วีดีโอ

Thank you Professor Clark, I found your talk enlightening and insightful. It honours Plath's work and legacy above everything else, which I think is what she truly deserves as an artist.

I'm so delighted I found this page.

At the time of her death Plath was prescribed antidepressants with side effects that were dangerous to certain individuals. I should know - i was one of them. They are no longer prescribed.

I do not think there can be any explaination for the misunderstood talent of Slyvia Plath some 62 years post career.

What a wonderful talk. Glad to see Professor Lee still going. I loved her biography of Virginia Woolf, and this is only adding to my interest in her work. Much thanks for your tireless efforts and deep insights. All the best.

Read someone competent! This is shallow commentary! Empty! Immature! Think for yourself!

Oxford has been a wasteland for 20 years

Phoney - Superficial - Devoid of Sentiment - Enotionally immature- Incompetent - Lackey - Petty

OMG. to interview Dame Imogen Cooper and to read off the paper. I could have done better ! ;-)

A wonderfully informative and compassionate discussion. Thank you.

A well- ordered, succinctly delivered out -line of resesrch on Lessing' s life writing starting from and going back to the Zimbawe farm house. It throws some light at Lessing's later literary interests as they grew out of her early experiences. So far I have read short stories by Lessing, but will also look for her memoirs now.

Clark is a good biographer but a terrible speaker .. the volume of this video is frustratingly and disgustingly low, (regardless of upping it to 100% ) the speaker is mostly mumbling, almost inaudible!

Thanks Natasha and the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing. This is an illuminating talk. My only regret is that I have come to it so late.

Thank you. Need to read her book. Never heard of her until the book.

Thank you for an excellent explanation. It is obviously a labor of love for you. Her translations have been the voice in my head for years. I felt a kinship without knowing a thing about the woman. At least now I know something, thanks to you.

I read “Red Comet” in 19 days. It’s by far the the most fascinating biography I’ve ever read. I was struck with awe at Plath’s devotion to her art. If ever there was someone deserving of the title “writer,” it is her.

10:19

Sylvia Plath ....... Drama Queen ......She abandoned her children and no one will forgive her for that . Let's be real .

Thank you Dame/Dr. Hermione Lee for taking time out of your busy schedule in dwelling on "life-writing" and the associated angst being perceived as "eccentricity". After all *normal is not something to aspire to, it's something to get away from*. Let's foster this spirit to live life fully now, as also read and/both write it. Perhaps, "genius" is the inexhaustibly capacity to do what one wants to and let our "genii" not be "affear'd" in pursuing the same. Was it Biddulph Martin? I'm forgetting the names as well. If we see the her/history of Theory and the her/history of Ideas as the her/history of shapes, "eccentricity" is not a bad shape of thought itself. One is always tip-toeing around the kernel, until one collapses in an inter-stellar manner to the centre. Personally, one of my greatest self-achievements have been very strong and vivid dreams. During the second year of my college, Professor Lee, I would have very long dreams and I preferred them over attending the morning 9:05 to 9:50 am classes. I would then clean everything spic and span on and off and seek the sublime in the domestic. I gazed at the woody furniture and penetrate itself visuality through the "polysaccharide" signifier floating in my literary imagination. During this time, I was not Woolf-literate and had only so much as heard about it deploying the "stream-of-consciousness" technique. The "subterranean" and the submarine often recur as objective correlatives of any Woolf-afterthought as one sub/un/consciously lives her "life-text" while walking out on the market and saying to the first acquaintance: "Hi Kenta!" and "awful! awful!" in self-consciousness if anything goes awry or is set askew. But O.C. is not the fitting lexicon to "describe" Woolf. That's why a Norton Woolf, is well-nigh implausible since "describing" Woolf is being prescriptive. "Clinical" almost for someone who patronized the former, binding and printing with her bare hands and her dear husband in the Hogarth House. As an aside, in the Sex and The City "text", in "The Domino Effect" episode in Season 6, I believe, the convalescence become the locus of contemplating the authenticity of relationship between Big and Carrie. Things heat up as Carrie doesn't know if Big will succumb to the angioplasty he'd been supposedly undergoing, evoking a "the gradual isolation of the human subject from the need for human contact" (Mukhopadhyaya, Priyasha in "Death and the Automobile). The article published in HU is crucial since it retains its modernity to the 21st century reader despite being imbricated strictly within the inter-war years and the associated techno-philia/phobia. The un-missable paralleling, complementing of the avian and the airplane in Mukhopadhyaya's short but interesting article, reminds one of the airplane which everyone looks up to. Flight is seen as the harbinger of good times and "prostheses" is seen as being "extra-linguistic" by returning to the body, en-shaping it through the technological. Perhaps, this is the wedding of the technical sciences in theory for now, also exemplified in Geeta Patel's highly inter-textual "Techno-intimacy", that, however, "may I just say thank god", eschews the Futurist perfection. I'm also inclined to think of the lack of fear of death which is Futurism's obsession with a personal masculinist quest to conquer if not pursue speed, exemplified by Chris Hemsworth's exceptional portrayal of James Hunt in "Rush" (2013). I am afraid of the dangers of inflecting the techno-tachyic with the masculinism in this regard, "but deader than dead", is a continual MOB for the masculinist journey, although I could be erroneous in generalizing my specific stand-point. The article's reference to "guillotine" I think underscores the revving up of the spirit as the verve of the masculine life one so misses. I miss it when I see a bike whoosh past me for instance, or if I see a plane take off while still tangential to the tarmac. "Guillotine" is the proverbial death-card in the Tarrot. Haha. And I if I were to cherrypick the "political subject" here and rather pursue my unity, I would say James Hunt was also pursuing the personal is the political project in his own way by making passionate love with the nurse. He seems to have a life of his own, aware of but not at all influenced by his family. He imitates Samantha Jones in being able to have a passionate moment with the air-hostess/female-cabin-crew aboard his flight and it is a sorry state that patriarchy overdetermines the lack of such life-style choices to very few. And indeed, futurist morality is sexual which incorporates the national, the fiscal, the environmental, the social, the personal-political. The re-birth of the Futurist Subject was announced, methinks by the Samantha Character who exercises choices both on/off-screen although the context is pretty pink and not the timbre of the metal, not the "violent jolt of the capital". I'm now inclined to think of myself as Futurist who foresees life, not death. :))

