American Literature & Culture: 10/25 Colloquium

The New York University

Colloquium in American Literature and Culture

presents

Ahab’s Wife and Lear’s Fool: Contemporary Publishing and the Symbolic Capital of the Canon

A talk by Jeremy Rosen of the University of Chicago

Objectifying the Word: Religious Education and Material Culture in Nineteenth-Century Sunday-School Classrooms

A talk by John Thomas of Rutgers University

Tuesday, October 25

13-19 University Place, Great Room

New York University

6:00 p.m.

All are welcome!

Refreshments will be served.

Rebecca Colesworthy NYU Lecture on Poe: May 20th

Positioning Poe:
Purloined Letters, Counterfeit Coins, and Other Modern Fictions

A lecture by Professor Rebecca Colesworthy

Friday, May 20th
6:00 PM - 8:00 PM
NYU's School of Law - Furman Hall,
245 Sullivan Street, Room 216

Reception to follow lecture.

Please RSVP to community.affairs@nyu.edu

How might literature be like money and money like literature? What is the relevance of economic notions of “credit,” “value,” and “exchange” to literary studies? What is the relationship between events in economic history (such as financial crises) and processes of artistic and intellectual production?

This talk positions the work of Edgar Allan Poe within a transnational and interdisciplinary tradition of reflecting on the strange connections between literary and monetary forms of representation. While Poe’s work is productive for pondering the formal and thematic intersections between art and commerce, reading his work in light of these intersections helps us to reconsider Poe’s gender politics—namely, his notorious claim that the most poetical topic in the world is the death of a beautiful woman.

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.

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.

The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, Seminar Next Tuesday: Feb. 15

Glucksman Ireland House and the MA Program in Irish and Irish-American Studies will host a seminar with Joseph Valente, Professor of English at SUNY Buffalo,on his new book,
The Myth of Manliness in Irish National Culture, 1880-1922 (Illinois UP).

The seminar will be at Ireland House on Tuesday, February 15, from 4:00 to 5:30
One Washington Mews on Fifth Avenue, ground floor.

The seminar will discuss the introduction ("The Double Bind of Irish Manhood") and Chapter 1 ("The Manliness of Parnell"); both are available as .pdf files from Professor John Waters (john[dot]waters[at]nyu[dot]edu).

Professor Valente is the author of James Joyce and the Problem of Justice: Negotiating Sexual and Colonial Difference (Cambridge UP, 1995), Dracula's Crypt: Bram Stoker, Irishness, and the Question of Blood (Illinois, 2002); he has edited the groundbreaking collection Quare Joyce (Michigan, 1998) as well as Disciplinarity at the Fin-de-Siecle (with Amanda Anderson, Princeton UP 2002), as well as journal issues on Joyce and Homosexuality (James Joyce Quarterly Spring 1994), Joyce and the Law (James Joyce Quarterly Spring 2002), and Urban Ireland (Eire-Ireland, Winter Spring 2010). He has also authored more than 40 articles in Romanticism, 19th century studies, Modernism, Irish Studies, and Literary and Cultural Theory.

The seminar will be of interest to students to students and faculty working in post-colonial studies, nationalism, and gender and sexuality studies, as well as those interested in Modernism, Irish literature, and literary theory.

Topics in Lit Cultures: Money and Other Modern Fictions

Draper has a number of interesting Topics class on offer this spring, some of which we've been highlighting over the last few months. One in particular that we'd like to call attention to is "Topics in Literary Cultures: Money and Other Modern Fictions" taught by Prof. Rebecca Colesworthy. The class will be held on Thursdays from 6:20 - 8:20 in the Draper Map room. A description of the course is below; please contact Draper directly at 212.998.8070 or via email at draper.program@nyu.edu if you are interested in enrolling.

Topics in Literary Cultures:
Money and Other Modern Fictions

The thing that differentiates man from animals is money.

-Gertrude Stein, “All About Money” (1936)

This course will explore various connections between economics and literature in creative and critical texts since the mid-19^th century, with a strong focus on modernist and early 20^th-century writings. For years, modernism was characterized as an assemblage of movements and figures united in their hostility to the market if in nothing else. In recent years, a host of critics—especially feminist and materialist critics—have challenged this view. We will approach the question of the relationship between modern art and commerce from a somewhat different angle, examining how writers across disciplines suggest that language and literature are like money and that money is like language and literature.

