Plenary Speakers

 

 

Professor Greg Clingham 

(The Pennsylvania State University, USA)

 

Greg Clingham (BA hons, MA, PhD, Cambridge) is Visiting Research Professor at the Humanities Institute of The Pennsylvania State University. For more than twenty years he was Professor of English at Bucknell University, Pennsylvania, and also Director and Chief Editor of the Bucknell University Press. Before that he taught at Fordham University, New York University, and the University of Cambridge, where he continues to be a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge. A recipient of fellowships at the National Endowment for the Humanities, American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Houghton Library Harvard, Beinecke Library Yale, St. Edmund’s College Cambridge, the Bogliasco Foundation, the Noel Foundation at Louisiana State University at Shreveport, and St. Andrews University, Dr. Clingham has lectured in Japan, China, Singapore, Turkey, Holland, and South Africa, and at various venues in the USA and the UK. The author or editor of fourteen books and dozens of scholarly articles, book chapters, reviews, and notes, Dr. Clingham is a distinguished scholar of eighteenth-century literature, writing on Johnson, Dryden, Boswell, memory, historiography, literary translation, ‘orientalism,’ archives, the history of the book, and matters to do with scholarly publishing. In particular, he is the author of Johnson, Writing, and Memory (Cambridge, 2002), the forthcoming Samuel Johnson’s Interests: Life, Literature, Limits (Lehigh), editor of The New Cambridge Companion to Samuel Johnson (Cambridge, 2022), and co-editor of Oriental Networks: Culture, Commerce and Communication in the Long Eighteenth Century (Bucknell, 2020). Dr. Clingham is presently writing an intellectual biography of Lady Anne Lindsay Barnard (1750-1825) that is also a cultural history of the Cape of Good Hope in the late eighteenth- and early-nineteenth centuries, while also working on Sir George Macartney’s diplomatic papers from China, India, Russia, and the Cape of Good Hope (1760s - 1799). Dr. Clingham is on the Editorial Board of the journal Eighteenth-Century Life, and he is the General Editor of a new series of scholarly books, Eighteenth-Century Moments, with Clemson University Press in association with Liverpool University Press. In 2022, Dr. Clingham’s contributions to eighteenth-century studies were recognized in a festschrift, A Clubbable Man: Essays on Eighteenth-Century Literature and Culture in Honor of Greg Clingham, ed. Anthony W. Lee (Bucknell). Website: www.greg-clingham.com

 

Obscure Spectatorship: Lady Anne Lindsay Barnard at the Cape of Hope, 1797-1802

 

Between 1797 and 1802, Lady Anne Lindsay (1750-1825), oldest child of the 5th Earl of Balcarres, an ancient Scots family, and her husband, Andrew Barnard (1757-1807), an Irish soldier turned civil servant, the son of the Bishop of Limerick, were part of the first, small British contingent at the Cape of Good Hope under Lord George Macartney (1797-98) and Sir George Younge (1799-1801). This was not initially a colonial enterprise, but a strategic military intervention to protect an important trade route to India and China. Britain was at war with France, an ally of Holland, who had been the colonial presence at the Cape since the 1650s.

 

Lady Anne of course had no official remit at the Cape of Good Hope. But during those five years, she recorded many aspects of life at the Cape — not only about matters domestic, personal, social, and natural, such as one would expect from one on the margins of intellectual and official discourse, but also about governmental, political, historical, and global issues. She did this in extensive, informed, lively and imaginative diaries and journals, written for the entertainment and information of her family, and in long, substantial letters addressed to Henry Dundas, Minister for the Colonies, and an old boyfriend. Most of these documents have been published, though they have left virtually no trace in literary scholarship or political or cultural history. Lady Anne also recorded her experience of people and places in drawings and watercolors, some of them — especially those of enslaved and indentured persons, indigenous women and children, and other people of color — being powerful, transformative, and beautiful. None of her watercolors have ever been exhibited or adequately reproduced, and, like the voluminous prose and poetry in her unpublished archive, all of them remain virtually unknown and invisible to art history and cultural history.

 

This illustrated talk, which draws on material in archives (both private and public) in Scotland and the Cape of Good Hope, considers some of these watercolors as illuminating, though liminal depictions of Lady Anne’s engagement with race, slavery and cultural difference at the Cape at a crucial historical moment, and in a pivotal geographical location, for the expanding global network in commerce and culture. These watercolors also constitute, I argue, an oblique, critical reflection on the broader British colonial project of which Lady Anne Barnard was inevitably part, but to which she was not wholly sympathetic. At the centre of my consideration of Lady Anne’s watercolors — an artistic form which she had never practiced before her departure for the Cape in her 42nd year, though she had been a prolific amateur sketcher and portraitist in pencil — are their formal, aesthetic and emotional features — their extraordinary use of color, for example. These, I argue, enable (but are not wholly to be equated with) their artistic seriousness and their commanding representations of Blacks at a time when race and ethnicity were usually exoticized in European art. Necessarily selective, my discussion will be historical and comparative, placing Lady Anne’s art in relation to enlightenment thought and to the texts of her own diaries and correspondence, while looking at her different iterations (drawing versus finished watercolor) of certain subjects for what they reveal of her artistic process and intellectual orientation. My discussion will, also, briefly, contextualize Lady Anne’s art in relation to the work of better-known contemporary professional artists, such as Samuel Daniell, who visited the Cape in 1799-1802, and David Martin, the creator of the legendary portrait of Dido Belle with her cousin, Lady Elizabeth Murray (1778).

