The school’s Literary Society was lucky enough to receive guest speaker Professor John Sutherland, currently Emeritus Professor of Modern English Literature at University College London and a regular Guardian columnist, to talk about Some Ideas About Literature You Really Need to Know.
Professor Sutherland talked with great flair and enthusiasm on the particular topics of what makes literature what it is, and how exploring authorial intentions changes with every new reading of a literary work.
One of his central points was that it is a human tendency to interpret the words on a page in a different light with each reading; to see subtleties in the text that the previous reading obscured. A particularly interesting idea he put forward was the beauty of literature as a subject; considering that novels and literary works are formed as dabs of ink on a page, it is extraordinary how the human mind appreciates beauty and form within those simple dabs of ink and expresses itself through that medium.
Professor Sutherland also talked about the paradox of a literary work’s parts making it a whole; he argued that one could not fully appreciate the individual parts of the work without reading the whole, but could also not appreciate the whole without the parts. This topic was particularly fascinating to the audience; it gave rise to the problem of how both could be equally appreciated in the fullest sense.
On behalf of all that were lucky enough to attend and hear Professor Sutherland’s thoughts on the literary sphere of study and literature in general, Literary Society would like to thank him for an enthralling and deeply-entertaining talk. We wish him all the best for the future as he continues to voice his thoughts on literature.