CCI Semineri: “John Clare in the _Longue Durée_ of Farming”, Ayşe Çelikkol, 12:30 7 Aralık (EN)

Please find below the details for this academic year’s first seminar for the Cultures, Civilizations and Ideas Colloquia Series, organised by Dr.
William Coker, Dr. Luuk de Boer, and Dr. Aslı Menevşe and featuring invited speaker Dr. Ayşe Çelikkol, Assistant Professor of English Language and Literature at Bilkent University. The event will take place in person.

Topic: CCI / Seminar : Ayşe Çelikkol, “John Clare in the _Longue Durée_ of Farming.”

Time: December 7, 2022, 12:30 PM
Bilkent University Library Art Gallery

Abstract:

John Clare in the _Longue Durée_ of Farming

Celebrated in the early nineteenth century as the “the Northamptonshire peasant poet,” John Clare famously laments the loss of the commons in rural England in the age of land enclosures. Such nostalgia suggests a simple binary in which a more humane past fades away in the presence of a decayed present, but, as I argue, the temporality in Clare’s _The Shepherd’s Calendar_ is anything but straightforward. In the polytemporal world Clare offers us, the past continually interrupts the present, and the verse disorients us as it disrupts our sense of the flow of time. The complex temporality owes to the superposition of two distinct temporal scales in the poem: the first, the shallow frame of capitalism, in which even the previous generation’s experience is alien, and the second, the _longue durée_ of farming, in which harvests and tilling interconnect farmers across myriad generations. Through polytemporality, Clare bridges the nature-culture divide without denying its pervasiveness under the capitalist mode of agriculture.