Lecture
Hamlet and Cultural Criticism
Monday, January 29
Music Center Recital Hall
7:00 PM

This is the 2000-2001 Undergraduate Distinguished Lecture in Literary Studies.
For more information about this event, please contact the Literature Department, 459-4778

Seminar
Historical Correctness: The Use and Abuse of History for Literature
Tuesday, January 30
4:00 pm-6:00 pm
Cowell Conference Room

Faculty and graduate students welcome. A paper will be circulated in advance for reading and discussion. For more information or to receive a copy of the reading, please contact Katy Elliott, cult@hum.ucsc.edu; 459-4899 by Friday, January 19. Papers available only to the UCSC community.

Professor Marjorie Garber is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English at Harvard University and Director of the Humanities Center in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She is the author of three books on Shakespeare (Dream in Shakespeare: From Metaphor to Metamorphosis[Yale University Press, 1974], Coming of Age in Shakespeare[Methuen, 1981], Shakespeare’s Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality[Methuen, 1987]); and a number of books of cultural criticism and theory: Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety(Routledge, 1992); Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life(Simon & Schuster,1995); Dog Love(Simon & Schuster,1996); Symptoms of Culture(Routledge, 1998); Sex and Real Estate: Why We Love Houses(Pantheon, 2000); and, most recently, Academic Instincts(Princeton, 2001). The general editor of the CultureWorks series, she has co-edited several collections of essays on cultural studies topics, including Media Spectacles;Secret Agents: The Rosenberg Case, McCarthyism, and Fifties America;Field Work;One Nation Under God? Religion and American Culture; and The Turn to Ethics.

These combined events are sponsored by the Literature Department, the Humanities Division, the Institute for Humanities Research, and the Center for Cultural Studies.

Saturday, January 27 | Oakes Mural Room | 10:00 AM

In the first of what we hope will be an ongoing activity, the Center is sponsoring an informal faculty discussion on an issue of concern. This event is coordinated by Professor Hayden White, who writes:

I have noticed that many people use the terms “figure” and “trope” as synonyms. Usage supports this practice, although the history of both rhetoric and poetics shows that the terms have different technical meanings. Figure is of course derived from the Latin figura while trope derives from Greek tropos. But the Latin figura is not a proper translation of Greek tropos.  Figura translates Greek schema, while tropostranslates (late) Latin modus. So the synonymy confuses “image” (as in “the image of the hero” or “the image of the abject”) with “mode” (as in “the heroic mode” or “the mode of abjection”). Does the difference matter? And if so, why?

The discussion will begin with a few brief presentations, totaling 30 minutes or so, followed by general discussion. Cultural Studies will provide lunch for all participants who RSVP.

To reserve a lunch contact Katy Elliott at cult@hum.ucsc.edu
Those interested in making a presentation should contact Hayden White at HWhite2736@aol.com

Seminar
The Space of the Novel & World Literature
Friday, November 17
Oakes Mural Room
12:00-2:00 PM

Lecture
On Bourgeois Seriousness
Friday November 17
Oakes Mural Room
4:00 PM

Seminar Reading: Atlas of the European Novel, pp. 164-197 (from Chapter 3, “Narrative Markets ca. 1850”) and “Conjectures on World Literature,” New Left Review 1 (Jan/Feb 2000): 54-68.

Copies of the reading are available for UCSC faculty and students at the Center office or may be requested by email (cult@hum.ucsc.edu). Please make email requests at least one week in advance.

The 1983 appearance of the essay collection Signs Taken for Wonders(Verso) established Franco Moretti as an original and paradigm-shifting voice in the study of literature and the social. Subjecting a wide range of literature–James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, Shakespearean tragedy, boys’ tear-jerker novels, Arthur Conan Doyle–to analysis simultaneously historical and rhetorical, Moretti opened up the field of literary history along lines begun by Georg Lukacs, Lucien Goldmann, Walter Benjamin, and Teodor Adorno, among others. Next came The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture(Verso, 1987), an analysis of what Moretti posited as the primary literary medium of bourgeois socialization. Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez(Verso, 1995) provided a new analytical framework where formal and generic breakthrough is read coterminously with capitalist world hegemony–for a consideration of those monuments of European modernity: Faust, The Ring, and Ulysses. With Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900(Verso, 1998), Moretti has re-invented the field of literary geography. In one hundred maps, Moretti charts not only the literary geography of modernity, but the role of literature in shaping the spatial and geographical imagination at micro-and macro-levels of analysis. The seminar will center on the geographical project, and will include in the introductory remarks some of Moretti’s new work on the geography of film. The talk, “On Bourgeois Seriousness,” is part of Moretti’s ongoing research on the figure of the bourgeois in European literature and social theory. Franco Moretti taught for many years in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, and has recently become Professor of English at Stanford University, where he also directs the Center for the Study of the Novel.

Thursday, November 9 | Oakes Mural Room | 4:00 PM

Ali Mirsepassi is currently directing a Five-College project on Alternative Modernities sponsored by the Ford Foundation, which is also the topic of his current book project. He is the author of Intellectual Discourse and Politics of Modernization: Negotiating Modernity in Iran(Cambridge, 2000), and has co-edited Local Knowledge in a Globalizing World: Rethinking Area Studies(forthcoming, Syracuse). He has published in journals such as Social Text, Radical History, and Contemporary Sociology. This seminar is organized by the Civilizational Thinking Research Cluster, whose activities are funded in part by the Ford Foundation. The seminar paper will be circulated in advance to regular participants; for others interested in attending, copies of the seminar readings are available for UCSC faculty and students at the Center office or may be requested by email cult@hum.ucsc.edu. Please make email requests at least one week in advance.

