QUILTING POINTS:

The next meeting for the Quilting Points Reading Group will be in the  Douglas Jefferson Room of the School of English at 5.15 on Tuesday the 6th of December.  The text under discussion will be Georges Bataille's review of Samuel Beckett's "Molloy". Dr. Claire Lozier (Leeds) will give a short introduction to Bataille's work and its  relation to Samuel Beckett's writing, which will be followed by a general discussion of  the essay as both theory and commentary. Some  wine will be served and people are welcome to bring their own. For a pdf copy of the essay (in English and/or French) or for general comments or expressions of interest (in introducing a thinker or presenting at our seminar series),please contact us: quiltingpoints@gmail.com

Following on from our successful first meeting and, as previously announced, the next meeting of the new James Joyce  Finnegans Wake  Reading Group will be on  Monday 31 st  October  from 5.00 to 6.30 pm in the Douglas Jefferson Room of the School of English.      We’ll be resuming on page 558 line 33 “Where are we at all? And whenabouts in the name of space?” and proceeding to page 562 or thereabouts.        Readers completely new to the  Finnegans Wake  experience will find helpful brief introductions in the chapter “ Finnegans Wake : Novel and Anti-Novel” in  A Companion to James Joyce  (Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), pages 71-98 and “ Finnegans Wake ” in  James Joyce: A Post-culturalist Perspective  (Macmillan-Palgrave, 1992), pp. 98-122.   Richard Brown  r.h.brown@leeds.ac.uk Arthur Rose  enajr@leeds.ac.uk

The next meeting for the Quilting Points Reading Group will be in the Douglas Jefferson Room of the School of English at 5.15 on Tuesday the 15th of November. The text under discussion will be Gilles Deleuze's essay on Samuel Beckett, "The Exhausted" [l'Epuise]. Dr. Ruth Kitchen (Leeds) will give a short introduction to Deleuze's work and its relation to Samuel Beckett's writing, which will be followed by a general discussion of the essay as both theory and commentary. Some wine will be served and people are welcome to bring their own. For a pdf copy of the essay (in English and/or French) or for general comments or expressions of interest (in introducing a thinker or presenting at our seminar series), please contact us: quiltingpoints@gmail.com

The next meeting for the Quilting Points Reading Group will be in the Douglas Jefferson Room of the School of English at 5.15 on Tuesday the 25th of October. The text under discussion will be Theodor Adorno's essay on Samuel Beckett's Endgame , "Trying to Understand Endgame " [Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen]. Michael Springer (York) will give a short introduction to Adorno's work and its relation to Samuel Beckett's writing, which will be followed by a general discussion of the essay as both theory and commentary. Some wine will be served and people are welcome to bring their own. For a pdf copy of the essay (in English and/or German) or for general comments or expressions of interest (in introducing a thinker or presenting at our seminar series), please contact us: quiltingpoints@gmail.com

      The James Joyce Reading Group in the School of English will be starting off again this semester for 2011-12 in a somewhat different form in response to a number of requests to offer an informal forum for the reading and discussion of Finnegans Wake. We’ll be meeting on the first Monday of the month during term time from 5.00 to 6.30 pm in the Douglas Jefferson Room of the School of English (except for a meeting on October 31 st   instead of November 7 th ).      The first meeting will be Monday 3 rd October.         The plan is to begin with Book Three Chapter Four, starting on page 555 with the line “What was thaas?” and to attempt to get through the whole of that chapter during the year or as much as we can of it. All are welcome whether experienced and confident readers of the Wake or bemused/enthusiastic newcomers.   I’ll bring along Douglas Jefferson’s personal copy to start us off at the firs...

