QUILTING POINTS:

The first meeting of the Reading Group for 2013 will be on Thursday the 31st of January at 5.15pm in the School of English. We will look at Lacan's "The Tragic Dimension of Analytical Experience"     in Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis , ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (Routledge), pp. 293-325. The text will be introduced by Linda Roland Danil (CIGS, Leeds). This group is generously funded by the Leeds Humanities Research Institute's Graduate Research Funding Programme.

The final meeting of the Reading Group for 2012 was on Thursday the 6th of December at 5.10pm in the Douglas Jefferson Room of the School of English. We looked at Lacan's " The Essence of Tragedy: A Commentary on Sophocles's Antigone "     in Seminar VII: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis , ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Porter (Routledge), pp. 243-90. Dr Elizabeth Pender (Classics) introduced the text. This group is generously funded by the Leeds Humanities Research Institute's Graduate Research Funding Programme

The next meeting of the Reading Group will be on Thursday the 22nd of November at 5.10pm in the Douglas Jefferson Room of the School of English. We will be looking at Lacan's " Desire and the Interpretation of Desire in Hamlet " as published in Yale French Studies No. 55/56 (1977). Ed Powell (English) will introduce the text. Some wine will be served This group is generously funded by the Leeds Humanities Research Institute's Graduate Research Funding Programme

The next meeting of the Lacan Read(s) Across the Disciplines Reading Group will be on Thursday the 1st of November at 5.10pm in the Alumnus Room of the School of English. We will be looking at Lacan's "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'" from Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English . Dr Stefan Skrimshire (Theology and Religious Studies) will introduce the text. Some wine will be served This group is generously funded by the Leeds Humanities Research Institute's Graduate Research Funding Programme.

The next Quilting Points Reading Group meeting will be on Thursday 11th of October in the Douglas Jefferson Room of the School of English at 5.15pm. The text under discussion will be "Courtly Love as anamorphosis" from Lacan's Seminar 7: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis. It will be introduced by Arthur Rose.

Our first Speaker will be Dr Paul Harper-Scott (Royal Holloway). He will be presenting in Seminar Room 3 of the LHRI at 5.15pm on Thursday the 27th of September. His paper is titled "Revolutionary Sex in Walton's *Troilus and Cressida*". Abstract: William Walton's opera * Troilus and Cressida * is an unexpectedly arresting intervention in the ideological field of sexuality and gender. Drawing on theories of sex, love, pornography, and communism by Jacques Lacan, Alain Badiou, and Giorgio Agamben, this paper argues that the circling of desire around the structural impossibility of a sexual connexion leads Troilus and Cressida to challenge culturally mandated scripts for normative heterosexuality in modernity. Paying particular attention to the pornographic interlude in which they consummate their love and the paradoxical deepening of their commitment to one another through Cressida's betrayal of Troilus, it suggests possibilities for conceiving a revolutionary l...

I was like all the other students of philosophy at the time, and for me, the rupture came with Beckett:  Waiting for Godot , a breath-taking spectacle. - Michel Foucault Bruno Clement, writing of early critical responses to Beckett's  Trilogy  by, amongst others, George Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, and Alain Robbe-Grillet, notes that they are all written "under influence." I mean... their content is indebted, in more than one way, depending on the particular case, to the discourse used by the work itself. Writing "under influence," philosophers from Bataille to Badiou have chosen to write their philosophy through Beckett. Richard Begam, Anthony Uhlmann, Steven Connor, Leslie Hill, Thomas Trezise, and other notable Beckett critics have commented extensively on the impact this has had in the realm of Beckett studies. Andrew Gibson has demonstrated the reciprocal impact Beckett has upon a reading of Badiou, for whom Beckett constitutes "a so...

David Vichnar will be giving the seminar "Reading Joyce Reading Theory - From the beginning" in Seminar Room 5 of the School of English on Wednesday the 2nd of May at 5.15pm. This seminar is organized by the Quilting Points and James Joyce Reading Groups. Some wine will be served and all are welcome. The abstract is given below. "READING JOYCE READING THEORY - FROM THE BEGINNING" (Abstract) The seminar will focus on the first three stories from Joyce's Dubliners ("The Sisters," "An Encounter" and "Araby"). The paper examines Joyce´s "signature" (as theorised by Derrida), specifically the seemingly contrary effects of Joyce´s writing which in Derrida´s words, "pushes us to the limit" and "compels us to ask what a literary text is and what we should do with it." The discussion will analyse the readiness with which theoretical frameworks can be said to apply to Joyce´s texts by dealing with some of th...

We will be meeting again in the Douglas Jefferson Room of the School of English at 5.15pm on Tuesday the 17th of April to discuss J.M. Coetzee's address to the 2006 Borderless Beckett Conference in Tokyo. Dr Sam Durrant (Leeds) will be  introducing the text, following which there will be a general discussion. Some wine will be served.

We will be meeting again on Tuesday the 13th of March in the Douglas Jefferson Room at 5.15 pm. The text under discussion will be Badiou's essay on generic form in Beckett, "The Writing of the Generic." Michael Kelly, the General Editor of the International Journal of Badiou Studies , will be introducing the text and then there will be some general discussion. Some wine will be served. 

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 February 28th. The text under discussion will be Simon Critchley's chapter on Samuel Beckett, "Know Happiness... On Beckett" from Very Little…Almost Nothing (Routledge, 2004).  Dr Richard Brown (Leeds) will give a short introduction to Critchley'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.

The next meeting for the Quilting Points Reading Group will be in Seminar Room 5 of the School of English at 5.15 on January 31st. The text under discussion will be Stanley Cavell's essay on Samuel Beckett's "Endgame", "Ending the Waiting Game". Michael Springer (York) will give a short introduction to Cavell'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.