Lesley Saunders
Lesley Saunders has worked all her life in education, as teacher, researcher, policy adviser and independent consultant. She is also a published poet; her most recent poetry collections are This Thing of Blood & Love (Two Rivers Press, 2022) and, with artist Rebecca Swainston, Days of Wonder (Hippocrates Press, 2021), a record of the first year of the Covid pandemic. Her translations – including the poem that won the 2016 Stephen Spender award – of Maria Teresa Horta’s poetry were published as Point of Honour (Two Rivers Press, 2019). Lesley is currently exploring the connectivities between literature, language and dementia, with two book chapters and an academic paper published so far.
‘”Brackets Are Exciting”: lacunae, fragment, allusion and non-propositional speech acts in the
art of learning Dementian’
Abstract
Lesley is currently exploring the connectivities between poetry, language and dementia, thanks largely to the support of colleagues at Lisbon University. Her conference talk follows this train of thought a little further, in relation to the displacement or disturbance of language conceived as a kind of home. As a creative experiment, um ensaio, Lesley will propose that the lacunae, fragments , allusions and non-propositional speech acts in ancient Greek might be imaginatively associated with the dysphasia / aphasia of people with dementia, in order to summon alternative modes of expressive and locutionary belonging. The title of her talk, ‘Brackets Are Exciting’, is taken from Anne Carson’s introduction to her book If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho. Like all Carson’s provocations, this is a cleverly generative idea which invites us to ‘read between the lines’, to interpolate and interpret and creatively apprehend – not just as literary scholars of incomplete or deformed texts but also as linguistic adventurers in the liminal space created by any textual or verbal ambiguity and slippage. This adventure is an empathic as well as intellectual activity which can also respond to the speech acts of people with advanced dementia or who have suffered a severe cerebrovascular accident (a ‘stroke’ in informal English). Such people are characterised as ‘babbling’, being ‘disfluent’ or ‘speech-impaired’, and often assumed to be incapable of meaningful utterance. Our socially-ingrained habit of over-valorising cognitive capacity and our consequent marginalising and pathologising of non-sensical speech can be countered by returning language to a sense of play and performance-in-the-moment, to which idiom, gesture, inflection, facial expression and relationality are integral. So the trajectory of this talk will begin in ancient Greece and end in a care home in Oxfordshire, England – where we may learn a little about the intriguing linguistic phenomenon that could be called ‘Dementian’.
Keywords
Fragments, Lacunae, Dysphasia, Speech Acts, Dementia