Humanities Day 2016 - Session 2

Bob Dylan's Blues

tpopelka — Mon, 08 Aug 2016 20:04:31 +0000

Presenter:

Bob Dylan’s musical appetites are famously omnivorous. Over the course of his career, he has metabolized a vast range of musical genres, from folk to rock ’n’ roll, country to gospel, Tin Pan Alley to Western swing. This talk will focus on one genre that has saturated Dylan’s music from the early 60s until today: the blues. I will propose that the blues is not merely a genre among genres for Dylan—one tongue among many in his musical Babel—but that it is something more: an assemblage of idioms and performative behaviors that may be disarticulated from one another while nevertheless retaining their signifying potential. By exploring the multi-dimensionality of Dylan’s blues—from lyrical structure to musical form, rhythmic groove to vocal inflection—this talk will demonstrate the genre’s critical role in the fascinating play of generic consonance and dissonance that has animated his music-making for over fifty years.

Vu Tran

tpopelka — Mon, 08 Aug 2016 18:02:57 +0000

Presentation:

Noir and the Refugee Experience

Session:

Session 2

Creative Writing

Vu Tran is Assistant Professor of Practice in the Arts in the Department of English Language and Literature and the Committee on Creative Writing. His first novel, Dragonfish, was a 2015 New York Times Notable Book, and his short fiction has appeared in the O. Henry Prize Stories, the Best American Mystery Stories, A Best of Fence, and other publications. He has received honors from Glimmer Train Stories and the Michigan Quarterly Review, and is a recipient of a 2009 Whiting Writers’ Award and a 2011 Finalist Award for the Vilcek Prize. Born in Vietnam and raised in Oklahoma, Vu received his MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and his PhD from the Black Mountain Institute at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where he was a Glenn Schaeffer Fellow.

Why Shakespeare?

tpopelka — Mon, 08 Aug 2016 18:02:12 +0000

Presenter:

Richard Strier

Session 2

The answer to the title question probably seems laughably obvious. But what if we ask how we know this, how we are so sure of it? Let’s stipulate that Shakespeare is great. But what about the comparatives? How do we know that his plays are better than those of his contemporaries in the great period of early modern English theater? This lecture will try to address these questions in a serious way.

Richard Strier

tpopelka — Mon, 08 Aug 2016 18:01:20 +0000

Presentation:

Why Shakespeare?

Session:

Session 2

English Language and Literature

Richard Strier is the Frank L. Sulzberger Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in the Department of English Language and Literature. His life-long project is to bring together two modes of literary study that have traditionally been seen as antagonistic: formalism and historicism. He is deeply interested in the intellectual history of the early modern period, especially theological and political ideas. His most recent book, The Unrepentant Renaissance from Petrarch to Shakespeare to Milton (University of Chicago Press, 2011), was awarded the 2011 Robert Penn Warren-Cleanth Brooks Award for Literary Criticism. Strier is also editor of the journal Modern Philology.

What It Took to Shock the Ming Dynasty: The Case of Li Zhi (1527–1602)

tpopelka — Mon, 08 Aug 2016 17:59:33 +0000

Presenter:

Haun Saussy

Session 2

Li Zhi’s career gives us many perspectives on the Ming Dynasty in the years of its decline. Li veered from scholar-official to Buddhist lay brother to critic of his times—or more broadly of the whole course of Chinese civilization since Confucius. In each of these roles, he stirred up controversy and made enemies. He occasionally made friends and allies, too, but these were unable to prevent his arrest and death in custody. The talk, based on a new translation, focuses on the scandals (actual and imagined) surrounding Li Zhi’s writing.

Close Reading of a Title: Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz

tpopelka — Mon, 08 Aug 2016 17:58:25 +0000

Presenter:

Maria Anna Mariani

Session 2

For many years in the United States, Primo Levi's first book was known by the title Survival in Auschwitz, rather than the Italian original If This Is a Man. This talk will interrogate the meaning behind this unfaithful, but also symptomatic mistranslation. How did this new title contribute to the extraordinary success of the work and in what way did the word "survival" condition its reception? What does it mean to survive not only in Auschwitz but also after Auschwitz? Most importantly, can the two titles shed light on each other, forcing us to ask: is this a life?

Maria Anna Mariani

tpopelka — Mon, 08 Aug 2016 17:57:43 +0000

Presentation:

Close Reading of a Title: Primo Levi's Survival in Auschwitz

Session:

Session 2

Romance Languages and Literatures

Maria Anna Mariani is Assistant Professor in the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures. She is a specialist in Italian autobiography and studies the relationship between memory and narrative, specifically the theme of trauma and survival. She is the author of Sull’autobiografia contemporanea: Nathalie Sarraute, Elias Canetti, Alice Munro, Primo Levi [On Contemporary Autobiography] (Carocci, 2012), and co-author of a history of Italian literature for upper-level secondary students, LiberaMente: Storia e antologia della letteratura italiana.

Songs and Storytelling in Bollywood

tpopelka — Mon, 08 Aug 2016 17:56:20 +0000

Presenter:

Rochona Majumdar

Session 2

Why do Indian films have so many songs? The function of the song, I will demonstrate, is deeply tied with the ebb and flow of time in these films. Through a close reading of select song sequences from Bollywood and Indian art cinema I show how Indian cinema combines realist and utopian dimensions of time.

Rochona Majumdar

tpopelka — Mon, 08 Aug 2016 17:55:30 +0000

Presentation:

Songs and Storytelling in Bollywood

Session:

Session 2

Cinema and Media Studies / South Asian Languages and Civilizations

Rochona Majumdar is Associate Professor in the Departments of South Asian Languages and Civilizations and Cinema and Media Studies. A historian of modern India, her research interests span histories of Indian cinema, gender and marriage in colonial India, and Indian intellectual thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is the author of two books, Marriage and Modernity: Family Values in Colonial Bengal (Duke University Press, 2009) and Writing Postcolonial History (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2010), and is currently researching the history of the film society movement in India from 1947 to 1977.

Margaret McDonald and Gilbert Ryle: A Philosophical Friendship

tpopelka — Mon, 08 Aug 2016 17:54:08 +0000

Presenter:

Michael Kremer

Session 2

Recently, I uncovered evidence of a close philosophical friendship between Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976), one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, and Margaret MacDonald (1907-1956), whose promising philosophical career was cut short by her untimely death. I will tell a minor detective story explaining this discovery, and discuss its significance for understanding the work of both Ryle and MacDonald, and the neglected place of women in the history of twentieth-century analytic philosophy.