Event Details

Informal discussion of a short pre-circulated text. All welcome. You can join in conversation or just listen in.

The readings for this seminar, with Dr. William Ghosh (Oxford), include an early essay and a late poem by T.S. Eliot (“Tradition and the Individual Talent” and “Burnt Norton”); an essay by Michael Levenson, “The End of Tradition and the Beginning of History”; and a few select paragraphs from the Catechism of the Catholic Church on “The Transmission of Divine Revelation”.

Will is just starting work on some thinking in questions of literary canon, tradition, and religion, which these pieces are framing some initial thought for.

Here’s a note from him to guide the conversation:

I’ve chosen the readings to frame a very broad overarching question, which is about the relationship between on the one hand Eliot’s conception of a literary tradition, which has done so much to shape our own, and on the other the catholic/Christian understanding of “tradition” as it is now articulated. A more local way of thinking about this would be: does Eliot’s vision of history and his place in it change substantially after his conversion to Christianity in 1927?

To receive the extracts just email e.lysne@lancaster.ac.uk