Agenda
Événements & colloques
Samuel Butler : colloque à Cambridge

Samuel Butler : colloque à Cambridge

Publié le par Sophie Rabau

A Colloquium on Butler's work and influence,

St John's College, Cambridge, Saturday 22 June 2002



Samuel Butler was the son of a clergyman who escaped the domestic claustrophobia depicted in his famous early painting Family Prayers, reproduced on the
cover of the Penguin Classics edition of his path-breakingly honest novel The Way of All Flesh. An undergraduate at St John´s College, Cambridge, he
became a New Zealand sheep farmer soon after, living and working for some years in what was then a remote part of South Island. Throughout his life
Butler transgressed boundaries of place, thought and time, describing one of the last great utopias before the age of science fiction, Erewhon. Bold and thorough, he translated the Iliad and Odyssey, only to argue that they were the work of a woman. He challenged Darwinism, and increasingly began to observe human life in all its diversity and dignity through the camera. Among the thousands of surviving photographs in the College collections we find
poignant pictures of a questing, mentally handicapped child, the lower and even lower classes: beggars in London, sailors, a little drunk; and then an ethnography of Catholic Italy. Unlike most of his contemporaries, Butler did not seek to categorise his objects into a system of high and low, or
evolutionary stages. He observed with respect, and many of his photos bespeak an extraordinary spontaneity in his engagement with people he sought to capture as subjects. Butler was also interested in landscape, music, and art: he painted, composed, and kept writing throughout his lifetime.

Intensely Victorian in many ways, Butler was nevertheless able to transcend many constraints of his time. He was, perhaps, a 'Victorian Modern', who opened himself up to wider cultural and confessional horizons, experimented with different forms of expression and queried orthodoxies. He never managed to secure a firm professional trust, or official prestige. Yet his two finest novels have remained in print for a century, widely translated and still selling to
new audiences. A hundred years after his death, his name remains well known.

But not enough is known about him. Our one-day colloquium aims to stimulate new research questions by creating a conversation about Butler´s multi-disciplinary approach to knowing and imagining the past, present and future. From the University of Cambridge, Dr Simon Schaffer will talk about
the Book of Machines in Erewhon, Dame Gillian Beer will discuss Butler and Darwin, and Dr Mary Beard will consider the case for the alleged 'Homeress'. Dr Elinor Shaffer of the School of Advanced Study, University of London, will look at Butler as a European writer and artist, Dr Elizabeth Edwards (Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford) will consider Butler's contribution to ethnographic photography, while Thomas Röske (Frankfurt) will discuss Butler´s paintings.
Dr Ulinka Rublack (St John´s College) will take the Chair.

The Colloquium is open to all. If you are interested in attending, please send a stamped, addressed envelope or your email address to The Librarian's
Assistant, St John's College, Cambridge CB2 1TP, telephone (0)1223-338661; email keh30@cam.ac.uk. .