Questions to be addressed include: how are we to conceptualize the relationship between art and the everyday realities of modern life? How do literary and economic genres distinguish themselves from one another? At the same time, what are the effects of events in economic history and financial crises on literature and intellectual production more generally—for example, on theories of language, subjectivity, authority, community and so on? If we treat money as a “fiction,” then what becomes of oppositions such as those between “real” and “fake,” “true” and “false,” “material” and “textual”? How are literary and monetary forms (not only coins, but paper money, checks, credit cards) similar? What is the relevance of economic notions such as “credit,” “value,” and “exchange” to literary studies? Why might it be appealing or useful to cast money and other economic phenomena as “fictions”? Why in turn are metaphors of “economy” appealing or useful for conceptualizing literature and other systems of representation? What are the stakes and limitations of these interdisciplinary appropriations and comparisons?

Readings will include:

Edgar Allan Poe (“The Goldbug,” “The Purloined Letter”)

Charles Baudelaire (prose poems from Paris Spleen)

André Gide (The Counterfeiters)

Gertrude Stein (Tender Buttons)

John Dos Passos (Manhattan Transfer)

Virginia Woolf (Three Guineas)

Karl Marx (excerpts from Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts and Capital, vol. 1)

Sigmund Freud (The case history of The Rat Man and assorted short essays)

Georg Simmel (“The Metropolis and Mental Life” and excerpts from The Philosophy of Money)

Jean-Joseph Goux (“Numismatics” and excerpts from The Coiners of Language)

Jacques Derrida (Given Time I: Counterfeit Money)

Marc Shell (excerpts from Art and Money)

Take your lunch to Rebecca Colesworthy's talk today!

Modernism’s Gifts: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Novel

Guest entry by Rebecca Colesworthy, Literary Cultures

A tenured professor and college administrator for whose work I have great respect recently told me that “a few years ago everybody was interested in the literary.” Such, she suggested, was no longer the case. Nowadays “objects” and “things” are all the rage. Her intention in remarking the declining preoccupation with “the literary” across the humanities was benevolent. Well aware that my current academic post is not tenure-track, she was trying to help me to determine how best to frame and, indeed, how to “sell” my work when applying for jobs in the future.

Still, she is not alone in marking such a sea change. In a recent issue of PMLA, the queer theorist and modernist studies scholar Heather Love observed a widespread shift from interest in “the discursive” to interest in “the affective.” It would be wrong to suggest that the turn to affect (or the “affective turn,” to cite the title of a 2007 anthology) is either tantamount or reducible to the turn to the object. Nevertheless, it seems fair to suggest that they do coincide in ways both temporal and conceptual. (Note the title of Draper’s own topics in gender politics course, “Objects of Affection.”) As someone who works on notions of “the gift” and “generosity” in particular and notions of “the social” in general – the subtitle of The Affective Turn is Theorizing the Social – I would promptly count myself among those invested in conceptualizing both affect and things. But what is one to do when the primary “things” on which one works are literary?

This question is in part a pragmatic one. How does one pursue a career in literary studies and encourage one’s students to do the same when “the literary” is no longer a hot commodity? In using such economic rhetoric I do not mean to suggest that the turn away from discursive analysis is motivated by interest rather than intellectual and (in some cases) political concerns, but simply to acknowledge the fact that academia is a business even if it is – thankfully – not only that.

Yet this question also has conceptual and even political valences for me.

In my course this semester, Introduction to Literary Cultures I, my students and I read and discuss theorists from a range of disciplines who figure culture as a “literary” phenomenon. What exactly this means and the ramifications of such a presupposition vary from one theorist to the next. Certainly we might question the extent to which “our” culture could be called “literary,” whether that term is taken to connote a certain Arnoldian notion of high culture or a more generalized Derridean notion of “textuality.” Admittedly, there is something counterintuitive about the claim that contemporary life is not “textual,” saturated as it is with text messages, tweets, facebook updates, and blog entries like this one. Yet in my view the abundance of information and communication and the technologies that enable them hardly fosters textual engagement of either the critical or the belletristic variety.

In teaching, I cannot help but feel a certain disjunction between the linguistically oriented theories we read and discuss and the world outside the classroom. My response to this disjunction varies. I wonder, isn’t such a disjunction the very point of the classroom, a space that Ellen Rooney provocatively terms a “semi-private room”? Shouldn’t it and the space and time it affords for reflection on such outmoded objects as literature be preserved?

