Terence Cave is a British literary scholar and professor emeritus at the University of Oxford.
He is a member of Academia Europaea, The British Academy, The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, a Knight of the Ordre national du Mérite, and an honorary doctorate at the University of London.
In 2009, Cave won the prestigious Balzan Prize for his studies of literature after 1500.
Abstract: Waiting
Major shifts in the constitution of the human world, whether they are perceived as arising internally (as in the case of war), or externally (climate change), or somewhere in between (disease, species extinction), create disturbance at their temporal border: what one might call the anxiety of kairos.
This talk will address some key features and examples of such disturbance within a broadly cognitive frame of reference. Its examples will be drawn primarily from a cluster of literary texts (those affiliated with C. P. Cavafy’s 1904 poem ‘Waiting for the barbarians’ and J. M. Coetzee’s 1980 novel bearing the same title), but it will also invoke historical crises both ancient and modern.
The central thread is provided by the title: modalities of waiting (including expectation and non-fulfilment) will be explored in their cognitive, ecological, and ideological contexts, in order to ground a reflection on (a) what it means to live on the current perceived temporal border (a kairos which cannot fully be conceived as such until after it occurs, if it does), and (b) how, while waiting, ‘we’ (humans), in our political and social ecologies, might engage or fail to engage in appropriate action.