The Professor Kenneth White Lecture

As part of HI~Arts' continuing association with Professor Kenneth White - which started in 2005 with his appointment as HI~Arts' first International Fellow - we are very pleased to publish for the first time the text of Professor White's annual lecture at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, 2006 (EIBF).

Professor White's annual EIBF lectures are established as a vital part of the festival's programme – and for many, a key date in the calendar of Scottish cultural life, providing in broad strokes both a challenge to and a vision of the future of Scottish culture.

The 2006 lecture is entitled, 'Along the High Lines – Figuring out the way towards a world culture', and takes as its starting point the themes of 'world-writing' Professor White elucidated in his 2005 lecture at EIBF, (published in 'On The Atlantic Edge' by Sandstone Press, Dingwall, in 2006, along with lectures from the HI~Arts International Fellowship series). As Professor White states in the 2006 lecture:

'Right at the end of that talk [2005] on the notion of world-writing, I knew I wanted to pick up again from there, come back on the theme of 'world', extending the notion of world-writing, which was seeing things from a literary point of view, to that of world-culture, that is, seeing things from a general point of view.'