Dear colleagues and students,
On Tuesday, November 10 at 12:40 PM the Program in Cultures, Civilizations and Ideas will launch this year’s colloquium series with a forty-minute talk by Dr. Ayşe Çelikkol (Assistant Professor, ELIT) on the topic, “Swinburne, Logos, and Deep Time.” The talk will take place in the Orientation Room of the Bilkent Main Campus Library. Her abstract is below. Sandwiches and refereshments will be served.
Best wishes,
CCI Colloquium Committee
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Swinburne, Logos, and Deep Time
The Victorian poet Algernon Charles Swinburne’s “Hymn of Man” locates reason both inside and outside the human subject, thus questioning modern secular narratives of self-reliance. This paper focuses especially on Swinburne’s construal of “deep time,” a notion derived from the discovery that the Earth’s history extended far beyond the six thousand years postulated by readings of the Bible. It is especially in portrayals of deep time that Swinburne employs a Heraclitean notion of logos that exceeds the individual subject, positioning the poet outside mainstream discourses of the secular in the Victorian period.