Procrastination Oxford brochure

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OXFORD

PROCRASTINATIONCULTURAL EXPLORATIONS

Wolfson College University of Oxford

2 July 2014

SCHEDULEthe Leonard Wolfson Auditorium

8.30-9amRegistration

t9-10amKeynote 1

Chair: Arthur Downing

Professor Avner Offer (Oxford)When to Stop?

t10-11.30am

Panel 1: Procrastination and creativityChair: Dr Amia Srinivasan

Dr Will May (Southampton)Porlocks Whim: Poetry as procrastination

Alex Belsey (Kings College London)Angst, Apathy, and Indulgence in the Studio of Keith Vaughan

Oliver Neto (Bristol)Preparatory to Anything Else...: Joyce, boredom

and creative procrastinationt

11.30am-12 noonCoffeet

12-1pmPanel 2: Procrastination and resistance

Chair: Dr Tracey Potts

Dr Mrinalini Greedharry (Laurentian, Ontario)Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Figuring procrastination as tactic

Anna Della Subin (Independent)Against Procrastination: Albert Cossery and the politics of laziness

t1-2pmLunch

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3.30-4pmCoffeet

4-5pmPanel 5: reflections on self-HelP

Chair: Dr Amia Srinivasan

Dr Barbara Leckie (Carleton, Ontario)Victorian Procrastination:

Or, Middlemarch as a primer on procrastination in ten easy lessons

Dr Susan Machum (St Thomas, New Brunswick)Overcoming Procrastination: A critical examination of trade books designed

to increase productivity and ensure things get donet

5.15-6.15pm (The Haldane Room)Keynote 2

Chair: Elizabeth Chatterjee

Dr Tracey Potts (Nottingham)Undoing the Maths: Notes toward a genealogy of procrastination

t6.15pm

Drinks reception, Cunctator Prize Presentation and Maanarama Exhibition

t7.15pmDinner

2-3.30pmParallel Sessions

Panel 3: Procrastination and timeSeminar Room

Chair: Elizabeth Dubois

Johannes Schlegel (Potsdam)Procrastination as Deceleration in

Shakespeares The Tempest

Lilith Dornhuber de Bellesiles (UC Berkeley)The Queer Art of Procrastination

Rebecca Birrell (Oxford)Coming Soon: Rachael Allen, Sam Riviere

and a poetics of procrastination

Panel 4: Procrastination and Placethe Leonard Wolfson Auditorium

Chair: Arthur DowningKamel Boudjemil (Sorbonne, Paris)

From Procrastination to Revolution: Guy Debord, the Situationists, and the last radical avant-garde

Pelle Valentin Olsen (Oxford)Idle Days in Baghdad:

The emergence of bourgeois time and the coffee shop as a site of procrastination

Susanne Bayerlipp (Ludwig-Maximilians-University)Procrastinating Abroad: Exchanges of letters and moral discourse on academic travel in the age of

Erasmus and after

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MANIFESTO

Its been called many things: a sin, an addiction, a disease, a devil. Estimates suggest that 80-95% of college students engage in it, and 20% of people are chronic sufferers. For Samuel Taylor Coleridge, it was a moral idiocy, an imbecility of the will, a haunting, an emptiness, a posthumous state. For Abraham Lincolns wife it was her evil genius. For Thomas de Quincey it was worse than murder. Lust? Morphine? Bad language on the Sabbath day?

We mean, of course, procrastination. It is ubiquitousperhaps especially among academics and writers. Yet for all the Wildean witticisms it has inspired, procrastination has remained remarkably understudied. The vast majority of existing works are, unsurprisingly, prescriptive: its a dirty word. There even exists a support group, Procrastinators Anonymous.

Existing studies are largely confined to behavioural economics and psychology. The social sciences and humanities are delayed arrivals on the analytical scene. Yet many of procrastinations most curious aspects are not well captured by psychology or economics. Its study is necessarily interdisciplinary.

First, the English language is unusual in having a word for the phenomenon. Proverbs against procrastination exist in many languagesbut without any single-word equivalent. Nonetheless, similar concepts and debates can be found outside the Anglophone world, like Goncharovs Oblomov (1859) or the francophone writings of the Egyptian-born Albert Cossery, patron saint of laziness. Speakers of Indian English have coined a new word, timepass, while Arabic has the nebulous taswif. Is procrastination a uniquely anglophone concept, then, or a cultural universal?

