2008 Spring Colloquium Schedule
*All readings will be on electronic reserves, listed under UNIT 2007, Rothberg.
Monday February 4, 8:00 pm
Levis Faculty Center
National? Comparative? Global? Literary Methodology Today (I)
Matthew Hart, English
Adlai Murdoch, French/African American Studies
Eleonora Stoppino, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese
Gary Xu, East Asian Languages and Cultures
In her recent book Through Other Continents, Americanist literary critic Wai Chee Dimock attempts to invent a literary study attuned to the geographical scale of the world-system and inspired by the "deep time" of geology and astronomy. She argues that "[r]ather than being a discrete entity, [American literature] is better seen as a crisscrossing set of pathways, open-ended and ever multiplying, weaving in and out of other geographies, other languages and cultures." Yet, while Dimock wants Americanist critics to be conversant with "Persian literature, Hindu literature, Chinese literature," with "written records going back five or six thousand years, and oral, musical, and visual material going back further," her book remains a study of "American literature." Thus, a project that marks itself as innovatively comparative and global maintains its ties to the national scale. This panel will explore the implications of the tensions between national, comparative, and global concerns in contemporary literary methodology that Dimock's work makes visible. Can literary criticism inhabit "deep time" and keep its eye on what Gayatri Spivak calls the horizon of "planetarity"? How do the tensions between the national, the comparative, and the global play out in other times and places, neither contemporary nor American? Is Dimock's return to the national an inevitable one? Are there limits to literary studies' attempts to globalize itself? Can comparative methodology provide an alternative path?
Background r eadings now available on e-reserves under UNIT 2008.
Casanova, Pascale. "Introduction: The Figure in the Carpet." The World Republic of Letters. Harvard University Press, 1-6.
Dimock, Wai Chee. "Introduction: Planet as Duration and Extension." Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time. Princeton University Press, 1-6.
Moretti, Franco. "Conjectures on World Literature." New Left Review 1. (Jan-Feb 2000): 54-68.
Monday February 25, 8:00 pm
Levis Faculty Center
National? Comparative? Global? Literary Methodology Today (II)
Ericka Beckman, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese
Waïl Hassan, Comparative Literature
Marcus Keller, French
Harriet Murav, Slavic and Comparative Literature
Respondent: Jed Esty, English
Background readings now available on e-reserves under UNIT 2008.
Casanova, Pascale. "Introduction: The Figure in the Carpet." The World Republic of Letters. Harvard University Press, 1-6.
Dimock, Wai Chee. "Introduction: Planet as Duration and Extension." Through Other Continents: American Literature Across Deep Time. Princeton University Press, 1-6.
Moretti, Franco. "Conjectures on World Literature." New Left Review 1. (Jan-Feb 2000): 54-68.
Monday, March 10, 8:00 pm
Levis Faculty Center
Tina Chanter, Philosophy, DePaul
“The Political Legacies of Antigone”Respondents:
Robert Rushing, Comp Lit/Italian
Steven Wagner, Philosophy
Co-organized with the Department of Philsophy.
Co-sponsored by
Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities, Department of the Classics, the
Unit for Cinema Studies, Program in Comparative and World Literature, Gender
and Women's Studies Program, Department of Political Science.
Tina Chanter is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University, Chicago. She is author of Ethics of Eros: Irigaray’s Re-writing of the Philosophers (Routledge, 1995), Time, Death and the Feminine: Levinas with Heidegger (Stanford University Press, 2001), Gender (2006), The Picture of Abjection: Film Fetish and the Nature of Difference (Indiana University Press (2007). She is editor of Feminist Interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas (Penn State University Press), co-editor of Revolt, Affect, Collectivity: The Unstable Boundaries of Kristeva’s Polis (State University of New York Press, 2005), and co-editor of Sarah Kofman’s Corpus (SUNY Press, 2008). She is also editor of the Gender Theory series at the State University of New York Press. Her current book project is The Political Legacies of Antigone.
Abstract:
This talk builds on and challenges insights from Judith Butler. It argues that the legacy of political and dramatic appropriations of Antigone demonstrates the need to go beyond Butler’s reading of the socially contingent nature of kinship. Taking into account the diverse racially combustible situations in terms of which Antigone has been translated, the talk explores how the figure of Antigone lends itself to exposing the socially contingent nature of race. Femi Osofisan’s Tègònni, for example, takes up the question of racial taboos, and in doing so, sheds light on the need to rethink the Hegelian and Lacanian assumptions that inform Butler. Tègònni reveals how race tends to be foreclosed both by the theoretical sources on which Butler depends and by the western tradition that both includes and rests upon Greek dramatists such as Sophocles.
Of related interest: Depaul University's "Year of Antigones"
Monday, April 14, 8:00 pm
Levis Faculty Center
Megacities: A Graduate Student Forum
Thursday & Friday, May 1-2
Levis Faculty Center
Decolonizations: Subaltern Studies and Indigenous Critical Theory
A conference featuring keynote lectures by Elizabeth Povinelli (Columbia) and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan (NYU).
Co-organized with the American Indian Studies Program
For more information, contact Michael Rothberg (mpr@uiuc.edu) or consult the Unit for Criticism website: http://criticism.english.uiuc