EVENTS – Global Blake Network

In Conversation: Autumn/Winter Programme, 2024/2025

Below you'll find links to our upcoming Autumn/Winter series, with David Worrall discussing his latest book as the first in our In Conversation series. In addition, we'll be running our online symposium on Blake and Music in November.

All events are free. Please use the links below to register.

All times are GMT/BST

23 September, Time: 19.00-20.00 - William Blake's Visions

David Worrall will discuss his latest book - William Blake's Visions: Art, Hallucinations, Synaesthesia

This book is an inquiry into whether what Blake called his ‘visions’ can be attributed to recognizable perceptual phenomena. The conditions identified include visual hallucinations (some probably derived from migraine aura), and auditory and visual hallucinations derived from several types of synaesthesia. Their individual phenomenology is recoverable, both within his art and writings and also through the testimonies of his friends. None of Blake's conditions were pathological, all of them have a degree of prevalence in modern populations. Blake has been celebrated as a ‘visionary,’ yet his ‘visions’ have been ignored for too long.

David Worrall is Emeritus Professor of English at Nottingham Trent University. He is editor of The Urizen Books (1995), and (with Steve Clark) editor of Historicizing Blake (1992), Blake in the Nineties (1999), Blake, Nation and Empire (2006) and many chapters in books and journal articles. He was also Principal Investigator of the Blake and Moravians project (AHRC,2004-06), with Keri Davies and a Panacea Society funded project on the female visionary, Dorothy Gott (with Nancy Cho).

7 October, Time: 19.00-20.00 - Los's Healthy Narcissism

Ines Tebourski will discuss the role of Los as a narcissist in Blake's epic poem, Jerusalem.

This presentation aims at showcasing the way Los - a major character in William Blake’s poetry - is a healthy narcissist. This is mainly studied through Jerusalem, Blake’s longest and culminating poem, that revolves around the idea of Los’s mission to save Albion, who stands for England in Blake’s poetry, and humanity in general. This presentation seeks to bring to bear Blake’s poetic as well as artistic productions within a multimodal analysis that takes into consideration Blake’s amalgamation of the “sister arts” in the production of his illuminated poetry. It strives to call attention to precise poetic and artistic elements by exploring selected plates of this poem to elucidate the way Blake’s words and paintings stand as markers of Los’s healthy narcissism. This presentation attempts also to highlight the links between Los’s healthy narcissism and Blake’s. As Los stands for the creative imagination in Blake’s poetry and stands for Blake himself, this presentation foregrounds the elements that associate Los’s to Blake’s narcissism. The theme of narcissism in Blake’s works is not to be understood in the Freudian negative sense of the word that revolves around people who have narcissistic personality disorder but with reference to what Heinz Kohut and Graig Malkin refer to as “healthy

narcissism” which is vital to one’s well-being and endows people with positive traits such as self-esteem, pride, ambition, creativity, but also high esteem and care for the other. This presentation operates on two axes. The first is through the iconic representation and the actions of Los and the second is through Blake’s unconventional choice of producing his illuminated works.

Ines Tebourski - PhD in English language and literature - is a lecturer at theHigher Institute of Applied Studies in Humanities, Tunisia.

2 December, Time: 19.00-20.00 - 'A Fly Like Thee?'

William Rubel considers some of the many readings of Blake's 'The Fly'.

Blake’s “The Fly” presents us with the absurd implications of the optics of finitude. Cut off from infinite sympathies by his epistemic stance, “The Fly’s” empiricist speaker cannot help but reduce himself to the humming chaos of non-life or of inert matter. For him, human life and insect life become equivalent, a mindless buzz. Akin to the other voices of the Songs of Experience, his is the voice of a circumscribed modern agent who, having negligently killed a fly, is thinking through its moral and existential implications. “The Fly” can be read as a more concise and sophisticated version of There Is No Natural Religion, offering the same parody of the violent absurdity of Lockean epistemology but in ways that dramatise rather than criticise the spectral and discursive “I.”

Among the Songs of Experience, “The Fly” has generated a variety of critical readings relevant to current debates about Blake in relation to ecophilosophy. In his recent reading, for instance, Timothy Morton notes how “The Fly” enacts the “blind laundry-folding hands of logic, reducing personhood to mechanism” (Hell, 205). Morton explicitly relates the poem to the logic of colonialism and violence of modern reductionism. “The Fly” has also struck a nerve among musicians, inspiring many classical settings, but none so apt or so marvellous as Esperanza Spalding’s jazz rendition, “Little Fly” (2010). Jazz strikes me as the perfect medium to question the notion of an “I” (endowed with properties and limited to an identity) and to play with the poem’s subversion of the darkness (isolated location) it enacts. To further unpack why this apparently minor poem speaks to us so strongly, I will contrast it with Emily Dickinson’s equally jazzy “I heard a Fly buzz - when I died - ”, which uses a similar kind of counter-epistemological humour to poke fun at the “I” and affirm nonlocal intelligence.

William Rubel is a playwright and assistant professor who teaches literature, philosophy, and mythology. You can see more of his work at: https://sympoiesis.blog/

13 January, Time: 19.00-20.00 - Wedding with Eternity: Death in the Poetry of Blake and Rumi

Ramazan Saral explores the shared sentiments and mysticism of Blake and Rumi.

The thirteenth century Persian poet-prophet Rumi is considered a mystic poet, whose company with Shams of Tabriz inspired him to write some of the most sensational poetry of separation, union and longing. The union with the “friend,” in whose reflection one sees God and he himself becomes the reflection of both, is a constant reminder of the maxim of yet another mystic poet from the nineth century, Hallaj: “Ana’l-Haqq” (I am the Truth [or God]). Through this union and separation from the Friend, Rumi’s views on life and death transform and death becomes not a negation or annihilation but a reawakening. Thereafter, he believes “Death is our wedding with eternity.” The same sentiment that death is not an end, but another form of life is ever present in Blake’s poetry. Life of experience is not the only life; therefore, death is not an end to it. Death, Blake believes, is nothing “but removing from one room to another.” The aim of this talk is to compare these two “mystic” poet-prophets in their outlook on life and death and to depict how this outlook deems death as a union with the “Divine.”

Ramazan Saral works as a research assistant in the department of English Language and Literature at Ege University, Türkiye. He recently finished his PhD on Blake and Mythopoeia. He is interested in poetry, British Romanticism, drama and fantasy literature. He also writes his own poetry.

For recordings of previous events, please visit the link to Global Blake in Conversation.