Prof. Patricia Rae

HuGSACon is proud to present Queens University’s Patricia Rae as the Saturday evening dinner Keynote Speaker. She will deliver a keynote address entitled “Proleptic, Pragmatic Mourning.”

In keeping with this conference’s interdisciplinary spirit, Patricia Rae will attempt to bridge the distance between literary criticism and bereavement counselling  reflecting on some of the ways in which elegiac poetry can enlighten and provide comfort to the bereaved. Her sources will mainly be British writings produced in the “Morbid Age” (Overy) between World War I and World II, when there was, in W.H. Auden’s words, a “boom in sorrow.” During this period, thousands mourned loved ones lost in the Great War while also anticipating (or, in the case of the Spanish Civil War, experiencing) another round of losses. This doubling of sorrow produced a pragmatic take on discourses of consolation: an understanding of what did and did not work in helping the bereaved. Writers and others were positioned to assess the consequences of certain consolatory strategies, and to devise new ones in preparation for the new round of loss, sorrow, and recovery. The perspective offered by interwar elegy, then, was often both “pragmatic” and “proleptic”:  both practical and forward looking. As such, Rae will argue, this writing may be especially helpful to those experiencing or anticipating grief, and to those who help them do the difficult “work” of mourning.

For more information on Professor Rae, please see her website and her research interests,  which include the following topics:

• Literary modernism in Britain and the United States, especially the genres of elegy and memoir
• culture and politics in the 1930s
• the Spanish Civil War
• World War I
• the theory and practice of mourning, elegy, commemoration
• literature and the visual arts
• Imagism and Vorticism
• and, pragmatism