1-2pm, Friday, 29 October, 2021. Room 1.22, 19 George Square.

The inaugural Reading Group for ELWN will discuss the seminal work of Laura Marcus, focusing on the ‘Introduction’ and the chapter ‘Auto/biographical Spaces’, from Auto/biographical Discourses. Chair: Maxime Geervliet (Edinburgh). Our first reading is extracted chapters from an essential text for anyone working on life-writing – Laura Marcus‘s Auto/biographical Discourses. Maxime had made this excellent suggestion earlier this year, some time before the truly shocking and deeply saddening news of Laura Marcus‘s death. There is a short, moving homage to her here: Professor Laura Marcus | Faculty of English (ox.ac.uk). Laura Marcus was, among other things, an inspiring teacher and much-loved colleague here at Edinburgh, as well as the JTB judge for Biography for some years, and returned (virtually) to give a brilliant Susan Manning Memorial lecture earlier this year, on ‘The Noise of Time: Autobiography and History in the 1930s’.  So it seems right – as well as deeply sad – for the group to appreciate and celebrate a small insight into her extraordinary work in our first reading group meeting. We’d decided on the Introduction as the main focus, but have included the final chapter too as optional – it suggests future areas of inquiry in life-writing and seems well worth including: it’s both prescient and challenging still.

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