Dr Edel Semple to deliver plenary lecture at Saint Louis University

13 May 2015

Friday 22nd May, The Department of English at Saint Louis University (Madrid Campus)

The Department of English at Saint Louis University – Madrid Campus will host its Thirteenth Annual International Academic Conference on the theme of "Desire, Death, and Dialogue: In Bed with the Text"on Friday 22 May and Saturday 23 May. The conference seeks to explore the fundamental links between desire and death in literature.  In both classical and Christian traditions, the origins of our mortality are indelibly linked to the erotic impulse embodied in the figures of Pandora and Eve and in their curiously suggestive symbols, the box and the apple. The conference may be thought of as an exploration of the literature of love and of loss, or as an interrogation of the sexual and the fatal, and the relationship, in literature, between the two. Dr Semple's plenary explores desire, mortality, power, and authorship in an infamous erotic poem by Thomas Nashe, and is entitled “Togeather let us live and dye”: desire in “The Choice of Valentines.”