第三讲
北京时间：12月6日（周一）下午4:30---6:00
讲座人：Professor Robert Eaglestone
讲座题目：Klara and the Humans：A Critical Reading of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and The Sun
腾讯会议号：166 778 209
主持人：张和龙教授
主办：上海外国语大学文学研究院、上外英美文学研究中心
讲座摘要：
Questions about agency and its attendant problems are at the heart of Ishiguro’s fiction: knowing or not knowing how to act, the limitations on action, what happens if you don’t or can’t act, the effect of bad actions from the past on the present. These questions and problems of agency are usually seen through their impact on the agent, even if the agent does not seem to recognize them. This is the source of much of the pathos (in The Remains of the Day or Never let me go) or irony (When We Were Orphans) or unsettling humour (The Undeceived) in his work. Klara and the Sun marks a change: not only are there many agents – there are more plots and subplots than most of Ishiguro’s other novels – but, at its core, the novel contrasts two visions of, or ideas about, agency: a machinic vision of agency is contrasted with a human one. The novel plays out and so illuminates the differences between these visions, which, in turn, tells us something about both machines and humans, and about the development of Ishiguro’s fiction.
讲座人简介：
Robert Eaglestone is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought at Royal Holloway, University of London. He works on contemporary literature and literary theory, contemporary philosophy and on Holocaust and Genocide studies.
He is the author of seven books, Ethical Criticism: Reading after Levinas (1997), Doing English (4th edition 2017), Postmodernism and Holocaust Denial (2001), The Holocaust and the Postmodern (2004), Very Short Introduction to Contemporary fiction (2013), The Broken Voice: Reading Post-Holocaust Literature (2017) and Literature: Why it Matters (2019).
He is the editor or co-editor of ten books, Reading the Lord of the Rings (2006), Teaching Holocaust Literature and Film (2008), Derrida’s Legacies (2008), J. M. Coetzee in Theory and Practice (2009), Volume 2 of the Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Literary and Cultural Theory (2011), Salman Rushdie (2013), The Future of Trauma Theory (2013), Brexit and Literature (2018), English: Shared Futures (2018) and The Routledge Companion to Twenty First Century Literary Fiction (2019). His work has been translated into six languages. He is the Series Editor of Routledge Critical Thinkers, which has 41 volumes.
