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2008-2009; 2007-2008; 2006-2007; 2005-2006;
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2002-2003; 2001-2002
2008-2009
SEPTEMBER
September 3
Comp Lit Welcome Back Party!
4:00-6:00
Casa Italiana (24 W. 12th Street)
All CL faculty & students invited!
September 12
2008-09 Comparative Literature Colloquium
Nancy Ruttenburg (Professor, Comparative Literature)
“Conscience, Rights, and the Delirium of Democracy”
September 19
TRAUMA AND VIOLENCE TRANSDISCIPLINARY STUDIES
presents a panel
VIOLENCE, RHETORIC, and POLITICS
6:30-8:30
5 Washington Place, Room 101
September 25
Dr. Antje Wessels (Freie Universität-Berlin)
Daphnisches Unternehmen
Zum Verhältnis von Kunst und Politik bei Günter Kunert
(co-sponsered by the Comparative Literature Department)
6:30
19 University Place, Ground Floor
Dr. Wessels teaches classical philology and reception history at the Freie
Universität Berlin. Author of "Ursprungszauber. Zur Rezeption von Hermann
Useners Lehre von der religiösen Begriffsbildung" (2003) and co-editor of
"Kunerts Antike" (2004) and "Bewegte Erfahrungen. Zwischen Emotionalität und
Ästhetik" (2008), she is currently completing her work on Roman tragedy,
aesthetics and violence ("Ästhetisierung von Gewalt in den Tragödien
Senecas").
September 26
Accessorizing the Renaissance Body
Jerry H. Labowitz Theatre for the Performing Arts
715 Broadway
http://blogs.nyu.edu/blogs/sdk248/celce/2008/09/accessorizing_the_renaissance.html
OCTOBER
October 3
2008-09 Comparative Literature Colloquium
Paul North (Faculty Fellow, German)
“The Ideal of the Problem: Walter Benjamin’s Art-Critical Theory”
Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz (Doctoral Candidate, Comparative Literature), respondent
October 10
The CUNY Graduate Center
Postcolonial Studies Group Colloquium Series 2008-2009
Ashley Dawson
The Graduate Center & Staten Island College, CUNY
Another Country: The Postcolonial State, Environmentality, and Landless
People's Movements
October 15
"Descartes, Latinity & War: Metaphors and Practices of Epochal Transition"
6:30-8:30
19 University Place, Great Room (1st Floor)
(reception to follow)
October 17
"The Renaissance and Nineteenth-century Politics"
(how the invention of the idea of Renaissance remains embedded in nineteenth-century political and ideological debates)
1:00-3:00
19 University Place, Room 224
Brown bag lunch; beverages provided
October 22
"Why and How to Research Early Modernity (or 'the Renaissance')
(What is the point in choosing to do literaty/cultural research in the early modern period? What ancient or contemporary exigencies may it meet? How and on what materials does one go about it?)
3:30-5:30
19 University Place, Room 305
Professors Jacques Lezra and Daniel Javitch will also participate
October 30
Special Manuscript viewing and Reiss talk at Pierpont Morgan Library
(Madison & 36th Street)
"Iconography of European Expansionism in an Early-Sixteenth-Century Religious Manuscript from Toledo -Pierpont Morgan Ms M.0887.1"
(political, ideological, commercial & religious meanings of the iconography of a Pierpont Morgan manuscript leaf from around 1502)
10:30-12:00
Seating for this event is limited. If you'd like to attend, please RSVP to susan.protheroe@nyu.edu
Roberto González Echevarría
Sterling Professor of Hispanic and Comparative Literature
Yale University
Improvisation in the Genesis and Structure of the Quixote
Sponsered by:
Medieval and Renaissance Center
Department of Comparative Literature
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
7:00
19 University Place, Room 222
"Passionate Bodies, Fiery Tests: 'Generosity' and Political Reason in Descartes"
6:30-8:30
19 University Place, Auditorium (1st Floor)
NOVEMBER
November 14
2008-09 Comparative Literature Colloquium
(Joint session with the English Department's Modern Colloquium)
Patrick Gallagher (Doctoral Candidate, Comparative Literature) and Brendan Beirne (Doctoral Candidate, English)
“The Sober Postmodern”
3:00-5:00
19 University Place, Room 222
The CUNY Graduate Center
Postcolonial Studies Group Colloquium Series 2008-2009
Mark Sanders
New York University
Reparation and Substitution: South Africa's Truth Commission and the
Afterlife of Apartheid
November 13-15
Conference: DISCOURSES OF REPUBLICANISM
Poetics and Theory Program
New York University
November 13-18
NYU DOCUMENTA BRAZIL Film Festival
King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center
http://www.nyu.edu/kjc/documentabrazil
DECEMBER
December 1
Sarah Nuttall & Achille Mbembe
on their new book from Duke University Press
Johannesburg: The Elusive Metropolis
Respondents:
Arjun Appadurai - John Dewey Distinguished Professor in the Social Sciences, The New School
Carol Breckenridge - Department of History, The New School
2:00-4:00
19 University Place, Room 222
December 5
2008-09 Comparative Literature Colloquium
Dissertations in Progress:
Daniel Hoffman-Schwartz (Comparative Literature), “After Burke: Late Empiricism and Romantic Sovereignty”
Beata Potocki (Comparative Literature), “Militant Withdrawals: Aesthetics of Impersonality in the French and Algerian Novel, 1950-1970s”
Michiel Bot (Comparative Literature), respondent
December 10
NYU Postcolonial Colloquium presents
Emily Apter
(NYU French & Comparative Literature)
Terrestrial Humanisms: Contemplating Edward Said's Legacy
6:30
19 University Place, Room 222
JANUARY
January 23
2008-09 Comparative Literature Colloquium
Kristin Ross (Professor, Comparative Literature)
Title: "Democracy for Sale"
January 30
Hellenic American Educators Association
United Federation of Teachers
GREEK LETTERS CELEBRATION
A Bouquet of Greek Poetry, Prose, and Music for a Winter’s Afternoon
Featuring Miltiades and Alumna Susan Matthias reading from their translations of works by Seferis, Cavafy, Elytis, Homer, Sfyridis, Kazantzakis
Original piano music by Miltiades Matthias
5:00
The Holy Trinity Cathedral
319 East 74th Street
The cutting of the New Year Vasilopita will take place after the presentation.
FEBRUARY
February 5
John Hamilton will present: "Mi manca la voce: How Balzac talks music"
The essay is essentially a reading of Balzac's 1837 novella, Massimilla Doni, which includes an extended interpretation of Rossini's operatic oratorio, Mose in Egitto. Over the course of his narrative, Balzac artfully coordinates the theme of the lost voice through its various modalities: in politics, in love, and in art; and thereby makes an important contribution to contemporary debates on music and meaningfulness.
100 Washington Square East, Silver Center, Room 220
5:30 P.M.
February 6
The Humanities Initiative at NYU presents: "Quo vadis, MAP?"
A faculty round table on the future of the MAP program at NYU
Humanities Initiative, 20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor
5:00 P.M.
Reception to follow
February 6-28
Telephone: A new play inspired by Professor Avital Ronell's book The Telephone Book
Performances will take place at the Foundry Theatre/Cherry Lane Theatre
http://thefoundrytheatre.org/frmcurrent.html
February 11
NYU's Mediterranean Studies Research Group (MSRG) Inaugural Event
Joint event with Catalan Center Film Series "Catalan Directors See the World"
Screening: On Translation: Miedo/Jauf by Antoni Muntadas.
Followed by a dialogue between Antoni Muntadas and Ibtissam Bouachrine
(Professor of medieval and early modern Mediterranean literatures and
cultures, Smith College).
Acclaimed conceptual artist and cultural critic Antoni Muntadas,
professor at MIT and winner of awards and grants from Guggenheim, NEA,
Rockefeller Foundations, et al., has been developing a series of
interventions on translation at those pressure points where traslatio
-translation, but also crossings-becomes an issue. His 2007 work
examines the construction of fear on both sides of the Mediterranean
through interviews, collages, archival images, and other fragments of
modern life in which "translation, interpretation, what is left unsaid
and silence all form a part of the narrative."
King Juan Carlos I Center
6:30 P.M.
Reception to follow
Co-sponsored by the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies, the
King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center, The Catalan Center at NYU, NYU's
Program in Hellenic Studies and the NYU Department of Comparative
Literature
For information about MSRG, please contact Jacques Lezra
(jl174@nyu.edu).
February 13
The CUNY Graduate Center
Postcolonial Studies Group Colloquium Series 2008-2009
Ben Baer
Princeton University
"Errant Marxism: London to Calcutta via Moscow (alternative routes possible)"
February 19
Series of Russian Films: Sluchainaia Vstrecha [An Unexpected Meeting] (1936)
Directed by Igor Savchenkon
Professor Michail Iamplolski will introduce and contextualize
19 University Place, Room 228
12:30 P.M.
NYU Postcollonial Colloquium presents:
Emily Apter: "Terrestrial Humanisms: Contemplating Edward Said's Legacy"
13-19 University Place, Room 222
6:30 P.M.
www.nyupoco.com
February 21
21st Annual Stony Brook Manhattan Graduate Student Conference
Keynote Lecture: "The Desire for Representation/The Desire of Representation"
Ulrich Baer
Uli will speak about Rainer Maria Rilke, Lyle Ashton Harris, Diti Almog, the fictions of love, and the love of fiction.
110 East 28th Street (between Park Ave. South and Lexington Ave), 2nd
Floor (directly beneath the large blue Stony Brook Manhattan banner).
Stony Brook Manhattan, New York
February 25-March 5
"Examined Life"
In "Examined Life," filmmaker Astra Taylor accompanies some of today’s most influential thinkers on a series of unique excursions through places and spaces that hold particular resonance for them and their ideas.
Featuring Cornel West, Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Kwarne Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor.
IFC Center
323 6th Ave at West 3rd St
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
February 27
2008-09 Comparative Literature Colloquium
Dissertations in Progress:
Michiel Bot
“The Right to Offend”
Joy Connolly (Associate Professor, Classics), respondent
February 28
“MUSIC, LANGUAGE, THOUGHT: TWO INTERDISCIPLINARY EVENTS"
Sponsored by the Departments of Comparative Literature and Music
10 A.M. - 12 P.M.
John Hamilton “The Rape of Euterpe: Music, Philology, and Misology in the Work of Nietzsche”
Mary Ann Smart (Berkeley) TBA
1:30-3:30 P.M.
Jacques Lezra “The Devil’s Interval”
Branden Joseph (Columbia University) “Biomusic”
Silver Center, room 220
24 Waverly Place
http://musiclanguagethought.wordpress.com
MARCH
February 25-March 5
"Examined Life"
In "Examined Life," filmmaker Astra Taylor accompanies some of today’s most influential thinkers on a series of unique excursions through places and spaces that hold particular resonance for them and their ideas.
Featuring Cornel West, Avital Ronell, Peter Singer, Kwarne Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor.
IFC Center
323 6th Ave at West 3rd St
212-924-7771
www.ifccenter.com
March 2
The newly created Center for International Research in the Humanities and Social sciences (CIRHUS, NYU-CNRS) is launching a seminar based on the interests it shares with two major NYU research programs, the Postcolonial (Anglophone) Project and the Re:Enlightenment Project, in order to engage in productive dialogue with them on the genesis and evolution of theories, political thought and institutions.
The seminar will give us the theoretical grounding for a critical examination of policies on multilingualism, literature, and cultural diversity, and the manifestation of these in the U.S.A., in Europe, and in India.
4 Washington Square North, 2nd Floor, CIRHUS Conference Room
2 P.M. – 4 P.M.
All are welcome to attend
Please RSVP to: ebn216@nyu.edu
"Rethinking 19th Century French Studies: Smuggling, Scams, and Semites"
Emily Apter, Professor of French, English, and Comparative Literature, NYU
Maurice Samuels, Professor of French, Yale
Richard Sieburth, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, NYU
La Maison Française, 16 Washington Mews (at University Place)
7 P.M.
March 3
Series of Russian Films: Velikij,Grazhdanin. part 1 [Great Citizen] (1939)
Directed by Friedrich Erlmler
Professor Michail Iamplolski will introduce and contextualize
19 University Place, Room 305
12:00 P.M.
March 5-6
NYU Center for Internatrional Research in the Humanities and Social Sciences (CNRS) Inaugural Workshop: "Transitions"
Jacques Lezra & Emily Apter are participants in this event
event program
CIRHUS Conference Room
4 Washington Square North, 2nd Floor
All are welcome to attend
Please RSVP to: ebn216@nyu.edu or cjg315@nyu.edu
March 5-7
"Security"
Poetics and Theory Group Conference, NYU
March 15-22
Spring Break
March 13
The CUNY Graduate Center
Postcolonial Studies Group Colloquium Series 2008-2009
Moustafa Bayoumi "The Race is On: Black and Arab in the American Imagination"
Brooklyn College, CUNY
March 24
Series of Russian Films: Velikij,Grazhdanin. part 2 [Great Citizen] (1939)
Directed by Friedrich Erlmler
Professor Michail Iamplolski will introduce and contextualize
19 University Place, Room 228
12:30 P.M.
Series - “Conversations on Tragedy and the Postcolony with Professor Tim Reiss”
"Introduction: Globalizing Tragedy" Toral Gajarawala, NYU
19 University Place, Great Room (first floor)
2-4:00 P.M.
March 26-29
American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) Convention
March 27-28
French Department Graduate Student Conference
March 30
"Hamlet against Hecuba: Carl Schmitt and the Stake of Modern Tragedy"
Katrin Trüstedt, Europa-Universität Viadrina, Frankfurt (Oder)
Professor Trüstedt will be speaking about Carl Schmitt's essay "Hamlet or Hecuba: The Intrusion of Time in the Play." She has pre-circulated a copy of the Schmitt essay; if you would like a copy, please email us at the address(es) given below. Hard copies of the essay will also be available for pick-up on Tuesday, March 24. These can be found in the pigeon hole labeled "CELCE" directly across from the elevators in the NYU English Department (5th floor of 19 University Place).
Room TBA
7:00 P.M.
As soon as we have determined the room, we will post it at the CELCE blog; we will also send out a message closer to the event.
If you have questions, contact Liza Blake, elizabeth.blake@nyu.edu, or Katie Vomero, kathryn.vomero@nyu.edu
March 31
Series - “Conversations on Tragedy and the Postcolony with Professor Tim Reiss”
"Tragedy and the Task of Time," Simon Gikandi, Princeton U
19 University Place, Great Room (first floor)
2-4:00 P.M.
APRIL
April 2
Comp Lit Spring Reception
4:30 - 6:30 P.M.
