“Cliché: The Nemesis of Exciting Writing”
with Professor Belinda Jack
Mawby Room, Kellogg College,
62 Banbury Road
5 pm (refreshments) for 5.30 pm
All are welcome and no bookings are necessary
Writers need an acute attentiveness to language when reading, and a self-consciousness when writing, which together foster a creative use of words. It is only an imaginative use of language that allows for new ideas and for a new understanding of ourselves and the world we live in. We need to be linguistically inventive and ingenious if new insights are to be conceived of, and articulated. And we also need to be aware of language that is no longer fit for purpose. We need to do something about words which have lost their vivacity and lounge lazily on the page. The term ‘verbicide’ (the killing of words) emerged in the mid-nineteenth century. In the twenty-first century it is cliché that needs to be in our sights.
Belinda Jack’s first two books are on francophone writing. She then wrote a biography of George Sand, George Sand: A Woman’s Life Writ Large and a group biography, Beatrice’s Spell. Her most recent book is a history of women’s reading, The Woman Reader, published by Yale University Press. She is a Student (‘Fellow’) and Tutor in French at Christ Church and is currently Gresham Professor of Rhetoric at Gresham College, London. The title of her three-year lecture series is ‘The Mysteries of Reading and Writing. Belinda Jack also writes for a number of periodicals, reviews widely and speaks at literary festivals and on the radio.
Seminar Convenor: Dr Clare Morgan
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