On Fictocriticism - Carol Mavor in conversation

Event details

Following her reading from her new book Like the Sea - Dancing with Mary Glass on Monday 21st October Professor Carol Mavor will discuss her current writing practice which she calls ‘fictocriticism’ with James Boaden from the department of History of Art. Mavor will talk about how this work fits into a distinguished career as an ‘artist historian’ and how a writer might begin to address the life of a practitioner who leaves almost no trace.

Carol Mavor is Professor Emeritus of Art History at the University of Manchester. As a writer who takes creative risks in form (literary and experimental) and political risks in content (sexuality, race in America, child-loving and the maternal), she has published widely.

Her Reading Boyishly: Roland Barthes, J. M. Barrie, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Marcel Proust, and D. W. Winnicott was named by Grayson Perry in the Observer as his 2008 ‘Book of the Year’. Mavor’s Blue Mythologies: A Study of the Colour ‘coaxes us into having a less complacent attitude…even when it comes to something as apparently innocuous as a color’ (Los Angeles Review of Books). For Maggie Nelson, Aurelia: Art and Literature Through the Eyes and Mouth of the Fairy Tale is ‘enigmatic and as full of magic as its subjects’. Max Porter sees Like a Lake as ‘a novella teasing an essay, or an erotic ghost haunting a fictional memoir, or a negative searching for its lost prints. It is an unnerving question-machine where desire, memory, loss and invention are staged, folded and held, tasted, re-made and undone. It’s a strange, vivid, troubling and beautiful book’. For Geoffrey Batchen, Serendipity: The Afterlife of Objects ‘reflects on the magical power of writing itself’.

Carol Mavor Instagram
Carol Mavor Web page

Image: The author, courtesy Carol Mavor