New Writer-In-Residence explores consumerism, ethics and culture
Jeanne Randolph
The Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture (CCWOC) is pleased to announce that Dr. Jeanne Randolph is its newest Writer-in-Residence. Randolph will be at the University of Manitoba until early April 2016.
A practicing psychoanalyst, Randolph is also known as engaging lecturer and performance artist whose unique vocal soliloquies―ranging from cat curating to architecture to boxing to Barbie Dolls to Wittgenstein―have been delivered in universities and galleries across Canada, as well as England, Australia and Spain. Randolph is the first and only writer in Canada to develop an object relations psychoanalytic theory as a medium for cultural criticism.
“I am excited about Jeanne’s residency with us,” says Jarvis Brownlie, CCWOC acting director. “Her deeply intellectual work brings a critical, interdisciplinary, philosophical perspective to the Centre. I have greatly enjoyed her literary and artistic explorations of consumerism, advertising, ethics, and other human problems, and I know the rest of the university community will be similarly inspired by her creative uses of psychoanalytic theory.”
Randolph is one of Canada’s foremost cultural theorists, having been writing, publishing and lecturing for over thirty years. She is the author of: Psychoanalysis and Synchronized Swimming (1993); Symbolization and Its Discontents (1997), Why Stoics Box (2003), The Ethics of Luxury (2008), and more recently Shopping Cart Pantheism (2015) and Out of Psychoanalysis: ficto-criticism 2005-2015 (2015). She is also the author of countless published articles in Canada and the United States, and has contributed texts to numerous monographs and exhibition catalogues for many artists.
Randolph’s pivotal essay “The Amenable Object,” (1983) remains required reading in many university art courses. Her writing is marked by an innovative approach to her chosen subject, a deeply ethical philosophical meandering that blends cultural theory and art criticism with personal history and a poetics of the imagination. Randolph’s books and solo performances embody her obsession with psychoanalytic theory, visual culture, ethics, advertising, consumerism and “The Technological Ethos.”
Randolph notes: “The Writer/Storyteller-In-Residence program is a language-loving milieu. It will be my privilege to nestle in and contribute. I hope that my project will absorb as much as possible the intelligent, open and spirited atmosphere of the Centre for Creative Writing and Storytelling.”
To consult with Dr. Jeanne Randolph, contact her at email: ccwocwir [at] umanitoba [dot] ca or phone 204-480-1067 to arrange a free meeting with her. She will be in residence through to the first week of April.
Please join us in welcoming Dr. Randolph to the University of Manitoba on Monday, January 25, 2016, at 11:30 am in the Great Hall of University College, where she will give an inaugural talk.
For more information, please contact Ranee Parker, Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture, at: 204-480-1065