Listening to Others
Description
In the 2026 Mangold lecture, Prof Seth Whidden asks what it means to listen to others. Language is often imagined as a bridge between people: a means of expression, translation, sympathy, and understanding. It also has limits; it may fail, exclude, simplify, or speak too confidently on behalf of those who have not been heard. “Listening to Others” explores what happens when we attend not only to voices, but to the spaces around them: silences, interruptions, misunderstandings, and forms of expression that do not fit easily into words.
The lecture begins from a question at once literary and deeply human: who gets to speak, who is heard, and under what conditions? It considers how language can create connection across difference, but also how it can impose itself on others. When does speaking for another become an act of care, and when does it become ventriloquism or possession? What changes when we stop asking how to give voice to others, and begin asking how to listen more carefully?
Moving from nineteenth-century writing to contemporary questions about identity, ecology, disability, sound, and creativity, the lecture considers linguistic communication as an ethical practice. Understanding depends not simply on more speech, but on more attentive forms of listening: across languages, cultures, histories, bodies, and ways of being. At its heart, “Listening to Others” proposes a poetics of humility, patience, compassion, and giving, in which language becomes not a tool of mastery, but a shared space for relation and recognition.
Image: Alfred Stieglitz, Listening to the Crickets (c. 1900). The Art Institute of Chicago (CC0 Public Domain designation)
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Prof Seth Whidden
Seth Whidden (PhD Brown University) joins the Faculty of Arts as the 2026 Mangold Fellow. He is Professor of French Literature at the University of Oxford and Roger Pearson Fellow in French at The Queen’s College, Oxford. In his research, which focuses on modern literature written in French, especially poetry and the nineteenth century, he asks how language shapes authority, identity, community, and relations between self and other. Across his work on voice, form, collaboration, parody, reading, and the lyric, he examines how literary texts create speakers and audiences, reinforce or unsettle inherited traditions, and open new ways of thinking about expression and cultural exchange. His publications include the books Leaving Parnassus: The Lyric Subject in Verlaine and Rimbaud (2007); Authority in Crisis in French Literature, 1850–1880 (2014); Arthur Rimbaud (2018); Reading Baudelaire’s Le Spleen de Paris and the Nineteenth-Century Prose Poem (2022); and, with Corry Cropper, Velocipedomania: A Cultural History of the Velocipede in France (2023), as well as edited volumes and scholarly editions on poetic collaboration, formal innovation, literary communities, the Paris Commune, and nineteenth-century poetry. He has been the editor of the scholarly journal Nineteenth-Century French Studies since 2014.
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