Tomes are being dusted off, undergraduates are returning from the hinterlands, and plenty of events are already scheduled for the first week of classes. Here’s a taste of what the academic scene has to offer in the next week.
WHAT: “The Idea of a Planned World”: H. G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon,” Simon J. James, Durham University, UK
WHERE: Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Room 346 of the Main Library), U of I
WHEN: Friday, August 30th at 3 p.m.
H. G. Wells is best known now for Victorian science fiction such as The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds. In his own time, however, Wells was more famous for his utopian and political writing. His later Edwardian scientific romances combine the fantastic with social thought. The First Men in the Moon gives extended consideration to the imagined life in the moon of the Selenite society—both a utopian image of Wells’s own dreams for the Earth, and a dystopian nightmare of a entirely planned world. Professor Simon J. James, of Durham University, UK, will give an account of this text in the context of Wells’s wider work, as well as of some unpublished material in the manuscript, held in the Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
Professor James is a specialist in Victorian and early twentieth-century fiction in particular, and in forms of narrative more generally. He is the author of Unsettled Accounts: Money and Narrative Form in the Novels of George Gissing (Anthem, 2003) and Maps of Utopia: H. G. Wells, Modernity and the End of Culture (Oxford University Press, 2012) and the co-editor of The Evolution of Literature: Legacies of Darwin in European Cultures (Rodopi, 2011) andGeorge Gissing and the Woman Question: Convention and Dissent (Ashgate, 2013). He is the editor of The Wellsian, the scholarly journal of the H. G. Wells Society, and of four Wells novels in the Penguin Classics series. He is currently working on an online edition of the manuscript of The Time Machine, as well as books on Dickens and on male bonding in Victorian and Edwardian fiction.
WHAT: “Life on the Moon: Literary and Scientific Reflections,” special exhibition curated by Marten Stromberg and Patrick Fadely
WHERE: August 30th-December 13, 2013
WHEN: Rare Book and Manuscript Library (Room 346 of the Main Library), U of I
From Lucian’s True History up to H.G. Wells’ The First Men in the Moon, this exhibition will trace the scientific and literary background of speculation about life on the moon.
The moon, we know, is a reflective body: at night a combination of sunlight, starlight and earthlight brighten its surface and illuminate our world below. But the moon also reflects human motivations and desires, providing a world of imaginative possibility onto which humanity projects images of its own making. The books displayed will reveal a range of speculation about earth’s sole satellite. In these pages, you find savage satire and fantasies of escape, utopian commonwealths and tyrannical kings, strange lifeforms and spectacular technologies. Together these works tell a story about the interplay of science and literature, and of the importance of imagination.
The exhibition opens with an Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities sponsored lecture by H. G. Wells scholar Dr. Simon J. James of Durham University on Wells’s novel, The First Men in the Moon. Additional moon-related lectures will take place during the course of the exhibition and other events will be hosted thoughout Champaign-Urbana to bring the focus of our scope on the inspiring, constant companion, the moon.
WHAT: “Friday on the Brain Seminar” (lecture on brain research)
WHERE: 2269 Beckman, U of I
WHEN: Friday, August 30th at 4 p.m.
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We live near a major university and a community college. There are smart people that come here every week to talk to the general public about interesting topics. Here’s a sampling of the talks and events you can find in the not-so-ivy-covered buildings near you. These events are free and will fill your brain with yummy knowledge (and sometimes will fill your stomach with free eats).
If you have an event, speaker, or film event that you’d like to see featured on Listen Up!, send the event information to rebecahpulsifer [at] smilepolitely [dot] com by the Friday prior to the event.