«Tectonics of Fragments in Personal Essays» by Dr Teresa Brus (Wroclaw University)
28 May, 2025. Via Zoom.
I propose to pair Brian Dillon’s explorations of fragments and fragmentation in the essay as a life-writing form with Virginia Woolf’s orchestrations of tectonics of fragments. I will argue for the conglomerate power of the fragment in her essayistic oeuvre, her pulverizing gestures turning away from the sum. I will focus on Woolf’s «Walter Sickert: A
Conversation» (1934), her biographical experiment, to illuminate ideas negating synthesizing impulses in order to repurpose portraiture by focusing on the fragment.
«The Art of Putting Things Together» by Prof. Bran Nicol (University of Surrey)
16 September, 2024. Via Zoom.
This talk considers the artistic practice of putting fragments together – the kind of aesthetic which remained central both to modernism and postmodernism and continues today in the work of a writer such as David Shields – and the fragmentary nature of our contemporary mediascape in which we are confronted constantly with a multiplicity of snippets, extracts, glimpses, generic tropes and micro-narratives. Can the reading methods demanded by works such as Shields’s Reality Hunger or Jean Baudrillard’s aphoristic writing help us navigate ethical positions in this contemporary world, and make sense of reality, perhaps even politics?
Literary assemblage 