Dear Bilkent faculty and students,
The Department of English Language and Literature is to hold two lectures on March 15, Wednesday in G-160 at 2 pm and 4 pm. From 3:00 to 4:00, there will be a reception in front of G-160.
Dr. Shazia Jagot (Post-Doctoral Research Fellow, Centre for Medieval Literature, University of Southern Denmark and University of York): “English Poetry and the Islamic World in the Global Middle Ages” (2:00 pm)
Dr. April Pierce (PhD, University of Oxford): “Telling the Truth: T.S. Eliot and the Linguistic Turn” (4:00 pm)
Abstract for Dr. Pierce’s lecture: What is truth? More specifically, how do we know that what we say attributes to the external world? This lecture looks at the way a young T.S. Eliot, modernist and proto-post-modernist poet-philosopher, posed the question of truth in his early years as a philosophy student. We will visit Eliot’s early ideas about language, closely examining his relationship to Bertrand Russell, a forefather for analytic philosophy of language. First, we will consider the modernist “moment” as it pertains to language theory, then look at Eliot’s early work in philosophy of language. Eliot and Russell’s relationship, both personal and philosophical, will be described, and their perspectives on the question of truth-telling will be compared and contrasted. Finally, we will consider a few ways Eliot’s poetry “answers” questions posed by his early philosophy, looking at themes and devices used in his later writing.
We welcome all of you to this event.