Date: Thursday 25th April 2019

Time: 6.30pm – 8.30pm

• 6:30 pm Wine reception
• 7:00 pm Talks begin
• 8:30 pm Close

Location: 70 Oxford St, Manchester Met

Tickets: Free – Available on Eventbrite

The Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies at Manchester Met presents an evening of two talks on Holy Ghosts; Hauntings Sacred and Profane:

Chihun Kim: Transcendence, Literature and Art in Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch’s notion of the Good may represent the religious transcendence which every human can experience regardless of their religious backgrounds. Likewise, according to Karl Rahner, every human can have the experience of transcendence in their own foundational human experiences even without referring to any particular religious faith. Literature and Art are the excellent medium which reveals that.

Chihun Kim, S.J., associate professor in English at Sogang University. B.A. & M.A in English at Sogang; B.A. & M.A. in Theology at Heythrop; Ph.D. in English at Warwick. Teaching British Romanticism, Literature and Environment; and broadly interested in Literature and Religion.

Ki Yoon Jang: The Vampiric Manifestations of Racialised Nationhood in American Gothic Literature

It is widely agreed that America is a land of the haunted. The nation promisingly came into being as the world’s first democratic polity, but doing so it created so many sociocultural Others so as to identify its entity that had neither precedents nor standards. Among those Others, African American slaves have been receiving the largest attention due to America’s heavy reliance on the institution of slavery and its simultaneously self-conscious obscuring of such reliance for a long time. American literature, especially gothic one, has been the main source of such attention by shedding light on the spectral presence of slaves in history and society and problematizing the nation’s founding creed to realize universal equality and harmonious diversity. Ki Yoon Jang’s talk especially pays attention to how contemporary American vampire literature obsessively features the everlastingly disruptive influence of slavery over the American psyche and how it effectively complicates the nation’s another ambitious attempt to be reborn as the one and only world power in the present era.

Ki Yoon Jang is an Associate Professor of English at Sogang University in Seoul, South Korea. She got her Ph. D. at Texas A&M University in the U. S. with a dissertation titled "Gothic Authors/Ghost Writers: The Advent of Unauthorized Authorship in Nineteenth-Century American Gothic Literature" in 2008. Jang's areas of interest include American literary studies, gothic studies, and authorship theories, on which she has been publishing articles in such prestigious journals as Henry James Review and Texas Studies in Literature and Language. She is currently working on the research project about gothic sociopolitical implications of early and nineteenth-century American regionalism.

MMU staff and postgraduate researchers interested in this topic might also be interested in the launch of a new research cluster in religion, spirituality and the arts which will take place tomorrow (Fri 16 April) from 10:30-12:30 in the same room. Drs Kim and Jang will be part of the discussion. Please contact Josh Edelman (j.edelman@mmu.ac.uk) for more information.

With apologies, due to a recent building assessment, No. 70 spaces are no longer considered accessible for disabled visitors. Please contact lucy.simpson@mmu.ac.uk or ring 0161 247 6740 if you have additional access needs and you were planning to attend.