Seminar and Workshops 2012
Archaeology Seminar Series
Staff and students of the University and the general public are very welcome to attend any of these seminars. First semester seminars are generally presented by staff, postgraduate students and guest speakers. Second semester seminars contain a mixture of Honours and Masters student presentations and guest speakers.
When & Where?
Every Thursday
3-5pm
Social Sciences South 149
Flinders University
English, Creative Writing and Australian Studies Seminar Series
Details for the Seminars for this semester:
When & Where?
Wednesday, 30 May
1pm
Humanities Room 264
Flinders University
The third session will be a presentation from Gillian Dooley, editor of Transnational Literatures.
From Jake to Ludens: The Desperate Pursuit of the Truth in Under the Net and The Message to the Planet.
In October 1986, not long before she started work on The Message to the Planet, Iris Murdoch told a symposium in Amsterdam that she believed her later novels were better than the earlier ones. ‘They are longer novels, and there’s more opportunity for descriptions of all kinds, and I think they are more realistic.’
The Message to the Planet contains two loosely interwoven plots: the love triangle between the painter Jack Sheerwater, his wife Franca and his lover Alison; and the desperate pursuit by the young historian Alfred Ludens of the enigmatic sage Marcus Vallar, one of Murdoch’s recurrent enchanter figures. In a review of the novel, Paul Duguid wrote that Murdoch’s novels ‘collectively resemble an artist’s insistent attempt to keep reworking a subject until the right picture emerges.’[1] Could it be argued that Ludens’ quest for the truth he believes Marcus possesses is merely an overblown reiteration of Jake’s pursuit of Hugo Belfounder in Under the Net?
In this paper I compare these two novels to see what The Message to the Planet has to add to the picture presented in Under the Net, and to consider whether the dramatization in Murdoch’s sparkling debut novel of a young acolyte’s quest for the truth he thinks his chosen sage embodies is improved upon, either on her own terms or in critical opinion, in the ‘baggy monster’ The Message to the Planet.
All welcome
Details about past FIRTH/FHRC seminars and workshops.
