The New College Literary Salon: Animal Languages
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 'Animal Languages' and it will take place on
Monday, 9 March 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 New College Literary Salon is generously funded by the New College Bayley Fund, in memory of John Bayley (1925-2015).
The Salon menu for Hilary and Trinity Terms 2026 can be found here.
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.
In the third session, we will explore the abilities and limits of literary texts to voice non-human animal languages, reflect on our co-habitation with animals, speak on behalf of animals:
Suggested short readings:
- Jean-Christophe Bailly, The Animal Side
- Walter Benjamin, Butterfly Hunt
- Julio Cortázar, Axolotl
- D.H. Lawrence, Whistling of Birds
- Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino 8
- Please, find the poem in translation on pp. 229/231/233; Martin Travers's commentary is also included in the pdf and may serve as a useful background information for those of you inclined to probe further
- Wisława Szymborska, Tarsier
