Richard Sieburth Receives Guggenheim Fellowship, 2012

Draper is pleased to congratulate Richard Sieburth, Draper’s master teacher in Literary Cultures, for receiving a 2012 Guggenheim fellowship for translation. He is working on a new edition of Late Baudelaire.

Sieburth, who holds appointments in NYU's Comparative Literature and French departments, is an accomplished translator, whose previous publications include a dozen translations from the French and German, such as Georg Büchner’s Lenz, Walter Benjamin’s Moscow Diary and Gérard de Nerval’s Selected Writings and The Salt Smugglers, as well as critical volumes in the field of Pound studies. Most recently, he released Ezra Pound, New Selected Poems & Translations through New Directions.

Brooklyn Rail offers an excellent interview with the Guggenheim fellow circa 2010. Read Sieburth’s thoughts on the exact craft of translation and on the role of the author’s ego. http://www.brooklynrail.org/2012/03/books/richard-sieburth-with-adam-fitzgerald

Comp Lit Colloquium: Jay Garcia, 4/27 "Richard Wright's Comic Corrective"

After an extended hiatus, we are delighted to herald the return of the
Comparative Literature Colloquium series next Friday, April 27.

Associate Professor Jay Garcia, who joined our faculty last fall, will give
a talk entitled:

"Richard Wright's Comic Corrective"

The talk will be based on an article currently in the works. Please pick up
a copy from the Comp Lit office (in a clearly labeled box behind the front
desk), or email Jay for a digital copy (jg197@nyu.edu).

Friday, April 27
4-6 p.m.
Draper seminar room: 22-24 8th St.

There will be ample time for questions and discussion, fueled as always by
light refreshments.

Hope to see you there!

Spivak Lecture, April 5 @ NYU

You’re cordially invited to the…

COMP LIT UNDERGRADUATE MAJORS’ CHOICE LECTURE with

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

“Comparative Literature and the Subaltern”

Thursday, APRIL 5th

Silver Center, Room 703  -  6:30-8:30pm

Reminder: On Limits, Grad Conference at NYU: March 22-23

New York University Department of Comparative Literature

Graduate Student Conference—March 22-23, 2012

For the full schedule, see the website, here: http://onlimitsnyu.wordpress.com/schedule/

The concept of the limit figures centrally, yet in different ways, across a wide range of discourses and disciplines. But what precisely constitutes a limit? We propose to examine both different conceptualizations of the limit and whether and how the limit may be productive of its own transgressions, exceptions, and excesses. Further, what tensions arise from understanding limits to be either immanent or transcendent? And how have understandings of the limit changed with the advent and subsequent transformations of modernity?

With this conference, we seek to stage an interdisciplinary engagement with different ways of understanding the limit, in its formal and structural as well as textual and historical manifestations. We thus invite participants to address the question of the limit as it emerges across the spectrum of theoretical discourses as well as social and aesthetic practices. Submissions are encouraged from the literature and language fields and from disciplines throughout the humanities and social sciences.

Sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature and the Graduate School of Arts & Science, New York University.

Comp Lit event: ALBERTO TOSCANO lecture - FEB 27

You’re cordially invited to a lecture sponsored by the Department of Comparative Literature with support from Media, Culture and Communication:

Alberto Toscano

“Uses and Abuses of Abstraction”

Monday, February 27

6-8:00pm

19 University Place, Great Room (1st floor)

Alberto Toscano is a cultural critic, social theorist, philosopher and translator best known to the English-speaking world for his translations of the work of Alain Badiou, including Badiou’s The Century and Logics of Worlds. He served as both editor and translator of Badiou’s Theoretical Writings and On Beckett.
His work has been described both as an investigation of the persistence of the idea of communism in contemporary thought and a genealogical inquiry into the concept of fanaticism. He is the author of The Theatre of Production (2006), and his book Fanaticism: The Uses of an Idea was published in 2010. Toscano has published numerous articles on contemporary philosophy, politics and social theory.

Poetics & Theory/Comp Lit Events in Feb/March/April - start FEB 14 with SHIRA WOLOSKY talk

The Poetics and Theory Certificate Program, with support of the Department of Comparative Literature, invite you to the first (and all!) in a series of Spring 2012 events.

A talk by SHIRA WOLOSKY

"Transcendence and Poetics: Levinas and Robert Frost"

FEBRUARY 14 4-6:00pm

19 University Place, Great Room (1st floor)

Professor Wolosky is Professor of American Studies and English Literature at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

POETICS & THEORY CERTIFICATE PROGRAM EVENTS

February, March and April 2012

The following events are sponsored by the Poetics and Theory Program -- with financial and moral support from the Department of Comparative Literature.

· Tuesday, February 14 4-6:00pm Shira Wolosky

Hebrew University

Lecture: "Transcendence and Poetics: Levinas and Robert Frost"

19 University Place, Great Room (1st floor)

· Friday, February 24th - Saturday, February 25th

Conference: Anachronic Shakespeare

100 Washington Square East/Silver Center, Jurow Hall (1st floor)

See http://complit.as.nyu.edu/page/events for program details.



· Saturday, March 3rd

Conference/Workshop:

“Flirtations: Rhetoric and Aesthetics This Side of Seduction”

19 University Place, Great Room (1st floor) All day

See http://complit.as.nyu.edu/page/events for program details.

· Monday, March 5th 6:30-8:30pm SEMINAR with Dirk Quadflieg

Goethe University & Visiting Scholar, Dept. of Philosophy, Columbia University

“Reification: Lukacs and Honneth” (readings TBA)

19 University Place, room 224

NOTE: Seating is limited! Come early!

· Thursday, March 8th 4-6:00pm LECTURE with Dirk Quadflieg "Reification"

19 University Place, room 222



· Monday, March 26th 6-8:00pm Kiarina Kordela

Macalester College

Lecture: “Spinoza’s Resistence”

19 University Place, Great Room (1st floor)

· Monday, April 2nd 6-8:00pm Katrin Trüstedt

University of Erfurt

Lecture: "Translation, Transference and Sublation in The Merchant of Venice: Shakespeare - Hegel - Derrida"

19 University Place, Great Room (1st floor)

"Queer Baroque: Perlongher strolls on Parque Lezama" (Nov 7, Comp Lit/CLACS)

The Department of Comparative Literature, Department of
Spanish and CLACS present a talk by …

Rubén Ríos Ávila
"Queer Baroque: Perlongher strolls on Parque Lezama"
Monday, November 7
6-8:00 pm
19 University Place – Great Room (1st floor)

Light reception to follow.

Rubén Ríos Ávila is Professor and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of Puerto Rico, where he teaches literary theory, the work of Jacques Lacan, Queer theory, and Latin-American literature and film. He is author of La raza cómica: del sujeto en Puerto Rico and of Embocadura, as well as numerous articles on Puerto Rican and Caribbean literature. He was for a number of years the literary reviews editor for the newspaper El Mundo, and served as the cultural critic for the TV program Cultura Viva; he coordinates the TV program EnCinta, a forum for film discussion and criticism. Ríos Ávila's journalism and critical work have been widely recognized. He has been awarded prizes by the Instituto de Literatura and the Pen Club.

Comp Lit talk: ETIENNE BALIBAR- TODAY (WED 10/19)

Etienne Balibar
"Bourgeois Universality & Anthropological Differences"

Wednesday, October 19
7-8:30 pm
at La Maison Francaise
16 Washington Mews

There will also be a presentation/discussion with Jacques Lezra on Professor Balibar's new book from puf publications: Citoyen sujet et autres essais d'anthropologie philosophique (Citzen Subjects and Other Essays of Philosophical Anthropology).

Co-sponsored by the NYU Department of Comparative Literature and La Maison Francaise.

Comp Lit Announcement

You are cordially invited to an evening with Etienne Balibar

Bourgeois Universality & Anthropological Differences

Wednesday, October 19. 7-8:30 pm

La Maison Francaise,16 Washington Mews

There will also be a presentation/discussion with Jacques Lezra on Professor Balibar's new book from puf publications: Citoyen sujet et autres essais d'anthropologie philosophique (Citzen Subjects and Other Essays of Philosophical Anthropology).

Co-sponsored by the NYU Department of Comparative Literature and La Maison Francaise.

Badiou Event Canceled!

Dr. Badiou's travel plans have changed, so the event below has been canceled. Comparative Literature hopes to reschedule the event for the spring.

Alain Badiou

"A New Universal? On Popular Insurrections in the Contemporary World"

October 10, 2011

6:30-8:00

Hemmerdinger Hall, 1st floor (100 Washington Square East)

CFP: CUNY Comp Lit conference -- Desire: From Eros to Eroticism -- due 9/15

CUNY Graduate Center (365 5^th Avenue, New York, New York)

November 10-11, 2011

Desire: From Eros to Eroticism

The students of the Department of Comparative Literature at the City University of New York Graduate Center present an interdisciplinary graduate student conference on November 10-11, 2011.

The concept of desire has been the subject of much examination throughout centuries of literature. From the ancient Greek idea of eros to psychological analysis of the subject through contemporary negotiations of love and desire, the interpretation of desire has evolved, but it has always held a central role in literature and discourse. Desire serves as the motivation for action, and yet the most satisfying desire is often the one that remains unfulfilled. This conference will explore desire as it impels us forward in our pursuit of an end that may ultimately be unattainable.

We invite papers from all disciplines focusing on works from any period that explore desire as it is portrayed in literature, philosophy, theory, art, film, or society. Some of the questions this conference seeks to answer include, but are not limited to:

· How does desire serve as a motivating force?

· Must desire be fulfilled or does it serve another purpose?

· In what ways are the repercussions of desire demonstrated?

· How has the definition of desire evolved between different cultures or time periods?

· In what way does desire figure into political landscapes, contemporary or otherwise?

· What is the relationship between desire and cultural production and entertainment in the age of the Internet and other technologies?

· How does an author’s desire factor into the creation of a text?

· How does a character’s lack of desire affect the text?

· How does comprehension of desire help us to explore the human psyche?

· How is desiring the “undesirable” presented and addressed?

· How does desire relate to discussions of gender, sexuality, race, and other intersections of sexual politics?

· How does desire relate to other concepts such as love, seduction, intoxication, and pleasure?

Please submit a 300 word abstract for a 15-20 minute paper by September 15, 2011 to desireconference2011@gmail.com. Proposals should include the title of the paper, presenter’s name, institutional and departmental affiliation, and any technology requests. We also welcome panel proposals of three to four papers.

This conference is co-sponsored by the Writers’ Institute at the City University of New York Graduate Center, an un-MFA program devoted to bringing together the country’s most talented writers and today’s most celebrated editors, and by the Doctoral Students’ Council, the sole policymaking body representing students in doctoral and master’s programs at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

CFP: Comparative Caribbeans: Interdisciplinary Conference at Emory

Comparative Caribbeans: an Interdisciplinary Conference*
Emory University, Atlanta GA
November 3-5, 2011

This is why we stay with poetry. And despite our consenting to all the indisputable technologies; despite seeing the political leap that must be managed..., the full load of knowledge to be tamed..., at the bow there is still something we now share: this murmur, cloud or rain or peaceful smoke. …We cry our cry of poetry. Our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone.

– Édouard Glissant

Recent debates in Comparative Literary studies have brought the very idea and practice of comparison under scrutiny. What are the limits and possibilities of comparison in a time marked by an ongoing process of globalization? What is the status of “world literature” as a category of analysis? What are the epistemological, political, and ethical stakes in doing work across disciplinary, linguistic, and geo-political boundaries?

This conference seeks to contribute to this ongoing discussion by taking the Caribbean as its point of departure. As a region marked by linguistic, historical, and geographical differences and as a site of displaced origins and rhizomatic identifications, the Caribbean not only necessitates comparatist perspectives, but may also help us reconfigure how comparison is thought and practiced.

We invite work that cuts across linguistic and disciplinary boundaries, bringing Caribbean art, literature, and culture into challenging dialogues with other traditions in order to map new trajectories for further comparative engagement. We are particularly interested in highlighting work that does not subsume Caribbean cultural and literary production under the umbrella of “area studies,” but instead draws on Caribbean aesthetic and philosophical traditions in an effort to rethink some of the theoretical and methodological axioms that underlie contemporary comparative studies.

Keynote Speakers:

Professor Guillermina De Ferrari (Spanish and Portuguese, University of Wisconsin, Madison)

Professor Natalie Melas (Comparative Literature, Cornell University)

Professor Mara Negrón (Comparative Literature and Gender Studies, University of Puerto Rico)

Professor Rubén Ríos Ávila (Comparative Literature and Hispanic Studies, University of Puerto Rico)

Possible areas of inquiry:

• The Caribbean and Post-Structuralism
• Caribbean Perspectives on Theories of Trauma and Memory
• Comparative Post-Colonialities
• Plantation Traces: The Caribbean and the American South
• Theories and Poetics of Relation, Creolization, and Hybridity
• Comparative Approaches to Migratory Movements and the Caribbean Diaspora
• Eco-Criticism and Planetary Archipelagos: Remapping Geographies
• A Post-Revolutionary Caribbean? Liberation and Alternative Philosophies of History
• Artistic and Performative Engagements with the Caribbean
• Caribbean Vulnerabilities
• Caribbean Queer Mappings
• Piracy, the Law, and the State: Revisiting Sovereignty, Empire, and Capital

Please submit your abstracts of 300-500 words with a short bio to comparativecaribbeans@gmail.com by August 15, 2011. We invite submissions from senior and junior faculty, graduate students, and independent scholars.

Join us on Facebook http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100002151392127

* Organized by the Graduate Students of Emory’s Comparative Literature Department

Comp Lit Colloquium on Archives: April 22

Please join us for the April installment of the NYU Comparative Literature Colloquium Series

Friday, 4/22, from 3-5 p.m. in 19 University Place, room 222

"Staging Archives"

Professor Cristina Vatulescu,

Departments of Comparative Literature, Russian & Slavic Studies

"East European Secret Police Archives: Reading Dilemmas"

&

Professor Peter Nicholls,

Department of English

"Living with the George Oppen Archive"

Reception to follow.

Cristina Vatulescu received her Ph.D in Comparative Literature from Harvard in 2005 and came to NYU after a year as a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. Her first book, Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film and The Secret Police, a study of the relationships between cultural and policing practices in twentieth century Eastern Europe, was recently published by Stanford University Press. Taking advantage of the partial opening of the secret police archives in Russia and Romania, Police Aesthetics focuses on their most infamous holdings-the personal files-as well as on the agency's less known involvement with cinema. Two articles stemming from this project, "Arresting Biographies: The Secret Police File in The Soviet Union and Romania," and "Politics of Estrangement: Tracking Shklovsky's Device in Literary and Policing Practices" have been published in Comparative Literature and Poetics Today. Vatulescu's current project is a crosscultural exploration of the interplay of documents and fictions in twentieth century literature, cinema, as well as in legal texts and practices.

Peter Nicholls has published widely on twentieth-century writing, with recent works including Modernisms: A Literary Guide (2nd ed. 2008) and George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism (2009). He is especially interested in connections between American and European poetry, and in the political and economic dimensions of literary texts. Nicholls arrived at NYU in 2009 after many years at the University of Sussex, where he was Professor of English and American Literature and editor of the journal Textual Practice.


For more information: http://comparatorium.wordpress.com/

Comp Lit Talk, 3/28: The Secret Literature of the Last Muslims of Spain

We’re very pleased to announce the following talk co-sponsored by the Departments of Comparative Literature and Spanish and Portuguese.

Luce López-Baralt

"The Secret Literature of the Last Muslims of Spain"

Monday, March 28

5-7:00 pm

408 Silver Building

(100 Washington Square East)

Luce López-Baralt, one of the foremost scholars of Muslim Iberia, is professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at the Universidad de Puerto Rico. Her many books, editions, translations and articles explore the mystical literature and religious practices of Spain and al-Andalus, from the late medieval to the early modern periods and the Spanish Golden age; they have been translated into French, English, German, Dutch, Arabic, Urdu, and Persian. Her recent studies of the cultural production among the morisco of Spain have transformed the scholarly understanding of those populations. López-Baralt has taught as a Visiting Professor at universities in South America, North America, Europe, North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia.

Comparative Literature Lecture on Philip K. Dick: 3/24

We would like to invite you and your students to this year’s Undergraduate Major’s Choice Lecture of the Comparative Literature department, which is entitled:

From Here to California:
Philip K. Dick, The Simulacra & the Integration of “Germany”

6:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 24th, in Lecture Hall 102

at 19 University Place of New York University

For this year’s Undergraduate Major’s Choice Lecture, the students of Comparative Literature have selected Laurence Rickels to present on his thorough and exhaustive work, I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick (2010).

Laurence Rickels is professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of California in Santa Barbara, professor at Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe, and Sigmund Freud Professor of Media and Philosophy at the European Graduate School. Professor Rickels has published seven books and edited four collections of critical essays, including Looking After Nietzsche (1990), one of the most thoughtful and necessary collaborative works on Nietzsche to date.

With the book launch of I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick, Laurence Rickels takes off for the outer spaces of critical, psychoanalytic and philosophical texts in order to land Philip K. Dick’s trek out of Faust’s Germany and onto P.P. Layout’s pad in Californian dreaming.

Of the hundreds of students who flocked to such well-designed courses as The Vampire Lectures (1999) and The Devil Notebooks (2008), many claimed to recognize the precognitive scientist of fiction, PKD, as an influence to Laurence Rickels’ teaching and writing. One crucial feature of textually encountering Professor Rickels is that you can never take for granted literal and literary appearances: Through a relentless irony, he will explain and exemplify at one and the same time — a talent in the profession of professing something like truth or knowledge.

For this presentation, Professor Rickels plans to shift his focus onto the postwar predicament of the integration of Germany as “Our Problem.” The poster boy of Rickels' The Case of California (1991), Philip K. Dick projected the future as fitting the Coast while carrying forward “Germany” as its ambivalent introject, our problem. This includes the ethical-clinical problem of the violent psychopath as failure of interpretation and treatment that can at best be contained. In and around The Simulacra, Dick and his intertexts connect denial of mourning to a notion of productivity based on restitution and reparation without responsibility for the specified dead. That the policy of restitution, which became the quintessential foreign policy of the Federal Republic of Germany, has come to be identified as the enabling context for the postwar German “economic miracle” is one more piece of this puzzle of integration.

Updated Schedule: French & American Authors in Conversation

FESTIVAL of NEW FRENCH WRITING
French & American Authors in Conversation

February 24 - 26, 2011

Hemmerdinger Hall
NYU Silver Center, 1st floor
100 Washington Square East


Curated by Olivier Barrot & Tom Bishop


In French and English. Simultaneous translation available for this event.

The conversations between French and American authors that constitute the seven one-hour sessions of the Festival of New French Writing will each pair one French and one American writer, confronting their respective experiences and ambitions with respect to literary creation. Each animated by an American cultural critic familiar with the literatures of the two countries, the dialogues will explore the singular qualities of each author, national similarities and differences, as well as the future of literature.

