Serious book collecting isn’t the draw it was for earlier generations, and the biggest prices are still attached to the works of the canonical dead white males (although Dickens can be surprisingly cheap), making Murdoch and some of her contemporaries viable and reasonable to collect. So how do you go about starting a collection of Murdoch’s works? Where do you find them? And, crucially, how much should you pay?
This collection includes four essays dealing directly with the writings of Iris Murdoch and reflecting work of my own from the years 2015-20. The essays in question are ‘The Varieties of Attention’ (not previously published but presented to a conference at Queen Mary, University of London in 2017), ‘The Elusiveness of the Ethical: From Murdoch to Diamond’, ‘Post-Existentialist Moments: Murdoch and Highsmith’, and ‘Iris Murdoch and the Quality of Consciousness’.
My research is part of the continuity, renewal and improvement of Franco-British studies on Iris Murdoch to date, in a common literary, philosophical, and ethical movement. My thesis intends to propound a new ethics of attention to language as a singular moral project, which Murdoch intuited in her first writings.
The 2022 Iris Murdoch Review places Murdoch in dialogue with contemporary novelists and philosophers whose views put her beliefs into sharp relief and develop conversations that have been ongoing since Murdoch’s centenary in 2019.
Murdoch’s beer mats point the way to how some of the most dramatic moments of her life were played out in pubs, as indeed they are for many characters in her novels. The names of scores of pubs lie within their pages, for it is to pubs that characters go to weep, to quarrel, to think, to hope, and often to come to conclusions that will destroy their lives.
What happens when we deliberately try listening to Murdoch’s novels? What can be gained by attending not just to the social, moral, emotional and visual worlds she creates, but also to the aural worlds in her work?
An account of the second-order commitments on the nature of the ethical realm that underlie Murdoch’s thinking. In developing this systematic framework, I hope to shed light on various long-standing problems for contemporary moral philosophy regarding the nature of moral knowledge, moral motivation and moral objectivity.
My PhD thesis is the first to compare the narrative works of Iris Murdoch and Elsa Morante. Its principal aim is to highlight the crucial influence Simone Weil’s philosophy had on the two authors, especially Weil’s idea of affliction.
The Cavalier could boast many distinguished visitors; his image has been gracing the Wallace’s sumptuous central gallery for decades. Among them was Iris Murdoch, visiting with her beloved father as a child and in the 1940s as an aspiring writer and philosopher …
At first glance, Malcolm may seem like a surprising choice as a guide to Murdoch’s novels, because he is best remembered—or so the anecdotal evidence I have gathered suggests—as a Murdoch parodist rather than critic.