Jacques Lezra's apartment
April 7
Series - “Conversations on Tragedy and the Postcolony with Professor Tim Reiss”
"Tragedy and Revolution," David Scott, Columbia U
19 University Place, Great Room (first floor)
3-5:00 P.M.
April 8
Comp Lit Undergraduate Luncheon
Come for lunch and our Fall ’09 course schedule & descriptions.
19 University Place, room 222
12:30 -1:45 P.M.
April 9
"CRISSCROSSING"
18TH Annual New York University/Columbia University Graduate Conference
Keynote Address: Roger Chartier, “How To Read A Text That No Longer Exists?
Cardenio Between Cervantes, Shakespeare, And Some Others”
King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center
6:30 P.M.
April 10
The CUNY Graduate Center
Postcolonial Studies Group Colloquium Series 2008-2009
Hala Halim "Tarabishi, Fanon, and Arabic Postcolonial Criticism"
Brooklyn College, CUNY
"CRISSCROSSING"
18TH Annual New York University/Columbia University Graduate Conference
Roundtable Discussion: Roger Chartier, Georgina Dopico Black, Jacques Lezra
Gabriel Giorgi (moderator), “My Purpose Is Merely Astonishing’
History and Translation, Pierre Menard Author of the Quijote”
Followed by a reception.
King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center
5:30 P.M.
April 11
"CRISSCROSSING"
18TH Annual New York University/Columbia University Graduate Conference
Closing Address: Gabriela Basterran, “Is There An Other?”
Is There an Other? crisscrosses painting, poetry and ethical philosophy, Spanish, English, and French texts, early modern and contemporary artistic languages, representation and what exceeds it, subject and object, suspending the separation between the ‘I’ and the non-I, a voice and its addressee, presence and absence, the inside and the outside, heteronomy and autonomy, ethics and politics.
Followed by a closing reception.
King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center
4:30 P.M.
April 15
Series of Russian Films: Velikij,Grazhdanin. part 2 [Great Citizen] (1939)
Directed by Friedrich Erlmler
Professor Michail Iamplolski will introduce and contextualize
19 University Place, Room 228
12:30 P.M.
April 16 - 17
Medieval and Renaissance Center of NYU Spring 2009 Conference
Session I - April 16
Graduate Student Panel
19 University Place, Rm 222
6:00-8:00 P.M.
Session II - April 17th
Plenary Speakers
19 University Place, Rm 102
9:00 A.M.-5:00 P.M.
(For more information, contact the Medieval and Renaissance Center at 212.998.8698)
April 16-18
Comparative Literature Graduate Student Conference
"WAITING TIME"
Keynote Speaker: Marshall Berman, Distinguished Professor of Political Science at The City College of New York and the CUNY Graduate Center
What are we waiting for? What awaits us? While often dismissed as a period of wastefulness or lost time, waiting may also intensify experience and become a condition in which to consider questions of modernity, aesthetic process, politics, erotics and the tempos of everyday life.
http://waitingtimenyu.blogspot.com
MAY
May 2
“SECRECY”
A one-day conference sponsored by the
Departments of Comparative Literature and Russian & Slavic Studies
Keynote Speech: “Robespierre Has Been Lost: Secret Mantraps of Film History”
Professor Yuri Tsivian, University of Chicago
If one of secrecy’s main functions is, as has been often argued, to distinguish a community of insiders from clueless outsiders, what would an interdisciplinary effort to understand secrecy look like? We invite you to have a hand at this question, hone new ones, and spill the secrets of your discipline by participating in this conference. While many disciplines and modes of reading, writing, listening and looking—from hermeneutics to psychoanalysis, criminology to radiology, classical melodrama to samizdat literature and cinematic depth style—privilege the latent over the manifest, the aesthetics and politics of secrecy vary widely and shift intriguingly. So what happens when secrecy’s prime location, framed dramatically behind an iron curtain, teeming with invisible cities, camps, roads and dead ends, is suddenly open to tourism, investment, archival research, indifference, and CIA interrogation bases? Thus dislocated, where does secrecy go? What kinds of transformations does it undergo on the way? Does the cult of secrecy still flourish best, as Hannah Arendt suggested more than fifty years ago, when the ultimate secret is that there is no secret at all? Is secrecy then about fabricating as much as it is about withholding, not telling, censoring, or holding in reserve? Other possible topics can range from (and beyond) conspiracy theories to the spectacle of secrecy, confession and unmasking, cabinets noirs, invisible inks, and spoilers. We invite graduate students and faculty to send a short proposal (about 150 words) for a twenty minute presentation to eliot.borenstein@nyu.edu or cristina.vatulescu@nyu.edu by April 1, 2009.
May 5
"Show Me the Zulu Proust”:Some Thoughts on World Literature
Professor Aijaz Ahmad, York University, Toronto.
Aijaz Ahmad is a well-known Marxist literary theorist and political commentator based in India. At present Aijaz Ahmed is Professorial Fellow at the Centre of Contemporary Studies, Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, New Delhi and is visiting Professor of Political Science at York University, Toronto. He also works as an editorial consultant with the Indian newsmagazine Frontline and as a senior news analyst for The Real News Network.
Lecture Series at Tokyo University
Xudong Zhang
April 28th: "Forgetting as Memory: The Politics of Time and Experience in Lu Xun's Personal Recollections"
May 12th: "Ah Q and the Spectral Name of Modern China: Toward a Semiotics of Political Philosophy"
flyer
May 13
John Hamilton performs with his band The Ludes!
Kenny's Castaways, 157 Bleecker Street (betw. Sullivan & Thompson)
9 P.M.
FREE ADMISSION
May 15-17
"The Plural Present of Historical Life"
UTCP Graduate Student Conference
Organized by: The University of Tokyo Center for Philosophy (UTCP), in collaboration with New York University, Peking University and East China Normal University
Professors Xudong Zhang (conference organizer) and Ulrich Baer, along with graduate students Beata Potowski, Sage Anderson & Pu Wang are participating in the conference.
flyer
SUMMER 2009
NYU-Tokyo Conference: "Modernism as International Movement"
2007-2008
04/17/08
Professor Tim Reiss Lecture
“From
the birds I Learned…” :
Jean de Léry on Violence, Religion and the Colonial
Thursday, April 17
7:00-9:00 La Maison Française
16 Washington Mews
“…aprendí de las aves
La sedienta esperanza,
La certidumbre y la verdad del vuelo.”
Pablo Neruda, "Arte de pajaros"
This lecture is sponsored by the Department of Comparative
Literature and co-sponsored by La Maison Francaise and the
Dean of FAS.
5/1/08
and 5/2/08 Prof.Emily Apter is Organizer at NYU/Columbia Conference
The
Way We Read Now:
Symptomatic Reading and its Aftermath
5/5/08
Prof. John T. Hamilton at Book Culture
Join
Book Culture for an Evening with
John
T. Hamilton
author of Music, Madness, and the
Unworking of Language
Monday May 5, 7 pm
536 W. 112th Street
Joining John Hamilton for a discussion about
his book will be Avital Ronell, Professor of German, English
and Comparative Literature at New York University.
Past Events
in 2007-2008
04/10-12/08
Lacoue-Labarthe Conference consponsored by Comp. Lit!
New York University/Princeton University/Cardozo
Law School present:
Catastrophe
and Caesura:
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe Today
Organized by Denis Hollier and Avital
Ronell
Keynote speaker: Jean-Luc Nancy
Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe
has irreversibly inflected the way we understand catastrophic
history and language. The depth of his work is considered
by a number of philosophers, poets, and scholars attuned to
this exceptional oeuvre.
Departmental faculty Professors
Richard Sieburth and John Hamilton will be speaking.
Sponsored by the departments of French, German, Comparative Literature at NYU; Princeton University
Department of French and Italian; Princeton Office of the
President; Trauma and Violence Transdisciplinary Studies;
NYU FAS Dean of Humanities; Cultural Services of the French
Embassy, The Center for French Civilization and Culture at
NYU; and the Humanities Initiative at NYU.
04/10/08
Professor Kristin Ross Lecture
“ON
MAY ’68 AND ITS AFTERLIVES”
Thursday, April 10, 12pm-2pm
South Gallery, Maison Française Buell Hall, 1st floor
In honor of the 40th anniversary of May 1968,
the Maison Française has invited Kristin Ross to lead a discussion
of her book, May ’68 and Its Afterlives. The book is
an historical study of the way in which the political upheavals
of the 1960s and early 1970s in France have been interpreted,
debated, forgotten, flattened, trivialized, buried under commemorations
and prey to endless ideological manipulations—a study, in
other words, of the memory of May ’68 in France and the way
in which the event has been overtaken by its own representations.
Luncheon seminar attendees are encouraged to read the book
before the seminar.
Kristin Ross is Professor of Comparative Literature at NYU.
She is the author of The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud
and the Paris Commune (1988), reissued this year by Verso; Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering
of French Culture (1995); and May ’68 and Its Afterlives (2002). All three books have been translated into French.
03/11/08
Ulrick Casimir Talk
“Reexportation
and The ‘Double Audience’ of Samuel Selvon and The Lonely
Londoners”
Tuesday, March 11, 6:00 pm
19 University Pl, Room 222
Casimir’s emphases are film studies and Caribbean
studies, his research focusing on the relationship between
British and American conceptualizations of the Caribbean and
the way(s) that Anglophone Caribbean fiction writers and filmmakers
tend to represent the region.
03/06-08/08
NYU Conference on Postcolonialism cosponsored by Comp. Lit.
Postcolonialism and the Hit of the Real
Keynote speakers: Pheng Cheah (University of
California, Berkeley) Simon Gikandi (Princeton University)
Alok Rai (University of Delhi)
Plus Plenary Panel: Simon Critchley (New School
for Social Research) David Lloyd (University of Southern California)
John Waters (NYU) Robert JC Young (NYU) with the participation
of Rajeswari Sunder Rajan
Plus many panels, including those on French,
German, Italian, Japanese colonialisms, on Ireland and Postcolonialism,
Islam and Postcoloniality, and Cinema and Postcolonial Realisms.
03/04/08 Ivy Wilson Talk
"Love
for the Race: Imagining Ethiopia and Trans-National Ideality
from the Age of the New Negro to Blaxploitation"
Tuesday, March 4, 6:00 pm
19 University Pl, Room 222
Dr. Wilson’s current research interests focus
on the solubility of nationalism in relationship to theories
of the diaspora, global economies of culture, and circuits
of the super-national and sub-national.
02/28/08
Susan Matthias Reading
The A.S. Onassis Program in Hellenic Studies
at New York University, in celebration of George Seferis's
birthday, cordially invites you to a public reading entitled:
The
Sensual Seferis: Six Nights on the Acropolis
Thursday, February 28th, 4:00 PM
Hellenic Studies Conference Room
285 Mercer Street, 8th Floor
Dr. Susan Matthias, a graduate of NYU's Comparative
Literature PhD program, is the winner of the 2006 Elizabeth
Constantinides Memorial Translation Prize by the Modern Greek
Studies Association.
For more information please call (212) 998-3990.
02/23/08
Prof. Ronell at German Graduate Student Workshop
Ghost
as a Trope
February 23, 1:00-7:00 pm
Deutsches Haus
Broadening out from literary and cinematic case
studies the workshop will explore the nature of ghostly figures
and ways in which they could lend authority to previously
silenced voices. The time framework stretches from the early
"sightings" in Shakespeare's "Hamlet" deep into current implications,
a time in which a return of that which returns becomes progressively
more apparent.
Participants: Sue de Beer (NYU), Nicola Behrmann
(NYU), Frauke Berndt (University of Chicago), Janelle Blankenship
(University of Western Ontario), Sladja Blazan (NYU/Humboldt
University Berlin), Jeff Champlin (NYU), Eckart Goebel (NYU),
Alicja Kowalska (NYU), Natalie Nagel (NYU), Avital
Ronell (NYU) Robert Stockhammer (Ludwig Maximilan
Universität München), Brigitte Weingart (Columbia University)
and further graduate students.
This workshop is organized by the Department
of German and is free and open to the public.
02/22-23/08
Prof. Apter at French Dept. Annual Graduate Student Conference
La
Vie de l'oeuvre: Inception, Reproduction & Decomposition
February 22-23
La Masion francaise
16 Washington Mews
Professor Emily Apter of the departments of
Comparative Literature and French will be participating in
the Roundtable Discussion on Feb. 23 from 4-6 pm.
02/07-23/08
Performance of Richard Sieburth's translation of Artaud's The Cenci
The
Hotel Savant presents The Cenci
by Antonin Artaud
Adapted, conceived, and directed by John Jahnke
From a new translation by Richard Sieburth (Prof. of Comp
Lit, NYU)
Showing at The Ohio Theater: 66 Wooster Street, NY, NY
February 7-23, 8pm Wed-Sun
February 16 & 23, 4pm Matinee
The Cenci is Artaud's only attempt to
put on stage what he set out to describe in his revolutionary
Theater of Cruelty manifestos. Granted the rights to adapt
a new translation through Artaud's estate and Editions Gallimard
in Paris, the Hotel Savant, long committed to re-envisioning
relevant, seminal works, commissioned Richard Sieburth of
The Department of French/NYU to translate the premiere American
version of the play. This singular, dark, and terse interpretation
opens at The Ohio Theatre in New York City on February 7,
2008 and was created in part through a residency at The Watermill
Center in May 2007.
This event is not sponsored by the Dept.
of Comparative Literature or NYU.
02/19/08
Kimberly Brown Talk
"Vantage
Points: Visualizing the Body of the Black Diaspora"
Tuesday, February 19, 6:00 pm
19 University Pl, Room 222
Currently a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at
Rice University, Dr. Brown’s research and teaching interests
concern slavery and the black female body, literatures of
the African diaspora, and violence, visuality, and cultural
memory.
02/11/08
Sven Spieker Lecture
GORGING
ON IMAGES: THE ARCHIVE IN 20TH CENTURY PHOTOGRAPHY
Monday, February 11, 7:45 pm
Silver Center, Room 300
This lecture is organized by Professors Ulrich
Baer and Shelley Rice, in association with the Humanities
Team-Teaching Initiative, as part of the seminar Archive,
Image, Text: The Myth and Reality of What Archives Hold, sponsored
by the Departments of Photography, German, Art History, English
and Comparative Literature.
02/11/08
and 02/12/08 Jonathan Abel Talk
"When
Redactions Speak Louder than Words: Tortured Texts, Strategic
Silence, and the Literary Casualties of War"
Talk:
Monday, February 11, 5:00 pm
715 Broadway, Room 312
Meeting and lunch with grads:
Tuesday, February 12, 11:00 am to 12:30 pm
715 Broadway, Room 312
Jonathan Abel is currently Assistant Professor
in the Department of German, Russian, and East Asian Languages
at Bowling Green State University. His research interests
include literary identity, techonologies of dissemination,
and theories of comparison.