 

Professor (Emeritus) Andreas H. Jucker

(University of Zurich, Switzerland; President of European Society for the Study of English (ESSE))

 

Andreas H. Jucker is Professor emeritus of English Linguistics at the University of Zurich. His research interests focus on historical pragmatics, politeness theory, speech act theory, and the grammar and history of English. His recent publications include Politeness in the History of English. From the Middle Ages to the Present-day (CUP, 2020), The Pragmatics of Fiction. Literature, Stage and Screen Discourse (co-authored with Miriam Locher; EUP, 2021), and the handbook Pragmatics of Space (co-edited with Heiko Hausendorf; de Gruyter, 2022). He is currently President of the European Society for the Study of English and Co-Editor in Chief of the Journal of Pragmatics.

 

 

“He shrugged a vague apology”: Pragmatic Ambiguity and Speech Act Theory

 

Semantic ambiguity is a concept that is relatively well understood, but so far little is known about the concept of pragmatic ambiguity, i.e. ambiguities and fuzziness at the level of pragmatics and in particular at the level of illocutionary force. Since the early days of speech act theory, speech acts have been defined in terms of felicity conditions which decide whether an utterance should be analysed as, for instance, a question, a request or an apology. Indirect speech acts – e.g. requests that on the surface look like questions – were seen as special cases which do not seriously impair the theoretical underpinnings of felicity conditions as diagnostic tools. However, there is an increasing amount of evidence that speech act values are regularly fuzzy, underspecified and ambiguous. Utterances can be laminated, i.e. perform several speech acts simultaneously, they can be indeterminate by leaving a range of different interpretations, and they can be equivocal by avoiding committing the speaker to a specific interpretation. In actual interactions, people often negotiate speech act values (“I want a real apology”; “Is that a compliment?”), which can be seen as problematic failures on the speaker’s side to signal the intended speech act value, or, alternatively, as strategic – and often effective – attempts to leave the precise speech act value underspecified. In this contribution, I want to re-examine and critique some of the basic assumptions of traditional speech act theory and argue for a discursive approach that recognises the inherent fuzziness and ambiguity of speech acts.

 

 

Professor Huriye Reis - Professor Talat Sait Halman Lecture

(Hacettepe University, Turkey)

 

Huriye Reis is professor of English literature at Hacettepe University, Ankara,Türkiye. Her PhD  is on Chaucer’s representations of women in his dream poetry, from the University of Liverpool, 1995. She has publications on Chaucer,  medieval English literature, contemporary British poetry, war poetry and women in British literature. She is the author of Ademin Bilmediği Havvanın Gör Dediği: Ortaçağda Türk ve İngiliz Kadın Yazarlar  (What Adam Knows Not and Eve Demands: English and  Turkish Women Writers of the Middle Ages)( 2005) and Chaucer and the Representation of Old Age, co-editor  of a number of collected essays such as Gender in British Literature.

 

Pilgrims Speaking Angry Words:  Change and Anger in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales

 

Medieval literature presents emotions such as anger as negative and destructive for the development of the medieval subject and society and defines anger  not as a positive  constructive affect but  as an emotive reaction that should be suppressed, controlled or avoided. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, which he wrote against a background of tremendous change generated by political and religious conflict, continuous wars and the Black Death, acknowledges anger as an essential element of medieval culture although it does not give much space to the causes of it. The Canterbury pilgrimage hence is presented as an experience of people who perform anger as  emotional excess or imbalance as a result of the unstructured and fast change taking place in the traditional stabilities. Indeed, the changing society represented by the pilgrims in the Canterbury Tales appears to have anger issues and accordingly  is characterised  by situations of conflict and emotional crises. The pilgrims are presented as failing in terms of conformity and obedience to the regulatory principles of the feudal structure also because they foster anger and have angry responses when they are expected to suppress, avoid  and control their anger.  Anger in this context is disciplinary as defined by the Parson  and  the change that produces it makes it an essential element of the new culture.

 

This paper reads Chaucer’s representation of anger as an affect/emotion in the Canterbury Tales and argues that as an emotive/affective agent, anger represents and forms the cultural response to the pervasive change and its results in the medieval feudal social structure represented in the Canterbury Tales.