Similarly, what is the relationship between procrastination and its (typically unpleasant) conceptual and psychological bedfellows, from laziness and hesitation to boredom, fear, and disgust? The concept of postponement has always appeared morally fraughtamongst classical authors delay had both its defenders (Herodotus) and detractors (Cicero).

By the time it entered the English language in the 16th century, however, the connotations of procrastination had become almost chronically negative. Preachers railed against it, and in 1742 Edward Young coined its enduring epithet: Procrastination is the thief of time. Today self-help literature propagates ideals of risk-taking and going with your gut, with the procrastinator the entrepreneurs miserable inverse. Is it coincidence that condemnation of procrastination increased alongside the rise of the factory, the office, and most recently the portfolio career?

Yet we also live in the age of spam, open-plan offices, and YouTube cat videos. The boundaries of private life bleed into the workday and the public sphere through flexi-time and social media. Does the organization of modern life inevitably foster procrastination even while denouncing it?

Procrastination still has its defenders too: as a critical component of contemplation and creativity (for Einstein and Bertrand Russell), a weapon of the weak against everyday exploitation (James C. Scott), or even part of a revolutionary right to be lazy (Paul Lafargue).Yet it may stall change through tactical filibustering and bureaucratic inertia. Does procrastination have genuine radical political potential, or is it an enforcer of the status quo?

It is with such open questions that this event begins. Moving beyond self-help prescriptions or notions of irrationality, we seek to explore the historical, social, and cultural dimensions of this most pervasive and ambivalent of phenomena.3

I never put off until tomorrow what I can possibly dothe day after. Oscar Wilde

SPEAKERS and ABSTRACTS

Keynote 1. Professor Avner Offer (Oxford)When to Stop?Procrastination is part of the larger problem of indecision, which is a pervasive response to uncertainty. Each disciplinary approach frames it differently: as an algorithmic problem (economics, decision theory), as a wiring defect of the human brain (psychology), or as fate (the humanities). Indecision predicaments considered include moral autonomy, watching television, mate selection, thesis writing,

technological design, and military planning. Climate change is an indecision problem which threatens civilization. The problem is defined, and solutions

are classified into algorithms, rewiring, and fate.

Avner Offer was the Chichele Professor of Economic History at the University of Oxford from 2000 to 2011. His most recent book, The Challenge of Affluence: Self-control and Well-Being in the United States and Britain since 1950 (OUP, 2006), is a comparative study of consumption and well-being, applying a dynamic conception of myopic choice to evaluate the experience of affluence in the two countries. Currently he is writing a book on From Social Democracy to Market Liberalism, the shift of policy norms from social solidarity to market individualism during the last four decades. He is an Emeritus Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford and a Fellow of the British Academy.

Keynote 2. Dr Tracey Potts (Nottingham)Undoing the Maths: Notes towards a genealogy of procrastination

According to Piers Steel, author of The Procrastination Equation (2012), 95% of us procrastinate at one time or another. Not surprisingly, the issue of self-control and personal productivity has generated both clinical and popular interest, giving rise to a growing body of professional and self-help literature. Both the World Health Organisation and the American Psychiatric Association list procrastination among a cluster of pathological behaviours that cohere in diagnostic categories such as Passive Aggressive Personality Disorder (PAPD) and Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD). At the same time, a veritable industry of cures, treatments and personal growth advice has emerged, ranging from best-selling time-management titles to an expanding universe of smartphone apps designed to keep us motivated and on task.

This paper seeks to question the so-called solid science (Steel) that underpins much of the research on procrastination. Utilizing a genealogical approach (Foucault), the aim is to undermine the emphasis on cure and solution promoted by the clinic, and, more broadly, by self-help guidance, in order to expose the operation of disciplinary techniques and institutions in the constitution of the seemingly indolent, procrastinatory subject. Above all, the intention is to dismantle the equation of procrastination with personality disorder and to disturb the mathematical and neurobiological modeling that serves to blackbox procrastination as a matter of evolutionary hardwiring.

