Graduate Student Colloquia
Graduate Colloquium: March 11, 2014
Graduate Colloquium: March 11, 2014
Tuesday, March 11, 2014
Liesl Owens, Ph.D. Graduate Student
Comparative Literature, Rutgers University
195 College Avenue
Potluck - 6:00pm
Colloquium - 7:00pm
"Archive and Incest: Luis López Nieves’ “El conde de Ovando”"
Luis López Nieves’ short story “El Conde de Ovando” highlights the internal conflicts between different European institutions -the church, the state and the family- during Puerto Rico’s early colonial period and illustrates the ideological conflicts between the traditionally conservative Catholic church versus the emerging scientific, humanistic, and religious movements. López Nieves’ historical fiction also points to the Caribbean present. In this case, the story offers us a way to look at the institutional, political, and cultural continuities between Puerto Rico’s colonial past and its neo-colonial present. This colloquia will focus on the relationship between how López Nieves uses the historical archives to tell his story of the abuse inherent in an incestuous relationship and the sadism of Inquisitorial torture and how these relate to the violence of the Caribbean colonial past and the continued violations of the neo-colonial present.
Graduate Colloquium: February 25, 2014
Tuesday, February 25, 2014
195 College Avenue
Potluck - 6:00pm
Colloquium - 7:00pm
Matthew Mangold, Ph.D. Graduate Student
Comparative Literature
Rutgers University
"WRITING WITH PATIENTS
Medical Insight and Comic Form in Chekhov’s Early Writing
Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) was training to be a doctor when his first stories appeared in St. Petersburg humor magazines. Looking closely at illness histories and autopsy reports Chekhov wrote during his medical training, Matthew compares these to stories the writer published in humor journals during the same period. Medicine drew Chekhov's attention to the spaces of the body and the effects of environmental conditions on the mind. Matthew shows how the writer aligns these concentrations with efforts to master irony and the grotesque in his early comic works.g"
Graduate Colloquium: February 4, 2014
Tuesday, February 4, 2014
Sergey Toymentsev, Ph.D. Graduate Student, Comparative Literature, Rutgers University
195 College Avenue
Potluck - 6:00pm
Colloquium - 7:00pm
Early Russian Cinema (e.g. Vertov, Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovzhenko) is widely represented in Deleuze’s Cinema 1 to exemplify the key components of the movement-image, such as the dialectical montage, the action-oriented narrative and its complicity with a dominant ideological regime. Yet in his second Cinema volume references to Russian cinema almost disappear and predominantly European and American modern films serve to demonstrate the emergence of the time-image. Does it mean that there is no time-image in Russian film? This presentation attempts to answer this question by arguing that the Soviet time-image is a latecomer in the history of world cinema that fully manifested itself only after the Cinema books were published. By rehabilitating the legitimacy of the Soviet time-image in terms of Deleuze’s philosophical aesthetics, the paper will equally address a number of methodological questions. For example, how shall we read Deleuze’s “difficult” books on cinema? According to his metaphysical framework or along the historical evolution of film? What is the relation between philosophy and a history of film? What other national cinematic traditions, unknown to Deleuze, could be viewed in terms of his taxonomy of images?
Graduate Colloquium: November 12, 2013
Tuesday, November 12, 2013
195 College Avenue
Potluck - 6:00pm
Colloquium - 7:00pm
Dr. Emily Sun, Associate Professor, Dept. of Foreign Languages and Literatures
National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan
"Topographies, Archaeologies, Genealogies: Comparative Literature between Past and Future"
Following recent reconsiderations of the discipline in the age of globalization, this
presentation will address the potential of comparative literature to rethink the terms
of a shared and common modernity and world culture by means of renewed attention
to heterogeneous linguistic and textual traditions. It will seek to elaborate this
potential by using as an example recent work on lyricism in the Chinese tradition that
aims to recover persistent patterns obscured by the pre-modern/modern as well as
colonial/post-colonial divides. It will reflect on how such recuperative work may shed
light on the valence and operations of lyricism in other traditions and thereby on
heterogeneous configurations of the common.
Graduate Colloquium: October 29, 2013
Tuesday, October 29, 2013
Janet A. Walker, Professor of Comparative Literature, Rutgers University
195 College Avenue
Potluck - 6:00pm
Colloquium - 7:00pm
Current, largely eurocentric methods of studying world literature do not sufficiently acknowledge non-Western literatures as part of the world. I want to suggest three fruitful ways to construct a world literature that not only more accurately reflects the composition of the world but also views the world in a more egalitarian way than current perspectives. One of these is to treat world literature from an indocentric, sinocentric, nipponcentric or other non-Western point of view. Another is to treat junctures of aesthetic circulation during which East learns from West and West learns from East. A third is to articulate originary poetic systems of West and East--systems that evolved before the modern period--in a comparative context.