LSE Literary Festival discussion
Date: Saturday 13 February 2010
Time: 2.30-4pm
Venue: Wolfson Theatre, New Academic Building
Speakers: Dr Jane Darcy, Brian Dillon, Sally O’Reilly
Chair: Dr Jenn Tarr
Consciousness of our own mortality is at the heart of the human experience, and has long fascinated writers and artists, inspiring quite an obsession with the body and its well-being. This panel will examine the relationship between creativity, illness and the imagination.
Dr Jane Darcy has recently completed a PhD on melancholy in biographical writing in the 18th and 19th centuries. She is a British Academy Post-Doctoral Fellow, working on theories of literary biography in the nineteenth century.
Brian Dillon was born in Dublin in 1969. He is the author of Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives (Penguin, 2009), which was shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize. His first book, In the Dark Room (Penguin, 2005) won the Irish Book Award for non-fiction. He is UK Editor of Cabinet, a quarterly magazine of art and culture based in New York, and writes regularly for such publications as the Guardian, the London Review of Books, the New Statesman, frieze, Artforum and Tate etc. His novella, Sanctuary, will be published by Sternberg Press in 2010.
Sally O’Reilly is a writer who contributes regularly to art and culture magazines, has written for numerous galleries internationally and is currently working on a series of documentaries that interrogate underlying abstract themes of cultural production and the history of ideas. Her latest book The Body in Contemporary Art is published by Thames & Hudson.
Media queries: Please contact the Press Office to request a press ticket for this event or if you have a media query, email pressoffice@lse.ac.uk.
Slides
A copy of Brian Dillon and Sally O'Reilly's PowerPoint presentations are now available online. Please be aware that Sally O'Reilly's presentation contains explicit images which some people may find disturbing.
Download: The Arts of Ilness- Hypochondria, Brian Dillon (pdf)
Download: The Arts of Illness- The Body in Contemporary Art, Sally O'Reilly (pdf)
Podcast
A podcast of this event is available to download from the LSE Public Lectures and Events: podcasts and videos channel.
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