Pudding Seminar with Holly Corfield Carr (PhD English)

‘Readings in depth: Thomas Hardy’s ‘doubleeyed’ vision’

Holly will be looking at models of depth in Thomas Hardy’s final novel, The Well-Beloved, published as the writer moves between prose and poetry at the turn of the twentieth century. Looking closely at the novel’s setting, the Isle of Portland in Dorset, we will consider how Hardy perceives time on the island to be organised vertically within the geological strata while being doubled horizontally in the quarrying activity that displaces much of Portland to London. At the same time, we will experiment with the double vision of stereographs – paired images which when viewed together produce a coherent three-dimensional image – to demonstrate how a reader might assume a similarly stereoscopic model of attention when reading the blurry ‘spot’ of Hardy’s placemaking. It is in this blurry spot that we might see Hardy’s writing as less an inheritor of Romanticism’s topographical tradition but more a material articulation of deep time, preparing the ground for the emergence of site-specific land art and performance in the twentieth century.

As part of this talk, a pair of stereographs will be circulated along with a stereoscopic viewer.

Holly is a PhD student in English at Newnham, where she is researching contemporary site-specific writing practices and sculpture. This year she is also working as a 2016/17 Visiting Research Fellow at the Henry Moore Institute in Leeds. Holly is also a Special Supervisor in English at Newnham.

She received an Eric Gregory Award from the Society of Authors in 2012 and was the winner of the Frieze Writer’s Prize in 2015. Her writing is published in magazines, artists’ books and has been broadcast on BBC Radio 3 and BBC Radio 4. She has undertaken residencies at the Wordsworth Trust, Spike Island, the Curfew Tower, Ceramic Review and the Bristol Poetry Institute at the University of Bristol.

All Senior Members, Students, and Staff are warmly invited to attend the Pudding Seminars, which feature coffee, cake, and lively discussion! To allow people to get to 2pm appointments, please note that coffee and cake will be available from 1 o’clock with the Seminar starting promptly at 1.15pm.

Full details of all this term’s pudding seminars can be found on the
college website:
https://newn.cam.ac.uk/research/pudding-seminars/forthcoming-pudding-seminars/