PUBLIC LECTURE: Windows: looking out, looking in, breaking through

This lecture will draw upon Freud and Woolf as well as 'Frankenstein' and 'Wuthering Heights' to mount an argument about the force of exclusion.

Abstract: The figure of the window is most frequently associated with visual art and cinema. In cinema, windows as often suggest spying and seclusion as they do an opening into a contingent world. The act of photography funnels sight through an aperture upon a scene beyond the power of touch. Pictures may present themselves as windows into a landscape or as frames from which figures bulge out towards us. But literature, with its private unframed images conjured within the reader's mind, has a paradoxical relationship to the window. The lecture explores some of the thematic tensions that novelists and poets have expressed through the idea of the window: the window may affirm connection but as often it asserts exclusion. During the nineteenth century class conflict is often figured in literature by images of looking through a window at delights that can never be shared by the poor. Alongside social realism goes the mingling of inner and outer in dream, with the window as unstable passage way. And the physical actuality of glass, shattered, makes the window also an expression of violence, breaking through the secure separation of within and without. Worse, some writers show, the window may become a void, rather than a source of replenishing light. That tension between inner and outer seems peculiarly sharp for writers. This lecture draws, among other writing, on Frankenstein and Freud, on Wuthering Heights and Virginia Woolf.

Biographical note: Dame Gillian Beer has recently retired as the King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge. Her books include Darwin's Plots (1983, 2000) and Virginia Woolf: the Common Ground (1996). She is a Fellow of the British Academy, for which she served as Vice-President from 1994 to 1996, and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She was a judge on the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2002, a Booker judge in 1993 and Chair of the Booker judges in 1997. Gillian Beer holds honorary degrees from London University, Liverpool University, Leicester University, Cardiff University, Anglia Polytechnic University, Oxford University, Queens University, Belfast, and Université de Paris Sorbonne. She has been awarded medals by M.I.T., St Andrew's University and the National Autonomous University, Mexico City. She became a DBE in 1998. She is at present President of the British Comparative Literature Association.

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