Friday Forum
Spring 2012
Unless otherwise noted, all events occur on Friday at 4 p.m. in the English Program lounge (room 4406). Please check back regularly for updates.
January 27
Jenny Davidson (Columbia University) "The Notation of Gesture: Restoration Theater and the Novel"
This talk considers the puzzle of why it should be that though we very often read and teach Restoration drama, we are very much more likely, by the middle of the eighteenth century, to deem the novel a more significant and appealing genre than anything being performed in the contemporary theater I argue that the novel was able to absorb many of the functions and techniques not just of Restoration comedy but of the theater more generally, and I build a more detailed case around the development of techniques for the notation of gesture: first in dialogue and stage directions, and subsequently in prose fictions in which the introduction of complex gestural interaction represented a meaningful innovation. Finally I consider the epistolary novel as a dramatic mode and the role of theatrical criticism as a mediator in this series of generic transactions and transformations.
February 3
Rebecca L. Walkowitz (Rutgers University) “Where is Summertime?”
In a global novel – a novel that aspires to planetary circulation, distributes its plot across distant time zones, and calculates the relationship among actions at a transcontinental scale – it is never the same season everywhere. By asking us to think about the global in this way, J.M. Coetzee’s fictional memoir
Summertime draws our attention to the local, regional, continental, and transcontinental histories of the state. This paper associates Summertime with a new genre of world literature: novels that do not simply appear in translation but have been written for translation from the start. These texts engage formally, thematically, and sometimes typographically in the theory and practice of translation. Born-translated novels ask us to imagine new strategies of reading and new approaches to literary and political collectivity. Coetzee’s work solicits what I call “close reading at a distance.”
February 10
Bruce Brugett (University of Washington Bothell) and Glenn Hendler (Fordham University) “What do Keywords Do?”
Drawing on their experience editing Keywords for American Cultural Studies (NYU Press 2007), Burgett and Hendler will discuss what makes keyword projects different from other forms of academic presentation and other means of approaching questions of interdisciplinary field formation. In contrast to encyclopedias and reference works, Keywords aims not to codify the state of scholarship in discrete fields called American studies and cultural studies, but to catalyze interdisciplinary conversations across those fields and others. In both print and digital formats, keyword projects encourage authors and users to think critical and creatively about the genealogies and futurologies of terms and concepts.
February 17
Debates in the Digital Humanities: Issues from the recent University of Minnesota Press collection
Featuring Moderator: Matthew K. Gold (Graduate Center and New York City College of Technology); Panelists: Steven Brier (Graduate Center); Charlotte (Charlie) Edwards (Graduate Center); David Greetham (Graduate Center)
February 24
Allison Pease (John Jay) “Boredom in/and Feminist Modernist Fiction”
Boredom has no essential character; it functions as a stance toward, or a gauge of, not only what is valued and meaningful, but one’s access to that meaning and value at any given point in time. Boredom emerges in British modernist fiction as an important register of British women’s experiences as they become aware of their lack of agency. This talk will explore how modern understandings of boredom are involved in the notion of the individual as producer of his or her own meaning, why it is a relevant gauge of early twentieth-century feminism and feminist fiction, and why contemporary feminist criticism has avoided the category of boredom despite its obvious place in modernist literature.
March 2
2:00PM
Paul K. Saint-Amour (University of Pennsylvania) "On the Partiality of Total War: From Charlton to Joyce"
An RAF officer traveling to Iraq in late 1922 takes Joyce's Ulysses along to read, describing the novel as an "official handbook" to the region. Later, that same officer protests the RAF's bombing of Iraqi civilians—part of its experiment in "imperial air control"—and resigns his post, only to become a writer of imperial adventure novels and a prophet of the necessary killing of civilians in the next world war. This talk trails Air Commodore L.E.O. Charlton through a series of disparate spaces and genres in order to trace how the emergent concept of “total war” effaced the connections between them—between imperial romance and the modernist day-book, interwar British mandates and the metropole, and narratives of threat and reassurance in military spectacle.
4:00PM
Andrew C. Parker (Amherst College) "The Theorist's Mother"
Noting how the mother is made to disappear perennially both as the object of theory and as its subject, Andrew Parker focuses in his forthcoming book on the legacies of Marx and Freud, who uniquely constrain their would-be heirs to "return to the origin" of each founding figure's texts. Analyzing the effects of these constraints in the work of Lukács, Lacan, and Derrida, among others, Parker suggests that the injunction to return transforms the history of theory into a form of genealogy, meaning that the mother must somehow be involved in this process, even if, as in Marxism, she seems wholly absent, or if her contributions are generally discounted, as in psychoanalysis. Far from simply being marginalized, the mother shows herself throughout The Theorist’s Mother to be inherently multiple, always more than one, and therefore never simply who or what theory may want her to be.