Tracey Potts is Lecturer in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies at the University of Nottingham and Visiting Scholar at Wolfson College, Oxford (2013-14). She is currently working on a cultural biography of clutter and procrastination entitled Neither Use Nor Ornament, for which she has been awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship. 4

Panel 1. PROCRASTINATION and CREATIVITY Dr Will May (Southampton)Porlocks Whim: Poetry as procrastination

Emerson advised would-be poets that the only way to ensure a good mornings work was to put off social engagements for tomorrow: I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls me [...] I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim (Self-Reliance, 1841). Whim becomes an early version of the auto-reply, a way of excusing the creative artist from social or ethical obligations to society. Yet Coleridge found the opposite tactic afforded convenient excuses, too: the interruption of his person from Porlock allowed him to publish a poetic fragment in 1816 when, as Stevie Smith wryly surmised, The truth is I think he was already stuck / With Kubla Kahn (Thoughts about the Person from Porlock, 1962). Procrastination is both the expedient excuse to write poetry and the means to avoid writing it: a poem becomes its own source of distraction. In this paper, I will explore the off-putting possibilities of procrastination for modern poetry by looking at sonnets by E.E. Cummings, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Ashbery. Through careful attention to the poets compositional practice and revisions, I will argue that while a poem might be a form of procrastination, procrastinating over a poem has its own implications for form too.

Will May is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Southampton. He is the author of Postwar Literature: 1950-1990 (Longman, 2010), Stevie Smith and Authorship (OUP, 2010) and the editor of The Collected Poems and Drawings of Stevie Smith (Faber, 2014). His current project is a cultural history of poetry and whimsy.

Alex Belsey (Kings College London)Angst, Apathy, and Indulgence in the Studio of Keith Vaughan

By the early 1960s, British painter Keith Vaughan (1912-77) seemed to have it all; widespread acclaim, famous friends, a doting long-term partner. Yet during this period he confided in his journal an intensity of angst that eclipsed anything written thus far in over two decades of journal-keeping. Sealed for long

periods in his home studio in London, Vaughans productivity and psychological well-being were unravelling. Mounting frustration at the repetitious nature of his

social engagements, his disconnection from the citys sexy young art scene, and an impasse in his own visual practice was transforming him into a cantankerous recluse. Angst

fed apathy as he shunned his partner, rejected invitations, and declared himself out of ideas. Medicating himself with alcohol and prescription drugs, he devoted himself more and more to his indulgencesa habitual pattern of masturbation and self-flagellation that he dressed up in extensive journal entries as a mixture of aesthetic and scientific investigation. This paper will examine the dynamic between the three forces of angst, apathy, and indulgence and how they trapped Vaughan in a cycle of self-loathing and self-destructive behaviours; a cycle that was only exacerbated by his compulsive yet conflicted accounts in his journal.

Alex Belsey is a PhD candidate in English Research at Kings College London. His doctoral research is an archival project on the journal of British painter Keith Vaughan (1912-77). Alex is affiliated with Kings Centre for Life-Writing Research and sits on the steering committee of the Postgraduate Memory Network. He is currently co-editing the fourth issue of Stet, the online postgraduate research journal for the English Department at Kings.

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Oliver Neto (Bristol)Preparatory to Anything Else: Joyce, boredom and creative procrastination

According to his friend Frank Budgen, James Joyce once spent a whole day working on the production of two sentences for his novel Ulysses. When Budgen asked him if he was seeking the mot juste, Joyce, in a now famous response, told him that he had the words already. What I am seeking, he continued, is the perfect order of words in the sentence. This paper will demonstrate how Joyces manipulation of syntax and frequent

deployment of narrative digression, often to the point of pedantry, produce a textual performance of procrastination. It is, moreover, the kind of hyperactive procrastination

commonly associated with boredom. Ulysses is full of characters who procrastinate in order to either fend off or confront boredom. As so often in Joyces writing, the works thematic concern is

embodied by its linguistic medium. The result is a narrative whose procrastination evokes the disquieting experience of being bored.

The broader aim of this paper will be to discuss how the novel form allows us to think about boredom-oriented procrastination as a potentially creative and subversive phenomenon. I shall develop this idea by reading Ulysses against two of Joyces contemporaries: Martin Heidegger and Theodor Adorno. While the two thinkers conceive of the more fundamental experience of boredom in apparently different ways, both treat the role of procrastination as an article of bad faith. Conversely, Joyces creative use of boredom-oriented procrastination in Ulysses demonstrates procrastinations radical potential.

