Arts and Humanities Colloquium

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Friday, September 19th, 2014
10:00 AM to 11:30 AM

Vancouver Island University�s Faculty of Arts and Humanities Colloquium: Novelist Kathy Page, from the Department of Creative Writing and Journalism, will give her presentation, Waters That No Vessel Ever Sailed. All are welcome.

This year is the centennial of the outbreak of the First World War, and while many aspects of that immense and tragic event have received media attention in recent months, Page brings her unique sensibility to focus on one soldier, Edward Thomas, who died at Arras on 9 April 1917, at the age of 39. As well as a soldier, Thomas was a writer, one of the well-known poets of the Great War.

Page will present a hybrid of story and essay that centres on Thomas�s poem, �The Lane,� and concerns the exact nature of his death, which, she argues, is open to question. Using the available evidence to construct several possibilities, she will explore the border territory between fiction and non-fiction, and our need to make stories of our own and other people�s lives.

Please note that there are two more presentations in our Fall series. On October 17 Dr. John Hill and Dr. Ann Rogers will speak on a controversial topic: The Rise of Drones: From the Great War to Gaza. Continuing the semester theme of war and its consequences, on November 28 Terri Doughty and Dr. Justin McGrail will present Cultural Contact Zones: Wroclaw, Poland, a look at how modern writers and artists are recovering Poland's multi-ethnic history and creating identities in a historically war-torn country