Henry Miller Symposium (Goldsmiths University, London)

Tropic of Cancer, Henry Miller’s debut novel, was published in Paris in 1934. An extraordinary street-level picaresque that combined high modernist literary styles with a graphic and irreverent approach to sex, it was immediately banned throughout the English-speaking world. Despite high praise from T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Samuel Beckett, Aldous Huxley and George Orwell and later homages from Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs and Norman Mailer, Miller has until recently been conspicuous by his absence from studies of modernism and the avant-garde.

This Symposium brings together eight international scholars whose work attempts to restore Miller’s reputation in the twenty first century. The aim is to build on a growing body of research that reassesses his literary and cultural contribution by moving beyond political correctness, his image as a pornographer and the equally reductive notion that he was some kind of sexual prophet.

How does Henry Miller fit in to the modernist lineage – particularly in relation to those ‘high’ modernists who marked him out for glory? Why has he been neglected for so long? Most importantly, what is Miller’s relevance now, in an age that imagines itself free of the repressive taboos he was blacklisted for challenging?

The event is free but please register at the following link to ensure admission: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/a-gob-of-spit-in-the-face-of-art-a-symposium-to-mark-the-80th-anniversary-of-henry-millers-tropic-tickets-12588415289

For more information visit: http://www.gold.ac.uk/ecl/gob-of-spit-in-the-face-of-art/ or http://agobofspitinthefaceofart.wordpress.com/

The organiseres will also be posting news, updates and links via facebook and twitter: https://www.facebook.com/events/293011817545869/
https://twitter.com/agobofspit/