Oliver Neto is a PhD student in English at the University of Bristol. His AHRC-funded project addresses the relationship between boredom and narrative in modernist fiction. His current focus is on the work of James Joyce. Oliver completed his MA at UCL, and his BA at the University of Sussex.

Panel 2. PROCRASTINATION and RESISTANCE Dr Mrinalini Greedharry (Laurentian, Ontario)

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Figuring procrastination as tactic

How might we think about the relationship between the practice of procrastination and an ethics of resistance? Like most other concepts given shape primarily in the domain of psychological discourses, procrastination is presumed to be an affliction we find everywhere, in all types of people. Nevertheless, it is also acknowledged to be a historically specific practice, one that belongs to modernity and takes shape in relation to the material conditions that organize modern life. Writing about Walter Benjamin, for example, Stephanie Polsky traces a particular tactic of procrastination that was necessary for the survival of the German-Jewish petit bourgeois subject under conditions of intense pressure to assimilate and eventually to disappear completely. However, different historical explanations call a wide range of procrastinating subjects into existence. There is colonizer as procrastinator (Young); colonized as procrastinator (Souchou); consumer as procrastinator (Bauman); and producer as procrastinator (Bauman again). In the face of so many accounts of the procrastinating subject, can we distinguish between the parts that procrastination plays in both upholding and unpicking oppressive social systems?

Through a close reading of Ann Cvetkovichs account of psychic and political inertia in Depression: A Public Feeling, I will argue that we can make some important distinctions, if we pay attention to the ways that procrastination is and is not metaphorical. Reading literature confirms that everyones procrastination is different, but literary approaches might illuminate the difference between figurative and literal tactics of procrastination.

Mrinalini Greedharry teaches literary theory and postcolonial studies in the Department of English, Laurentian University, Canada. She is the author of Postcolonial Theory and Psychoanalysis (Palgrave, 2008) and has kept an irregular blog about her own procrastination since 2011 entitled Thinking from here to there. 6

Anna Della Subin (Independent)Against Procrastination: Albert Cossery and

the politics of laziness

The Egyptian novelist Albert Cossery wrote only when he had absolutely nothing better to do. From his arrival in Paris in the mid-1940s until his death at ninety-four in 2008, Cossery lived a life of extreme idleness, sleeping late, venturing out of his austere room at the Hotel La Louisiane only in the afternoons, to sit in the Caf de Flore, watch the girls, and do nothing. On such a schedule Cossery managed to write, in French, at the rate of one new, short novel roughly every decade. Yet the idle auteur

was no procrastinator. For Cossery, laziness was a refusal of the monetization of time, a rejection of the very system in which productivity has value, in which one ought to do

something today instead of tomorrow. His literary activities were in service of the greater cause: when asked why he writes, Cossery would reply, So someone who just read me decides

not to go to work. It was a philosophy best captured in his semi-autobiographical novel Laziness in the Fertile Valley (1949), about a family in the Nile Delta that sleeps all day. Idleness was a protest, a weapon, and an escape from the evils and indignities of a world forever ruled by time-keeping tyrants, in which revolution is futile. With the colonial occupation of Egypt in the 19th century had come the arrival of the clock, and the imposition of European notions of time and punctuality upon the indolent Orient.

When Egypt gained nominal independence from the British in 1922, it was said that, having fallen behind the times, Egypt, and the greater Middle East, was at last awakeningor must awakefrom its long slumber into modernity. The Awakening, or Nahda, has been used as the central, rallying image of every subsequent revolution in Egypt, from Gamal Abdel Nassers 1952 coup to, most recently, the brief regime of the Muslim Brotherhood. This paper will examine how Cossery, and contemporaries such as the Turkish satirist Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar in The Time Regulation Institute (1962), took on themes of sleep and awakening, timeliness and torpor, revolution and inaction in their writings, to remind us that the clock is neither natural nor neutral nor nonpoliticaland as a means of refusing Time.

Anna Della Subin writes about sleepwalkers, grave worship, animal rights in Cairo, mummies, imperial Ethiopian court etiquette, visions of the flood, thirteenth-century occulists, 300-year naps, resurrection, men becoming gods, and gods becoming men. Her work has appeared in Harpers, The White Review, BOMB, Jadaliyya, and The Paris Review Daily, among other publications. She is also a contributing editor at the Middle Eastern art & culture magazine Bidoun. She studied philosophy and classics at the University of Chicago and religion at Harvard.

