Friday 17 September 2010

In the administrative jungle, ideas struggle for light

I'm spending most of the day trying to work out how our new courses will work (teaching starts next week), but I'm having a lunchtime break to go to a staff research seminar. 5 of us are gathered to listen to a Bulgarian visiting scholar talk about

‘Writing across the Native/Foreign Divide: Krystyn Lach-Szyrma’s Letters, Literary and Political on Poland (1823) and Kapka Kassabova’s Street without a Name (2008)’


Lach-Szyrma was a 19th-century Polish philosopher (read more here or buy his British travel memoir here), while Kassabova is a cosmopolitan Bulgarian poet, novelist, journalist and travel writer (b. 1973), educated in New Zealand and resident in Scotland. 


The intellectual link seems to be cross-cultural links and the complications of the terms 'native' and 'foreign', especially when it comes to intellectual endeavour - both authors wrote in English for Anglophone readers. 

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