Writers Block: Professor Michael A. Peters will look at some of the anxieties writers and academics face during his Inaugural Professorial Lecture this month.
Everyone can identify with writers’ block – staring blankly at a screen or sheet of paper for hours, re-writing a paragraph over and over, never sure if it’s actually any better than what we started with.
For some, these frustrations can turn into what Professor Michael A. Peters describes as ‘anxieties of knowing’, the topic of a free public lecture later this month.
The Professor of Education has written dozens of books and hundreds of papers and chapters on education, philosophy and politics, but a paper on these ‘anxieties of knowing’ has evaded him for the past decade. In trying to write his paper, he finds himself suffering from the very problem he is trying to address.
“This failure to write is a very unusual situation for me because I write easily and freely – by most standards I write quite a lot,” says Professor Peters. He describes the lecture as “an exercise in self-therapy, confession and self-examination”, and hopes that presenting his ideas to an audience will help him finally finish the elusive paper.
Performance anxiety as a form of self-torture
“When you perform, you may suffer from performance anxiety. In the same sense, when you are writing something that is going to appear in print, you wonder if it’s the best you can do. Some people get so anxious that they just can’t do it – in some instances it can become crippling, like a form of self-torture.”
But it’s not all doom and gloom – he will explore the lighter side of these anxieties, drawing on the works of American film-maker and comedian Woody Allen, as well as philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Jacques Derrida.
Professor Peters’ inaugural professorial lecture, Anxieties of Knowing: Academic Pathologies, Critical Philosophy and the Culture of Self, takes place on Tuesday 26 March in the Gallagher Academy of Performing Arts. The Opus Bar is open from 5pm; the lecture begins at 6pm.