Johannes Schlegel (Potsdam)Procrastination as Deceleration in Shakespeares The Tempest

Taking The Merchant of Venice as a starting point, my paper argues that the early modern period witnesses an often neglected acceleration in various areas of life and culture, in which discursive formations such as power, economics, mobility, and (national) identity become intertwined. This goes hand in hand with the early modern discovery of timeas recently described by scholars like Anthony Graftonwhich becomes a powerful instance of governmentality, and the sine qua non of procrastination in the first place.

This paper, however, suggests that in Shakespeare, especially in The Tempest, procrastination is introduced as a means of purposely decelerating and thus, to some extent, subverting said regime. It thus challenges notions of subjectification and sovereignty. By means of the plays self-referentiality, procrastination becomes inseparable from the theatre itself, which becomes the medium in which the contradictory, simultaneous anxiety of acceleration and deceleration is negotiated. In order to deal with the threat that is inherent to procrastination, theatre, as I will argue, ultimately converts procrastination into productivity, thus rendering stasis meaningful. Both procrastination and its theatrical transmutation contribute to an early modern cultural technique of speed, that is a closely knit network covering gadgets, artefacts and infrastructures on the one hand, and skills, routines, practices, and techniques on the other.

Johannes Schlegel teaches English literature and cultural studies at Potsdam University, Germany. He has published on literary and cultural theory, Romanticism, and popular culture. Within a couple of weeks, he will hand in his PhD thesis on evil in Romantic literature. In his next project, he will address early modern cultures of speed.

Panel 3. PROCRASTINATION and TIME (Parallel session)

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Lilith Dornhuber de Bellesiles (UC Berkeley)The Queer Art of Procrastination

Reading the practice of procrastination through the lens of contemporary queer theory, this paper argues that procrastination is queer. Similarly to how Judith Jack Halberstam reconceived failure as queer, this papers framing of procrastination reinterprets a societally undesirable practice as interrogating, critiquing, resisting, and queering presumed definitions of labour, time, accomplishment, and resolution. Drawing upon several significant queer theoretical approaches portrays queer procrastination more vividly than as a simple metaphor for defying neoliberal efficiency expectations and ideals.

When understood as the deferment of labour that would produce accomplishment or resolution of responsibility, procrastination can be read as a temporary or provisional failure. Applying abjection and temporality also contribute to a queer reading of procrastination. Describing gay male subjectivity through the humiliation and othering of abjection, David Halperin explains how abjection can be a source of pleasure and affirmation, a site of identification. Deriving from Michel Foucaults views of space and time, queer temporality transgresses traditional temporal delineations, presenting a scepticism well-suited to questioning the temporal assumptions around labelling an action procrastination.

Looking beyond the political and moral implications of queer procrastination, this examination engages procrastinations theoretical encounters. The paper questions the value judgements behind procrastination as an insufficient or even failing practice, considers an agents pleasure and affirmation deriving from subverting societal expectation, and measures again what procrastination would comprise under a queered temporality.

Lilith Dornhuber de Bellesiles is a PhD student in the Rhetoric Department at UC Berkeley. After graduating from Smith College, Lilith held a Research Fulbright in Germany, then received a graduate diploma in philosophy from the University of St Andrews and MSt in womens studies from the University of Oxford.

Rebecca Birrell (Oxford)Coming Soon: Rachael Allen, Sam Riviere and a poetics of procrastination

Best Thing You Can Do Now is Do Nothing Sam Rivieres poem announces half way through his collection 81 Austerities, an overt reference to the theme of procrastination that permeates his work. Primarily, it is the internet that facilitates Rivieres advice to his reader to try not to *do* anything (Guide to the Liberal Cities) and, in particular, pornography. His poem Coming Soon puns on the intimacy

of porn and procrastination, a relationship that according to Rivieres archly self-conscious Index occupies the most privileged position in his collection.

This paper will argue that the theme of procrastination surfaces most strikingly in Rivieres poetic language. The impact of the internets compositional particularities, where one is confronted by clips continually suggestive because of similar content (Joe Dunthorne: Camradefest), is replicated in the metonymic accrual of meaning across the collection. Riviere pairs an imitation of the internets structuring principles with stylistic features mimicking the procrastination attendant, or perhaps even implicit, in internet use. Aural and rhythmical features, as well as meaning itself, function through intricately constructed systems of postponement, delay and deferment. I will pair Rivieres work with Rachael Allens comparable linguistic experiments in the 4Chan poems, which take the imageboard website as formal inspiration.