But I also remain convinced that the literary and the discursive remain relevant – and not only because I and many of my students work on literature. I could say a lot about this. For example, the Lacanian in me worries that the turn away from the literary is a foreboding sign of the times, a symptom of the widespread repression of the signifier – in all its imperfection – in an era ruled (as Michel Foucault would also have it) by a misbegotten wish for total knowledge. Setting such rarefied terminology aside, we might also ask in a much more general way: what are the potential costs of this turn away from the literary (and the textual, the discursive, the linguistic, and so on)?

In re-reading Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s 1986 essay “Writing ‘Race’ and the Difference It Makes” for class this week, I was reminded of what a powerful tool literary criticism can be in enabling us to expose the ways in which the literary has been marshaled in the service of maintaining injustice and inequality. Gates writes: “The growth of canonical national literatures was coterminous with the shared assumption of intellectuals that race was a ‘thing,’ an ineffaceable quantity, which irresistibly determined the shape and contour of human feeling as surely as it did the shape and contour of human anatomy” (3). Race, Gates persuasively argues, is not a “thing,” but a “trope” (5). Even if we wouldn’t ascribe the same authority to national literatures today we might still ask how the literary is put to use for various political and economic ends. What tropes are treated as if they were things? How do we distinguish between tropes and things? At what cost do we confuse them?

At stake in these questions is not only a project of critique and demystification, but also our confrontation with the limits of what “we” – that is to say, literary critics – do. Thus while I would want to insist on the importance of distinguishing between the textual and the material for myriad reasons, I would also suggest that the task of what Gayatri Spivak called “reading the world” twenty years ago is far from finished.

So, what is a literary critic to do? I hope, a lot.

Interview with Richard Sieburth, Draper Master Teacher in Literary Cultures

Draper is privileged to have Professor Richard Sieburth as our Master Teacher in Literary Cultures. Richard has a joint appointment in the Comparative Literature and French Departments at NYU, is a noted Ezra Pound scholar, and is also a respected translator of German and French texts. His English translation of Selected Writings by Gérard de Nerval won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month-Club Translation Prize in 2000 and his translation of Emblems of Desire: Selections from the "Délie" of Maurice Scève was a finalist for the PEN Translation Prize.

Richard's most recent translation, The Salt Smugglers by Gérard de Nerval was published in August. This week, he took the time to answer some questions about translation for in.ter.reg.num.

1. How did you come to be a translator?

When you grow up, as I did, in a bilingual household (German-English), you tend as a child to be fascinated with the secret language your parents are speaking (you imagine, in order to exclude you). I imagine most translators are driven by this kind of infantile curiosity: not Freud’s child voyeur who happens to “see” some primal scene (a tergo or not), but rather one who “listens” to or “overhears” a language not primarily intended for him. The act of translation would thereby involve the fantasy of readdressing this forbidden language to yourself, and then reperforming it in your own tongue in order to recapture its intention.

Later, while in boarding school in Switzerland, I spent a great deal of time traveling across the cantons in trains. You become a translator by simultaneously observing the landscape flowing by beyond the train window and noticing, written below it like some sort of allegorical inscription, the quadrilingual command: NICHT HINAUSLEHNEN/ E PERICOLOSO SPORGERSI/ NE PAS SE PENCHER AU DEHORS/ DANGER! DON’T LEAN OUT. Are these all saying the same thing?

2. What has been your most difficult translation project? What has been the most enjoyable?

Translating the rhymed dizains of Maurice Scève was probably the most difficult from the purely formal point of view: there was so little room to maneuver. Think of Marcel Marceau the mime feeling his way with his hands along the surface of an invisible mirror that is caging him in. Hölderlin, whom I translated in my mid-twenties, was a pure joy. It was what Schiller would call a “naïve” translation, as opposed to a “sentimental” (self-conscious, ironic) or “elegiac” translation. I actually visited Hölderlin’s landscapes near Tübingen just to get a sense of how the light or sound broke across the local hills. I translated Büchner’s Lenz in the course of a (mild) nervous breakdown, though I can now no longer remember which provoked which. Scholem I translated during and just after Sept. 11th, with the acrid after-stench of the Twin Towers floating through my window. Translating Michaux has perhaps been the most total blast. Nerval lies somewhere between a fond sibling and a scary Doppelgänger.

