The 10th Annual
Frank Sargeson Memorial Lecture
Frank Sargeson in his garden at 14 Esmonde Rd, Takapuna, mid
1940s. Photo: Frank Hofmann. Courtesy Stephen Hofmann.
“The Bad Difficult Years”: Sargeson’s Post-War Reconstruction
John Newton
‘Glover in his blatant way used to say, “Remember that you’ll be pre-war – you’ll be completely
out of it now – forget that you ever put pen to paper.’ I was groping around for a while.’
Sargeson’s relative silence in the 1950s separates his work into two distinct phases. The author of the classic early stories
is almost unrecognisable as the fussy mannerist of Memoirs of a Peon. So how does one turn into the other? Are they
really the ‘same’ writer? This lecture looks at Sargeson in the years immediately following the war in an effort to make
sense of this curious evolution. It asks if it still makes sense to refer to the post-war Sargeson as a ‘literary nationalist’.
And it considers ways in which we might re-think the period to situate more accurately its most important fiction writer.
Formerly of the English Department at the University Canterbury, John Newton now lives on
Waiheke Island where he works as a poet and independent scholar. He is the author of The
Double Rainbow: James K. Baxter, Ngāti Hau and the Jerusalem Commune (VUP, 2009), and
of numerous articles on mid-century New Zealand literature. In 2010 he held the J.D. Stout
Research Fellowship at Victoria University. His new volume of poems, Family Songbook, will be
published next year by VUP.
Photo courtesy Robert Cross
Date
Time
Venue
Parking
RSVP
Thursday 16 August 2012
Lecture begins at 5.30pm. Light refreshments to follow, from 6.30pm
S.G.01, University of Waikato
Gate 1, off Knighton Road, Hamilton
Please RSVP to Hannah Wright by Monday 13 August
[email protected] or call (07) 838 4922
Hosted
by the University of Waikato Cultural Committee, the Friends of the Hamilton Public Library Association, and the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences.