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J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country
18th November 2024: 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm GMT
A Month in the Country (1980) by J. L. Carr is a short novel that describes the re-emergence of a shell-shocked World War I veteran through his engagement with a small community. The focus of Pope Francis’ encyclical Fratelli Tutti is for us to extend out from self and family to a suffering world. He urges us to pull back from protectionism, individualism, and isolation to a more global perspective—in short, to open our “local” arms to embrace a greater “global.” By looking at A Month in the Country, Neil Garrod will discuss how someone who has lost their sense of local can rebuild themselves through engagement with the global. It is not as straightforward as adopting someone else’s local but, rather, reshaping one’s own local from interactions with the various other locals that make up the global.
By taking the perspective of rebuilding an empty husk, A Month in the Country provides a strong endorsement of the importance of the global to each and every one of us. Rather than a hectoring, political, religious, or moral stance, it simply conveys the need we all have to maintain our own sense of self.
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.
Neil Garrod is an honorary professor in the Faculty of Economy at the University of Ljubljana and a lifelong academic. Originally a mathematician, he studied management sciences and completed his doctorate in constrained optimization. He is also widely published in the field of accounting and finance. With time he moved into university administration and held senior positions throughout the United Kingdom, South Africa, and the United Arab Emirates. His love of literature never left him and now, in retirement, he spends much of his time thinking of the best word for his next line of poetry. He splits his time between London, South Africa, and as much of the world that he can visit.
Upcoming events in this series
Dr Anthony O’Mahony
4pm, Mon, 25 Nov: On The Sayings of the Desert Fathers
Contact:
Las Casas Institute with Georgetown University
lascasas@bfriars.ox.ac.uk