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UID:https://www.otago.ac.nz/news/events/margaret-dalziel-lecture-the-letter-twisted-jane-austens-love-spells
URL:https://www.otago.ac.nz/news/events/margaret-dalziel-lecture-the-letter-twisted-jane-austens-love-spells
DTSTART;TZID=Pacific/Auckland:20251031T163000
DTEND;TZID=Pacific/Auckland:20251031T180000
SUMMARY:Margaret Dalziel Lecture – The Letter Twisted: Jane Austen’s Love Spells
DESCRIPTION:Professor Clara Tuite, University of Melbourne. The love letter has a special power in Jane Austen’s novels, not least because it dramatizes the uncanny endurance of an ancient technology of intimacy within the supremely mediating, third-person, post-epistolary form of free indirect novel that Jane Austen invented for the modern world. From the madcap zaniness of early epistolary writings, such as Janetta’s Love and Freindship (c. 1790), to that marvel of mid-career zaniness, Emma (1815) which is also Austen’s crowning glory of free indirect discourse, to Persuasion’s climactic drama of indirection as Wentworth writes a letter to Anne while she is seated a few feet away, Austen’s third-person wonders of layered indirection mine the amorous first-person epistle for special charges of drama and emotion. Marking 250 years since the birth of Jane Austen, this lecture explores the endurance of the intimate technological primordium of the love letter, and its transformation and re-mediation in Austen’s oeuvre. Ever the miniaturist, Austen wields with special force the occult power of the single letter, cypher, and riddle, to add extra allusive charm to the spell-making, as charades become occasions of spelling and un-spelling love. These are spells of a strange indirection and deferral, unwinding the “interval” and “a bill between them” (Persuasion), thrilling to a love that never did run smooth but was always up for “a perverse turn” (Emma), in a world linking modern social comedy and archaic romance, alike, where love spells both trouble and pleasure. By such letters twisted do love’s misdirections, misrecognitions, improper objects and go-betweens fly “with the speed of an arrow” (Emma)—and with their vital role to play—promiscuously ensuring the rhetorical opportunities for the clarification, transmission and transformation of the language of love. Livestream informationLivestream The Letter Twisted: Jane Austen’s Love Spells 
LOCATION:College of Education Auditorium, 145 Union St East, University of Otago, Dunedin
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