Friday, October 27 | Oakes Mural Room | 4:00 PM

Saskia Sassen is Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago. In addition to numerous articles and book chapters, her publications include: The Global City (Princeton, 1991); Globalization and Its Discontents: Essays on the New Mobility of People and Money(New Press, 1998); and Guests and Aliens(New Press, 1999). This seminar is organized by the Civilizational Thinking Research Cluster, whose activities are funded in part by the Ford Foundation. The seminar paper will be circulated in advance to regular participants; for others interested in attending, copies of the seminar readings are available at the Center office or may be requested by email cult@hum.ucsc.edu. Please make email requests at least one week in advance.

Monday, October 9 | Oakes 109 | 4:30 PM

Matthew Coolidge has been Director of Programming at the Center for Land Use and Interpretation (see the website at www.clui.org) since 1994. The Center’s projects combine perspectives drawn from geography, installation and conceptual art, tourism, and political economy, and have centered on landscape perception, unusual and undernoticed places, and touristic practices. Coolidge has lectured widely on contemporary landscape matters, and has studied human-induced changes to the landscape professionally since joining the CLUI in 1994. Among the exhibits that he has curated are “Hinterland” (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions 1997), “Commonwealth of Technology” (at the List Center for Visual Arts, MIT, 1999), and “The Nellis Range Complex: Landscape of Conjecture” (at CLUI Los Angeles, 1999). He is the author of several books published by the CLUI, including The Nevada Test Site: A Guide to the Nation’s Nuclear Proving Ground; Around Wendover: An Examination of the Anthropic Landscape of the Great Salt Lake Desert Region; and Route 58: A Cross-Section of Southern California. His talk and slide show will introduce the Center’s current projects and activities, including the ongoing work on environmental art in decay.

Friday, April 14 | 4 PM | Oakes Mural Room

Prasenjit Duara is one of the most innovative China historians working in the United States today, especially noted for his work on the national framing of history and the suppressions this framing entails. He is the author of Culture, Power, and the State: Rural Society in North China, 1900-1942 (Stanford, 1988); Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China(Chicago, 1995), and “Why is History Anti-Theoretical?”, Modern China (April 1998). His current project is a transnational history centered on northeast Asia, tentatively entitled “Frontiers of the East Asian Modern: Sovereignty, Authenticity, and Manchukuo.” This seminar is part of the Center’s ongoing program in Civilizational Thinking, funded by the Ford Foundation. The seminar paper will be circulated in advance to regular participants; others interested in attending should contact cult@hum.ucsc.edu for a copy.

Thursday April 6 | 4 PM | Oakes Mural Room

Wang Ning is Professor of English and Comparative Literature and Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Beijing Language and Culture University, where he is also head of the Center for European Studies. Nationally, he directs China’s National Research Institute for Postmodern Studies. A leading scholar in literary and cultural studies in China, his work centers on postmodern and postcolonial studies. Among his numerous Chinese-language publications are Comparative Literature and Contemporary Chinese Literature (1992), The Influence of Chinese Culture in Europe (1999), and Comparative Studies of 20th Century Western Literature (2000). Wang Ning has been a central figure in the encounter between contemporary Chinese and European and North American literary and cultural critics. He has organized several international conferences, such as “Postmodernism and Contemporary Chinese Literature” (1993), “Cultural Studies: China and the West” (1995), and “The Future of Literary Theory: China and the World” (2000). His talk at UCSC will discuss issues such as the relationship between traditional Chinese learning (guoxue) and Western learning, modernity and postmodernity in the Chinese context, and “cultural colonization” and “decolonization” in Chinese critical discourse.

Thursday February 24 | Oakes Mural Room | 4:00 PM

Linda Tuhiwai Smith is Associate Professor of Maori Education and Director of the International Research Institute for Maori and Indigenous Studies at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Professor Smith works as a consultant to the development of aboriginal and indigenous studies at five major universities in Australia and Greenland. In New Zealand she has been central to the development of a tribal university, Te Whare Wananga o Awanuiarangi, and to the nationwide movement for an alternative schooling system, Kura Kaupapa Maori. Her leadership represents the pioneering work of Maori scholars and activists which inspires indigenous and sovereignty work internationally.

Professor Smith’s book Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (Zed, 1999) explores the intersections of imperialism, knowledge and research. From the vantage point of the colonized, the term ‘research’ is inextricably linked with European colonialism; the way in which scientific research has been implicated in the worst excesses of imperialism remains a powerful remembered history for many of the world’s colonized people. Here, an indigenous researcher issues a clarion call for the decolonization of research methods. In setting an agenda for planning and implementing indigenous research, Smith shows how such programs are part of the wider project of reclaiming control over indigenous ways of knowing and being.

February 5-20 | Porter College Faculty Gallery

In conjunction with the conference “Native Pacific Cultural Studies on the Edge,” the Hawai`i Studies Research Cluster presents an art exhibit by Jewel Castro. Castro is a visual artist who creates multimedia installations about Samoan identity and history from her drawings, paintings, sculptures, and recorded sound. Her installation-environments invoke a sense of inside and outside, past and present layered together in the same space. Jewel Castro was born in Chicago, Illinois, spent her first year in American Samoa, and then was raised in San Diego, California. She considers herself a border dweller. She is half Samoan, half Danish and Irish. She currently lives on the border of Mexico and the United States, as well as on the border of the Barona Reservation in Southern California, and previously lived on the border of the Suquamish Indian Reservation in the Pacific Northwest. She has spent a great deal of time in the Southwest, and has collaborated with Chicano border artists. Her work is influenced by Samoan art forms (especially fine mats and tapa), as well as Mexican muralists, Chicano art, and Native American art forms.

Co-sponsored by the Asian-Pacific Islander Programs at Merrill College, the Asian American Pacific Islander Resource Center and the Hawai`i Studies Research Cluster.