Close this window EVENTS FROM PREVIOUS YEARS click here to return to current events 2006-2007; 2005-2006; 2004-2005; 2003-2004; 2002-2003; 2001-2002 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 For more information please click here. 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. For more information see the conference website: http://homepages.nyu.edu/%7Emat373/ 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 Program 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