Macgeorge Public Lecture

“A Feeling for Life: Biosemiotics, Autopoiesis and the Orders of Discourse”, Professor Wendy Wheeler (London Metropolitan University)

Date: Thursday June 26, 2014
Time: 6:30-7:30 pm
Venue: Old Arts, Theatre D | University of Melbourne | map

This lecture will discuss some of the theoretical implications of using biosemiotics as a way of approaching art and culture, and especially literature. In order to do that, it will look at the rather surprising connections between semiotic theories of culture and art, the roots of structuralism in the work of Roman Jakobson, and biology. The structuralist, and hence post-structuralist, legacy has been long, but now it seems that this history, at least in part, needs rewriting with its proto-biosemiotic aspects taken into account. The lecture will focus on structuration as an organic process of growth in living systems, including that made up of both human and non-human systems as comprised of autopoietic readers, and upon the role of a feeling for life as affect constrained by form.

Wendy Wheeler is Professor Emeritus of English Literature and Cultural Inquiry at London Metropolitan University. She is also a Visiting Professor at Goldsmiths, University of London and RMIT in Melbourne, Australia. She has been a Visiting Professor on the Literature and the Environment programme at the University of Oregon, and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh where she also collaborated on the Environmental Values project between 2008 and 2010. She is the author of four books, two on biosemiotics, and many essays on the topic in journals and edited collections. She is currently completing her fifth book The Flame and Its Shadow: Reflections on Nature and Culture from a Biosemiotic Perspective.

This free public lecture is supported through the Norman Macgeorge Bequest. All welcome.