The Mystical Moment in Modernism

Professor Emeritus Chris Ackerley (University of Otago) is giving a lecture for the Literature and Religion research group seminar entitled: The Machinery of Transcendence: the Mystical Moment in Modernism.

Emeritus Professor Chris Ackerley has recently retired from the Department of English and Linguistics at the University of Otago. His major works on Samuel Beckett are two book-length annotations of Murphy and Watt. He has also edited Watt for Faber (2009) and (with S. E. Gontarski) he co-authored the Grove Press and Faber Companion to Beckett (2005, 2006). More recently he was part of a team editing and annotating three works by Malcolm Lowry, including the 'lost' novel, In Ballast to the White Sea (2014). He is currently working on a study of Samuel Beckett and Science, this being part of a wider project (supported by the Royal Society of New Zealand) called The Machinery of Transcendence, which examined the impact of medieval paradigms upon the Modernist aesthetic.