Using Allens attentiveness to gender as a point of departure, I will go on to discuss the politically oppositional potential of procrastination in both poets work, with particular emphasis in 81 Austerities on the positioning of procrastination against neo-liberal discourse on worklessness and dependency.

Rebecca Birrell is a student on the Womens Studies MSt at the University of Oxford, funded by an AHRC Studentship. She graduated in 2012 from University College London with a BA in English Literature and Language. 8

Kamel Boudjemil (Sorbonne, Paris)From Procrastination to Revolution: Guy Debord,

the Situationists, and the last radical avant-garde

In 1953, Guy Debord wrote on a wall of the Rue de Seine in Paris the slogan Ne travaillez jamais, Never Work.

Guy Debord never worked. He walked a lot in the streets of Paris, certainly drank more than others and developed in his works (written or filmed) theoretical weapons of uncompromising critique of modern society. He

considered this bit of graffiti of tremendous importance throughout his life, including it in his autobiography, Panegyric (1989). The three words contain an

entire program that he intimately applied in practice.

This paper aims to examine how a group of young neo-avant-garde artists, mainly headed by Guy Debord, radicalized through the influence of Marxism and established a program that contained a radical refusal of work at the core of their political project. The Situationist International (SI), considered to be the last avant-garde of the 20th century, reached the apex of its creative output and influence in 1967 and 1968 in shaping the ideas behind the May 1968 insurrections in France.

Procrastination was, according to Guy Debord, a strategy for the realization of the [Marxist] philosophy, a way to achieve in practice Paul Lafargues greatest hope of the right to be lazy (le droit la paresse). This paper will mainly focus on the Lettrist and early years of the SI movements. During this period, the Situationists and early Lettrists had almost finished developing their arsenal of war against work and capitalist alienation, by developing complex and obscure concepts and practices. This paper will outline these practices as a cohesive strategy to avoid work, its alienation and at the same time subvert the city. It will explain how mtagraphie, dtournement, drive (drift), psychogeography, construction of situations, unitary urbanism... were developed all in order to lead a life without work.

Kamel Boudjemil is currently completing his masters in law at the Sorbonne and will start a PhD in Political Science and International Relations on the subject of human rights and corruption in the Arab world at CERI, Sciences Po, Paris.

Pelle Valentin Olsen (Oxford)Idle Days in Baghdad: The emergence of bourgeois time and the coffee shop as a site of procrastination

Recalling his youth in Baghdad, the Iraqi Jewish author and academic Nissim Rejwan describes the endless hours spent in Caf Suisse on Baghdads main street and writes, the coffee shop was quite an institution. Apart from providing a haven for us idlers, it was the ideal meeting place for friends, and it was there that our endless conversations about politics, literature and women were conducted. Through an examination of a number of autobiographical works written by authors and intellectuals who grew up in Baghdad in the first half of the twentieth century, this paper explores how the coffee shop as an important social space came to simultaneously represent both a site of procrastination and creativitya creative procrastination.

More importantly, this paper argues that the notion of procrastination must be historicized and placed in a temporal context. When the office became the fixed place for work and the classroom the prime place for education, a number places outside of these institutions became increasingly problematic. The Iraqi state and normative society rallied around vilifying the vices and dangers of the coffee shop, among other places. In fact, the more time became measured, controlled, and organized, the more unsupervised intellectual activity raised suspicion among Iraqi intellectuals close to the state. In other words, the notion of idleness and procrastination emerged as a function of a new and modern temporality and became associated with a particular space, namely the coffee shop. Baghdads avant-garde intelligentsia, however, did not accept the disciplinary discourses of the state without a good amount of playful defiance and bravado.

Pelle Valentin Olsen is an MPhil candidate in Modern Middle Eastern History at St Antonys College. He is interested in Middle Eastern Jewish literature, thought and intellectual history. In the fall he is moving to the United States to start a PhD at the University of Chicago.

