Inaugural lecture by Professor Adam Watt

Chairs are banal, ordinary, everyday. This lecture sets out from the academic notion of the ‘personal chair’ and pauses for thought on some of modernism’s chairs. It ranges from Poe’s ‘Philosophy of Furniture’ to rocking chairs and wheel chairs in Beckett, by way of Proust’s fauteuil magique and a range of chairs in Woolf, Sartre and Ionesco among others. The lecture proposes that a consideration of the roles of these chairs might offer some alternative insights into the changing sensibilities and preoccupations of writers across the twentieth century.