Geez, she bangs on in EVERY interview about Plath's art being overshadowed by the drama of her death.. Does she think this is an original or unique insight? So many other scholars and biographers have made the same point, it's a little redundant in itself. She claims others "patronize" Plath but seems to patronize potential readers.

Yes, l agree.Just started reading Emily Dickinson- a real Challenge.

I do SO hope that Ms. Lee will one day turn her formidable attention to Emily Dickinson, another “eccentric”.

Hemingway and Wallace were much older and had lived much longer lives than Sylvia which is why her suicide is always associated with her more

lol

Volume is WAYYY to low!!! please learn about compression, re edit the video, and then re post!!! :)

The poem spoken of here (written in 1951) called "I Am An American"... comes up nowhere on Google Search. Super interesting.

If you had bee n my prof, definitely would have wanted to take English courses in university. It's interesting that you are reading here though. But fine, when you talk, you make quite a lot of sense.

I thoroughly enjoyed Red Comet. Wonderfully done. Thank you!!!

I decided to try out natural stuff by giving a try to #dralamale am so glad that I was able to cure my HSV2 with his product.

Foster Wallace and Hemingway were already highly regarded writers prior to their suicide, whereas Plath was not. That is why her suicide is central to people's understanding of her: it's what made her famous. It has little or nothing to do with the fact that she is female. Virginia Woolf also committed suicide and that fact is not frequently mentioned in relation to her.

Utterly well interpreted meaning of life- writing. I am from Nepal

Great presentation.Once again we see how the prejudice and ignorance of the barbaric Catholic West in its never ending jealousy of great and illuminating ideas festers in the black heart of all things Catholic.

This is so inspiring, thank you

Thank you so much for this Professor Clark; I have only very recently read the poetry of Sylvia Plath - the Faber and Faber Collected poems; I have never read The Bell Jar - as I am bipolar the subject matter of the novel - mental illness - is, as something I have experienced for decades since I was 18, an experience I share with Plath - although obviously differently from Plath's own experience of mental illness - I have a lot of insight into and knowledge of my mental illness. Plath's poetry when I first read it instantly struck me as being so directly original, forceful and emotionally compelling that some of Plath's poems almost struck me in the face; I find the TS Elliot quote you give somewhat limiting; I was a child of the 1950's and I was raised within a very female environment; I see women as total equals; at least I hope I do. A great deal is known about Sylvia Plath really; Plath is similar to Virginia Woolf perhaps whose literature is extensive and Woolf's life as seen by her contemporaries is very, very well recorded; I am very, very interested in Emily Bronte - and very, very little is known about Bronte - and what we do know has been often disguised and screened by her sister Charlotte Bronte; I am an English graduate with some knowledge of the differing literary forms and creative artists who used them; it is the lives of great creative artists that fascinate me; I find all people totally fascinating; so to me at least the conjectural psychoanalytical insights one can gain from reading creative texts as being essentially aspects of selfhoods expressed in so many ways by the writer is an imaginative and fascinating addendum to the artist and their form; form is not the author? What can we know of Shakespeare and Emily Bronte for example - as people and consummate artists - if we cannot try to explore their minds through their art? To me art/life is a duality and always shall be. Is there a plaque recording the life of Sylvia Plath in Westminster Abbey yet? There is of Ted Hughes.