We are happy to invite all interested parties to attend the first meeting of the 2011/2012 Academic Year. The meeting will be in the Douglas Jefferson Room of the School of English at 5.15 on Wednesday the 5th of October. The text under discussion will be Maurice Blanchot's review of Samuel Beckett's "The Unnameable". A short introduction to Blanchot's work and its relation to Samuel Beckett's writing will be followed by a general discussion of the value of the review as a theoretical piece in its own right. Some wine will be served and people are welcome to bring their own.  For a pdf copy of the review or for general comments or expressions of interest (in introducing a thinker or presenting at our seminar series), please contact us: quiltingpoints@gmail.com

We are happy to announce a Quilting Points Seminar will take place at 5:30 on Monday 9th May 2011 in the Douglas Jefferson Room at the School of English, University of Leeds. Dr Natalie Diebschlag (Leeds) will be presenting a paper entitled "The 'to come' in post 9/11 British Cinema: Sally Potter's Yes ". All are welcome.   The to come in post 9/11 British cinema: Sally Potter's Yes Written in immediate response to 9/11 and released in the UK shortly after the London bombings in 2005, Sally Potter's film Yes portrays the romantic encounter between a Lebanese surgeon and an Irish-American embryologist in London, Beirut and Cuba. Yes is a statement of hope and a plea for unconditional hospitality which avoids didactic undertones and instead dazzles by its stylised use of language and its unconventional cinematography: the dialogues are written in iambic pentametre and the visual grammar evokes the Joycean stream-of-consciousness. Framed within Jacques Der...

The paper presented by our speaker, Dr Maebh Long, has been published by the journal World Picture in their issue entitled 'Sustainability'. The essay can be found here . We encourage you all to read it.

The reading group will be meeting at 17.15 on Tuesday the 5th of April to discuss Agusto Boal's Theatre of the Oppressed , to follow on from our reflections on spectator and spectacle at the Guy Debord meeting. The main text will be Frances Babbage's second chapter from Agusto Boal , 'Theatre of the Oppressed'. The discussion will be led by Katie Elphick, who will give a brief introduction to Boal and the chapter. The book is accessible online through the Leeds library, and through www.dawsonera.com. Venue: Seminar Room 5. Hope to see you there. The Link is here . The Press about Babbage's Agusto Boal : This useful study combines: a biographical and historical overview of Boal 's career as playwright and director in-depth analysis of Boal 's classic text on radical theatre, The Theatre of the Oppressed exploration of training and production techniques practical guidance to Boal 's workshop methods.

The next Quilting Points Reading Group Meeting will be on Tuesday the 15th of March at 5.15 pm in the Douglas Jefferson Room of the School of English. We will be reading Maurice Blanchot's three essays on Nietzsche from The Infinite Conversation . No familiarity with Nietzsche is required. If you would like copies of the text, please email quiltingpoints@gmail.com. Please also remember Dr Maebh Long will be presenting a paper entitled "The Hedgehog and Lord Browne: the "to come" of the Humanities" at a combined Critical and Cultural Theory Group and Quilting Points Seminar next week, Thursday 10th of March at 5.30 pm, also in the Douglas Jefferson Room of the School of English. All are welcome to both events.

We are happy to announce the inaugural seminar of the Quilting Points Seminar Series will take place at 5.30 pm on the 10th of March 2011 in the Douglas Jefferson Room of the School of English at the University of Leeds. Dr Maebh Long (Durham) will be presenting a paper entitled, The Hedgehog and Lord Browne: the "to come" of the Humanities. All are welcome. The Hedgehog and Lord Browne: the “to come” of the Humanities In Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities , Martha Nussbaum speaks of the current global education crisis, in which the humanities, “seen by policy-makers as useless frills, at a time when nations must cut away all useless things in order to stay competitive in the global market, … are rapidly losing their place”. This paper investigates the future of education proposed by the Browne Report, a future in which the humanities are unabashedly sidelined as low-priority frills. Claiming to present a “sustainable future for education”, the Bro...

There is to be a mini-exchange conference between MA and Phd students and academics of the University of Leeds and Humboldt-University of Berlin on the 15th and 16th of February in the School of English and the Leeds Humanities Research Institute at the University of Leeds. Papers will treat topics in the fields of African literary and cultural studies, theatre studies, politics and poetry. The programme may be found here.

We will be meeting on the 22nd of February in the Douglas Jefferson Room of the School of English at 5.15 pm to discuss Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle, and, if there is the time and desire,  responses by Agamben and Ranciere.

Quilting Points , or The reading group formerly known as the School of English Theory Reading Group, will be meeting at 5.15 on Wednesday the 2nd of February in the Douglas Jefferson Room of the School of English at the University of Leeds. The text under discussion is Deleuze and Guattari's Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature , with particular emphasis to the question posed by Chapter 3: What is a Minor Literature? All are welcome, and people are encouraged to bring something potable.