OxTalks will soon move to the new Halo platform and will become 'Oxford Events.' There will be a need for an OxTalks freeze. This was previously planned for Friday 14th November – a new date will be shared as soon as it is available (full details will be available on the Staff Gateway).
In the meantime, the OxTalks site will remain active and events will continue to be published.
If staff have any questions about the Oxford Events launch, please contact halo@digital.ox.ac.uk
Does art cure our anxieties or exacerbate them? This reading group explores transforming literary representations of mental health and engages critically with the therapeutic (or non-therapeutic) role of the arts. We aim to bring together a small cohesive cross-period group from a variety of interdisciplinary fields to consider the relationship between literature and forms of mental illness. Drawing from a variety of literary texts (as well as films and paintings!), we discuss how writing both cures and invites forms of madness, what one might mean when one says that a work is ‘intense’ or ‘depressing’, and how a genre’s distinctive formal features represent the inner workings of the mind.
We believe that our critical engagement with representations of mental health in literature can help us understand the role of arts in a world of self-help books and bibliotherapy. As discussions about mental health make their way into the mainstream, we are interested in how literature interacts with social and historical conceptions of mental illness.
Webpage: english.web.ox.ac.uk/reading-group-literature-and-mental-health
Reading list: drive.google.com/drive/folders/1u3IaqwXUPyeOKKQ0oznFdeMODLlTw35g
This series features in the following public collections:
