May 5 at Fordham) that "will draw out the questions shaping the future and
the discipline."
NYU Comp Lit/Fordham Conference
"Comparative Modernisms, Medialities,
Modernities"
MAY 4 & 5
Note that this conference will take place
this Friday (May 4) in Silver Center's Jurow Hall and on Saturday (May 5) at
Fordham University, Lowenstein Building,
60th Street and Columbus Ave, 12th floor. Schedule is below or here at the
Modern Language Initiative's web site:
http://www.
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<http://www.
Friday, May 4: New York University
Silver Center (100 Washington Square East),
1st floor Jurow Hall
9:30 - 10:30
Editors' Panel: Publishing Comparative
Studies I
Cathie Brettschneider (University of
Virginia Press)
J. Michael Dash (New York Universiy)
Helen Tartar (Fordham University Press)
chair: Fredric Nachbaur (Fordham Univeristy
Press)
Points for discussion on this panel might
include what comparative literature means today; how it has changed and why;
how the Modern Language Initiative presses are responding to these changes;
and what would constitute a compelling submission to any one of our five
presses, depending on the focus and scope of the particular project.
11:00 - 12:45
When Did the Past Become Modern?
Jody Greene (University of California, Santa
Cruz)
Kathleen Davis (University of Rhode Island)
John M. Archer (New York Univerity)
chair: Jerome Singerman (University of
Pennsylvania Press)
What does it mean to call anything "early
modern?" How did we come to apply these words to the period formerly known
as the Renaissance, for example, and what can this tell us about our notions
of both modernity and periodization? Why did theory come relatively late to
medieval and early modern studies? And what is not modern about the early
modern?
12:45 - 2:00
Lunch
2:00 - 3:45
Against Modernism
Toral Gajarawala (New York University)
Joseph Slaughter (Columbia University)
Ben Tran (Vanderbilt University)
chair: Fawzia Mustafa (Fordham University)
Where in the world is modernism? And more
importantly, why? This panel will consider the literary turn toward
modernism as a politics, as an aesthetics, and as an ideology. But it will
also suggest its theoretical fracture, particularly in its new "worldly"
incarnation. While recent discussions have heralded colonial, alternative,
subaltern, and vernacular ways of being modernist in the world, this panel
asks: What is at stake in this intellectual gesture in a moment of literary
worldliness?
3:45 - 4:30
Refreshments
4:30 - 6:00
Roundtable Dialogue: Comparative Modernisms,
Global Methodologies
Susan Stanford Friedman (University of
Wisconsin-Madison)
Rebecca L. Walkowitz (Rutgers University)
When and where is modernism? How do global
approaches to modernism alter our methodologies, our principles of analysis,
and our most basic reading strategies? What new methodologies do we need to
develop? This roundtable session will explore how the analysis of modernism
on a global scale challenges our assumptions about the proper time, place,
and objects of modernist studies.
Saturday, May 5: Fordham University, Lincoln
Center
Lowenstein Building, 60th Street and
Columbus Ave, 12th Floor Lounge
9:30 - 10:30
Editors' Panel: Publishing Comparative
Studies II
Henry Carrigan (Northwestern University
Press)
Edward Dimendberg (University of California,
Irvine)
Richard Terdiman (University of California,
Santa Cruz)
chair: William Germano (Cooper Union)
Challenged by the downsizing of the research
university and rapid changes in the book business, scholarly publishers and
series editors in comparative literary studies today work differently from
how they have in the past. The goal of this panel is to explore the
possibilities of the present moment and to suggest how manuscript
acquisition, academic disciplines, networks of scholars, information
technologies, book marketing, and reading itself shape and respond to
current conditions and portend a distinctively twenty-first-century mode of
scholarly communication.
11:00 - 12:45
Translating Modernities
Susan Gillman (University of California,
Santa Cruz)
Michelle Clayton (University of California,
Los Angeles)
Crystal Parikh (New York University)
chair: Arnaldo Cruz-Malave (Fordham
University)
Translation produces a comparison and works
comparatively, both a product and a process, material and method. The
critique of comparison is generally about its use as a formal method, with
the isolation of cases, the establishment of variables, factors, and
elements of difference and similarity. Eschewing the notion of a universal
method in favor of an approach built to suit a particular problem,
comparison becomes less a method and more a perspective, a way to bring
together the local and the global, the past and the present. In this
context, translation as comparison brings into view the critical question of
first and seconds, of originals and copies, and their unexamined assumptions
and potential uses. The translatability of keywords for race, place and
ethnicity raises a different set of questions about the limits and
possibilities of inter-medial and inter-cultural comparison. Thinking
through comparative modernities allows us to hear and see the role of
language in culture, the ideology of monolanguage and national cultures.
12:45 - 2:00
Lunch
2:00 - 3:45
New Media and Literary Theory
Lydia Liu (Columbia University)
McKenzie Wark (New School)
Timothy C. Campbell (Cornell University)
chair: Emily Apter (New York University)
Has literary theory lost touch with the
evolving technology of writing in new media that is rapidly transforming our
social life? This panel will reevaluate the goals and tasks of literary
theory and raise some fundamental issues about their relevance to today's
world. The panelists will consider, for example, in what ways the unfolding
of digital media might make the conditions of its own critique legible or
illegible, and to what extent the limits of our understanding are imposed by
our writing machines and the minds that have invented such machines.
3:45 - 4:30
Refreshments
4:30 - 6:00
Keynote Address: Languages Other than
English
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Columbia
University)
respondent: Kyoo Lee (CUNY Graduate Center
and John Jay College)
chair: Chris GoGwilt (Fordham University)
6:15 - 7:30
Reception
Information on Contributors
<http://www.fordhampress.com/
Conference sponsored by Fordham University's
Comparative Literature Program, New York University's Comparative Literature
Department, Fordham University Press and the consortium of presses
participating in the Modern Language Initiative. Funding generously provided
by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and by the Fordham University Arts &
Sciences Deans. For information contact: gogwilt@fordham.edu.
<http://www.fordhampress.com>
Fordham University Press
<http://www.ucpress.edu>
University of California Press
<http://www.upenn.edu/
University of Pennsylvania Press
<http://www.upress.virginia.
University of Virginia Press
<http://www.washington.edu/
University of Washington Press
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