REFRACTIONS AND ADAPTATIONS: Revisiting the Cultural and Historical Canon
Interdisciplinary Colloquium in Humanities 2009-2010
This is the third year of our Colloquium. In AY 2007-08, we dedicated it to a discussion of the humanities as an academic profession, asking some of the most distinguished senior faculty at Stanford to reflect on their intellectual contributions to their field within the framework of their professional experience (you can review the 2007-08 colloquium here). Last year's theme, "Mimesis and History," was devoted to the complex inter-relationship among events, facts, and fiction in historical writing produced by the practitioners of the discipline of academic history or by scholars working in literary studies and cultural history (you can review the meetings and readings of the 2008-09 colloquium on this page below).
This year, AY 2009-10, we will look at the way past cultural forms (canons and various other mythologies) get retreaded, revised, and re-appropriated in a new cultural and social setting. The naive resurfaces as the sentimental (Schiller), tragedy as farce (Marx), trauma as symptom (Freud), histories as mythologies (Roland Barthes), ethnography as Orientalism (Said), archetypes and modes as today's stories and histories (Northrop Frye and Hayden White), and the present, pace Eric Hobsbawm, as invented tradition -- the method well-known to the ancients, viz. Homer in Virgil's Aeneid and uses of Judaism in Christianity and Islam. In sum, any given present is made up of a patchwork of recurring patterns that lend form, authority, and legitimacy to institutions or, conversely, tear them down by way of travesty and satire. With modernization and globalization, such re-appropriations have become only more ubiquitous and the process itself, ever more relentless. Our speakers will help us examine it from a variety of perspectives, thematic, comparative, historical, and disciplinary.
The colloquium meets five times a year: twice in the fall and winter, and once in the spring. The meetings are noon to 2 PM on Fridays (few classes meet on this day). We serve lunch (RSVP is required: Monica Moore). Participants will have access to advanced reading, 15-30 pp., to provide background or focus, or both, for the discussion that follows the presentation by the speaker (about 30 minutes). Lunch is served at noon, and the speaker has the floor around 12:30, following a brief introduction. The rest of the colloquium is taken up by discussion.
Our first meeting is scheduled for October 9, 12:00-2:00. Please mark your calendar. The speaker will be Professor Dan Edelstein (French and Italian, DLCL), the author of the just published, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2009). The title of his presentation is: "Inventing the Enlightenment." Click here to download advance reading. The meeting place: Building 50, Room 51A (in the Quad).
Our second speaker is Catherine Gallagher, Professor of English, UCB, presently Senior Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. She will be speaking at the Colloquium on Friday, November 20, 12:00-2:00 PM. The title of her presentation: "Why We Tell It Like It Wasn't." Advance Reading (soon to be available on-line):
1. "The Rise of Novelistic Fictionality," Franco Moretti, ed., The Novel, 2 vols. (Princeton, 2006)
2. "When Did the Confederate States of America Free the Slaves," Representations (Spring 2007)
Professor Gallagher is the author of, most recently, The Body Economic. Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel ( Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2006). Her current project is a study of the web of interactions between alternate history novels, counterfactual histories, social policies, and political debates.
The Colloquium is required for students enrolled in the GPH and is open to the graduate students and faculty in the DLCL and the departments and programs participating in the GPH.
9/18/2009
2009-2010 Colloquium Schedule
________________________
20 November (Friday) 2009, 12:00-2:00. Building 50, Room 51A (in the the Quad).
Catherine Gallagher
Professor, Department of English, University of California at Berkeley
Why We Tell It Like It Wasn't
Advance reading (click to download the first and second articles or request a hard copy from Monica Moore)
________________________
9 October 2009, 12:00-2:00. Building 50, Room 51A (in the the Quad).
Dan Edelstein
Assistant Professor, Department of French & Italian, DLCL
Inventing the Enlightenment
Advance reading (click here to download or hard copy by request from Monica Moore)
____________________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Interdisciplinary Colloquium in Humanities 2008-2009
MIMESIS AND HISTORY
This is the second year that the Colloquium has been in existence. Last year's theme was: "Humanities in the Academy." This year's is: "Mimesis and History." How do we imagine or represent the past from their position in the present and how they see the role that mimesis plays in historical representation. It has been almost a century since Erich Auerbach's book on Dante illuminated the role of mimesis in the representation of reality (Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt, 1929), half a century since Derrida's Of Grammatology fundamentally problematized the relationship between writing and experience, and some thirty five years since Hayden White's Metahistory (1973) forced historians to notice what had been hidden in plain view, namely, their deep kinship with the writers of imaginative fiction. Much has happened to the notions of "representation," "reality," and "history" since. How, then, do we conceive of the past, history, and history writing today?
The Colloquial is open to students and faculty in the Graduate Program in Humanities (GPH) and the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages (DLCL). Graduate students and faculty outside the GPH and DLCL may join the Colloquium by sending a request to Monica Moore.
________________________
April 17, 2009, 12:00 - 2:00. Bldg 50, Rm 51A
Aestheticism, Messianism, and the (Socio-) Biological Paradigm
(Mandelstam, Benjamin, Mazlish)
Moderators:
Marton Dornbach (German), Grisha Freidin (Slavic), Peter Mann (History)
A round-table kicks off the discussion, an opportunity to reflect on this year's colloquium and our own work.