---

Updated schedule. Authors biographies and festival details available at www.frenchwritingfestival.com

Thursday, February 24
7:00 p.m. Geneviève Brisac & Rick Moody (moderated by Chad W. Post)

8:30 p.m. Stéphane Audeguy & Jane Kramer

---

Friday, February 25
2:30 p.m. Pascal Bruckner & Mark Lilla (moderated by Adam Gopnik)

4:00 p.m. David B. & Ben Katchor (moderated by Françoise Mouly)

7:30 p.m. Atiq Rahimi & Russell Banks (moderated by Lila Azam Zanganeh)

---

Saturday, February 26

2:30 p.m. Laurence Cossé & Arthur Phillips (moderated by Judith G. Miller)



4:00 p.m. Philippe Claudel & A. M. Homes (moderated by John R. MacArthur)

---

Organized by the Center for French Civilization and Culture of NYU, Institut Français, and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy

Comparative Literature Talk Tomorrow, 2/15: Questions of Blackness, Realism and Literary Production

Bode Ibironke Lecture: February 16, 1:00 - 3:00

13-19 University Place, Room 222

The 'African' in the African Writers Series:
Questions of Blackness, Realism and Literary Production

Dr. Ibironke holds a PhD in English (2008) from Michigan State University, and an MA in Comparative Literature from MSU. He specializes in African and African Diaspora Literatures. His dissertation examines the role of the publishing house Heinemann in the creation of an international reading-market for African novels. He has held a Big 10 CIC Postdoctoral Fellowship and is currently Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Johns Hopkins University.

Time-Based Art: Comparative Lit Colloquium, 12/10

Please join us for the December installment of the Comparative Literature Colloquium next Friday, 12/10, from 1-3 p.m., in room 222 of 19 University Place.

(Note the earlier time, shifted due to the "Music, Language, Thought" event taking place later that afternoon.)

To close out this semester's programing, we are delighted to welcome:

Professor Boris Groys (Department of Russian and Slavic Studies)

With a presentation entitled: "Time-Based Art"

For more information: http://comparatorium.wordpress.com/

"The Fate of Trans-" Humanities Lecture, 11/22

The Fate of "Trans-"
November 22, 2010
6:30pm (Please note the change of time from 5:00pm to 6:30pm.)
19 University Place, Great Room (1st Floor)

A panel with Francois Noudelmann, Professor of Literature and Philosophy, Universite de Paris VIII, and
Emily Apter, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, NYU
Manthia Diawara, Professor of Comparative Literature and Africana Studies, NYU
Denis Hollier, Professor and Chair, Department of French, NYU
Shireen Patell, Clinical Assistant Professor of Trauma and Violence Transdisciplinary Studies, NYU
Avital Ronell, University Professor of German, Comparative Literature, and English, NYU
Jane Tylus, Professor of Italian Studies and Comparative Literature; Director, The Humanities Initiative, NYU


This event is free and open to the public. Reception to follow. Please note the location at 19 University Place.

Co-sponsored by the Humanities Initiative, Africana Studies, the Departments of French and German, and Trauma and Violence Transdisciplinary Studies

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You may contact the Humanities Initiative with any other questions at res349@nyu.edu.

Draper student to present at Stony Brook Manhattan Recycling Conference

Draper student Ji Hyun Lee will be presenting a paper entitled "Pastiche: Recycling Animals and Language in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake" on September 25th at Stony Brook Manhattan's upcoming Recycling conference.

The conference is being held by the university's Department of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies and is open to the public. More information on attending can be found on their website. If you are a Draper student also presenting at this conference, please let us know!

Ji Hyun will also have an article appear in York University's Strategies of Critique. Her article title is "(An)Archiving after the Apocalypse: The Death Drive, Representation, and the Rise and Fall and Rise of Civilization in Miller's A Canticle for Leibowitz." The issue containing this article will come out at the end of the year, and a previous issue is available online at https://pi.library.yorku.ca/ojs/index.php/socj/index.