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Speaker: Patrick Flanery

Date\Time: Thursday 24 October2024, 12:30-13:30

Location: 1A21 (accessed from the foyer joining Building 1 and )

or Zoom:

Abstract

This paper considers a preoccupation with entropic zones across American artist Robert Smithson’s seminal 1970 work of land art, Spiral Jetty, American novelist Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 novel Gravity’s Rainbow, the Russian novelists Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s 1972 novel Roadside Picnic and its subsequent film adaptation, Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 Stalker. 

In each of these cases, the unspeakable but omnipresent spectre of nuclear holocaust lurks as the summoner of entropy in its most apocalyptic form.

All are welcome to this seminar.

Bio

Patrick Flanery is Chair in Creative Writing at the University of Adelaide. 

Prior to joining the University of Adelaide, he was Professor at the University of Reading, and subsequently Professor and Director of Creative Writing at Queen Mary University of London. He is the author of the novels Night for Day (2019), I Am No One (2016), Fallen Land (2013) and Absolution (2012), which was shortlisted for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize, among others. 

In 2019, he published a volume of creative-critical nonfiction, The Ginger Child: On Family, Loss and Adoption. Patrick holds a BFA in Film & TV from NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and a DPhil in English Literature from the University of Oxford.

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