The 2020 F. M. Salter Lectures on Language February 28, 2020

February 28, 2020 3:00 PM - 4:30 PMHC L-3,

The Domesday Clock is as close to midnight as it has ever been, and humanity has perhaps the darkest prospect for its future that most of us have seen in our lifetimes. Mark Morris argues that so many of what seem to be separate challenges – the climate crisis, the rise of authoritarian states, increased global competition, the enormous gulf between a tiny handful of the very rich and the rest of the world’s population, to name but some – are actually linked, and also share a common corruption of the honesty of language.
He has wondered for many years what it would have been like to teach in the 1930s if one was aware of what Nazi Germany was building to, and what his responsibility would have been to those students who were going to take the brunt of the consequences of‘peace in our time’. He sees the 2020s as echoing that era, and asks what our responsibility is to those students who are going to bear the brunt of what is almost inevitably coming.

Mark Morris has been an outsider looking in for most of his life, an Old Etonian Welshman-come-Albertan music critic. He has hobnobbed with the very rich and the famous and a few politicians, lived down and out as a kitchen porter, is an award-winning librettist, a photographer, a theatre director, the author of Domesday Revisited and the Pimlico Guide to 20^th-Century Composers, and is currently the classical music critic of the Edmonton Journal. He has a doctorate in Creative Writing, is a former Artist-in-Residence at the University of Alberta, and has taught as a contract instructor in the Department of English and Film Studies for 20 years.