennia\, writers a
 nd artists have been fascinated by ruins\, and in particular by the return
  of nature following human abandonment. This lecture explores the cultural
  history of ‘ruinism’\, and the counterfactual visions in modern art a
 nd literature of how nature might thrive in a world without us – of life
  in ruins. Moving from Thomas Babington Macaulay’s figure of the ‘New 
 Zealander’\, who sits surveying an enjungled London\, through to Cormac 
 McCarthy’s recent post-apocalypse novel The Road\, and travelling by way
  of Japanese anime films\, the Cold War\, copper sulphate crystals\, Max E
 rnst\, concrete\, and the writing of the naturalist-poet Edward Thomas (18
 78–1917)\, I want to investigate a persistent paradox of apocalyptic art
 \, which is that in order to abolish the world imaginatively it is necessa
 ry simultaneously to summon it into being. The lecture will start with a t
 hought-experiment that involves the entire audience.\n\nBiography\n\nRober
 t Macfarlane is a Fellow of Emmanuel College and Senior Lecturer in the Fa
 culty of English. He is the author of Mountains of the Mind: A History of 
 a Fascination (Granta: 2003)\, The Wild Places (Granta: 2007)\, Original C
 opy: Plagiarism and Originality in Nineteenth-Century Literature (OUP: 200
 7)\, and The Old Ways (forthcoming from Penguin\, June 2012). His books ha
 ve won numerous national and international awards\, and two of them have b
 een filmed by the BBC. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature\,
  and the recipient of a Philip Leverhulme Prize.
LOCATION:LMH\, Lady Mitchell Hall
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