02/07/08
Prof. Jacques Lezra at Medieval Studies Round Table Discussion
New
Voices in Early Modern Studies at NYU
Thursday, February 7, 6:15 pm
19 University Place, room 222
A Round Table Discussion with:
Prof. Benoit Bolduc Dept. of French
Prof. Jacques Lezra Depts.
of Spanish & Portuguese and Comparative
Lit.
Prof. Karen Newman Dept. of English,
Dean Susanne Wofford, Dean of Gallatin
Reception to follow.
02/04/08
and 02/05/08 Daniel O'Neill Talk
"Masochism
and Other Worldly Pleasures: Natsume Soseki's Failed Theory
of Tragedy"
Talk:
Monday, March 3, 5:00 pm
715 Broadway, Room 312
Meeting and lunch with grads:
Tuesday, March 4, 11:00 am to 12:30 pm
715 Broadway, Room 312
Daniel O'Neill is an assistant professor of
Japanese literature at UC Berkeley. he received a BA from
Stanford in Modern Thought and Literature and a PhD from Yale
in Japanese Literature.
2/4/08
and 2/5/08 Sayumi Takahasi Talk
"Tea
and Sympathy of the Word and Image:
The Intermedia Arts-Texts of Rengetsu"
The Talk:
Monday, February 4, 5:00 pm
715 Broadway, room 312
Meeting and Lunch with grads:
Tuesday, February 5, 11:00 am-12:30 pm
715 Broadway, room 312
Sayumi Takahashi studied philosophy and creative
writing at Princeton University and earned an MA and PhD in
comparative literature and literary theory at the University
of Pennsylvania. Her doctoral dissertation included a study
of the life and work of Otagaki Rengetsu.
01/31/08
Marshall Brown lecture
Music
& Fantasy
Thursday, January 31, 6:30 pm
19 University Pl, Room 222
Marshall Brown is a Professor of English and
Comparative Literature at University of Washington and the
editor of Modern Language Quarterly. He has written
four books on European literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, with special emphasis on the intersection of form
with literary and cultural history. He also works on music
and literature and is currently revising a collection of previously
published and new studies entitled 'The Tooth that Nibbles
at the Soul': Essays on Music and Poetry.
12/07/07
Professor Avital Ronell introduces Slavoj Žižek
Friday, December 7, 7:00 pm
The Cantor Film Center
36 E. 8th Street, Room 102
Trauma
and Violence Transdisciplinary Studies and the Department
of German proudly sponsor a lecture by Slavoj Zizek:
Fear
Thy Neighbor as Thyself
Introduction by Avital
Ronell, Professor of German and Comparative Literature.
This is a ticketed event open to the public. Please pick up
your free tickets at NYU Ticket Central, Kimmel Center for
University Life 60 Washington Square South, Room 206.
11/29/07
Department alum Mariano Siskin at the Lit Café
November 29th, 2007, 7:30 pm
Habitus @ the Lit Café
JCC in Manhattan
334 Amsterdam Avenue
FREE
Mariano Siskind (Buenos Aires/Boston): Assistant
Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard
University. In 2007, he published his first novel, Historia
del Abasto.
11/19/07
Micaela Kramer at the Robert Holmes Award Reception
Great Room, 19 University Place 6:30 – 8 p.m.
As part of the Robert Holmes Travel and Research Award for
African Scholarship, past recipients present on research made
possible through the grant. Past awards have supported the
research and study abroad of scholars in the humanities and
social sciences.
Presentations include "Writing and Rewriting
Carceral Spaces; the Prison as Master Signifier in Contemporary
South Africa" and "The Life Course of Nevirapine."
11/8/07 Lecture
by Professor Jacques Lezra
The Indecisive
Muse
a conversation on Borges, Wittgenstein, translation, and Comparative
Literature
with Professor Jacques Lezra
Friday, November 9, 2:00-400 pm
13-19 University Place, The Great Room
Jacques Lezra is a Professsor of Comparative Literature and
Spanish and Portuguese. The Indecisive Muse is sponsored
by the Department of Comparative Literature.
First
two events of the series *Abolition
Marassa*, which marks the 200th
anniversary of the abolition of the British Slave Trade, to
be presented by ÀJA (Adisa
Jelani Andwele), leading Caribbean dub poet, performance artist,
and humanitarian activist, who creates poetry in word and
video, addressing issues of peace, poverty, and HIV/AIDS:
11/7/07 ÀJA
presents "Don't Let me Die"
7:00 pm, 41-51 East 11th St., 7th Floor (just
east of University Place)
“Don’t Let Me Die”
E-BOOK of Perspectives, Poems, & Photographs on War and
Poverty.
11/8/07 ÀJA
presents VIDEO JOURNEY
7:00 pm 19 University Place Room 102 (auditorium)
VIDEO JOURNEY to hunger-torn Rio, Soweto, Sierre Leone,
Palestine, and Trenchtown (Kingston, Jamaica)
10/1/07 Public lecture by Professor Timothy Reiss
A
Metaphor of Bird-Islands:
Columbus Counts His Chickens
(Colonization & Subversion)
7-9:00 Jurow Lecture Hall (100 Wash Sq E; first
floor)
Tim Reiss is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature
and Distinguished Scholar in Residence. This lecture is co-sponsored
by the College of Arts and Science Dean’s Office.
9/27/07 Professor Emily Apter at La
Maison Française
Luxury
and Labor: The 18th/19th Century Turn
Thursday, Sepember 27 – 7:00 pm
Round
Table Discussion with:
Emily
Apter, NYU
Ben Kafka, NYU
John Shovlin, NYU
Caroline Weber, Barnard College
9/26-28/07 Professor Avital Ronell at Narcissus
& Eros Symposium
Narcissus
& Eros: Image or Text?
A Symposium at New York University
September 26 - 28, 2007
The symposium will negotiate methodological
problems of the humanities today by rethinking a famous mythological
pattern and should provide new theoretical insights into the
relation between image and text through a series of case studies.
Friday, September 28, 4:15 pm
19 University Place, 1st Floor: The Great Room
Avital Ronell : Falling for Narcissus: Concluding Remarks
9/26/07 Professor
John Chioles at The Onassis Cultural Center
Wednesday, September 26, 2007, 7:00pm
Literary
Evening the Atrium Café
A literary evening with Ersi Sotiropoulos, winner of the Greek
State Prize for Literature and the prestigious Book Critics'
Award for Zigzag through the Bitter-Orange Trees (2006),
and John Chioles, Professor
of Comparative Literature at New York University.
Reception to follow. Limited seating. Reservations for this
literary evening begin September 17; please call 212-486-8314.
The Onassis Cultural Center is located in
Olympic Tower at 645 Fifth Avenue, entrances on 51st and 52nd
Streets, between Madison and Fifth Avenues.
9/5/07 Comp
Lit Welcome Back Party!
Celebrate the start of a new year!
4-6:00 Casa Italiana 24 W. 12th Street
2006-2007
April
Ernesto Laclau- Articulation
and the Limits of Metaphor
Friday April 13th, 6:00 p.m.
251 Mercer Street, Room 109
A public lecture sponsored by the Department of Comparative
Literature and organized by Professor Gabriela Basterra.
Laclau is NYU's "Distinguished Writer in Residence"
for this semester.
Africa House Book Reading:
Zoe Wicomb
Thursday April 26, 6-8:00 p.m
NYU Wasserman Center, Room A
133 East 13th Street, 2nd Floor
In collaboration with the Department of Comparative
Literature, Africa House is proud to host South
African author Zoe Wicomb. Wicomb, author of David's
Story and You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town,
will be reading from her latest novel Playing in
the Light. Wicomb will also be the keynote speaker
at Comparative Literature's conference, J.M.
Coetzee and His Doubles (April 27th - April
28th).
Ms Wicomb will be introduced by Yvette Christiansë.
Prof. Christiansë is the author of Castaway, a collection
of poems published by Duke UP in 1999, and the novel
Unconfessed, published by the Other Press in
2006. She teaches in the English department at Fordham
University.
J. M. Coetzee and his Doubles
Friday April 27th - Saturday April 28th
A conference on South African writer J.M. Coetzee organized
by Professors Mark Sanders and Nancy Ruttenburg.
Sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature
and co-Sponsored by NYU Humanities Council
March
Comparative Literature
Spring Reception
Thursday March 29th, 4-6:00 p.m.
19 University Place, Room 222
Comparative Literature
Graduate Student Conference
"Foreclosure and Forgiveness: Tracing Debt in Literature
and Culture"
Thursday March 29th - Saturday March 31st
19 University Place, 1st Floor
Debt is a central concept of social and cultural life,
and a defining characteristic of contemporary experience.
Its prevalence raises the question of what happens when
debt itself undergoes inflation: does debt lose its
meaning when so much is owed? This conference seeks
to critically engage with the ubiquity of debt in a
variety of disciplines and to explore the transactional
basis of social and cultural exchange. A conspicuous
presence from Plato’s Republic to the current state
of international relations, debt is equally salient
in literary, psychoanalytic, philosophical, and political
discourses. To invoke Roland Barthes, debt is a free-floating
signifier appropriate for the age of the floating exchange
rate, a topos of judgment translatable into any discursive
field. This conference will map the costs of foreclosure
and the value of forgiveness in an effort to think relationships
beyond rhetorical recourse to the “balance of payments.”
On Textual Ownership and
Gifting: Debt, Debits, Credits
Thursday March 29th, 7-8:00 p.m.
Professor Mark Sanders will be the keynote speaker
at the conference.
French Cinema: Revisiting
the New Wave
Thursday, March 29, 7:00 p.m.
La Maison Française, 16 Washington Mews
A rountable discussion organized by La Maison Francaise
and co-sponsored by the Department of Comparative
Literature. The discussion will feature Molly
Haskell, a writer and critic, and author of From
Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies,
Richard Peña, Associate Professor of Film at
Columbia University, the director of the New York Film
Festival and program director of the Film Society of
Lincoln Center, and Geneviève Sellier, Professeur
d'études cinématographiques at the Université de Caen
and author of La Nouvelle vague, un cinéma au masculin
singulier.
February
Emily Apter - Flaubert's
Kapital, Marx's Bovary
Friday February
2nd, 12:00 p.m.
Maison Française at Columbia University
NYU Comparative Literature Professor Emily Apter will
present a paper at Columbia University. For more information
and a copy of the abstract, please contact Professor
Apter at ea31@nyu.edu.
Mary Louise Pratt - Language
Study and the University: Addressing the Monolingual
Handicap
Tuesday February 6th, 6:30 p.m.
Deutsches Haus, 42 Washington Mews
Mary Louise Pratt is Silver Professor in the Department
of Spanish and Portuguese and the Department of Social
and Cultural Analysis, and an associated faculty
member of the Department of Comparative Literature
at NYU. She is also an Olive H. Palmer Professor of
Humanities (Emerita) at Stanford University. She is
a former president of the Modern Language Association
and recently chaired its Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign
Languages. Pratt is author of Toward a Speech Act Theory
of Literary Discourse (1978), Linguistics for Students
of Literature (with Elizabeth Closs Traugott, 1980),
Women, Culture and Politics in Latin America co-authored,
1990), and Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation
(1992). This talk first examines the sense of crisis
around language that the United States has experienced
since 9/11, and considers the limitations of what has
been called the "securitization of language." It will
then go on to suggest parameters for an informed public
investment in language education and a new public idea
about language
Paul
Kottman - Toward
a Politics of the Scene
Thursday February 8th, 6:00 p.m.
19 University Place, Room 222
Professor Paul Kottman of The New School will lecture.
Un/Common Experience: The
Dross and the Glory of Everyday Life
Department of French Graduate Student Conference
Friday, February 16th, 11:00
Maison Francaise, 16 Washington Mews
Professor Kristin Ross is the keynote speaker.
Her talk is entitled, "Yesterday's Critique, Today's
Myths: Barthes and Lefebvre Fifty Years Later."
January
Poetry
Project
Wednesday January 17th, 8:00 p.m.
St.Mark's Church, The Bowery, 131 East 10th Street
Comparative Literature professor, Kamau Brathwaite
and special guest Susan Howe, will present their poetry
at the upcoming Poetry Project meeting at St. Mark's
Church.
For more information call 212-674-0910.
November
“Who
Is Afraid of Ngugi?”
November 17th-18th
presented by The Institute for African American Affairs
November 17th- “Who is Afriad of Ngugi?”
Film Premier and Panel
6:00 p.m., at theCantor Film Center at NYU, 36 East
8th Street, Theater101
Featuring: Njeeri Wa Thiongo, Manthia Diawara
and Ngugi Wa Thiongo(former Comp Lit faculty member),
moderated by Sonia Sanches. The Institute of African
American Affairs is pleased to present the New York
premier of the film “Who is Afraid of Ngugi” by filmmaker
and IAAA director Manthia Diawara and panel with scholar
and activist Njeeri Wa Thiongo and the renown African
author Ngugi Wa Thiongo. The film follows Ngugi Wa Thiongo
as he journeys back to Kenya with his wife after prolonged
exile. The couple are faced with crowds of the hopeful,
welcoming the now legendary author’s homecoming. Yet,
also present is the persistent questions of exile, as
well as the looming threat of those who still find Ngugi’s
words a threat to their existence. The film uncovers
the power of the author’s words and faith in his native
language to the future of African literature and political
developments in the 20th Century.
November 18th- : Reading from The Wizard of the
Crow
6 p.m, at the Cantor Film Center at NYU, 36 East 8th
St., Room 315
RSVP by November 15 to 212-998-4222.
Professor Beatriz Jaguaribe-
"Media, Culture, & the Urban Experience"
Tuesday November 7th, 6:00 p.m.
19 University Place, Great Room (1st Floor)
Professor Beatriz Jaguaribe, Professor of Comparative
Communications at the Universidade Federal do Rio de
Janeiro, links artistic productions, lived experiences
and academic discourses. Her cultural maps of urban
Brazil are address issues about estrangement, belonging
and diversity.
Oliver
Feltham -"On Changing Appearances in Badiou and Lacan"
Monday November 6th, 11:30 a.m.
19 University Place, Room 222
Oliver Feltham, currently Adjunct Assistant Prof at
American Univ in Paris, research interests include psychoanalysis,
Marxism, poetics, theatre and formal ontology. Professor
Feltham recently completed his translation of Alain
Badiou’s "Being and Event" for Continuum Books.
