Comparative Literature Program
Jerusalem within Athens: The Theological Substratum of Derrida's 'Plato's Pharmacy'
Through the juxtaposition of the Indian-English, Hindi, and Tamil literary spheres, this talk argues for a focus on how writers and texts perform acts of “worlding,” rather than defining which texts belong in the global literary canon, as contemporary scholarship has done. Such acts mobilize “world literature” to define certain texts as “literary,” while simultaneously concealing other existing literary processes and social relations.
From Caitlyn Jenner to Laverne Cox, transgender people have rapidly gained public visibility, contesting many basic assumptions about what gender and embodiment mean. The vibrant discipline of Trans Studies explores such challenges in depth, building on the insights of queer and feminist theory to raise provocative questions about the relationships among gender, sexuality, and accepted social norms.
Two recent stage productions—Clifford Odets’s Awake and Sing, performed by the National Asian American Theater Company and New Yiddish Rep’s presentation of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in Yiddish translation—employ provocative performance interventions to problematize notions of the Jewishness of these plays’ characters and narratives.
Caroline Godart will be discussing new book: The Dimensions of Difference Space, Time and Bodies in Women’s Cinema and Continental Philosophy. Caroline Godart is a Scientific Collaborator at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB).