3. Do you subscribe to a particular theory of translation? Do you believe it possible to apply the same theory to all texts, or does each project require a more individualized approach?

The only translation theorist who has made a real difference to me is Antoine Berman. But the more I think about it, the more I tend to believe that there is no Theory of Translation, only a History of Translation. This is what Benjamin means by the original’s Nachleben or Fortleben. Translation merely articulates the history of the original (or the history of its translator’s encounter with it). If a translation does not register the “historicity” (ugh) of its encounter with the original—if it cannot define the “time” at which its language meets (or greets) the language of the original—the “event” of translation has not really taken place. How to theorize the “eventness” of the event? Here’s Hölderlin: “Try taking it by surprise, and it turns/ To a dream; try matching it by force,/And punishment is the reward;/Often, when you’ve barely given it/ A thought, it just happens.” Translation: a way, perhaps THE way, that language “happens.”

4. What would you say is a common myth about translation?

The most prevalent (mis)conception (or myth?) is that a translation is somehow “like” or “equal to” to the original. That it is a “metaphor” of the original, thus somehow “substitutable” for the original. Yes, the words “translation” and “metaphor” are etymologically “translations” of each other. But Benjamin’s great insight is that a translation is not “like” the original (via some sort of “equivalence” theory of truth as the “adequation” of two terms), but that it exists “next” to the original, “after” the original, as a “result” of the original. Therefore the relation is profoundly metonymic, not metaphoric.

5. Who is a translator whose work you admire?

I agree with Ezra Pound that Arthur Golding’s version of Ovid’s Metamorphoses is “the most beautiful book in the English language.” I very much dig Florio’s Montaigne & Renaissance translations in general. Perverse as it may sound, I have a greater interest in translators from English than into English because their work renders the “event” of translation so much more evident to me. [I love watching English-language films with foreign subtitles]. Thus: Pierre Leyris’s French versions of Hopkins (or Coindreau’s French Faulkner), or Celan’s Shakespeare. Or some of the current castings into French of Zukofsky (of course, Zukofsky’s Catullus is an ongoing instigation). But for me THE most important translator has been Pound. Of late, I have been increasingly whelmed by his late Confucian Odes.

6. What advice would you give to someone interested in becoming a translator?

Learn languages, many languages, in order to lose your own. Learn to listen. I.e. Learn to be excluded from what you hear [see above] or think you speak.

Above all, stay in touch with the best of contemporary writing (and singing) in your OWN language. Anybody can learn a foreign language. What’s hardest is then trying to (re)learn your own.

Introducing Rebecca Colesworthy: Draper's New Faculty Fellow in Literary Cultures

This semester, Draper is delighted to welcome two new faculty fellow members to our program. Rebecca Colesworthy joins us as the faculty fellow in Literary Cultures and will be teaching one course for Draper this fall: 'Introduction to Literary Cultures I.' Please see below for her introduction.

Rebecca Colesworthy joins Draper as the new Faculty Fellow/Assistant Professor in Literary Cultures after having received her PhD in English from Cornell University. Her dissertation, entitled “Modernism’s Gifts,” explores the relationship between modernist ethics and poetics by juxtaposing the work of Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, and Stevie Smith with theories of the gift and exchange drawn from the fields of anthropology, psychoanalysis, and philosophy. In addition to completing articles on Jean Rhys and on the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan, she looks forward to undertaking her next project, which considers the ways in which various 20th-century writers reimagine the traditionally exceptional position of the feminine subject with respect to moral laws.

Professor Colesworthy attributes much of her investment in interdisciplinarity to her longstanding interest and work in the field of feminist, gender, and sexuality studies. As an undergraduate concentrating in English and Women’s Studies at Brown University, she had the opportunity to develop a course of study at once variegated and specific to her intellectual concerns. After graduating, she worked as a research assistant for three Brown faculty members: Professor Carolyn Dean in History, Professor Mary Ann Doane in Modern Culture and Media, and Professor Elizabeth Weed at the Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women. Before attending Cornell, she also worked for two years at the National Council for Research on Women – a nonprofit network of feminist research, advocacy, and policy centers – where she gained significant insight into the difficulties and rewards of bringing the humanities and the social sciences into dialogue.