The Owen Barfield Society

News and Announcements

 

A conference on the life and work of Owen Barfield is being organized. The conference will take place on 27 – 29 March 2009 at the Goetheanum, Switzerland. Information about the conference will be posted on this site as it becomes available.

 

The Owen Barfield Session  of the 2008 Rocky Mountain Modern Language Association Convention will be held in Reno, Nevada, on Saturday, October 11 from 10:15 to 11:45 a.m. Two papers will be presented in this session, both of them centering on Barfield’s view of the imagination. Jamie Hutchinson will present “Imagine That: Allegories of the Soul in C. S. Lewis’s Till We Have Faces” – a Barfieldian reading of Lewis’s novel. Jane Hipolito will speak about “The Rosicrucian Nature of Owen Barfield’s The Rose on the Ash-Heap: The Alchemy of Love and Imagination.” All members of the Owen Barfield Society are warmly invited to attend this session.

The Owen Barfield Society will meet in the Shoshone Room of Harrah’s (Reno, Nevada) on Saturday, October 11, at 11:45 a.m., immediately following the Owen Barfield Session of the RMMLA Convention. The meeting will feature a “book club” discussion of Barfield’s Poetic Diction. In brief (5-minute) presentations and conversation, we will celebrate the 80th birthday of this major work, first published in 1928, and explore its significance for the literary arts and humanities in our time. Members who cannot attend the meeting in person and wish to contribute to the discussion can do so by sending their written reflections on Poetic Diction to the meeting’s chair, Jane Hipolito ( JaneHipolito@earthlink.net) .   If you send her your contribution no later than October 8, she will be able to bring it to the meeting and share it with everyone there.  Please consider doing this.

 

C. S. Lewis, My Godfather: Letters, Photos and Recollections: Laurence Harwood announces the December, 2007 publication of his book, C. S. Lewis, My Godfather: Letters, Photos and Recollections   Mr. Harwood writes, “I have written a book of memories of C. S. Lewis, who was my godfather; it is based on regular correspondence he wrote to me and my parents and others.  Owen Barfield features a great deal in the book; he was a lifelong friend of my father (Cecil Harwood) and I knew him well myself; he was my older brother’s godfather.”  C. S. Lewis, My Godfather has been published by InterVarsity Press of Downers Grove, Illinois, and is available for purchase directly from the publisher as well as from online book sellers.          

 

In Geardagum:  Peter J. Fields, the editor of the journal In Geardagum: Essays on Old and Middle English, invites contributions that employ a Barfieldian approach to medieval subjects.  Articles should be jargon-free and keyed to a discussion of a specific passage or passages in a medieval document (i.e., a document in Old English, Middle English, Old French, and so forth), or related analogue in another language (e.g., Latin, Icelandic, etc.).   In Geardagum was founded in the 1970s under the auspices of the Society for New Language Study, an organization formed by the late Raymond L. Tripp, with William Johnson; Tripp and Johnson also have contributed substantially to Barfield studies.  Over the years, the leadership of the organization has continued to include Barfieldians, and indeed Peter Fields now serves as its secretary.  In Geardagum is fully represented in the MLA database.   Send submissions by attachment to peter.fields@mwsu.edu.    

 

The Barfield Press

Georg Bernhard Tennyson (1930-2007)