Event date: Tuesday 20 April 2010, 5.30 p.m. – 6.30 p.m.
Location: Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Blandijnberg 2, Faculty Room 

“In War Times” given by Professor Roger Luckhurst (Birkbeck College, University of London)

“This lecture will seek to examine novelistic responses to the ‘noughties’ as an era of war and trauma. Ramifications of the ‘war on terror’ have become constant questions of novelistic address. Yet the critical judgment on novels that have tried to confront these urgent issues (as with the films that focus on 9/11 or the Iraq War) have been notably lukewarm. Does this imply a formal restriction on the novel? Can we expect the novel to respond to, or act as, ‘news’? I want to explore the notion that it is novels that filter this war through other, earlier conflicts that have been the more successful reflections. They operate as instances of what Michael Rothberg calls ‘multidirectional memory’ (although multitemporal would more accurately describe the overdetermined time signatures explored here). In particular, I will focus on a little-known American novel by Kathleen Ann Goonan, In War Times (2008). The plural in the title puns on a narrative set during the Second World War in which a secret project inside the Manhattan Project produces a quantum device that multiplies and proliferates potential post-1945 worlds, including several non-nuclear ones. The novel is a sly, irenic commentary on our warring era that suggests obliquity and filtration may be valued novelistic devices.”

Roger Luckhurst is Professor of Modern and Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck College, University of London. He is the author of books on J. G. Ballard, science fiction, telepathy, and, most recently, The Trauma Question(2008).