End Date :
Komoda Seminar Room, The Heyman Center for the Humanities
Open to the ICLS community, these presentations are an important opportunity to share dissertations-in-progress and receive feedback from other ICLS students and ICLS faculty.
February 10, 2011 – April 25, 2011, Various Dates and Times
PROGRAM
Avishek Ganguly “Translation and the staging of collectivity in David Edgar’s “Pentecost” Thursday, Feb. 10, 4-5:45pm, Komoda Seminar Room, Heyman Center
Avishek Ganguly will present on David Edgar’s play “Pentecost” (1995) is part of his dissertation project “Translation as Dramatic Strategy: Staging collectivity in world theatre since the 1960s.” In identifying translation as a significant dramatic strategy in texts of world political theatre since the nineteen-sixties, his dissertation signals a shift from thinking about translation either as a metaphor for the adaptation of a literary text to the stage, or, as a description of the transference of plays from one language into another. Through a comparative reading of a set of plays and non-fiction prose that also includes the work of Brian Friel (Ireland), Utpal Dutt (India) and Wole Soyinka (Nigeria), that have rarely been read together, he demonstrates how such instances of translation function as a political instrument almost invariably emerging as alternative configurations of collectivity in these texts.
Sarah Ponichtera “The Theoretical Turn in American Jewish Poetry” Thursday, Feb. 17, 4-5:45pm, Komoda Seminar Room, Heyman Center Sarah Ponichtera’s presentation will discuss how American Jewish avant-garde poets in the 1970s and 80s used literary theory in their poetry as a way to access an intercultural perspective on their own experience.
Nina Lee Bond “Trains as Tricknology in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Zola’s La Bête humaine.” Tuesday, Feb. 22, 4:15-6:00pm, Komoda Room, Heyman CenterICLS graduate student, Nina Bond, will present on a part of her dissertation which focuses on two late nineteenth-century novels, Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1877) and Zola’s La Bête humaine (1890). The advent of train travel introduced new visual experiences that Tolstoy and Zola explored in their investigations of the human condition at the dawn of modernity. Nina will look specifically at motion parallax, the visual cue that makes stationary objects appear to be moving backwards when viewed from a train traveling forward. Nina’s comparative reading of Tolstoy’s and Zola’s novels will demonstrate how motion parallax contributes to a different understanding of the narrative structure of novels written during the second half of the nineteenth century. Her multi-disciplinary project interweaves literary analysis with sociology, history of science, and visual cultural history.
Veronika Tuckerova “Reading Kafka during the Cold War” Monday, Apr. 11, 4-5:45pm, Komoda Room, Heyman Center
In her talk, Veronika Tuckerova will focus on the chapter of her dissertation titled “Vestiges of Prague Ghetto: the Czech Translation of the Trail”, which discusses the ghetto concept that lies at the heart of many interpretations of Franz Kafka, including Deleuze and Guattari’s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Among the first who used this concept was the Czech/German translator and essayist Paul/Pavel Eisner, who developed this interpretation between 1920s and 1950s. Veronika will analyze Eisner’s translation of Kafka’s Trial(1958), the first translation of the novel to Czech, and discuss the relationship between Eisner’s concept of ghetto, his theory of translation and bilingualism, and his actual translation of the novel.
Her dissertation, “Reading Kafka during the Cold War,” discusses various appropriations of Kafka’s texts and Kafka as an author during the 1950s and 1960s in Eastern Europe. The dissertation addresses the questions of censorship, the interplay between politics and literature, and construction of authorship.
Alvan Ikoku “On Reading Malaria Literature: the Place of Literary Analysis in Evaluating Disease Control in Colonial Kenya, 1935-37” Tuesday, Apr. 12, 4-5:45pm, Komoda Room, Heyman Center
Alvan Ikoku will present a 1935 public health pamphlet circulated in colonial Kenya as part of a prevention program against malaria. The presentation will focus on the pamphlet’s use of literary rhetoric in shaping knowledge of disease, engagement with human and ecological difference, the organization of colonial environments and actual health outcomes. Alvan’s examination of the pamphlet is part of a dissertation, titled The Writing of Malaria: 1885-1935, that presents malaria literature during the period as a corpus requiring rhetoric that remained opportunistic through to the early twentieth century, drawing readily from positivist and figurative textual traditions. In reading samples from malaria literature, Alvan demonstrates instances where tropical medicine — and public, even global health — can be understood as a confluence of literary and scientific practice, and so requires literary analysis for the evaluation of its projects.
Adam Bund “The Land, ‘Raw’ and ‘Cooked’: Writing the life and death of a Chinese village in the shadow of innovation” Thursday, Apr. 14, 4-5:45pm, Komoda Room, Heyman CenterThe talk is part of Anthropology and ICLS graduate student Adam Bund’s dissertation project, “Anxieties of Innovation: Labor, infrastructure, and nation in Chinese technology zones.” Adam’s dissertation examines the official Chinese concept of “indigenous innovation” (a highly contested translation of the term, zizhu chuangxin) as a condensation of emergent shifts in the Chinese and global economies. Simultaneously an ethnographic account of Chinese economic theory and policy in-the-making and an investigation of more or less concrete conditions of labor and infrastructure within zoned spaces of high-tech production, the dissertation traces the processes by which the contemporary Chinese subject of innovation (or innovation’s absence) emerges as an object of governmentality and a locus of value extraction. This talk will be an account of the expropriation of peasant land to make way for a Shenyang software park intended to foster an ‘innovative ecosystem.’ If, as Marx famously wrote, “…primitive accumulation plays approximately the same role in political economy as original sin does in theology,” Adam’s talk asks: What will have come to constitute the original sin of ‘indigenous’ innovation in contemporary China?
Mehammed Mack “Representations of ‘problematic’ Franco-Maghrebi masculinities in French cinema” Monday, Apr. 25, 4:10-5:45pm, Komoda Room In this chapter of his dissertation, Mehammed Mack explores representations of Franco-Maghrebi men in French contemporary cinema; studying the processes of “heterosexualization” and “homosexualization” as they are represented on-screen and paying special attention to how a general “French” masculinity is defined in concordance or contrast with that of minority Franco-Maghrebi men. He will explain how “homosexualization” and “androgynization” constitute attempts to assimilate Franco-Maghrebi males in French culture via an earlier assimilation in French gay culture. He will also examine beur-authored (beur meaning the descendants of immigrants from North Africa born in France) representations that playfully manipulate anxieties about beur masculinities in order to trip up the correlation so easily made between virility and homophobia or misogyny. From within a Cultural Studies approach inspired by the work of Richard Dyer and his analyses of bodies on-screen, Mehammed looks for the theoretical and textual import of the content of these popular or avant-garde images for the processes he is analyzing.
