Secretary of The Christian Literary Studies Group

Scholar of T.S. Eliot

 

 

Narratives usually derive their coherence through a sequence that is in principle linear, and the theme of pilgrimage involves a second dimension being a journey in space as well as time. A third arises from the idea of a spiritual significance to such journeying. Pilgrimage was a major feature in medieval Europe at all levels of society, and the idea persisted in the literary tradition. The second part of the lecture discusses two recent British novels which make considerable play with the idea of pilgrimage, David Lodge’s Therapy (1995) and Rachel Joyce’s The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry (2012).

 

In his doctoral research at Oxford University on the leading poet of Modernism, T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), Dr. Roger Kojecký broke new ground in discovering the documents of a discussion group, The Moot, of which Eliot was a leading member. A previously unknown paper given there by Eliot was edited and published in Kojecký's book, which gives a wide-ranging account of Eliot's social criticism. T S Eliot's Social Criticism won the George Adam Smith Prize from the University of Aberdeen, and remains the standard work on the subject. Dr Kojecký is organizing secretary of the Christian Literary Studies Group in the U.K., and he is editor of the journal The Glass. He is co-editor of a collection of essays Visions and Revisions: The Word and the Text (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2013). He has recently given lectures at the University of Exeter, the European universities of Krakow and Olomouc, and in Toronto. He has also held appointments as professor in English Literature at universities in Tokyo and at London University. His lecture at Tsinghua in 2010 was on the British Nobel prize-winning novelist William Golding.