Organized by the Department of Comparative Literature
and Professor Emily Apter.
Comp Lit Undergraduate
Luncheon
Thursday November 2nd, 12:30-1:45
19 University Place, Room 222
Relax, eat, and get descriptions of Spring '07 classes!
October
A
Reading with Award-Winning Poet Kamau Brathwaite
Thursday, October 26th, 6 PM
Hue-Man Bookstore & Cafe, 2319 Frederick Douglass Blvd
Bet.124th and 125th
Kamau Brathwaite, a native of Barbados, is an internationally
celebrated poet, performer, and cultural theorist. Co-founder
of the Caribbean Artists Movement, he has received many
awards, including the 2006 International Griffin Poetry
Prize, the Neustadt International Prize for Literature,
the Bussa Award, the Casa de las Américas Prize, and
the Charity Randall Prize for Performance and Written
Poetry. He has received Guggenheim and Fulbright Fellowships,
among many others. His book The Zea Mexican Diary (1993)
was the Village Voice Book of the Year. Some of his
many works include Middle Passages (1994), Ancestors
(2001), The Development of Creole Society, 1770-1820
(2005). Over the years, he has worked in the Ministry
of Education in Ghana and taught at the University of
the West Indies, Southern Illinois University, the University
of Nairobi, Boston University, Holy Cross College, Yale
University and was a visiting fellow at Harvard University.
Brathwaite is currently a professor of comparative literature
at New York University, and shares his time between
CowPastor, Barbados, and New York City. His latest book
is Born to Slow Horses, published by Wesleyan in 2005.
Brathwaite’s latest book is Born to Slow Horses (Wesleyan
University Press), which was the winner of the 2006
International Griffin Poetry Prize.
For more information, call 212-665-7400
A Talk by Peter Zeillinger
On Reading: The Voice of Écriture Saying the Event:
Derrida Levinas Badiou
Tuesday, October 31st, 5:00 p.m.
19 University Place, Room 222
Peter Zeillinger's talk is presented by the Department
of Comparative Literature and co-sponsered by the
Departments of French and Spanish & Portuguese.
A
Talk by Susan Maslan
Trouble in Paradise:
Human Rights and Biopolitics From Zizek to Diderot
Thursday October 19th, 6:30 p.m.
19 University Place, Room 222
Susan Maslan is an Associate Professor of French at
UC Berkeley, presented by the Department of Comparative
Literature and co-sponsered by the Department of
French.
HELENE
CIXOUS
Workshop presented by the Humanities Council at NYU
with: The Department of Comparative Literature,
French, English, Dramatic Literature, German, Drama
at Tisch, and The Center for French Civilization and
Culture
The Infinite Taste of
Dreams
Thursday, October 12 – 5:30 p.m.
Hemmerdinger Hall, Silver Center, 100 Washington Square
East
Hélène Cixous will speak
of her collaboration with Jacques Derrida on the meaning
and workings of dreams, as expressed in her 2005 essay
Insister: à Jacques Derrida.
Drums on the Dam
Friday, October 13 – 7:30 p.m.
Loewe Theater, Tisch School of the Arts, 721 Broadway,
2nd Floor
Staged reading of the
English translation of Cixous’s Tambours sur la digue,
directed by Kevin Kuhlke (Tisch School of the Arts,
NYU). Followed by Q & A with the author, moderated by
Judith Miller (Department of French, NYU).
The Flying Manuscript
Saturday, October 14 – 2:00 p.m.
La Maison Francaise, 16 Washington Mews
Cixous will speak of her
rediscovery of Jacques Derrida’s manuscript of his essay
in Voiles, their collective work, which Derrida sent
“not to be opened” from Buenos Aires in 1995.
Celebrating Hélène Cixous
and Maria Chevska: Ex-Cities
Saturday, October 14 – 6:00 p.m.
Co-sponsored by Slought Foundation and The Drawing Center
The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street
Book Launch with Hélène
Cixous, Maria Chevska, Avital Ronell, Judith Miller,
Eric Prenowitz, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Aaron Levy
The Paradox of Necessary
Fictions: To Paul Ricoeur
Thursday, October 5, 7:00 p.m.
La Masion Francaise, 16 Washington Mews
A lecture by Gabriela Basterra: Associate
Professor of Comparative Literature and
Spanish at NYU and program director of Collège International
de Philosophie, Paris. She is also the author of Seductions
of Fate: Tragic Subjectivity, Ethics, Politics.
Paul Ricoeur's thinking draws its creative force from
the imagination's work on our behalf. His reflections
on evil, metaphor, narrative or ethics remind us of
our ability to create and make sense of the world. But
why should we need to reacquaint ourselves with our
creative potential, with the fictionality of the world?
Aren't they evident to us? This lecture will explore
our tendency to represent ourselves as powerless --
as controlled by essentialized fictions to which we
attribute responsibility for our acts --as one of our
most enabling creations. It will propose that creativity
works by denying itself, by erasing from its products
the trace of the human hand. But what happens when a
thing's fictionality becomes irrecoverable? What happens
when certain artifacts (such as tragic fate) conceal
their artificiality and, appearing inevitable, deny
the human capacity for action and creation? And what
are we to do with "necessary" fictions such as the "subject"
or the "law," fictions that we have created but cannot
renounce because they constitute what we are?
Memories
of the Cuban Revolution
Presented by the Cuban Studies Working Group at NYU
Wednesday, October 4th, 6:15 P.M.
King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center 53 Washington Square
South
A lecture
given by Elizabeth Dore, Professor at the University
of Southhampton, UK. The event is co-sponsored by the
Cuban Studies Working Group, (Professor Ana Dopico
and Ada Ferrer, Directors), by the Humanities Council,
and by the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center.
September
Symposium:
"The Spirit of Nature"
A Workshop
of the Department of German and the Deutsches Haus at
NYU
Friday, September 15 - Saturday, September 16 at the
Deutsches Haus
The international workshop approaches the concept of
"nature" from two perspectives: "nature as totality"
and the concept of "third nature", designating as highly
ambivalent longing under the conditions of a disenchanted
world. The workshop intends to highlight the fragility
of canonical concepts of "nature", and to reconstruct
the utopian vision fueling the complaints about creaturely
alienation from nature in modern times. It will work
through aspects of a notorious conflict in German history
of ideas: the conflict between the seductive ideal of
an uncorrupted nature, and the influential though dark
concept of "spirit" (Geist), a conflict that found several
volatile solutions under the politico-theological sign
of the "Spirit of Nature".
Participants: Friedmar Apel (Bielefeld), Ulrich
Baer (NYU), Janelle Blankenship (NYU), Eckart
Goebel (NYU), Martin von Koppenfels (FU Berlin), Ernst
Osterkamp (HU Berlin), Avital Ronell (NYU),
Thomas Stachel (NYU) Moderators: Nicola Behrmann (NYU),
Dan Childers (NYU), Andrea Dortmann (NYU), Paul Fleming
(NYU), Natalie Nagel (NYU)
COMP
LIT WELCOME BACK CELEBRATION!!!
Tuesday, September 12th, 4-6:00pm
at the Casa Italiana Garden at 24 W.12th Street
All Comp Lit faculty, grads, undergrads, and staff
are invited!!
2005-2006
April
The
Social and Material Life of Indian Cinema Thursday
Thursday, April 20th - Sunday, April 23rd, King Juan
Carlos Center, 53 Washington Sqaure South
Over the
past decade we have seen a wide spectrum of research
on Indian Cinema. This conference brings together most
of the major scholars on Indian Cinema from around the
world, as well as new and emerging ones, in order to
take stock of current work and outline directions for
future research in the field. The organizers hope this
gathering of scholars from India, Europe, and North
America will initiate new collaborations across disciplines
and within specialist subject areas, thus expanding
the parameters and boundaries of Indian Film Studies.
The goal of the conference is to foster a deeper understanding
of the aesthetic, economic, and technological forces
that have shaped the history and practice of cinema
in India. In particular, the conference is designed
to combine existing approaches to Indian film with new
perspectives that recognize the transformative power
of globalization on the aesthetic, social, and cultural
value of cinema, and thereby foster new ways of thinking
about both the present and the past.
Conference Organizers: Ranjani Mazumdar, Richard Allen,
and Aparna John.
Co-sponsered by the Dept. of Comparative Literature
Conference
Info: http://cinema.tisch.nyu.edu/object/indiancinema.html
Professor Leo Bersani:
April 2-14 2006
Professor Bersani is the author of many articles
and books on modern French literature and film as well
as aesthetics and psychoanalysis. Among his many works
are: Forms of Being: Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity
(2004); Homos (1995); Arts of Impoverishment:
Beckett, Rothko, Resnais (1994); The Culture
of Redemption (1990); The Freudian Body: Psychoanalysis
and Art (1986); The Death of Stéphane Mallarmé
(1981); Baudelaire and Freud (1978); A Future
for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (1976);
Balzac to Beckett: Center and Circumference in French
Fiction (1970): and Marcel Proust: The Fictions
of Life and of Art ( 1965).
I. Two-Part Film and Literature
Seminar
Monday, April 3rd: 7:00 La Maison Française, 16 Washington
Mews.
“The It in the I” Patrice Leconte, Henry James
and Analytic Love”
Speculations on impersonal intimacy in the psychoanalytic
dialogue: Leconte’s Intimate Strangers and Henry
James’ The Beast in the Jungle. Participants
are expected to have viewed the Leconte film, which
will be screened on Friday, March 31st at 3:00 in
screening room 656 of the Cinema Studies Department,
721 Broadway. Particpants must also have read James’story,
The Beast in the Jungle.
Monday April 10th: 7:00 La Maison Française, 16
Washington Mews.
“Claire Denis and New Relational Modes”
The lecture will discuss Denis’ Beau Travail as
an exemplification of Foucault’s polemical distinction
between desire and pleasure. Participants are expected
to have viewed the Denis film which will be screened
on Friday, April 7 at 3:00 in screening room 656
of the Cinema Studies Department, 721 Broadway and
to have read Foucault’s The History of Sexuality:
Volume 1.
(For specially registered students in graduate programs
of Cinema Studies, French, Comparative Literature, and
English: please contact Mélanie Griot of the French
Department immediately, if interested: melanie.griot@nyu.edu.
Registration will close at 50.)
II. Lecture
Tuesday, April 4th: 7:00 The Rosenthal Pavilion of
the Kimmel Center.
"Shame, AIDS, and Gay Spirituality”
This lecture will discuss recent developments in gay
male “sexual culture,” particularly in light of such
thinking as G. Dustan’s “I live in a wonderful world
where everyone has been to bed with everyone else.”
(Open To All)
III. THE JUROW LECTURE
Tuesday, April 11th: 4:30 Hermmerdinger
Hall, Silver Center.
“Foucault, Freud, Bush and the Power of Evil”
This lecture will examine the uses of “evil” as a political
and psychoanalytical category. (Open To All)
Brought to you by:
The Center for French Civilization and Culture and the
Departments of French, Cinema Studies, Comparative
Literature, and English,, The Program of Sexuality
and Gender Studies of SCA, The Draper Program, Deans
Catherine Stimpson, Edward Sullivan, Matthew Santirocco
(for the Jurow Lecture), and NYU’s Humanities Council.
NYU
Comparative Literature Graduate Student Conference
April 6-8, 2006
"Making Friendship: Bonds, Boundaries, Becomings"
The conference topic, "Making Friendship: Bonds, Boundaries,
Becomings," seeks to explore the notion of friendship
in its various conceptualizations and codifications,
both throughout history and in the present. We emphasize
the idea of friendship as a terrain of constant negotiation,
and as a mode of relation with a plurality of meanings
and implications. It appears particularly urgent to
interrogate the concept of friendship in an age of war,
humanitarian crises, and conflicts, as well as professional
specialization and the fragmentation of fields of knowledge.
The conference seeks to elaborate upon these diverse
conceptualizations and stratifications of friendship,
from the Greek concept of "philia" (that necessarily
accompanies all pursuit of knowledge) to the politics
and economy of friendship, the friend/enemy distinction,
and potential ways of constructing, thinking about,
or mobilizing friendship in the present.
An
African New York: Johannesburg and the Writing of Intimate
Estrangement
Thursday
6 April, 4-6 pm, The Great Room, 19 University Place
Prof. Stefan Helgesson, Department of Comparative Literature,
Uppsala University Respondent: Prof. Mark
Sanders, Department of Comparative Literature,
NYU
Stefan Helgesson
is associate professor at the Department of Comparative
Literature, Uppsala University, and a critic and editor
at Sweden's biggest daily, Dagens Nyheter. His publications
include Writing in Crisis: Ethics and History in Gordimer,
Ndebele and Coetzee (2004), and Literary Interactions
in the Modern World, vol. 3:2 of Literary History: Towards
a Global Perspective (editor; 2006).
Abstract:
Johannesburg has enjoyed a privileged place in above
all South African and Mozambican literature. Since its
founding in 1886, the city has been the economic centre
of southern Africa. Although divided along racial lines
for much of its history, it has always been a cosmopolitan
city. After the fall of apartheid in 1994, migrant workers,
European capitalists and a local middle class have been
joined by large numbers of immigrants from all parts
of Africa. More than ever, Johannesburg has become a
site of hope and despair for Africans, with high-tech
malls and abject poverty superimposed on each other.
Focusing on a selection of writings in English and Portuguese
from the 1950s until today, the lecture will show how
the position of the writer is invoked and inflected
in literary representations of Johannesburg. Perhaps
more importantly, it will also demonstrate that alienation
and estrangement are recurrent preoccupations among
writers despite their different positions. It is, paradoxically,
through the figure of the stranger or outcast that an
attenuated sense of metropolitan belonging is intimated
in the writing of, among others, Arthur Maimane, Noémia
de Sousa, Rui Knopfli, Mongane Serote, and Ivan Vladislavic.
Presented
by The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation, English
Department, NYU and the CRALS Colloquium.
For further
details, please contact Sheila Ghose at sg219@nyu.edu
or Stephen Donovan at sed306@nyu.edu.
March
Guest Lecture Series- cont'd.
HALA HALIM - title to be determined Wed,
3/1 @ 3:00 Kevorkian Center Library. Postdoctoral fellow,
UCLA.
EMILY WILSON - "Socratic Enlightenments"
Thurs, 3/2 @ 12:00, 19 University Place, 1st Floor.
Assistant Professor, Classics, University of Pennsylvania.
JOHN HAMILTON - “Unequal Song: Mimesis, Music,
and Madness in the Age of Diderot” Tues, 3/7 @12:30,
19 University Place, 1st Floor. Associate Professor,
Comparative Literature, Harvard University.
