The Culture of Encounter in James Joyce’s “The Dead”

In a new Future of the Humanities Project event series — Cultural Encounters: Books that Have Made a Difference — we embrace the other at a time when we have heard much about the ways in which national, religious, and cultural lines divide us as humans. In this series, we invite leading scholars across disciplines to explore themes of cultural encounters both in classic literary works and in contemporary cultural debates.

In his third encyclical, Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis proposes that “an innate tension exists between globalization and localization.” In his great short story “The Dead“ (1914), James Joyce undertakes an exploration of that tension as it presents itself in Ireland of the early twentieth century. During this webinar Georgetown University Professor Emeritus Michael Collins will explore how Gabriel Conway, the central figure of the story, experiences three cultural encounters with other persons that illustrate both the obstacles to genuine encounter among people and the disfiguring separation of the global and the local that creates, in the words of Pope Francis, “a dangerous polarization.”

This event is sponsored by the Future of the Humanities Project and Blackfriars Hall, Oxford. It is part of the year-long series, Cultural Encounters: Books that Have Made a Difference.

Online. Free and open to all. Registration is required.

Participants

Michael Collins is a teaching professor of English and dean emeritus at Georgetown University. He has published essays on Anglo-Welsh poetry in Poetry Wales, World Literature Today, the Dictionary of Literary Biography, and the Anglo-Welsh Review. He is an honorary fellow of Wrexham Glyndwr University, University of Wales, and a recipient of Georgetown University’s Presidential Medal and its Bunn Award for Outstanding Teaching.

Michael Scott, Ph.D. (moderator), is senior dean, fellow of Blackfriars Hall, Oxford, college advisor for postgraduate students, and a member of the Las Casas Institute. He also serves as senior advisor to the president of Georgetown University. Scott previously served as the pro-vice-chancellor at De Montfort University and founding vice-chancellor of Wrexham Glyndwr University, where he is professor emeritus.

 

Further events in the series:

26 February: Professor Alexa Alice Joubin, George Washington University, DC – ‘Worldwide Encounters with Shakespeare’

Contact:
Las Casas Institute with Georgetown University
lascasas@bfriars.ox.ac.uk