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Writer Will Self explores how we remember fiction at free online event
27/01/2021
A University of Wolverhampton academic will be in conversation with novelist, Will Self, as part of the Wolverhampton Literature Festival – discussing how people remember fiction and what happens when they re-read stories.
Sebastian Groes, Professor of English Literature in the University’s School of Humanities, will host the free online event with writer, Self, and Dr Tom Mercer, Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University.
They will discuss how factors including emotions and adaptations shape our memories of books that we have read in the past and how perspectives change when they are re-visited. Dr Mercer will invite the audience to participate in an interactive memory experiment and Self will read from his novel – Will: A Memoir. The audience is also invited to participate in the online memory survey about how they remember fiction: https://nquire.org.uk/mission/novel-memories-1
The event, which is inspired by the BBC Arts’ Novels That Shaped Our World project, and the £300,000 Art and Humanities Research Council funded research project Novel Perceptions, takes place on Sunday 14th February 2021 between 2.30 pm and 3.30 pm and will be followed by a Q&A session. Tickets can be booked here.
Professor Groes said: “We’re delighted to welcome Will back as our guest in Wolverhampton. Will is one of the smartest and most entertaining thinkers in Britain, and we’re looking forward to discussing our research into the complex ways we remember the fiction we read during our childhood and youth.
“It seems that most of us remember fiction by the feeling it gives us, and not by memories of specific passages, quotations and endings – though people's memories work in different ways.
“At the event, Will, Tom and I will talk about the complexities of memory, and the ways in which memories of our most loved books are shaped by specific period in our lives, and vice versa.”
Will said: “As a writer, time and again I have come to appreciate the full force of Montaigne's apercu: ‘In our part of the country, we call a man who has no memory... stupid.’”
Dr Mercer said: “Thinking about the important novels we read as a child or teenager may also help us remember where we were, who we were with and how we felt at the time of reading. Exploring how we remember fiction may therefore allow us to ‘reactivate’ old autobiographical memories and reminisce about our past life.”
This event has been organised as part of a series of public engagement events to support the research of Novel Perceptions which is asking people to fill out a survey of the most sold/borrowed fiction between 2014-19.
University researchers will analyse the data to understand how demographic factors such as gender, age, ethnicity and location shape people’s perception of what good books are. They will also focus on computational linguistics analyses to understand the degree of difficulty, breadth of vocabulary and other linguistic factors of the 400 most sold/borrowed novels.
About the Speakers
Will Self is a highly prolific writer and journalist who has appeared on television programmes including Have I Got News For You? and Question Time. He has published 11 novels including The Book of Dave and the Booker-shortlisted Dorian, and has written across many different genres. Self has written about his psychogeographical exploits in newspapers and various books, including Psychogeography. His latest book is Will: A Memoir. In 2018, Will Self attended the Wolverhampton Literature Festival as headline guest, speaking about his novel Phone to a sold out audience of 180 in the Georgian Room in the Wolverhampton Art Gallery.
Sebastian Groes is Professor of English Literature at the University of Wolverhampton. He has written and edited numerous books and leads The Memory Network (www.thememorynetwork.com), which brings together scientists, arts and humanities scholars, writers and artists. Currently, he is working on BBC's project Novels That Shaped Our World and leads the Art and Humanities Research Council-funded research project Novel Perceptions. His most recent book is Smell, Memory, and Literature in the Black Country.
Tom Mercer is a Senior Lecturer and cognitive psychologist based within the Department of Psychology at the University of Wolverhampton. Mercer’s main research interest is forgetting, with projects using experimental methods to examine factors responsible for the loss of memory. Much of this research examines memory for non-verbal, sensory information.
Find out more about the Wolverhampton Literature Festival.
Picture courtesy of Aidan Byrne.
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