- Title
- The Ethics of Reading in the Double Negative
- Creator
- Rolls, Alistair
- Relation
- Still Loitering: Australian Essays in Honour of Ross Chambers p. 45-64
- Publisher
- Peter Lang Limited, International Academic Publishers
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2020
- Description
- As I considered what kind of contribution I could make to this volume, I found myself in the perhaps unusual position of having written my own homage to Ross Chambers while he was still alive. I only had the chance to meet Ross once, on Monday 7 July 2003, following a keynote address that he had given at the annual Australian Society for French Studies (ASFS) conference, which was held that year at the University of Queensland. So, I was not able to form a friendship with him, which might have allowed me to express my debt to him for the ways in which he had enabled me to think about reading, and especially about reading Baudelaire, in a less formal way. As a result, my avenue for paying tribute to Ross was, as it has been for many of us, I expect, the use of his work as a cornerstone of my own attempts to grapple with issues of French studies. Loiterature, in particular, is a constant presence in my bibliographies: it haunts my work, to use a reference from that text that I quote frequendy.1 Not that opportunities for personal communication did not arise. As I learned, Ross was not only a great man of letters, but also a great writer of letters. I was treasurer of ASFS at the time of that conference at UQ which meant that I used to receive cheques from people renewing their membership. Ross's renewal form that year contained a postcard with a short, friendly message. It was just a reminder that we had met, designed to wish a young scholar well as he embarked on his own career in French studies in Australia. It was, of course, a gesture typical of Ross.
- Subject
- ethics; Ross Chambers; loiterature; French studies
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1434922
- Identifier
- uon:39550
- Identifier
- ISBN:9781789972566
- Language
- eng
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