Close this window EVENTS FROM PREVIOUS YEARS click here to return to current events 2008-2009; 2007-2008; 2006-2007; 2005-2006; 2004-2005; 2003-2004; 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 2004-2005 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 Back to top