You are cordially invited to Prof Joyce Goggin’s (University of Amsterdam) intriguing talk on the intersection of narrative and knitting in the works of Charles Dickens, “‘Trifles make the sum of life’: Dickens, Knitting and Narrative.”
Mark your calendars for Thursday, 2/11/2023, at 13:30-15:00, and find us in Room 112 of the Old Building. To participate in the event, kindly fill out this form.
“In this talk I discuss the relationship between text(uality) and knitting in Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities and David Copperfield, and how knitting serves as shorthand for character and daily life. My focus is on how knitting signifies differently in each of these two novels and how knitting is presented as a palpable language or a kind of code and archive. In this regard, I will also address how knitting relates to Dickens’ own remarkable relationship with language, and how his fictional accounts of knitting as language encode many things from menace and death to coziness and domestic comfort. This talk will include an historical contextualization of what it meant to knit when Dickens was writing and creating characters like Mme Defarge and Mrs. Heep, particularly where this concerns gender and knitting, and knitting as ‘unseen,’ undervalued labour.”
