Lecture notes and reading lists, Season 3
11th April to 18th June
PRR = prior reading required
PRH= prior reading helpful
Please note that the resources on this page will be available for one month after the lecture or course has ended and removed after that date.
Max Adams
Viking & Anglo-Saxon Science, Knowledge and Belief, Friday 16th June, 11.00 -13.00
Please read the notes for this lecture here
Viking & Anglo-Saxon Science, Knowledge and Belief, Friday 10th June, 11.00 -13.00
Please read the notes for this lecture here
Viking & Anglo-Saxon Science, Knowledge and Belief, Friday 3rd June, 11.00 -13.00
Please read the notes for this lecture here
Viking & Anglo-Saxon Science, Knowledge and Belief, Friday 27th May, 11.00 -13.00
Should you wish to do some preparatory reading in advance of this lecture Max's notes are available here
Michael Ayton
Guy de Maupassant, ‘Boule de Suif’ (Ball of Fat), Tuesday 31st, 10.30 - 12.00
Maupassant’s famous naturalistic story explores a moral choice, while offering a scathing delineation of French society.
Online text:
http://americanliterature.com/author/guy-de-maupassant/short-story/boule-de-suif
S. T. Coleridge, ‘This Lime Tree Bower My Prison’, Tuesday, 12.30 - 13.30
What influences help to shape Coleridge’s ‘conversation poems’? This most moving and humane example will help us to find out. Online text:
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/173248
Bronwen Calvert
Imagining the Victorians in Contemporary Fiction, Tuesday 7th June, 10.30 - 12.00
Please bring the handout with you - there's no need to read it in advance, though do have a look if you can manage it. Download the notes here
Malasree Home
The Anglo Saxon Chronicles, Monday 6th June
18.30 - 20.00
Please read the notes from this lecture here
Stuart Howard
Mining Society in North East England 1850 - 1950, Thursday 26th May, 12.30 - 13.30
Please find the suggested reading for this class below:
B. Williamson, Class, Culture and Community, (London 1982)
H. Beynon and T. Austrin, Masters and Servants, (London, 1994)
N. Dennis, F. Henriques, C. Slaughter, Coal is Our Life, (London, 1956)
Peter Quinn
Links from our three lunchtime sessions on Collections. Each of the three links should take you to a google map. You can zoom in, click on the ‘balloon’ markers, these should contain basic contact info for the museum, art gallery, or site. Each should also have a link to the gallery’s own website.
1. SCOTLAND Collections, historic and contemporary a day or so away from Newcastle. Originial lecture on Monday 18th April 2016 12.30-1.30.
http://bit.ly/1tctazj
2. NORTH OF ENGLAND Cumbria, the North West and Yorkshire. Collections within easy reach of Newcastle. Lecture held on Monday 16th May 2016, 12.30 - 1.30.
http://bit.ly/1X7iluf
3. EUROPE Collections in Europe by Ferry, train or plane. Lecture held on Monday 6th June 2016, 12.30 - 1.30.
http://bit.ly/25HOyKq
Fred Stephenson
Please find the notes from Season 2 below:
Martin Wheeler
`Iris Murdoch, A Fairly Honourable Defeat', Tuesday 14th June 10.30 - 12.00
Through a vivid assortment of characters that certainly fulfil Murdoch’s dictum that the author must reflect ‘the absurd irreducible uniqueness of people’, and an arresting series of events that enact both comedy and tragedy of Shakespearean proportions, we shall explore how the novel interrogates the meaning of love, of good and of evil, the terrifying power of contingency and the gap between the theory and practice of morality. (Continued in the lunchtime session.)
‘Words as magic’: Iris Murdoch and the artists, Tuesday 14th June 12.30 - 13.30
That Iris Murdoch the acclaimed novelist had an abiding suspicion of art testifies to the depth of her commitment to it and of her belief in its power. The functions of art and of ethics are, she argued throughout her life, profoundly linked. In this session we shall focus on some of Murdoch’s critical output as moral philosopher and commentator on the practice of writing, most especially as it impacts on her novels and our reading of them. In particular we shall look at her essay, ‘Against Dryness‘, published in Encounter magazine in 1961. It can be found at
https://www.unz.org/Pub/Encounter-1961jan-00016
