主讲人：Seán Hand（英国华威大学荣休教授、欧洲科学院院士、英国高等教育学院高级院士）

主持人：杨革新（浙江大学教授）

时间：2026年10月16日10:00-12:00

地点：浙江大学紫金港北2-314

讲座题目：Reading à rebours: Recursion as Ethical Criticism

主讲人介绍

Professor Seán Hand is Emeritus Professor at the University of Warwick. He holds degrees from the universities of Oxford (M.A. Oxon, D. Phil.) and Warwick (MBA, D.Litt.), and an executive qualification from INSEAD. He is a Chevalier des Palmes Académiques and a member of the Academia Europ?a. He is a Senior Fellow of the UK Higher Education Academy, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He has written, edited or translated 13 books and special issues; published 62 articles, chapters and reports; and delivered over 100 papers and lectures.

讲座提要

The paper considers the motivations and stakes exposed when a critic turns the procedures of interpretation back upon his or her own earlier criticism. Reading here à rebours across four moments in an academic career, the paper identifies the recurring critical temptation to discover the origin, secret, structure or explanation that will finally make a text yield. In each case interpretation is seen to encounter something that resists such completion. The paper therefore proposes recursion as a model for critical practice: neither a surrender to indeterminacy nor a rejection of critical knowledge. It then argues that ethical criticism may reside precisely in this capacity to remain answerable to what interpretation cannot fully possess: distinguishing what has not been deciphered, what cannot be formulated, and what perhaps ought not to be revealed. Criticism becomes, on this account, not the progressive accumulation of definitive answers but a recursive practice in which each act of understanding remains open to revision by the object or other that responds.

浙江大学世界文学跨学科研究中心

2026年10月9日