AAMIR MUFTI- “Inside and Outside the World Republic
of Letters” Wed,3/8 @ 12:30 19 University Pl, Room 222.
Associate Professor, Comparative Literature, UCLA.
Colloquium in the Humanities:
The repudiation and the Allure of Chivalric Romance
in Cinquecento Poetics
Wednesday , March 29, 2006, 6:00 P.M., 24 West 12th
Street, 2nd Floor Library
Presented by the Department of Italian Studies,
featuring Professor Daniel Javitch,
Director of Graduate Studies, Department of Comparative
Literature.
Stratifications of Body and
Gender in Early Modern Italian Opera Liberetti
Wednesday March 29th, 2006,
5:00 P.M., 4 Washington Square North, MARC Conference
Room, Rm. 233
Presented by MaRGIN,
the Medieval and Renaissance Graduate Infrormation Network,
given by Katherine Piechocki.
February
Cultural Memory: Cuba and
the Soviet Bloc
Friday 17 February, 3:00-5:00 PM at King Juan
Carlos I of Spain Center, 53 Washington Square South,
Room 404 West
The Cuban Studies Working Group, an NYU Humanities
Council Seminar organized by Professor Ada Ferrer and
Professor Ana Dopico, is pleased to invite you
to hear a talk by Professor Jacqueline Loss (University
of Connecticut).
( Please RSVP to fps203@nyu.edu)
Guest Lecture Series
CRISTINA VATULESCU - “The Politics of Estrangement:
Tracking Shklovsky’s Device in Literary and Policing
Practices" Tues, 2/7 @ 12:30, 19 University Place, 1st
Floor. Junior fellow, Harvard University Society of
Fellows.
BAN WANG - "World Literature, Aesthetics, and
Cultural Crisis: Chateaubriand, Virginia Woolf and Lu
Xun" Thurs, 2/9 @12:00, 19 University Place, 1st Floor.
Professor, Asian Studies and Comparative Literature,
Rutgers University.
ELLIOT COLLA -"Melancholic Anti-Colonialism:
Reading Faulkner in Arabic" Mon, 2/13 @ 3:00, Kevorkian
Center Library. Assistant Professor, Comparative Literature,
Brown University.
ELLEN McLARNEY- "Vein, Root, Race: Homeland
in Two Arabic Novels" Wed, 2/15 @ 3:00, Kevorkian Center
Library. Assistant Professor, Asian and African Languages
and Literature, Duke University.
AMELIA GLASER - "To and From the Fair: Sholem
Aleichem Reads Nikolai Gogol." Tues, 2/21 @ 12:30, 19
University Place, 1st Floor. Postdoctoral Fellow,Center
for Russian and East European Studies, Stanford University.
NICHOLAS HALMI - "Rationalism, Nationalism,
and Historicism in German Romantic Architectural Writing"
Tues, 2/28 @ 12:30, 19 University Place, 1st Floor.
Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature,
University of Washington.
Timing the Political
Thursday
2 February,
4:00-6:00 PM at Deutsches Haus, 42 Washington Mews
The first in a series of public sessions
sponsored by the NYU Humanities Council, TIMING THE
POLITICAL is organized by Emily Apter, Mary
Louise Pratt, Ana Dopico and Sybille Fischer.
This session will feature two major media theorists
on the topic of war and media. Thomas Keenan, the Director
of the Human Rights Program and a professor of Comparative
Literature at Bard College, will speak on "Where
Are Human Rights?: Iraq on the Internet." Keenan
is working on a new book called Live Feed: Conflict,
Media, Intervention. He is also the author of Fables
of Responsibility: Aberrations and Predicaments in Ethics
and Politics. He is an editor of two other journalistic
works, Paul de Man: Wartime Journalism 1939-1943
and Responses: on Paul de Man's Wartime Journalism.
McKenzie Wark, Professor of Cultural and Media Studies
at Lang College, New School University, will be the
respondent. He is currently immersed in a project on
video war games and is the author of, A Hacker Manifesto,
Virtual Geography: Living with Global Media Events, and The Virtual Republic: Australia's Culture
Wars of the 1990's.
December
Traumatic Effects: Violence
and Culture
Wednesday 7 December 6:30 PM at The
Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street
How does trauma impact the formation of culture?
What is the relation of culture and violence? Does
cultural production mediate, sublimate, and translate
trauma and violence, or does it somehow also perpetuate,
reproduce or initiate violence? How to think through
the violence of culture? These questions will be addressed
by artist Luis Camnitzer, Professor Patrick
Deer, Professor Rosalind Morris, Professor
Avital Ronell, and Professor Shireen Patell.
Translating Ezra Pound:
A Conversation (with readings)
Thursday 8 December 7:00 PM at La Maison
Francaise, 16 Washington Mews Professor Richard
Sieburth, editor of Pound's Poems and Translations
and Pisan Cantos, in conversation with
Professor Michel Beaujour, translator of a
forthcoming French edition of the Pisan Cantos.
November
Comp Lit Undergrad Fall
Lunch
Tuesday, November 8 12:30-1:45 19 University Place,
Room 222.
Your chance to hobnob, and to pick up course lists
and descriptions for Spring Semester 2006.
October
Comp Lit Career Panel for
Undergrads!
Tuesday, October 4 12:30-1:45 19 University
Place, Room 222.
Initiated and organized by Peter Wolfgang (Comp Lit
BA '04), this panel will consist of 5 students from
our department, each representing different post-Comp
Lit BA possibilities.
Peter Wolfgang - Peter has interned and worked
in publishing , and is currently applying to Yale
and Columbia graduate programs in business. Peter
is also working on the production of his own literary
magazine.
Heather Cleary (BA '03, MA '05) - Was one of
the first in our Comp Lit BA/MA program . She is currently
employed at Stern while she continues work on the
translation of The Persuasion of Days by Oliverio
Girondo. (Heather won a PEN fellowship to complete
this project.)
Sara Sanchez (BA '03) - Sara has just begun
her third year at NYU Law.
Mariano Siskind (current Ph.D. student) - Mariano
has completed his course work for the Ph.D.. He is
currently writing his dissertation, working as a Research
Assistant for Prof. Sylvia Molloy in the Spanish Department,
and is about to enter the job market for university
teaching in Comp Lit or Spanish. Last year Mariano
was awarded the American Comparative Literature Association's
A. Owen Aldridge Prize.
Ifeona Fulani (Ph.D. '04) - Ifeona is now a
full time faculty member in the NYU/SCPS General Studies
Program. She also has an M.F.A. in creative writing
and is a freelance writer (author of the novel, Seasons
of Dust, and numerous short stories).
A question and answer period will follow brief presentations
by the panelists. And -- we will have food.
September
Comp Lit Welcome Back Party!
Be there or be square.
Wednesday 14 September, 4:00-6:00 at the Casa Italiana,
24 W 12th St.
Passwords: Juliana Spahr
on Kamau Brathwaite
Spahr, whose books of poetry include Response
and This Connection of Everyone with Lungs,
will speak about the life and work of Professor Brathwaite.
Admission is $7.
Tuesday 11 October, 7:00 at the Poets House, 72
Spring Street 2nd Floor
-
May 2005
Thursday, May 12th,
beginning at 12:30
Congratulations!!!
CompLit Graduation Celebration for graduating seniors.
Please bring your parents/family/friends to celebrate!
(Champagne & sandwiches, so you don't have to wander
around wondering where to go for lunch.)
This event will be held at 19
University Place, Room 222.
- April 2005
Tuesday, April 26th,
4:00-6:00
CompLit
Bar Party for faculty and grad students. Pull
that stick out of the mud. Hang that wet rag out to
dry. Clean out those closets. (Unless you'd rather
be at Bobst?!) Free Beer!
This event will be held at Josie Wood's Pub,
11 Waverly Place. March
2005
Tuesday, March 1st, 4:00-6:00
The Department of Comparative
Literature, the Department of East Asian Studies, and
FAS Humanities present the first lecture in a series
of four organized by Professor Xudong Zhang. Professor
Arif Dirlik,
a leading intellectual historian of China and scholar
on issues relating to revolution, colonialism, globalization
and comparative social-cultural studies, will give this
first lecture, entitled "The End of Colonialism?
The Colonial Modern in the Making of Global Modernity."
This event will
be held at 715 Broadway, Conference Room (312).
The Department of Comparative
Literature, the Department of French, and La Maison
Francaise present a series of three lectures by Christopher
Prendergast. The
lectures will present a developing argument under the
heading Proust's Skepticism, where skepticism
is to be seen not in relation to the usual Proustian
suspects (the universe of worldly values), but in relation
to the redemptive aesthetic conventionally posited as
the celebration of a world-transcendent stance.
Elstir's Optical
Illusions
Monday February
28, 7:00 at La Maison Francaise, 16 Washington Mews
Walking on Stilts
Thursday
March 3, 7:00 at La Maison Francaise, 16 Washington
Mews
The Allegorical Body
Tuesday
March 8, 7:00 at La Maison Francaise, 16 Washington
Mews
Tuesday, March
29, 12:30-1:45
CompLit Undergraduate Luncheon
The Fall '05 CompLit course schedule and course descriptions
will be available at the luncheon!
This event will be held at 19 University Place, room
222
Thursday, March
31, 4:00-6:00
CompLit Spring Reception
This event will be held at 19 University Place, room
222
Comp
Lit and French Graduate Student Conference
Revolution: Figure, Fiction, Event
March 31-April 2
Keynote Lectures:
Peter Hallward, King's College in London: "The
Politics of Prescription"
March 31st, 6:30pm at La Maison Francaise, 16
Washington Mews
Rebecca Comay, University of Toronto: title t.b.a.
April 1st, 5:00pm at La Maison Francaise, 16
Washington Mews
- February 2005
-
- Friday, February
4, 10:15-6:00
The
NYU Humanities Council, along with, among others,
the Department of Comparative Literature, is sponsoring
a free, all-day workshop entitled Storytelling
in Performance. The workshop's website, given
below, lists the day's events, which include the delivery
of papers by CompLit graduate students: Anna Brigido-Corachan
will present "Native Oralituras: Narrating
the Historical in Southern Mexico" and Sabrina
Waldron will present "Reconfigurations of
the Calypso Epic in Trinidad."
http://www.nyu.edu/humanities.council/workshops/storytelling/
-
- Thursday, February
10, 2:00-3:30
Lecture
by Mark Sanders, Assistant Professor in the
English Department of Brandeis University.
- "Literature
after Apartheid: Idiom and Translation."
This event will
be held at 19 University Place, First Floor.
Monday, February
14, 2:30-4:00
Lecture
by Dominic Thomas, Associate Professor in the
Departments of French and Francophone Literature, Comparative
Literature, and in the African Studies Program, UCLA.
"Textual Ownership and Global Mediations of
Blackness: Ousmane Sembene and Richard Wright"
This event will
be held at 19 University Place, Room 222.
Wednesday, February
23, 6:00-7:30
Lecture
by Francoise Lionnet, Professor and Chair of
French and Francophone Studies, UCLA.
"Comparative Literature,
Disciplinary Proximity, and the Ethics of Ambiguity"
This event will
be held at 19 University Place, Room 222.
- February 25,
1:00-3:00
New Book Celebration!
- In
the last year our faculty have pumped out several
new books. To celebrate this multiple birth, we're
having a reception, reading, and all-around New
Book Celebration. Refreshments! Music! and did
we mention Celebration!
This event will be held at 19 University Place,
Room 222
December 2004
December 1, 6:30-8:00
Professor Richard Sieburth presents a bilingual
reading of his new translation of Georg Büchner's
Lenz.
This event will be held at Columbia University Deutches
Haus, 420 West 116th St.
November 2004
November 9, 12:30
The Departments of Comparative
Literature and English
present a lecture by Anne Janowitz of Queen Mary
University, the author of Women Romantic Poets: Anna
Barbauld and Mary Robinson, Lyric and Labour
in the Romantic Tradition, and England's Ruins:
Poetry and the National Landscape. The lecture
is entitled "'What a Rich Fund is Treasured
Up Here': Adam Smith's Campaign Against the Sublime."
This event will be held at 19 University Place, room
222.
- October 2004
October 22, 4:00PM
Keynote address by Professor Nancy Ruttenburg,
"Carwin the Inalienable Alien," at the opening
reception for the Fales Library Graduate Student Exhibit
"Circles and Circulations in the Revolutionary
Atlantic World." Samuel Otter, Professor of English
at Berkeley, will deliver a second keynote address,
his entitled "Fever."
This event will be held in the Fales Library Reading
Room.
-
-
-
- APR 2004
Apr 1, 4:00PM
Discussion on Sonia Rivera Valdez's work, The Forbidden
Stories of Marta Veneranda (Seven Stories Press,
2000), with Mario Picayo, Executive Director of LART
and producer of TV show Gente y Cultura. Organized
by Professor Ana Dopico and Angel Lozada, with
the support of the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center,
New York University.
This event will be held at at Silver Building,
Room 720.
Apr 9, 2:00-5:00PM
The Program in Poetics
and Theory presents a workshop on Form
and the Sublime, with
Brigit Kaiser (Comparative Literature), Aliki
Caloyeras (Draper), Michael Mascio (Classics), and
Hannah Pressman (Hebrew and Judaic Studies).
This event will be held at the ground floor of
19 University Place.
Apr 9 & 10
Belonging: Community, Commonality, and The Politics
of Singularity
Friday, April 9th, 10 -
noon
Community, Cosmopolitanism, and
Obligation
"How to make a cosmopolitan: the problem of moral motivation
across boundaries" Rahul Rao, Oxford University.
"The Right to Exclude? : Membership, Citizenship, and
Distributive Justice" Deborah Goldhaber, New School
University.
"Insult and Obligation" Nico Carbellano, Harvard
University and Michael Tan, New York University.
1-3 pm
Community, Death, and Memory
"Durs Gruenbein's Community of Infinite Finitude," Arne
de Boever, Columbia University.
"Information Genres, National Community, and the Politics
of Memory: the State Department Argentina Papers"
John-Patrick Leary, New York University.
"State Sponsored Myth, States of Exception: Gujarats
Gendered Violence" Sonja Thomas, New York University.
4-6pm
Community and Modernity
"Borges meets Laclau, or The Last Latin American Modern
Recipe" Mariano Siskind, New York University.
"Paris 1900: Cosmopolitan itineraries" Alejandra
Uslenghi, New York University.
"The Mysterious Lives of Passers-by: the Writing
of Urban Experience in Selected Poems by Charles Baudelaire
and Walt Whitman" Maria del Pilar Blanco, New York
University.