Thank you for this Dame Hermione; much appreciated. I am a Birkbeck London University English graduate and studied Woolf in the early 1980's. I am also bipolar myself; you said Dame Hermione once on a TV programme ages ago that Woolf's novels aren't so great as many people consider them to be; and that Woolf had a profound insight into the creative imaginative mind; I totally agree. However, Woolf is too idealised politically as a writer to satisfy more and more people I now think. Professor Barbara Hardy of Birkbeck said in a lecture I attended that Woolf's novels were nebulous; this was probably almost a dismissal of Woolf due to Woolf's lack of societal structuring from multi-form angles. Virginia Woolf never escaped from the prison of her upper class ideas; she was a snob; she had a definite and profound aversion to ordinary people - especially the working classes. Her room of one's own was essentially her room and you needed a private income to live in that protected room. Woolf never managed to fuse body and mind - she had a near dread of her body and waste products. I was once totally a profound admirer of Woolf - but my views now have changed. I regard her novel To the Lighthouse as an exquisite work of literary art; and some of her essays interest me. Woolf is still I think held to be a feminist icon; I am a man - a well educated man - and I find the early Victorian writer Emily Bronte far more of a icon; Bronte did fuse mysticism with violence and the earth; she was not terrified of existence - but faced it bravely; Emily Bronte - if she had lived longer - would have become a major European writer; Virginia Woolf will never be this I think. This is not an all-out attack on Virginia Woolf; I am a male intense admirer of a limited amount of Woolf's creative work. One can stay in bed as Lamb and Woolf might have done if one is nursed and paid for by others - most people had to work and they did. I have experienced a bipolar illness since the age of 18 and I am now 73. And this little personal estimation of Woolf I have definitely condensed without looseness - or made the attempt to do so; nebulous being is self-being all-inclusiveness - one understands why Woolf drowned herself in the waters near her privileged home - for in many ways nothing is more totally one symbolically I think than the seas; I have listened to Woolf's vision of a language she could construct to suit herself - a speech is available from a radio programme that Woolf broadcast once - and it seems a somewhat grandiose vision at least to me. Sadly, I think Woolf's new language she would have pushed as the acceptable language of an elite. If only she had the dual world experience of Emily Bronte - Woolf may then have become a major writer; Woolf is not a genius; very brilliant; and not as original as most readers think.

Back in 1978, I wrote my thesis on 'Ariel'. I didn't know what to make of the (then very incomplete, often extremely biased) biographic picture that was painted of the poet herself. I basically analysed 'Ariel' using the close reading approach, but even then it was practically impossible to ignore e.g. the biographical notes made by Ted Hughes. It was while translating 'Ariel' in Dutch (a very good exercise for close readers) that I fully realized that her poetry was far more complex and important than could be derived from any of these biographic views. Through the years, I've been following biographic and other publications on Plath from afar, but I never thought I would ever see one that fully demonstrated the phenomenal achievement that Plath's life and work is. Especially after reading 'American Isis' by Carl Rollyson, I gave up. Until 'Red Comet' appeared. I know that the final word on an artist can never be said, but this to me feels like a circle that, finally after so many years, has been closed.Thank you so much!

Wonderful .... Thank you Dame Hermione.

This was so so fascinating! Thank you

Absolutely beautifully explained. People are so often confused when I say I'm a life writer. Even more so if I say I research phenomenology! Let's hope we soon can get back into the lecture theatres.

Tony, fascinating to hear about your work. As you say, everyone has a story, whether they think it or not. I've sent your details to someone who is about to embark on writing their life story. Hopefully she will get in touch with you!!

Highly interesting!

hi. how can i contact you?

Can’t wait to check out some of your other videos!! Good luck with growing your channel. Have you ever heard of SMZeus . c o m?! You could use it to promote your videos!