On Thursday November 10, 2011, the English Department hosted a guest lecture by visiting U.K. scholar Dr Roger Kojecky. Speaking to a crowded lecture room, Dr Kojecky [pronounced koh-‘yet-ski] addressed the question of whether the novel, which is regarded as inheriting the assumptions of Enlightenment rationalism, can accommodate intimations of a transcendent reality. Can it credit the fantastic and the real as equivalent? William Golding’s impulse to write the story on which he built his reputation, Lord of the Flies, arose from a mid-century disillusion and the anguish of his experience of war, yet even as he subverted the sturdy optimism of Ballantyne’s The Coral Island (1857) he made spaces for moments of epiphany and the apprehension of the divine. Dr Kojecky argued that even in Darkness Visible, the dark vision of Golding’s novels still allows for such intimations, particularly through the suffering and the actions of the central character of Matty, a “holy fool.” Dr. Roger Kojecky: In his research on the leading poet of Modernism, T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), Dr Kojecký broke new ground in discovering the documents of an organized discussion group, The Moot, of which Eliot was a leading member during World War Two. A previously unknown paper by Eliot was edited and published in Kojecký’s book, which gives a wide-ranging account of Eliot’s social criticism. T S Eliot’s Social Criticism won the George Adam Smith Prize from the University of Aberdeen, and remains the standard work on the subject. Dr Kojecky is organizing secretary of the Christian Literary Studies Group in the U.K., and he is editor of the journal The Glass. He has recently given lectures at the University of Exeter, the European universities of Krakow and Olomouc, and Tsinghua in Beijing. He has also been a British Council lecturer in English Literature at universities in Tokyo and at London University.