March 9
Colin Jager (Rutgers University) "Justified Sinners and Religious Minorities: Scott, Hogg, Benjamin"
Through readings of novels by James Hogg and Walter Scott, my talk argues that religious "fanaticism" is a byproduct of asymmetrical warfare. Hogg's "solution" to religiously-motivated violence, I propose, replaces Scott-style uneven development with a tentative and shadowy practice of living together.
March 16
2:00PM
Nature Shakespearianized: Shakespeare, Coleridge, and Poetic Faith featuring Richard McCoy, Alan Vardy and Anne McCarthy
The turn to religion in Shakespeare studies has become a stampede, inspiring wanton speculation about the playwright’s religious beliefs and readings of the plays as covert religious propaganda with “sacramental” and “godly” aims. Shakespeare’s plays often require great leaps of faith in magic, ghosts, witches and even gods onstage. Yet despite their aura of the supernatural, what they demand is more aptly described by Samuel Taylor Coleridge as “the willing suspension of disbelief, . . . which constitutes poetic faith." Coleridge’s idea of plays as “willing illusions” that sustain a “semblance of truth” helps show how Shakespeare’s plays enable us to mind “true things by what their mockeries be.'
4:00PM
Admissions Event: Open House for Admitted Students (current students and faculty are encouraged to attend)
March 23
9:00AM-9:00PM English Students Association Annual Conference
4:00PM
Plenary Session of the 2012 ESA Conference by Rachel Adams (Columbia University), "Her Left Foot: Gaby Brimmer and the American Routes of Disability Literature”
Professor Adams specializes in 19th- and 20th-century literatures of the United States and the Americas, media studies, theories of race, gender, and sexuality, medical humanities and disability studies.
http://esaconference2012.wordpress.com/about/
March 30
2:00PM
Workshop on the Comprehensive Exam
4:00PM
Meredith Martin (Princeton) “The Rise and Fall of Meter”
Why do we often teach English poetic meter by the Greek terms iamb and trochee? How is our understanding of English meter influenced by the history of England's sense of itself in the nineteenth century? Not an old-fashioned approach to poetry, but a dynamic, contested, and inherently nontraditional field, "English meter" concerned issues of personal and national identity, class, education, patriotism, militarism, and the development of English literature as a discipline. The Rise and Fall of Meter tells the unknown story of English meter from the late eighteenth century until just after World War I. Uncovering a vast and unexplored archive in the history of poetics, Meredith Martin shows that the history of prosody is tied to the ways Victorian England argued about its national identity.
April 20
2:00 PM
Allison Dushane (Institute for the Environment University of Arizona) "Autonomous Life"
This presentation puts Romantic-era literature and science into conversation with contemporary critical perspectives on the problem of life in order to consider the possibilities and limits of vitalism for rethinking the relationship between human and non-human forms of agency. I begin with a consideration of vitalist matter theories advanced by figures such as Erasmus Darwin, Joseph Priestley and John Thelwall, who stress the latent and dynamic potential of matter. These vitalist models take the organism as their reference point, stressing the activities of self-articulation, self-maintenance, and self-enclosure that are central to conceptions of the autonomous modern subject. I then move to a reading of Mary Shelley’s post-apocalyptic novel, The Last Man, which imagines life beyond the borders of the organism through its extended meditations on sense, potentiality, and the event. I argue that The Last Man—and by extension, Romanticism—offers a critique of the autonomous self through aesthetic instantiations of non-human, inorganic, autonomous life.
4:00 PM
Poetry in Public Space -- a Reading by South African Poet Laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile and conversation with Meena Alexander (Distinguished Professor, PhD Program in English)
South African Poet Laureate Keorapetse Kgositsile will read from his work and engage in conversation with Meena Alexander about questions of poetry, history, memory and the role of poetry in public space.
April 27
Mario DiGangi (Graduate Center) "Affective Agency and Political Knowledge in Shakespeare's History Plays"
Sixteenth-century English drama engages political thought in ways that go beyond statements of doctrine or constitutional allegiance. Drawing on the work of affect theorists and philosophers of emotion who critique the notion of the political agent as simply a “rational cognitive subject” and who reject the ontological dualism that splits the political from the psychic, I explore in this talk the affective politics of the Elizabethan history play. I will focus on scenes in Shakespeare’s Richard III and King John in which affective relations between noblemen and hired murderers make available certain forms of political agency and political knowledge.
May 4, Segal Theater
Victorian Cities: CUNY Victorian Conference with keynote by Judith Walkowitz; other speakers include Julian Wolfreys, William Cohen, Michelle Allen-Emerson, Nancy Rose Marshall, Deborah Nord.
Day-long conference in the Segal Theater on the topic of urban life, art, and literature in the nineteenth century.
http://victorian.commons.gc.cuny.edu/
May 11
Final Forum (Open Executive Committee Meeting, Poetry and Revels)