The New College Literary Salon: Resonance
Looking for a space where you can share ideas, enjoy reading literature, explore literary theory with others?
We have created it: The New College Literary Salon.
This session will consider the theme of 'Embodiment' and will take place on
Monday, 16 February at 8.30pm in the MacGregor Matthews Room.
Wine, soft drinks and nibbles will be provided.
The New College Literary Salon brings together fellows and students from across the college with an interest in literature, to make a convivial space for reading and thinking together. At a time when it is getting harder to make time for shared reflection and contemplation, the New College Literary Salon offers a period of slow time, in which we collectively immerse ourselves in readings of poetry, fiction and philosophy. Every term we gather together a range of short texts that cluster around the issues that are most pressing for us today – climate change, the impact on our lives of new technologies, the dwindling of the democratic public sphere. We meet for evening discussion over wine, to establish what Edith Wharton calls a republic of the spirit.
The Salon menu for Hilary and Trinity Terms 2026 can be found here
The New College Literary Salon
In six sessions throughout Hilary and Trinity Terms, we will be celebrating literary expression as an integral part of the human condition by engaging with seminal texts and theories. Our specific focus this year is about literary expression as a form of embodiment — and its role in an age of artificial intelligence. We will be reading travelogues and nature writing, as well as theoretical texts on reading, sense & perception, creativity.
This is a great opportunity to mingle with like-minded peers across subject boundaries in an inclusive environment for undergraduates, postgraduates and academic teachers. We will circulate this year's programme in the first meeting and it will be published here on the college webpage.
In this first session, we will be celebrating literature as a form of resonance with individual, social and ecological environments. We will explore practices or writing of resonance and their importance for creativity in a culture that privileges productivism and consumerism.
Suggested short readings:
