School of English Evening Lecture Series 2013: 'Magic'

January 15th -March 12th, 2013

From the mysterious Green Knight picking up his own just-chopped-off head at the start of the medieval romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, to narrator Saleem Sinai’s enormous ever-dripping telepathic nose in Salman Rushdie’s 1981 novel Midnight’s Children, magical beliefs and practices have been depicted and discussed in literature in English from the middle ages to the present day. Some writers have even thought of their own writing as a form of magic, or of becoming practising magicians: W. B. Yeats, for instance, was for many years a member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. This lecture series will examine the role of magic in the work and lives of various writers through the ages.

1. Tuesday 15 January
‘Magic and Literature: An Introduction’
Professor Darryl Jones

2. Tuesday 22 January
‘Grendel as Magician - Curses and Spells in Beowulf’
Dr Helen Conrad-O'Briain

3. Tuesday 29 January
‘An Outrageous Adventure: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight’
Professor Brendan O’Connell

4. Tuesday 5 February
‘The Magic of Money in Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist’
Professor Ema Vyroubalova

5. Tuesday 12 February
‘Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Magicians’
Professor Stephen Matterson                                    

6. Tuesday 19 February
‘Yeats and Magic: Not Such a Weird Wizard?’
Professor Tom Walker

7. Tuesday 26 February
‘Magic in the Art of Frida Kahlo’
Professor Melanie Otto

8. Tuesday 5 March
‘The Only Practising Witch in New England: Shirley Jackson’s Housewitchery’
Dr Dara Downey

9. Tuesday 12 March
‘Wizards and Wisdom in Children’s Books: the Merlin Figure in the Work of TH White, Susan Cooper and JK Rowling’
Professor Amanda Piesse

Please click for application_form_2013.pdf, or contact Lilian Foley at the address below for more details:

Lilian  Foley
Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing
School of English Trinity College Dublin
21 Westland Row
Dublin 2
Telephone: 01-8962885
http://www.tcd.ie/OWC/