Saturday, April 10th
10am - noon
Community, Francophonie, and the Postcolony
"Universalizing the Particular: the Politics of Dissimulation
and Assimilation in the Project of La Francophonie"
Kate Benward, New York University.
Unworking Community and the Wretched: Fanons Politics
of National Belonging Lindsey Simms, University of Minnesota.
The Void and the Line: Images of the Postcolony Satyel
Larson, University of California at Berkeley.
1-3pm
Sociologies of Community
Identity and Territorial Representation in Contemporary
Art Institutions: the Gap Between Discourse and Practices
Ana Leticia Fialho, EHESS, Paris.
"The Inlander Collection of Great Lakes Regional Painting:
Imagining Community in Middle America" Vincent Carducci,
New School University.
Trinidad Parang: Afro-Latino Erasure or Retention? Sabrina
Waldron, New York University.
4-6pm
Being-With: Heidegger, Nancy, and Beyond
The Singular Community: Reflections on Aristotle, Heidegger,
and Nancy Matthew Linck, New School University.
Heidegger and the Political Turn: Towards a Coming Community
. . . With a Little Help From Our Friends Adam Rosen,
New School University.
The Coming Christian Community: Postmodern Theology
and Oppositional Politics Vincent Lloyd, University
of California at Berkeley.
6:30 pm
Closing Reception followed by Keynote Speaker: Simon
Critchley Professor of Philosophy, New School University
"Universal Shylockery - Money, Morality, Mercy and
Merchants" This event will be held at Hemmerdinger
Hall Silver Center, 100 Washington Square East.
Apr 12, 6:30PM
The Comparative Literature Faculty Lecture Series presents:
One Hundred Years of Gabriel García Márquez:
Making and Unmaking in Macondo with Professor Ana
Dopico
To be held at 19 University Place, ground floor conference
room.
Apr 15, 6:00PM
Svetlana Boym from Harvard University will be
giving a lecture sponsored by Comp Lit called "Estrangement,
Freedom, and the Banality of Evil: Victor Shklovsky
and Hannah Arendt". Informal reception to follow.
This event will be held at 19 University Place, Room
222
2003-2004
SEPT
2003
Sept 9, 4:00PM - 6:00PM
Welcome Back Party! - All Comp Lit students &
faculty invited to attend!!
Will be held
at the Casa Italiana, 24 W12th St.
- Sept 16, 7:30PM
- "The Politics
of Translation"
- PEN American Center/Comp
Lit co-sponsors
- Kimmel Student Center,
Room 914
- Panelists Susan Sontag,
Ammiel Alcalay, Esther Allen, Michael Henry Heim,
Michael Hofmann, and Steve Wasserman will discuss
the complex relationship between world literature
and the English language.
- Free Admission for Comp
Lit faculty & students w/ID (otherwise $10)
- Limited seating. For
reservation & info call 334-1660, x107
- Sept 23, 6:30PM -
8:30PM
- Contemporary Film
at the China Institute. The Making of Morning
Sun, a film directed by award-winning documentarian
Carma Hinton.
- For information, call
(212) 744-818.
-
- Sept 25, 6:00PM
- Prof. John Chioles
will be giving a lecture titled "Cavafy and
his Meta-Phrases". This is a Cavafy Year
Lecture presented by the Department of the Classics
of Harvard University and the George Seferis Chair.
- This event will take
place at Barker 133, Humanities Center at Harvard
University, Boston.
-
- Sept 25, 7:30PM
- Emily Apter,
Prof. of French & Comp Lit, will be giving a talk
at LA MAISON FRANCAISE titled "Weaponizing the
Femme Fatale: Rachilde's Marquise de Sade."
OCT 2003
Oct 30, 12:30PM - 1:45PM
Comp Lit Undergrad Luncheon
Have some food and drinks, and get the descriptions
on our Srping 2004 course lineup! To be held at Room
222 of 19 University Place.
Oct 30, 4:30PM - 6:30PM
Comp Lit Graduate Student Bar Party
To be held at Negril Village Restaurant located
at 70 W.3rd St.
- NOV 2003
Nov 5, 7:00-9:00PM
Disappearance: A Visual Culture Series
Artists Xu Bing and Alfredo Jaar discuss their
works with Xudong Zhang (NYU East Asian Studies
& Comparative Literature) and Richard Vine (Art in
America Managing Editor and critic). This is the first
in a series of evening programs that feature the work
of leading contemporary artists exploring themes of
disappearance, discussed by prominent scholars and
critics. This event's discussion will focus on the
enforced erasure of radical thinkers, political activists
and religious dissenters during periods of political
repression in the Americas, Asia, Africa and Europe.
The event is sponsored by the Weatherhead East Asian
Institute's Program in Contemporary Culture and Arts
in Columbia University.
This event will be held at the Columbia University
International Affairs Building (420 W. 118th @ Amsterdam
Ave.) Subway: 1/9 to 116th Street stop (walk east,
through campus, to Amsterdam).
Nov 6, 6:30PM - 7:30PM
Avital Ronell will be giving a lecture titled
Sexual Warfare as part of the Ilse and Otto
Mainzer Lecture Series. It is suggested you RSVP by
Nov 3 to either Kathrin DiPaola at (212) 998-8661,
or Erin Evers at (212) 998-8663.
This event will take place at the Jurow Hall at Silver
Center, the entrance is through Waverly Place.
Nov 18, 4:00PM - 6:00PM
Reading with Chinese writer Yu Hua
A reading of both Yu Hua's novels To Live and
Chronicle of a Blood Vendor. The reading will
be followed by a seminar style discussion.
The reading will be held at 726 Broadway, 7th floor,
Room 747. Participants should take the elevator to
the 6th floor, follow the signs for Politics and walk
up to the 7th floor (there is no direct elevator access).
Copies of the English Translation of the talk are
available in the departments of Comp Lit and East
Asian Studies.
-
- Nov 18, 7:00PM
Ulrich Baer will be giving a lecture titled
"Towards an Aesthetic of Indeterminacy: Goethe
and Caspar David Friedrich". Prof. Baer
will discuss a specific moment in the history of aesthetics
as an autonomous discipline, focusing on the encounter
and ultimate falling-out between J. W. v. Goethe and
the Romantic landscape painter Caspar David Friedrich
and show how the proper depiction of clouds emerges
as the symbolic site where modern art criticism is
born.
This event will be held at Deutsches Haus, 42 Washington
Mews.
Nov 21 and 22
- Bernd Hüppauf
has organized a two-day conference titled "Images
of the Sciences and Scientists in Visual Media"
in collaboration with the Center of Interdisciplinary
Studies at the University of Bielefeld, Germany. The
symposium will bring into contact specialists from
two areas of expertise, namely the theory of images
and modern media with the history and sociology of
the sciences. It is the contention of the symposium
that discourse on "the public understanding of
science" is shaped within the framework of a
visual culture. Popular images of scientists and scientific
research, constructed by the media have had and continue
to have a significant impact on the perception of
science and research and do, ultimately, also contribute
to the definition of the sciences as a social and
cultural institution. The conference will be held
at the Deutches Haus.
- Advanced
Comp Lit students should contact Prof. Hüppauf
if they are interested in chairing a session or acting
as a respondent.
-
-
- Nov 22, 9AM-5:30PM
Walking the Bicultural Tightrope
Psychoanalytic & Literary Perspectives on the
New American
The National Psychological Association for Psychoanalysis
in conjunction with Asian/Pacific/American Studies
Program and Institute of NYU organize the 12th Annual
Annete Overby Conference.
This event will take place at the Summerville Theatre,
Room 703 in the Silver Center
100 Washington Square East (enter on Waverly Place
or Washington Place)
Spring
2004
- FEB
2004
Feb 5, 12:30PM [NOTE
TIME CHANGE]
The Department of Comparative Literature is pleased
to present a talk by Professor DAVID PIKE titled
"The Devil Comes to Town: Paris, London,
and Urban Modernity".
Prof. Pike teaches in the Literature Department
at American University.
His fields of specialization are medievbal literature,
European modernism, Victorian urban studies, cinema
studies. He has published Passage through Hell:
Modernist Descents, Medieval Underworlds (1997),
and has a book forthcoming in 2004 entitled Subterranean
Cities: Subways, Cementeries, Sewers, and the Culture
of Paris and London. He has served as principal
editor for vols. 1 and 2 and contributing editor for
vol. 5 of the forthcoming Longman Anthology of
World Literature.
This event will be held at 14 University Place, Draper
Conference Room [NOTE LOCATION CHANGE]
Feb 12, 12:30PM [NOTE
TIME CHANGE]
Prof. Julia Lupton will be giving a lecture titled
"Rights, Commandments, and the Literature of
Citizenship". Prof. Lupton teaches in the Department
of English and Comparative Literature in the University
of California, Irvine. Her fields of specialization
are Renaissance drama and poetry, religious studies,
and psychoanalytic theory and criticism. She has published
Afterlives of the Saints: Hagiography, Typology, and
Renaissance Literature (Stanford, 1996) as well as a
collection co-authored with Kenneth Reinhard entitled
After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis (1993).
Her new book, Citizen-Saints: Shakespeare and Political
Theology is forthcoming from Chicago next year.
This event will be held at 19 University Place, Room
222
Feb 19, 12:30PM
[NOTE TIME CHANGE]
Professor Victoria Kahn from the Departments
of Comparative Literature and English at the University
of California, Berkeley will be giving a lecture. Her
fields of specialization are Renaissance literature,
rhetoric and poetics, early modern and contemporary
political theory, and the intersection of literary and
political theory. Her published work includes Machiavellian
Rhetoric: From the Counter-Reformation to Milton
(1994), Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the
Renaissance (1985), and the following edited collections:
Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe, coedited
with Lorna Hutson (2001), Machiavelli and the Discourse
of Literature, coedited with Albert Ascoli (1993).
She has a book forthcoming in 2004 entitled Wayward
Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England,
1640-74 and is working on a collection of essays
entitled Early Modern/Post Modern which will
include work on Benjamin, Schmitt, Strauss, and Althusser
in relation to Shakespeare, Hobbes, Spinoza, Descartes
and Corneille.
Talk will be held at
19 University Place, Room 222
Feb 27, 2PM
The Comparative Literature Department Cosponsors a Symposium
with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak called Death
of a Discipline. This event will be divided in two sessions.
Session I: Area Studies | Literary Fields |
Multilingualism | Theory 2PM - 5PM
Leila Ahmed | Harvard Divinity School
Eduardo Cadava | English Literature | Princeton University
Ana Dopico | Spanish, Portuguese and Comp. Lit | NYU
Brent Hayes Edwards | English Literature | Rutgers University
Ira Katznelson | Vice President for the Arts and Sciences
| Columbia
Catharine Stimpson | Dean of the Graduate School | NYU
Xudong Zhang | East Asian Studies and Comp. Lit. | NYU
Moderator | Mary Louise Pratt Spanish | Portuguese and
Comp. Lit. | NYU
Session II | 7.30 pm - 10.00 pm
A Conversation between Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
from the English and Comparative Literature of Columbia
University, and Judith Butler from the Rhetoric
and Comparative Literature Departments of University
of California, Berkeley.
Moderator | Emily Apter French and Comparative Literature
| NYU
This event will take place at Hemmerdinger Hall,
Silver Center, located in Waverly and University Place,
NYU.
- MAR 2004
Mar 8, 6:00PM - 8:00PM
Jay M. Bernstein will be giving a lecture titled
"Bare life, bearing witness: Auschwitz and the
pornography of horror". He is a University Distinguished
Professor in the Graduate Faculty and Chair of the
Philosophy Department, at New School University. This
lecture is part of his new project on ethics and poetics
after Auschwitz. Prof. Bernstein is the author of
Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (2001); Recovering
Ethical Life: Jürgen Habermas and the Future of Critical
Theory (1995); The Fate of Art (1992);
The Philosophy of the Novel. Lukacs, Marxism and
the Dialectics of Form (1984). He is also the
editor of Classical and Romantic German Aesthetics
(2003); The Frankfurt School: Critical Assessments
(1994) and The Culture Industry: Selected Essays
on Mass Culture by T.W. Adorno (1991). He has
a forthcoming book on modernist art and philosophy
titled Against Voluptuous Bodies: Adorno's Late
Modernism and the Meaning of Painting.
Ulrich Baer, an Associate Professor of German
and Comparative Literature at NYU, is the moderator
for the lecture.
The lecture is co-sponsored by the German and the
Comparative Literature Departments.
This event will be held at 19 University Place,
room 222
-
- Mar 24 & 25
- "Two Days with
Ato Quayson"
Dr. Quayson is a university lecturer and Director
of the Centre of African Studies at Cambridge. He
is author of Strategic Transformations in Nigerian
Writing (1997), Postcolonialism: Theory, Practice,
or Process? (2000), Calibrations: Reading for
the Social (2003), and co-editor of Relocating
Postcolonialism (2002). He is joint editor of
the journal Interventions, and associate editor
of Wasafiri and African Literature Today.
-
- Mar 24, 4:00PM -
6:00PM
- "Fanon's Poetics",
a lecture.
This event will be held at 19 University Place,
Room 222
Mar 25, 12:20PM - 3:00PM
"Literature and Disability: Samuel Becket
& Toni Morrison", a seminar.
This event will be held at the King
Juan Carlos Center Portrait Room (Seating is limited).
Mar 28,
3:00PM - 4:00PM
Prof. John Chioles will participate in a lecture
titled Aesthetics of Insanity in the Greek Drama
and Japanese Theatre, organized by Salon Series.
The lecture will explore the underlying meaning of insanity
in the theatre traditions by comparing that of Japanese
theatre with the Greek drama. The presentation will
focus on the Japanese dance and drama genre calles Kyoran-mono
(Insanity dances), and plays on Noh and Kabuki. Prof.
Chioles will discuss Greek dramas such as Medea,
with specific references to the subject.
This event will take place at Sachiyo Ito & Company,
405 West 23rd St. Suite 4G
Mar 30, 7:00PM
Reading and Discussion: Auguste Rodin. Meditations
by Rainer Maria Rilke, with Daniel Slager
-Comp Lit PhD candidate- and William Gass. Rainer Maria
Rilke is one of the most sensitive poets of our time,
and was also sculptor Auguste Rodin's secretary. This
reading and discussion will be from Slager's translation
of the text, which includes an introduction by William
Gass. The text discusses Rodin's work and development
as an artist, which reveals as much of Rilke as of his
subjects. The event will be moderated by Prof. Ulrich
Baer.
