“How to Live. What to Do.”

Department of English and Creative Writing

Goldsmiths Writers' Centre presents...“How to Live. What to Do.”

This event will be onlineSpeaker: Josh CohenWe tend to draw a strict line of demarcation between reality and fiction. And yet fictional characters are a key part of our inner reality, while our real relationships are inevitably shaped by our imaginative needs and wishes. In How to Live. What to Do, Josh Cohen, psychoanalyst and Goldsmiths professor of literary theory, plots a course through the various stages of our lives, discovering the insights literature has to offer and exploring its constant interplay with our delay reality. Beginning with Wonderland’s Alice, he tracks the resonances between fiction and real life (his own and the lives he encounters in the consulting room), meeting the creations of authors from Goethe to James Baldwin, Sally Rooney to Marilyn Robinson. Join us for a discussion of how fiction might help us to live with the ordinary and impossible dilemmas life sends our way. Chair: Ardashir Vakil