Speaker: Prof. Neil Murphy, Department of English, CUHK

Date: 31 January 2024 (Wed)
Time: 4:30 – 6:00 pm
Venue: CYT LT5, 3/F Cheng Yu Tung Building, CUHK (University Station exit B)

Please click here to reserve your seat.

About the lecture:

In this interdisciplinary talk, Prof Murphy will discuss the impact of the “pictorial turn” identified by W. J. T Mitchell in the 20th century. It analyses how selected contemporary novels have responded to a proliferation of images in modern society and demonstrates how they incorporate visual encounters in their narratives, exemplifying a deep intermedial integration of word and image. This analysis argues that the porous form of the novel has proven to be an eminently suitable place of cohabitation with the visual arts, demonstrated most vividly in its innovative use of ekphrasis.

Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. University of Chicago Press, 1994: 3.

M. C. Escher, Drawing Hands (1948)

About the speaker:

Neil Murphy is a Professor of English at CUHK. He is the editor of Aidan Higgins: The Fragility of Form (Dalkey Archive Press, 2010), and has co-edited (with Keith Hopper) The Short Fiction of Flann O’Brien (Dalkey Archive Press, 2013) and a four-book series on the Irish writer, Dermot Healy. His monograph, John Banville (2018), was published by Bucknell University Press (new edition to be re-issued in 2024), and he has co-edited (with W. Michelle Wang and Cheryl Julia Lee), the Routledge Companion to Literature and Art (2024). Forthcoming in 2024 is his co-edited (with Derek Hand and Kathleen Costello-Sullivan) Companion to Contemporary Irish Literature (Syracuse Uni. Press), and a monograph on Contemporary Fiction and Art (2025).