Neil Campbell will examine the idea of 'accent', relating it both to Mikhail Bakhtin's 'reaccentuation' and Hamid Naficy’s ‘accented cinema’ to discuss some recent rethinking about the American west in fiction / western fiction. Through this he will define key terms: postwestern, worlding, and errantry that all figure in his recent work. He is particularly using Kevin Barry's novel The Heart in Winter - a 'western with Irish accents' as a close reading of some of these ideas in action.
About our distinguished speaker:
Neil Campbell is Emeritus Professor of American Studies at the University of Derby, U.K. He published an interdisciplinary trilogy of books on the post-war American West: The Cultures of the American New West (Edinburgh University Press, 2000), The Rhizomatic West (2008) and Post-Westerns: Cinema, Region, West (both University of Nebraska Press, 2013). He co-edited the book series Place, Memory, Affect with Rowman Littlefield International, and has a volume within it, Affective Critical Regionality (2016). He edited Under the Western Sky (University of Nevada Press, 2018), a collection of essays on the fiction and music of Willy Vlautin and published Worlding the West (University of Nevada Press, 2022). He is currently working on a new book Errant Wests.
The event is free and open for all.
Contact
Stefan Rabitsch.