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Panel 4. PROCRASTINATION and PLACE (Parallel session)

Susanne Bayerlipp (Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich)Procrastinating Abroad: Exchanges of letters and moral discourse on academic travel in the age of Erasmus & after

The ERASMUS program, the student travel bursary by the European Union, has funded academic studies abroad for almost twenty years now. Yet, its reputation has suffered severely due to the way studying abroad is practiced by a number of its scholarship holdersoften resulting in a year of licensed procrastination. This phenomenon, however, seems to be dating back at least as long as to the age of its eponymous humanist scholar, Erasmus of Rotterdam.

Travelling abroad was fundamental to the circulation of knowledge, and this mobility, in turn, played a major role in the development of humanism in England. However, even then the utility of such travel was often questioned, accusing the students of procrastinating, instead of studying. Especially the University of Padua, which fell under Venetian law, attracted numerous Englishmen. In his Historie of Italie William Thomas records that the students came thither under the pretense of studying; Roger Ascham, Queen Elizabeths tutor, rails even more fervently against the corruption of morals students in Venice are exposed to deriving from the distractions offered by the liberties of the city. I will argue that the liberties of foreign travel and procrastination are closely related in early modern discourse as liberty often has a negative connotation in these texts, referring to a lack of (moral) constraints. In my paper I will investigate early modern forms of student procrastination and the reaction it provokes, looking at exchanges of letters displaying strict hierarchies as those between fathers and sons as well as students and masters on the one hand and moral texts, such as Aschams Scholemaster on the other. It seems as if procrastination challenges these authorities, while being fostered by them at the same time.

Susanne Bayerlipp teaches English Literature at the Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich. She is currently working on her PhD thesis William Thomas and the Culture(s) of Translation in the mid-Tudor Period and has published two articles on this topic: Translating Iconoclasm: William Thomass The Perygrine and The Historie of Italie in Anglia 130(3) (2012), and Early Modern Negotiations of the Questione della Lingua in William Thomas and the Florios in Gabriela Schmidt (ed.), Elizabethan Translation and Literary Culture (Berlin, 2013).

Dr Susan Machum (St Thomas, New Brunswick)Overcoming Procrastination: A critical examination of trade books

designed to increase productivity and ensure things get done

With the rise of neoliberalism, it should hardly be surprising that the beginning of the 21st century is fraught with an overwhelming number of self-help books aimed at improving individual productivity. The notion that we are all in charge of and responsible for our own destinies puts increasing pressure on us as individuals to constantly perform. Your local bookstore is filled with advice on how to stay productive, increase output and steadily climb to the top of the performance ladder.

This paper provides a critical literature review of twenty trade bookssome hot off the press and others top-selling classicsfocused on ensuring readers become

more successful, more productive, more innovative, and more fulfilled. How will readers reach such pinnacles? By following the advice, techniques and step-by-step instructions for

overcoming procrastination hidden within these texts, of course. The paper undertakes a critical discourse analysis of these texts, the messages they transmit about personal responsibility and the specific productivity typologies they purport work for overcoming procrastination. It concludes with a discussion of the relationship between this literature and the larger neoliberal ideology within which its production is embedded.

Susan Machum is a struggling procrastinatoreven when she succeeds at overcoming challenges and pushes past stresses and anxieties to meet deadlines, she soon finds herself falling off the wagon and needing to climb the hill again. Obviously, she has overcome her negative spirals at various points in her life. For example she obtained her PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 1999; is an Associate Professor at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, Canada and has been holding a Canada Research Chair in Rural Social Justice since 2006. Nevertheless, the need to overcome procrastination remains a constant feature of her life. She welcomes the idea of discussing this topic and learning more about it with other academics. 10

Panel 5. REFLECTIONS ON SELF-HELP

Dr Barbara Leckie (Carleton, Ontario)Victorian Procrastination: Or, Middlemarch as a primer on procrastination in ten easy lessons

[Casaubon to Dorothea] I have insisted to him [Will] on what Aristotle has stated with admirable brevity, that for the achievement of any work regarded as an end there must be a prior exercise of many energies or acquired facilities of a secondary order, demanding patience. I have pointed to my own manuscript volumes, which represent the toil of years preparatory to a work not yet accomplished. But in vain.

