Foto: Marion Ettlinger
The novel The Blazing World (2014) by the award-winning author Siri Hustvedt was inspired by one of the earliest examples of science fiction: Margaret Cavendish’s utopian romance The Blazing World from 1666. Hustvedt has written extensively about writers and thinkers, and grappled with questions of how science has divided mind and body through history. Many of these thoughts are collected in her essays in A Woman Looking at Men Looking at Women from 2016.
4.30pm – 7pm
Keynote Speaker: Siri Hustvedt
"My Margaret Cavendish: or, Notes Towards a Mind-Body Reconciliation"
*With brief introduction by Lisa Walters, Liverpool Hope, UK
Siri Hustvedt’s sixth novel The Blazing World was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize and won the Los Angeles Book Prize for Fiction 2014. In 2012 Hustvedt was awarded the International Gabarron Prize for Thought and Humanities. Hustvedt has a PhD in English from Columbia University and is a lecturer in psychiatry at the Dewitt Wallace Institute for the History of Psychiatry in the Psychiatry Department of Weill Medical College of Cornell University. Her work has been translated into over thirty languages.
Margaret Cavendish (1623-1673) was a poet, philosopher, writer of prose romances, essayist, and playwright who published under her own name at a time when most women writers published anonymously. Her writing addressed a number of topics, including gender, power, manners, scientific method, and philosophy. She is singular in having published extensively in natural philosophy and early modern science.
The lecture is connected to the International Margaret Cavendish Society Conference, which this year takes place in Trondheim, June 6-9. The International Margaret Cavendish Society was launched as an international non-profit organization at the June 1997 Cavendish conference in Oxford (UK), and was established to provide a means of communication between scholars worldwide and to increase awareness of Margaret Cavendish and her writings.
The event will be in English. Free admission, but because of limited capacity you need to get a ticket. Look here to the right under Extra material.