About
Notes
Notes to Literature
Adult Education
Notes to Literature is an educational project that borrows its title from a collection of essays by the German philosopher and critic, Theodor Adorno. A recent translator explained her choice of “Notes to” rather than “Notes on” in terms of the allusion to music in the original title (Noten Zur Literatur). But “Notes on” might also suggest that the literature in question is simply and unproblematically there: static and self-contained, and awaiting explanation by a relevant expert. “Notes to” invokes the idea of creative response. The tuition and seminar series at NL all provide relevant notes on the literature taught. But their aim is in the direction of notes to, in the sense of intelligent and creative response to important works of literature, history and philosophy. Notes has been set up with the goal of fostering and enabling such engagements outside of the university setting.
Dr Jonathan Gallagher
Postdoctoral fellow
Birkbeck College, University of London
My doctorate was awarded in July 2019 (University of Edinburgh) for a thesis on state-formation and religious poetry in seventeenth-century England. This research focused on the poetry of John Donne, George Herbert and John Milton, and has been published in some of the leading academic journals in my field, including Modern Philology (“Poetics of Obedience,” Nov. 2017), and Studies in Philology (“Breaking The Church,” 2020). Currently, I am a postdoctoral fellow at Birkbeck College, University of London, where I’m preparing the manuscript for my first book, Ungodded England: A Study of State-formation and Religious Poetry. Based on my doctoral work, this research advances a two-fold thesis. First, I argue that English political and social relations, characterised by increasingly impersonal forms of rule and obligation, were effectively “ungodded” (Dryden’s term) by the end of the seventeenth century; and second, I suggest that the major religious poetry of the period, from the Holy Sonnets to Paradise Lost, offers us a vital and critical response to this process of desacralisation.
I am also in the early stages of a new research project that will try to think about prosody in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, in the context of colonial reform, expropriation, and race discourse in sixteenth-century Ireland.