When thinking of how geography inflects prose style one might think of such examples as “oceanic style” in Melville's Moby Dick, John Banville’s The Sea, or even the sea of sand in Michael Ondaatje's English Patient. Alternately, the implications of mountainous topography in Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg or Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian provide ways of mediating allegory and symbolism with the rhetoric of geographical representation. But what might we make of narratives dealing with geographies lacking such thalassan potentialities or the symbolic inducements of craggy altitudes? This lecture will attempt to map out how several major modern writers negotiate inland semi-arid zones, and will examine the prose styles in which they perform this act. The steppe, plain, grassland––unvaried topography neither desert nor littoral, neither urban nor rural, yet a strangely replenishing source for agriculture, husbandry, and the history of human migrations––provide sufficiently distinct material by which to understand their specific mediations of narrative modes. Further, such undifferentiated topographies impel deep reflection upon the very point of prose style: what is it for, and what is it meant to do? These questions will be ventured in relation to such works as Olive Schreiner's Story of an African Farm (1883), Anton Chekhov's The Steppe (1888), Dino Buzzati's The Tartar Steppe (1940), David Malouf's An Imaginary Life (1978), J. M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), and Gerald Murnane's The Plains (1982) and Inland (1988).

以下の講演会を開催いたします。

日時：2019年10月11日（金）16:30〜18:00

場所：名古屋大学文系総合館7階オープンホール

講師：Dr. Mark Byron (University of Sydney)

演題：The Steppe in Modern and Contemporary Literature

言語：英語

主催：名古屋大学アメリカ文学・文化研究会

バイロン先生には以前にも名大で講演していただいていますが、今回は「ステップ」（steppe）を鍵語に世界文学的視野から、南アフリカ（Oliver Schreiner、J. M. Coetzee）、ロシア（Anton Chekhov）、イタリア（Dino Buzzati）、オーストラリア（David Malouf、Gerald Murnane）の作家について論じていただきます。

バイロン先生からはそれぞれの作家の作品の短い抜粋をいただいています。参加ご希望で、事前に抜粋を読みたい方はご連絡ください。

名古屋大学人文学研究科 長畑明利