时间：2024年11月6日14：00

地点：恕园19-205

主讲内容：

Lucia Boldrini's concern in this lecture is twofold. On the one hand, it is with biofiction (texts that reimagine historical individuals, transparently using their names and exercising varying degrees of faithfulness to the historical record) and how this increasingly popular literary form explores not just the lives of individuals but also our interpretations of the historical world. On the other hand, it is with ghosts, and in particular with how historical, documented individuals return in fictional, imagined, immaterial form. The discussion will use as its main case study the novel Still Life (2022) by South African writer Zoë Wicomb, in which the narrator, a writer prompted by her agent to write a novel about real life, is joined by a group of ghosts who demand that the life of Scottish colonist, humanitarian and anti-slavery activist Thomas Pringle (1789-1934) be narrated. Alongside Pringle’s, the ghosts include that of Mary Prince, author of The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself, the only published English-language testimony by a West Indian slave woman; and that of Hinza Marossi, an indigenous South African young man best known for being the subject of Pringle’s1834 poem “The Bechuana Boy”. Another ghost is that of Nick Greene, the only purely imaginary character who migrates into this novel from Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (1928). As the transnational, transcultural, translingual and transworld stories of the ghosts emerge, we are faced as readers with intertwining and conflicting narratives that demand discernment, judgement, and a responsible engagement with the complexity of history, with the evolving concept and value of the human, and with the ethics involved in the telling of these ghostly, but all too real, stories.

主讲人简介：

Lucia Boldrini is Professor Emerita of English and Comparative Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she founded and directs the Centre for Comparative Literature, and Honorary Professor of Comparative Literature at University College London. She holds doctorates from the University of Pisa (Italy) and the University of Leicester (UK). Among her books are Autobiographies of Others: Historical Subjects and Literary Fiction (2012), Joyce, Dante, and the Poetics of Literary Relations (2001), and, as editor, Medieval Joyce (2002), Experiments in Life-Writing: Intersections of Auto/Biography and Fiction (with Julia Novak, 2017), and the Routledge Companion to Biofiction (with Laura Cernat, Alexandre Gefen and Michael Lackey, in press, 2025). She is an elected member of the Academia Europaea, and currently serves as President of the International Comparative Literature Association (2022-25).