Becoming an abcedminded Brofèsor [not], josser [not], ?

Friday, 29 May 2026, 5.30pm to 7pm

There has long been a call to save literary studies from itself by appealing to the ‘lay reader’ (in John Guillory’s revealing phrase). This is a bad idea—as Joyce took pains to spell out in Finnegans Wake (1939). In this workshop, Peter McDonald (St Hugh’s) considers how the Wake’s many reading lessons speak not only to our current disciplinary and institutional malaise but to the future of literary studies in the age of the reader bot.

Peter McDonald teaches English at St Hugh’s College. He is the author of The Double Life of Books: Making and Re-making the Reader (2024), Artefacts of Writing: Ideas of the State and Communities of Letters from Matthew Arnold to Xu Bing (2017), The Literature Police: Apartheid Censorship and its Cultural Consequences (2009), British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 1880–1914 (1997), and co-author of PEN: An Illustrated History (2021). He is currently working on a book about re-imagining a literary education in the age of artificial intelligence.

All welcome.

Speaker(s): Professor Peter McDonald

Series: Finnegans Wake Seminar

Venue: New College - Lecture Room 6 - Lecture Room 6 New College Holywell Street Oxford Oxfordshire OX1 3BN United Kingdom

Department: English (Department)