The Humanities Project Events for November 2007
In 1988, Dylan Glenn ran for a congressional seat in Southwest, Georgia, aiming to unseat incumbent Democrat Sanford Bishop. This documentary chronicles Glenn's effort to become the first African American Republican elected to Congress from the deep South since Reconstruction. This film offers a unique perspective on racial, ideological, and regional intersections in modern political campaigns.
Read more about the film on the Internet Movie Database.
This roundtable will address the impact the book business has on how readers perceive and think about literature from the Americas. Publishers, book reviewers, magazines, bookstores, translators -- all aspects of the book business play a role in determining what texts make their way into English and how they are perceived and presented. Although we like to think of the publishing industry as a benevolent enterprise benefiting culture, for most presses it is a business, and a lot of other factors go into deciding which titles get published, how they are received by the media, and how they sell. This is especially true in terms of literature in translation. And as a result, the marketplace can shape many of our perceptions about literature from other countries. In America, some countries are generally overlooked (like Canada), and others pigeonholed (like South American "magical realism"). Participants in this roundtable discussion -- all representing different parts of the industry -- will discuss these topics, exploring ways in which literature from the Americas needs to be "re-imagined" and positive developments in book culture that are increasing access to other international voices.
Participants:
- Chad W. Post (moderator), Director of Open Letter, the University of Rochester's literary translation publisher
- Lisa Dillman, translator from Spanish and Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Emory University
- Jack Kirchhoff, Book Review Editor and Paperbacks Columnist, Globe & Mail (Toronto)
- Daniel Shapiro, Director of Literature at the Americas Society and editor of Review
- Jonathon Welch, co-founder and buyer at Talking Leaves Books
Please join us afterwards for a reception in the Schlegel Hall, Eisenberg Rotunda (maps and directions).
Jonathan D. Katz is the 2007-08 Clark-Oakley Fellow at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute and a visiting professor at Smith College. Katz founded and directed the Larry Kramer Initiative for Lesbian and Gay Studies at Yale University and was the founding chair of the Department of Lesbian and Gay Studies at City College of San Francisco, the first department of Lesbian and Gay Studies in the United States. He has written extensively on Cold War American art and sexuality for a wide range of publications. His newest book, The Silent Camp: Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Cy Twombly John Cage, will be published next year by the University of Chicago Press.
About the talk: Beginning in early 1954, Robert Rauschenberg invented that particular conjunction of objects and gestural painting he called a "combine." He informed at least one interviewer that he constructed the first combine "at a time of passion for a friend," exactly at the moment he was becoming romantically involved with Jasper Johns. Yet nothing of this passion can be read off the surfaces of his combines, for as assemblages of found things, each carrying its own history, they can be read in a multitude of different ways. This paper argues that the advent of assemblage coincided with Rauschenberg's desire to find a means of expressing sexual difference within or alongside other kinds of meanings, in essence hiding his authorial voice through the objects in his combines.
There will be a reception following the talk.
Debra A. Castillo, is a Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow, Emerson Hinchliff Professor of Hispanic Studies, and Professor of Romance Studies and Comparative Literature at Cornell University
Professor Castillo specializes in contemporary narrative from the Spanish-speaking world, gender studies, cultural theory, and visual studies. She is author, editor, or translator of ten books, including Talking Back: Strategies for a Latin American Feminist Literary Criticism (l992), Easy Women: Sex and Gender in Modern Mexican Fiction (l998), and (co-written with María Socorro Tabuenca Córdoba) Border Women: Writing from La Frontera (2002). Her most recent book is Re-dreaming America: Toward a Bilingual Understanding of American Literature (SUNY, 2004), a book that focuses on Spanish-language US writers.
About the Talk: This presentation examines several films from Spanish America and the Philippines that represent the difficulties of obtaining a U.S. visa. Whether humorous or dramatic in their approach, these takes on the hopeful immigrant's encounter with the complicated officialdom of the U.S. visa system typically highlight the performance of cultural identity and heterosexual masculinity, and the resolution of the visa dilemma through heterosexual pairing.
Peter Haidu taught medieval literature and critical theory at Columbia, Yale, Virginia, Illinois, and UCLA, where he is professor emeritus. He now lives in Paris.
He is the author of numerous books, which include The Subject Medieval/Modern: Text and Governance in the Middle Ages, The Subject of Violence: The Song of Roland and the Birth of the State, and has published more than a score of essays, in English and French, in journals such as New Literary History, Diacritics, L'Esprit Createur, Poetics Today, Exemplaria, and Viator.
Professor Beth Jörgensen of the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures will introduce the film.
Director: Alejandro Springall. Synopsis: Pious widow Esperanza is devastated when her teenage daughter dies as the result of a mysterious virus contracted during a routine throat operation. Remarkably, she is told that her daughter is still alive by a vision of Saint Jude who appears in her dirty oven. So begins Esperanza's journey through sleazy brothels and eventually to Los Angeles to try and find her lost child.
Spanish with English subtitles
Read more about the film on the Internet Movie Database.
Maryse Condé, internationally acclaimed novelist, playwright, critic, and scholar, is Professor Emeritus in the Department of French and Romance Philology at Columbia University.
About the Talk: Erased memory, 'mémoire raturée', is a concept coined by the Martinican philosopher, Edouard Glissant, to express the damage wrought by colonization on the minds of the Caribbean people. The memory of their history has been replaced by the colonizer's own history. They have been innoculated with self-hatred, an inferiority complex and a pervading feeling of guilt. For example, they regard slavery not as a crime perpetrated against their ancestors, but as the punishment for their own barbarity while in Africa. Aimé Césaire's Négritude was the first attempt at disrupting this alienation.
This 2006 winner of the Sundance Special Jury Prize and the High Falls Film Festival Best Documentary Award examines patterns of voter disfranchisement from Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004 while concurrently following the failed congressional campaign of Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney. This documentary considers the news media's portrayal of the candidates and issues across two election cycles in very different political contexts.
Read more about the film on the Official website.
Alastair Minnis (curriculum vitae) is professor of English and Medieval Studies at Yale University. He has previously taught at the Queen's University, Belfast, Bristol, York, and Ohio State Universities.
His books include Fallible Authors: Chaucer's Pardoner and Wife of Bath (forthcoming, University of Pennsylvania Press), and Valuing the Vernacular: Authority and Imagination in Middle English Literature (collected essays, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press); Magister Amoris: The 'Roman de la Rose' and Vernacular Hermeneutics (Oxford, 2001); Chaucer's Shorter Poems (Oxford Guides to Chaucer, 1995, 2000); Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages (1984); and Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity (1982).
About the Talk: Margery Kempe was interrogated about two Biblical texts which were potentially troublesome for her attempt to transcend material marriage, Genesis 1:28 and Luke 11:27-28. What was in the minds of her questioners? I will place Margery amidst various heresies in the search for possible answers.