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'Art and Attunement', by Professor Rita Felski, University of Virginia and Southern Denmark

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Great Writers Inspire at Home
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In this talk Rita Felski reported at new research on how we engage with works of art across a broad range (including cat videos) and considered the puzzling question of why we are drawn by some pieces of music, art and literature, and not by others.
Why do we prefer, say, Matisse to Picasso, or Joni Mitchell over Bob Dylan, and how can those preferences change quite sharply in a life-time? Drawing on an essay by writer Zadie Smith, in which she describes falling in love with Joni Mitchell quite by surprise one afternoon at Tintern Abbey while longing for a sausage roll, Rita Felski explored a range of explanations that have been given for these responses. She came to settle on actor-network theory as offering the most satisfactory explanation taking account of the many factors that come together when we turn to a certain book or choose a piece of music: education, temporality, and the relationships we have with other people and things.

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Writers Selma Dabbagh and Courttia Newland read from their work, and discuss why they write, who they write for, their imagined audiences, and how their writing relates to their identities.
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Great Writers Inspire at Home
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Reading Bass Culture

On 26 April 2018, Linton Kwesi Johnson read from a selection of his poetry and discussed with Professor Paul Gilroy the inter-generational and transatlantic relationships that had nurtured it.
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Episode Information

Series
Great Writers Inspire at Home
People
Rita Felski
Keywords
art
literature
reception
attunement
attachment
actor-network theory
Department: Faculty of English Language and Literature
Date Added: 19/12/2017
Duration: 00:55:20

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