George Eliot, Middlemarch

This paper will read George Eliots Middlemarch through the lens of 20th and 21st century procrastination self-help guides. Edward Casaubon famously procrastinates his great work, The Key to All Mythologies; by looking closely at his procrastinatory methods, energies, and excuses I want to argue that we can learn something about both Eliots novel (and the 19th century novel itself as a procrastinatory structure) and the rise of self-help literature on procrastination since the 1980s. I will distil ten lessons from Eliots novel and compare them to the ways in which procrastination has been discussed more recently. The paper will, accordingly, combine a literary approach with the more recent work on the psychology and philosophy of procrastination. It at once offers a light reading of procrastinationten easy lessonsand a reflection, following the philosopher Mark Kingwells argument that procrastination is about living itself, on the relationship between procrastination, knowledge, and mortality. When Casaubon dies with his great work unfinished, in other words, the novel provides a perspective on procrastination that one does not find in the more upbeat self-help literature and this perspective expands the field to embrace both philosophical and literary/historical approaches to procrastination.

Barbara Leckie is an Associate Professor cross-appointed in the English Department and the Institute for the Comparative Study of Literature, Art, and Culture at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada. Her publications include Culture and Adultery: the Novel, the Newspaper, and the Law, 1857-1914 and Sanitary Reform in Victorian Britain: End of Century Assessments and New Directions (an edited collection of documents), as well as many articles on Victorian print culture. She has recently completed Open Houses: The Architectural Idea, the Rise of the Novel, and Nineteenth-Century Modernity and is now working on a new project on Victorian procrastination.

The CUNCTATOR PRIZE

This is Quintus Fabius Maximus Verrucosus Cunctator, a monument to procrastinations virtues. Roman consul and then Dictator, Fabius Maximus (280-203 bc) is credited as an inventor of guerrilla warfare. Later he would lend his name to the Fabian Society, the byword for middle-class gradualism in the transition to socialism.

Fabius Maximuss controversial tactics earned him the rather rude-sounding honorific Cunctator, the Delayer. (His other nickname, Verrucosus, came from his warty lip.)

In collaboration with the Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust, we offered a 50 prize for the best paper by a graduate student to honour the art of cunctation. Berlin himself was something of a procrastinator, leaving behind several

million unpublished words upon his death in 1997. Drs Henry Hardy and Mark Pottle, co-editors of volumes three and four of his Letters, 1960-1997, have very generously sponsored and judged the Prize.

The winner will be announced at the drinks reception.

Cunctator, n. One who acts tardily, a delayer. (oed)

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SPONSORSWe would like to thank the Oxford Centre for Life-Writing (OCLW), The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH), All Souls College, and the Isaiah Berlin Literary Trust for their generous financial support.

Procrastination: Cultural Explorations was the winner of the 2013-14 OCLW-TORCH Award for a postgraduate conference on life-writing and the humanities. The competition runs annually, and more information can be found on the OCLW website and blog.

CONVENERS

Danielle Yardy is a DPhil student in the English Department at Oxford. Her thesis investigates the motif of burning at the stake on the early modern stage. She completed her undergraduate degree at Durham University, before taking her Masters in English (1550-1700) in Oxford. She is the lesser procrastinator of the duo in charge, but recently engaged in an extended flirtation with 2048.

Elizabeth Chatterjee is a Fellow of All Souls College, and has been in Oxford for far too long. Today her doctoral research takes her to Delhi, where she examines the politics of electricity in India. Past procrastinatory pursuits alongside the DPhil include travel writing, interviewing Indians about toilets, and learning the banjo.

Arthur Downing is an economic historian and a Fellow of All Souls College. His DPhil looks at the saving patterns of working class households in nineteenth century Britain, and how individuals overcame their procrastinatory and myopic tendencies to put off saving. It hasnt helped him be more self-controlled: he knows the words to nearly every Friends episode.

Amia Srinivasan is a Fellow in philosophy at All Souls College interested in epistemology, ethics, metaphilosophy and feminism. Heroically suppressing her procrastinatory tendencies, she recently finished her DPhil. She is now largely back to her old ways, planning dinner menus and reading about otters. She will join the UCL Philosophy Department in autumn 2015.

Elizabeth Dubois is a DPhil student at the University of Oxfords Internet Institute. She is interested in how technology

may be leveraged to increase democratic accountability and political engagement. Elizabeth previously worked in politics, including for

a Canadian Member of Parliament, and in the realm of international climate change policy.

Details coming soon at

ProcrastinationOxford.org

#procrastinox@ProcrastinOx

In autumn 2014, the conversation will continue

the Procrastination seminarMichaelmas Term 2014

Wednesdays, 5.30pmOld Library, All Souls College

all souls college