To be held at the Deutsches Haus, 42 Washington Mews
FALL
2002-SPRING 2003 PAST EVENTS
Fall 2002
DECEMBER 2002
December
10
Sara Nadal "Brown Bag Lunch" Presentation: Dissertation
in Progress
"The Decay of Realism: A Negative Genealogy"
19 University Place, 3rd floor, German Conference Room
#337
12:30-1:45
December
11
Prof. Kamau Brathwaite
'__Golokwati 2000__"
Reading, book signing, reception for his most recent
visionary poetry '__Golokwati 2000__,' an anthology
of Professor Brathwaite's poems woven into tales, memories,
and revelations of how they came to be. The reading
is sponsored by NYU's Institute of African-American
Affairs, Africana studies program, and Black Renaissance/Renaissance
Noire.
269 Mercer Street - Suite 601
6:00-9:00
***RSVP: 212-998-2130***
NOVEMBER 2002
November
15
After Dark Faculty Lecture Series #2
Professor Richard Sieburth
'Under the Invocation of St. Jerome'
Sponsored by the Comp Lit After Dark lecture
series.
Abstract:
There is no Muse of translation. But there is
at least a Saint-Hieronymus, or St. Jerome. Jerome
was born in 347 C.E. in Dalmatia (not far from the Trieste
of Joyce and Svevo), studied the Latin and Greek authors
in Rome, and then travelled to the Orient where, between
374 and 382, he lived as a hermit in a desert cave near
Antioch (Syria), reading the Bible and learning Hebrew.
Recalled to Rome by Pope Damasius, Jerome was commissioned
to produce a standardized version in Latin of the Greek
New
Testament-a translation that would later come to be
known as The Vulgate and that was officially adopted
by the Catholic Church at the Council of Trent in 1546.
Until his death in 419, Jerome lived ascetically in
Bethlehem, surrounded by his female disciples and working
on a translation of the Old Testament-it would be another
1000 years before any other Christian translator again
returned to the Hebrew original. For the Middle Ages
and the Renaissance, Jerome's life and work constituted
the single most important example of the role played
by the Translator in the transmission (or translatio)
of sacred scripture. We will look at some
of the rich iconography depicting St. Jerome (medieval
manuscript illuminations, engravings, paintings) in
order to see just how the Western Tradition thinks about
the act of translation, particularly when, as in the
case of Jerome, it is associated with the religious
practices of asceticism and self-flagellation.
Richard Sieburth
is Acting Chair of Comparative Literature.
His
translations include works by Hölderlin, Benjamin,
Scholem, Scève, Nerval, and Michaux.
Event followed
by discussion. Coffee and Nutterbutter cookies
served.
November 21
Prof. Emily Apter
"Auerbach and Spitzer: The 'Invention' of Comparative
Literature in Istanbul -- 1933"
19 University Place, Rm 222
12:30-1:45
SORRY, FOR
COMP LIT FACULTY & STUDENTS ONLY
PAPER SHOULD BE READ PRIOR TO TALK; AVAILABLE IN
SUSAN PROTHEROE'S OFFICE
OCTOBER 2002
October 1
Marc Caplan "Brown Bag Lunch" Presentation: Dissertation
in Progress
"Education and Initiation in the Novels of the
Yiddish Haskole and Muslim Negritude: A Study in
Comparative Modernisms."
19 University Place, Room 222
12:30-1:45
October 15
After Dark Faculty Lecture Series #1
Professor Keith Vincent
'Whose Sex is it Anyway? Envisioning the Homosexual
in Yaoi Culture.'
Sponsored by the Comp Lit After Dark lecture
series.
Abstract:
A protracted and sometimes exasperating debate took
place over the course of several years in the early
'90s in the pages of a Japanese feminist zine over the
political status of "Yaoi." Yaoi is a genre of
underground girls comics portraying male-male sex and
romance for an overwhelmingly female readership.
It emerged sometime in the 1980s as the immodest step-sister
of the critically acclaimed (even men read them!) girls'
comics (shojo manga), with more boy sex and less storyline,
but (sometimes) also with a subversively savvy cultural
critique. The debate was sparked by an editorial written
by a gay male activist friend of one of the editors
who complained that "his" sexuality had been unfairly
co-opted by yaoi and its women fans. Sato argued
that the highly romanticized portrayal of gayness typical
of yaoi said more about the female reader's fantasy
than gay reality. Contributors to the zine wrote
reams of responses in an attempt to clarify the stakes
involved in their fascination with (a mostly imagined)
gayness. Some, agreeing with Sato, saw it
as a cowardly flight from empowered, desiring womanhood,
while others defended it as a fantasy-driven leap toward
an overcoming of strai(gh)tening genital sexuality.
This paper tries to see in the debate as a whole a crucial
point of intersection and ultimately productive conflict
between feminism and queer theory; one from which neither
escapes unscathed.
Event followed
by discussion. Coffee and Nutterbutter cookies
served.
October 17th
Iraq: Is War Absolutely Necessary?
(organized by a group of CL grad students)
Why is deterrence no longer an option?
Is Iraq the most imminent threat to the U.S.?
Why the urgency to invade Iraq now?
NYU Law School, 40 West 4th Street, Room 210
Thursday, 7:00 p.m.
Richard W. Murphy
is Senior Fellow for the Middle East at the Council
of Foreign Relations. He was Assistant Secretary
of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs.
Mr. Murphy, who is familiar with Arabic, was an U.S.
Ambassador to Saudi Arabia and Syria, among other places.
Zachary Lockman
is Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at New York University.
He is a lecturer of modern Middle East history focusing
on imperialism, nationalism and the Israel-Palestine
conflict.
Zaid A. Zaid
is the Staff Assistant to the US Permanent Representative
to the United Nations. He was Staff Assistant to Ambassador
David Welch in the US Embassy in Cairo, Egypt.
He has also served in Tunisia, Jordan, and Syria.
Contacts: STIR
(Students for a Thoughtful Initiative and Response)
stir_info@yahoo.com and http://www.geocities.com/stir_info
October 21
War with Iraq?
The Middle Eastern Studies Department and
The Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies
invite you to a public forum. Co-sponsored by
the Department of Comparative Literature.
Silver (Main) Building, 100 Washington Square East,
Room 703
7 pm
With Speakers:
Faleh Abdel-Jabbar, Iraqi Opposition Activist, Univ.
of London
Khaled Fahmy, Middle Eastern Studies, NYU
George Fletcher, Law School, Columbia University
Zachary Lockman, Middle Eastern Studies, NYU
Molly Nolan, History Department, NYU
Joe Stork, Human Rights Watch
What threats
does Iraq pose to its neighbors and to US national security?
What are the legal implications of a US pre-emptive
strike on Iraq? What is the history of US involvement
in the region? How is US policy seen by the peoples
of the Middle East? What impact might a US-led strike
have on Israeli-Palestinian relations? What impact has
the decade-long sanctions
regime had on Iraqi society? How best to deal with Saddam
Hussein?
Also C-osponsored
by: Anthropology Department, Asian/Pacific/American
Studies Program, Center for the Study of Gender and
Sexuality, Department of Comparative Literature, Hellenic
Studies Program, History Department, Institute for Law
and Society, International Center for Advanced Studies,
Religious Studies Program, Politics Department, and
Sociology Department.
October 29
Fall Undergraduate Luncheon
19 University Place, Room 222
12:30-1:45
Come to the annual
undergraduate luncheon featuring free food and course
offerings/descriptions for spring registration!
SEPTEMBER
2002
September
23
Poetry and (the Limit of) Cosmopolitanism by Xi Chuan
(1963- )
-International Prize Winning Poet, Essayist, Playwright,
and Translator
-Professor of English, The Central Academy of Fine Arts,
Beijing, China
-Fellow, International Writers Workshop, University
of Iowa, Fall 2002
Time: SEPT 23 (Wednesday), 5-6:30pm
Location: 715 Broadway, Room 312, Department of
East Asian Studies conference room
Xi Chuan is a key figure in contemporary Chinese poetry,
poetic theory, and translation of world literature.
He will be giving an introduction to contemporary Chinese
literary production and debates, and, in an informal
fashion, engaging in a dialogue with interested NYU
faculty and students.
Coffee and refreshments will be provided
Spring
2003
JANUARY 2003
January
24
Laura Tanenbaum ' ICAS Friday Seminar' "Reluctant Warriors: Reading DeLillo's Cold War"
King Juan Carlos Building, 53 Washington Square South,
Room 428E, 10:00 AM - 12:00 PM.
The paper should
be read in advance; if you cannot
print from the link, copies may be obtained at the
ICAS office, Room #401. If you would like the
paper mailed, please contact ICAS, at 212.998.3770.
A lunch will follow the presentation.
If you plan to attend, please RSVP via email to jeryl.martin@nyu.edu.
DeLillo Paper
January 30
Jessie Labov "Brown Bag Lunch" Presentation: Dissertation
in Progress
"The Myth of Central Europ in the 1980s: The political
and aesthetic use of regionalism in exile/emigration"
19 University Place, Room 222
12:30-1:45, Thursday
Bring your lunch. Faculty Welcome.
Topics::
*Brief historical (and geographical) sketch of the idea
of Central Europe in the 19th & 20th centuries;
*Particular emigre/exile communities that have chosen
to identify with region over nation;
*Historical development of the political-cultural journal
in emigre/exile communities;
*Example of "Cross Currents: A Yearbook of Central European
Culture" (1982-1994);
*Theoretical and biographical link to the paradigm of
the postcolonial writer/intellectual in exile
Featuring: Joseph
Brodsky, Danilo Kis, Gyorgy Konrad, Milan Kundera, Czeslaw
Milosz, Edward Said, Susan Sontag, Joseph Skvorecky,
Derek Walcott, Adam Zagajewski
FEBRUARY 2003
February
11
Bilingual Reading by Richard Sieburth and Michel
Beaujour celebrating the publication of 'Emblems
of Desire: Selections from the "Délie"
of Maurice Scève'
La Maison Française
of New York University
16 Washington Mews (at University Place) - New York,
NY
Reading: 7:15pm
R.S.V.P. 212-998-8750
maison.francaise @ nyu.edu
Friday, February
21 (evening) & Saturday, February 22 (all day)
'TURNING THE TIDE: The Growing Resistance to
Neoliberalism in Latin America'
New York University, Silver Center, 100 Washington Square
East, New York City
CL is cosponsoring
this event & J.P. Leary is a CL grad student.
For most of the
past twenty years, neoliberal economic reform—the so-called
“Washington Consensus” on trade and fiscal policy—has
been a reigning
orthodoxy in most of Latin America. The standard prescription
of
privatization and structural adjustment promised
development and
prosperity, but two decades on, poverty and inequality
are more widespread
than ever throughout Latin America.
Lately, however,
strong opposition to these policies has emerged from
dynamic social movements and, more recently, at the
national political
level—from Argentina’s piqueteros and the anti-privatization
battles of
Bolivia to the turn to the organized left in Brazil.
Conference speakers
will discuss the social consequences of neoliberalism
and consider the
challenges that political organizers and the social
movements face as they
articulate a solution to an escalating social crisis.
SPONSORS: NYU
Department of History; NYU Center for Latin American
&
Caribbean Studies; North American Congress on Latin
America (NACLA); Public
Concern Foundation; NYU Center for the Study of Gender
and Sexuality; NYU
Department of Spanish and Portuguese; NYU Department
of American Studies;
NYU Department of Comparative Literature; Information
Network of the
Americas; Left Turn Magazine; Committee for Social Justice
in Colombia; NYU
Womyn’s Center; NYU Law Students for Human Rights; NYU
Law School Drug
Policy Forum; NYU Law School Cuba Legal Studies Group;
NYU Alliance of
Latino/Latin American Students
Registration:
$15/$10 students/low-wage; pre-registration now available
at
www.colombiareport.org.
For more information,
please contact JP Leary at jpl257@nyu.edu
MARCH 2003
February 28 and March 8
''Anti-Americanism: Its History and Currency"
King Juan Carlos Center, Screening Room
53 Washington Square South
***
February 28th
MIDDLE EAST
11 am - 12:45 pm
Tim Mitchell
Rabab Abdulhadi
Michael Gilsenan
|
EUROPE
2 pm - 3:45 pm
Molly Nolan
Vangelis Calotychos
Kristin Ross
Patrick Deer |
LATIN AMERICA
4:15 pm - 6 pm
Mary Louise Pratt
Greg Grandin
Diana Taylor
George Yudice |
March 1st
UNITED STATES
1 - 2:45 pm
Linda Gordon
Adam Green
Jack Tchen
Andrew Ross
|
EAST ASIA
3:15 pm - 5 pm
Harry Harootuninan
Rebecca Karl
Hyun Ok Park
Moss Roberts
Yutaka Nagahara |
March 3
Bei Dao "Poetry Reading and Discussions"
translations provided by Eliot Weinberger
19 University Place (NYU Languages & Literatures
Building),
Room 222
4:30-6:00pm,
The Departments
of East Asian Studies and Comparative Literature at
New
York University are pleased to sponsor a Poetry Reading
and Discussion led by Bei Dao, an internationally
renowned poet and essayist from China, founding editor
of Today Magazine. English translations will be provided
by Eliot Weinberger, award winning translator and published
essayist (Eliot Weinberger also teaches the Translation
Workshop grad course with Prof. Sieburth).
Born in Beijing
in 1949, Bei Dao is considered one of the most gifted
and
controversial writers to emerge from the massive upheavals
of modern China.
1n 1978, he co-founded the first unofficial literary
journal since 1949
called Today (Jingtian), which became a prominent forum
for Misty
Poets, a group derided by the Communist literary establishment
for their
of obscure language and their departure from socialist
realism. Since
1987, Bei Dao has lived and taught in England, Germany,
Norway, Sweden,
Denmark, Holland, France, and the United States.
His work translated into
twenty-five languages, including five poetry volumes
in English Unlock
(2000), Landscape Over Zero (1996), Forms of Distance
(1994), Old Snow
(1992), The August Sleepwalker (1990) £the collection
of stories Waves
(1990) and the collection of essays Blue House (2000).
He won numerous
awards, including Tucholsky Prize from Swedish PEN,
International Poetry
Argana Award from the House of Poetry in Morocco. He
is an honorary member
of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Now
he lives in Davis,
California.
March 11
Dr. Richard Sieburth and Dr. Steve Wasserstrom (Reed
College) will read and discuss the German poems
of the German-Jewish author Gershom Scholem and present
their book on the subject.
At Deutsches Haus.
