Swinging between the extremes

Two things on today: a mini-conference and a meeting. The conference, though not entirely in my field (Decadence and Decline in Literature and Culture) promises to be enormous fun. 

Professor Juan Luis Conde, UCM (Spain)
                      Crisis: Compression and Comprehension10:30-11:10     Viktoriya Zaevska, UVT (Bulgaria)
                      De-humanising Reality: the Paradigm of Roguery and the Distortion of the Orderly System of Beliefs in Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller11:10-11:30     COFFEE/TEA
11:30-12:10     Professor Brenda Tooley, Monmouth College (USA)
                      Decline and Degeneration in Alexander Pope’s Dunciad12:10-12:50     Dr Benjamin Colbert, UoW (UK)
                      Romantic Palingenesis, or, History from the Ashes12:50-14:30     LUNCH (Millennium City Building, Hospitality Suite)
14:30-15:10     Maxime Briand, UVSQ (France)                      The Old North on the Wane: Pastoral Dissolution in Wordsworth's Writings15:10-15:50     Dr Glyn Hambrook, UoW (UK)
                      The Twilight of the Idle: A Blueprint for the Elimination of Literature Written by Humans, in Rafael de Zamora’s ‘Máquina cerebral’ (1906)
16:10-16:50     Dr Anna Katharina Schaffner, University of Kent (UK)
                      ‘Degenerate’ Sexualities: On the Theorization of the Perversions in Nineteenth-Century Sexology

9:30-10:10       Petya Tsoneva, UVT (Bulgaria)
                      The Crumbling House, the Exploding Planet, the Invading Desert: Topoi of Decay in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry10:10-10:50     Professor Dámaso López García, UCM (Spain)
                      From Empire to Middle-Class Decorum: the Poetry of Philip Larkin
11:10-11:50     Dr Ludmilla Kostova, UVT (Bulgaria)
                      Countering the Threat of Historical Decline: the Case of Bram Stoker’s The Lady of the Shroud (1908)11:50-12:30     Professor Jan Borm, UVSQ (France)
                      Proust, Joyce, and Musil, or Modernism Warming to the Theme of Decline 

Sadly, thanks to the meeting and Olympic duties tomorrow, I'll only be able to make the morning session, damn it, though I might just make it back to the paper on Sexology ('ooh, she's got an 'ology'). The meeting (HR Workstream 3: Staff Engagement, Motivation and Communications) promises, on the surface at least, to be less enthralling. 


I may live blog some of the conference, but probably won't hit you with details of the meeting.