APRIL 2003
April 1
Terence Cave
Mignon's afterlife: narrative, lyric and song"
Deutsches Haus, NYU, 6pm
April 8
Terence Cave "Fictional Songs: Goethe, Balzac
and
George Eliot"
19 University Place, Room 222, 12:30-1:45pm
Terence Cave is Emeritus Professor of French and Fellow
of St John's College Oxford; among many academic honors
he is fellow of the British Academy and Delegate to
Oxford University Press; among his numerous publications
are The Cornucopian Text: problems of writing in the
French Renaissance (Oxford 1979) and Recognitions: a
study in poetics (Oxford, 1988); he has edited George
Eliot's Daniel Deronda and Silas Marner (for Penguin
Classics and Oxford World Classics, respectively). He
is currently
writing a book-length study on "Mignon's Afterlife".
He will be staying at
NYU between March 23 and April 12 as Distinguished International
Visitor and is willing to meet with interested graduate
students to discuss his and/or their work; other lectures
he will deliver at NYU are:
* "Early modern pre-histories: a
methodological seminar" (as part of MARC Distinguished
Lecture Series, March 26 @ 6pm, Kevorkian Center)
* "Mignon's afterlife: narrative,
lyric and song" @ Deutsches Haus, April1 @ 6pm
* "Recognition in the Bildungsroman:
Goethe and George Eliot", to be delivered at a conference
on "Recongition in Narrative, Film and Opera" @ Kevorkian
Center on Saturday April 5, 2003 @ 11:30am.
For further information on
his visit please contact philip.kennedy@nyu.edu
April 22
Yoko Tawada 'A Trilingual Reading with Yoko
Tawada'
Deutsches Haus, 42 Washington Mews at University Place
7pm
“Tawada’s stories
... agitate the mind like songs half remembered or treasure
boxes whose keys are locked within.” - New York Times
Please join Deutsches
Haus at New York University and New Directions Publishing
as we celebrate the publi-cation of Yoko Tawada’s new
collection of stories, W h e re Europe Begins. Reception
and booksigning.
Yoko Tawada has lived in Hamburg since 1982 and writes
in both German and Japanese. She has won Japan’s prestigious
Akutagawa Prize as well as Germany’s
Adelbert von Chamisso Prize, the highest honor bestowed
upon a foreign-born author. Tawada is widely regarded
as one of the most innovative and important
writers of her generation, joyously confounding borders
of language, nationality, and genre.
Co-sponsored
by Deutsches Haus and the Departments of Comparative
Literature and East Asian Studies at NYU
MAY 2003
May 8
The Américas Society has organized a Spr
Fest & Conf opening at HUNTER
COLLEGE ASSEMBLY HALL Th May 8 @8pm. Included
will be a poetry reading & or VOICING featuring
Antonio Benítez-Rojo (Cuba), Kamau Brathwaite
(Bdos), Jean-Robert Cadet (Haiti), Edouard Glissant
(Martinique), Veronica Gregg (Ja), John Leerdam (Nederlands),
Earl Lovelace (TT), Cynthia McLeod (Surinam), Ineke
Phaf (Nederlands), Olive Senior (Ja)
FALL
2001-SPRING 2002 PAST EVENTS
SEPTEMBER 2001
September 5
First Day of
Classes, Fall '01
September
13
Comp Lit Welcome Back Party
Casa Italiana Garden, 24 W. 12th Street
4:30-6:30
Comp Lit faculty, grads, and undergrads are invited!
September
13
Lecture: Professor Werner Hamacher
"Capitalism as Religion, A Project by Walter Benjamin"
Deutsches Haus
42 Washington Mews
4:00 Reception to follow
This is the first of three lectures by Professor Hamacher
sponsored by NYU's International Visitors Program, the
Department of German, and the Department of Comparative
Literature. Contact the German Department for
more information at (212) 998-8650 or german.dept@nyu.edu
September
19
Poetry: Poems of Constantine P. Cavafy
"Before Time Could Change Them"
A new translation of the complete poems of
Constantine P. Cavafy (Harcourt Brace, 2001)
given by the translator Theoharis C. Theoharis
Deutsches Haus
42 Washington Mews
6:30 p.m.
Sponsored by the Program in Hellenic Studies
September
20
Workshop: Professor Werner Hamacher
Discussion of "Afformative Strike," "Working Through
Working," "Lingua Amissa"
3:30-5:30
Deutsches Haus (see above)
September
25
Lecture: Professor Werner Hamacher
"The Structure of Historical Time"
7:00 pm Reception to follow
Deutches Haus (see above)
Through September
and October
Shifting Tides: Cuban Photography After the Revolution
This university-wide exhibition includes gallery talks,
panel discussions, poetry readings, film presentations,
and related programs. The photographic exhibit
is on view at the Grey Art Gallery, 100 Washington Square
East, August 28-October 27.
Contact the Grey Art Gallery for information at
(212) 998-6780 www.nyu.edu/greyart
See the October 11 entry below for participation by
Comparative Literature's Professor Ana Maria Dopico.
OCTOBER 2001
Through September
and October
Shifting Tides: Cuban Photography After the Revolution
This university-wide exhibition includes gallery talks,
panel discussions, poetry readings, film presentations,
and related programs. The photographic exhibit
is on view at the Grey Art Gallery, 100 Washington Square
East, August 28-October 27.
Contact the Grey Art Gallery for information at
(212) 998-6780 www.nyu.edu/greyart
See the October 11 entry below for participation by
Comparative Literature's Professor Ana Maria Dopico.
October 5
Comp Lit 2001-02 Faculty Workshop Series - 1st Workshop
"Aesthetics and Politics: Rethinking the Link"
Lecture: Professor Jacques Ranciere (College de Philosophie)
Respondent: Jay Bernstein (New School)
10:00-12:00 Reception to follow
Casa Italiana, 2nd Floor Library
24 W. 12th Street
This is the first
in a series of six faculty workshops organized
around the theme of "Aesthetics and Politics."
The workshops will take place on the first Friday of
the months of October, November, December, and then
three months (to be determined) in the spring semester.
The focus for each workshop's discussion will be a text
provided by the speaker which we will read in advance.
Copies of the text will be available a week before each
workshop in Susan Protheroe's office in the Comp Lit
department. On the day of the workshop, the speaker
will not lecture, but merely introduce his/her text
and situate it in terms of work in progress. A
designated respondent will comment briefly on the text.
The floor willl then be opened to discussion.
October 11
Panel Discussion, Prof. Ana Maria Dopico, moderator
"Cuban Visions: Images and Imaginaries since the
Revolution"
As part of the Grey Art Gallery's "Shifting Tides" exhibit,
this panel discussion on contemporary Cuban art and
culture will feature distinguished speakers in the arts,
and will be moderated by Professor Ana Maria Dopico.
Prof. Dopico is Assistant Professor in the Department
of Comparative Literature, and the Department of Spanish
and Portuguese.
October 19-21
Globalization and Popular Culture: Production, Consumption,
Identity
University of Manitoba
The Globalization and Popular Culture workshop explores
the interface of global forces and local constellations
as they are refracted through the prism of popular culture.
We believe that analysis of popular culture provides
a critical perspective on the everyday practicies of
production, consumption and contestation of identities.
We promote study of the relationship between globalization
and popular culture from a variety of disciplines
and across area studies . The objectives of the
workshop include enabling cross-area examination of
globalization and popular culture and further
developing interdisciplinary scholarship in both fields.
The keynote address, "Postmodernism and the Cultural-Political
Claims to the Universal: Identity or Identification?"
will be delivered by Prof. Xudong Zhang.
October 23
EAS Colloquium
The East Asian Studies Faculty and Graduate Student
Colloquium series is pleased to announce a brown bag
lunch-time seminar with the guest discussant Wang Anyi,
an award-winning Chinese writer. The seminar will
start at 12:30 pm in the EAS conference room on the
3rd floor of 715 Broadway on Tuesday, October 23.
Participants should feel free to bring food with them.
Light refreshment will be provided.
The reading materials include two short essays by Wang
Anyi in
Chinese, and an critical essay in English by Xudong
Zhang. They will be available at the EAS office
by Oct. 18 (Thursday)
October 24
AS THE GROUND WAR IN AFGHANISTAN BEGINS
(organized by comparative literature graduate students)
Two Distinguished Military and Diplomatic Policy Experts
Debate the Pros and Cons of the WAR ON TERRORISM
--Is the War in Afghanistan a winnable war?
--What will be the fallout regionally and globally?
-- What are the domestic costs of ensuring safety?
--What are the root causes of terrorism?
--What are the long-term obstacles to this fight?
Dr. David Callahan
is a co-founder of Demos, an innovative think tank and
has authored books on post-Cold War American
foreign and military policy ("An Unwinnable War," etc.).
He has been a commentator for The New York Times, The
Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC and Fox News among numerous
other
venues. He will discuss the necessities of the war in
Afghanistan and the long-term prospects of fighting
terrorism. He will also connect these security concerns
to issues of civil liberty at
home and economic justice around the globe.
Dr. Waheguru Sidhu is an associate at the International
Peace Academy, an United Nations affiliate, where he
coordinates
the project on "The UN, NATO and Other Regional Actors."
Dr. Sidhu is an expert on the India-Pakistan nuclear
build-up as well as regional politics in general (including
Afghanistan). He has been a MacArthur fellow at Oxford,
Visiting Scholar at Stanford and a Warren Weaver fellow
at the Rockefeller foundation. Dr. Sidhu will raise
concerns about the war in Afghanistan--its necessity,
costs and fallout--both for the region and for the war
on terrorism at large.
Time: 7 pm
Place: New York University School of Law
40 Washington Square South
Room No. 214
October 25
Undergraduate Luncheon
12:30 - 1:45 p.m. at 726 Broadway, 6th floor
Food, fun and Spring course descriptions!
Civil War
as Political Paradigm
(organized by comparative literature graduate students)
featuring speaker Giorgio Agamben
NYU - Casa Italiana 24 W. 12th st., 2nd floor
6:00 - 8:00 p.m.
October 30
Jens Christian Grondahl: Silence in October
Reading and Reception
The DCA Gallery, 525 W. 22nd st., NYC 6:30 p.m.
Hosted by: The Royal Danish Consulate General of New
York & The Danish American Society
Moderator: Comp Lit student Anne Mette Lundtofte
NOVEMBER 2001
November 2
Comp Lit 2001-02 Faculty Workshop Series - 2nd Workshop
"Geographical Knowledges/Political Powers"
Lecture: David Harvey
Respondent: Manu Goswami
2:30 - 4:30 p.m. Reception to follow
Casa Italiana, 2nd Floor Library
24 W. 12th Street
November 8
"Olives, Bitter Lemons, and Sour Grapes in Durrell's
Mediterranean"
A presentation by Prof Vangelis Calotychos to
the Program in Modern Greek, Brown University.
DECEMBER 2001
December 7
Comp Lit 2001-02 Faculty Workshop Series - 3rd Workshop
"Aesthetics is a Joke"
Lecture: Professor Doris Sommer (Harvard)
Respondent: Margaret Cohen (NYU)
10:00 a.m.-12:00 p.m. Reception to follow
Casa Italiana, 2nd Floor Library
24 W. 12th Street
TBA
A series of lectures in Cyprus
presented by Prof. Vangelis Calotychos
December 28-30,
2001
MLA/AATSEEL Annual Meeting 2001
New Orleans, Louisiana
* Scores of panels will offer hundreds of papers and
presentations
on language, literature, linguistics, technology
and pedagogy.
* Some 500-600 of the most active and professional scholars
in
Slavic from the USA, Canada, and a number
of other countries
will attend.
* Gratis interviewing facilities will be available.
Please contact the
Executive Director for details.
* The exhibit hall will be packed with companies offering
the
newest and best in scholarly books, textbooks,
audiovisual aids,
study abroad and summer intensive programs,
and more.
Comp Lit student Julia Trubikhkina will be reading
her paper on Romanticism and translation, "Origins:
Nabokov's romantic roots".
JANUARY 2002
January 5-6
"From Local History to Global Individual: Changing
Themes in Modern Greek Fiction, 1975-2000"
at Oxford University, UK
Prof. Vangelis Calotychos has been invited to
speak on
"Migrant Differences: The A's and Worker Bees of the
Balkan Honeycomb."
January 9-12,
2002
2nd Conference on Caribbean Culture
University of the West Indies, Mona Campus, Jamaica
The 2nd Conference on Caribbean Culture honours Kamau
Brathwaite: Griot, Poet, and Historian. This major
international conference brings together cultural workers
for three days of deliberation and celebration centred
on one of the foremost aspects of the region’s heritage,
the word.
The conference Chairs, Professor Barry Chevannes and
Mr. Joe Pereira welcome submissions on a broad spectrum
of topics within the scope of ideas informing Caribbean
Culture, in particular issues
that converge around the art of the word as a centre-piece
for Caribbean expression.
The conference is organised around concurrent panels
emerging from the following themes:
The Works of Kamau Brathwaite
Issues in Nation Language(s)
Orality in Caribbean Culture
Theories and Philosophies of the Word in the Caribbean
Politics, Religion and the Word in the Caribbean
The Word as Resistance
Caribbean Historiography
Caribbean Communication
Caribbean Popular Music
Literary Creation and Caribbean Self-definition
The Vocabulary of Caribbean Artistic Expression
The Idioms of Youth Culture
Engendering the Word
Caribbean Education and Culture
The Word Industry: Production, Protection & Promotion
Discourses on Africa and the African Diaspora
January
22
First Day of Classes, Spring '02
FEBRUARY 2002
February 1
Comp Lit 2001-02 Faculty Workshop Series 4th Workshop:
"The Industrialization of Bohemia"
Lecture: Prof. Andrew Ross,
Respondent: Prof. Emily Martin (NYU Anthropology)
10 am - noon; 726 Broadway rm. 754
*NOTE CHANGE OF LOCATION!!*
coffee and danish served 9:30 - 10 am
MARCH 2002
*POSTPONED
UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE*
March 1
Comp Lit 2001-02 Faculty Workshop Series 5th Workshop:
"Islamist Discourse for Western Consumption"
Lecture: Prof. Jenine Abboushi
Respondent: TBA
10 am - noon; location TBA
APRIL 2002
April 5-6
Poetics and Theory program: "Zone 2: The Force of
Sovereignty"
A two day conference sponsored by Deutsche Forshungsgemeinschaft,
Bonn; European University, Viadrina; Frankfurt/O; GSAS/Center
for Ancient Studies/ Depts of English and German, NYU
Prof Mikhail Iampolski will be speaking April
6 at 9:30 am at Hemmerdinger Hall.
April 9
Undergraduate Luncheon
12:30 pm 19UP room 222
get info on fall courses and mingle with complitters...and
don't forget the FREE FOOD!!!
April 26
Comp Lit Spring 2002 Graduate Student Colloquium
"The Speakable, The Unspeakable and the Politics
of Listening: Ethics of Confronting the Real"
Time and Location TBA
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