Click Here for the Advance Reading
________________________
February 28, 2009, 12:00 - 2:00. Bldg. 50 / Rm. 51A
Yuri Slezkine
Professor of History, University of California at Berkeley
History, Fiction, and Babel's First Love
Advance Reading
________________________________________________
January 23, 2009, 12:00 - 2:00
Bissera Pentcheva
Assistant Professor of Art History, Stanford University
The Other Mimesis:
The Byzantine Icon as Simulation and the Limits of Pictorial Naturalism
Advance Reading
________________________________________________
November 14, 2008 12:00 - 2:00
James Sheehan
Dickason Professor in the Humanities
Professor of Modern European History, Emeritus
Reflections on History
Advance Reading
________________________________________________
This is the third year of our Colloquium. In AY 2007-08, we dedicated it to a discussion of the humanities as an academic profession, asking some of the most distinguished senior faculty at Stanford to reflect on their intellectual contributions to their field within the framework of their professional experience (you can review the 2007-08 colloquium here). Last year's theme, "Mimesis and History," was devoted to the complex inter-relationship among events, facts, and fiction in historical writing produced by the practitioners of the discipline of academic history or by scholars working in literary studies and cultural history (you can review the meetings and readings of the 2008-09 colloquium on this page below).
This year, AY 2009-10, we will look at the way past cultural forms (canons and various other mythologies) get retreaded, revised, and re-appropriated in a new cultural and social setting. The naive resurfaces as the sentimental (Schiller), tragedy as farce (Marx), trauma as symptom (Freud), histories as mythologies (Roland Barthes), ethnography as Orientalism (Said), archetypes and modes as today's stories and histories (Northrop Frye and Hayden White), and the present, pace Eric Hobsbawm, as invented tradition -- the method well-known to the ancients, viz. Homer in Virgil's Aeneid and uses of Judaism in Christianity and Islam. In sum, any given present is made up of a patchwork of recurring patterns that lend form, authority, and legitimacy to institutions or, conversely, tear them down by way of travesty and satire. With modernization and globalization, such re-appropriations have become only more ubiquitous and the process itself, ever more relentless. Our speakers will help us examine it from a variety of perspectives, thematic, comparative, historical, and disciplinary.
The colloquium meets five times a year: twice in the fall and winter, and once in the spring. The meetings are noon to 2 PM on Fridays (few classes meet on this day). We serve lunch (RSVP is required: Monica Moore). Participants will have access to advanced reading, 15-30 pp., to provide background or focus, or both, for the discussion that follows the presentation by the speaker (about 30 minutes). Lunch is served at noon, and the speaker has the floor around 12:30, following a brief introduction. The rest of the colloquium is taken up by discussion.
Our first meeting is scheduled for October 9, 12:00-2:00. Please mark your calendar. The speaker will be Professor Dan Edelstein (French and Italian, DLCL), the author of the just published, The Terror of Natural Right: Republicanism, the Cult of Nature, and the French Revolution (University of Chicago Press, 2009). The title of his presentation is: "Inventing the Enlightenment." Click here to download advance reading. The meeting place: Building 50, Room 51A (in the Quad).
Our second speaker is Catherine Gallagher, Professor of English, UCB, presently Senior Fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center. She will be speaking at the Colloquium on Friday, November 20, 12:00-2:00 PM. The title of her presentation: "Why We Tell It Like It Wasn't." Advance Reading (soon to be available on-line):
1. "The Rise of Novelistic Fictionality," Franco Moretti, ed., The Novel, 2 vols. (Princeton, 2006)
2. "When Did the Confederate States of America Free the Slaves," Representations (Spring 2007)
Professor Gallagher is the author of, most recently, The Body Economic. Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel ( Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 2006). Her current project is a study of the web of interactions between alternate history novels, counterfactual histories, social policies, and political debates.
The Colloquium is required for students enrolled in the GPH and is open to the graduate students and faculty in the DLCL and the departments and programs participating in the GPH.
If you plan to attend and participate, please contact the GPH Administrator, Monica Moore (monica.moore@stanford.edu).
9/18/2009
2009-2010 Colloquium Schedule
________________________
20 November (Friday) 2009, 12:00-2:00. Building 50, Room 51A (in the the Quad).
Catherine Gallagher
Professor, Department of English, University of California at Berkeley
Why We Tell It Like It Wasn't
Advance reading (click to download the first and second articles or request a hard copy from Monica Moore)
________________________
9 October 2009, 12:00-2:00. Building 50, Room 51A (in the the Quad).
Dan Edelstein
Assistant Professor, Department of French & Italian, DLCL
Inventing the Enlightenment
Advance reading (click here to download or hard copy by request from Monica Moore)
____________________________________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________________________________
Interdisciplinary Colloquium in Humanities 2008-2009
MIMESIS AND HISTORY
This is the second year that the Colloquium has been in existence. Last year's theme was: "Humanities in the Academy." This year's is: "Mimesis and History." How do we imagine or represent the past from their position in the present and how they see the role that mimesis plays in historical representation. It has been almost a century since Erich Auerbach's book on Dante illuminated the role of mimesis in the representation of reality (Dante als Dichter der irdischen Welt, 1929), half a century since Derrida's Of Grammatology fundamentally problematized the relationship between writing and experience, and some thirty five years since Hayden White's Metahistory (1973) forced historians to notice what had been hidden in plain view, namely, their deep kinship with the writers of imaginative fiction. Much has happened to the notions of "representation," "reality," and "history" since. How, then, do we conceive of the past, history, and history writing today?
The Colloquial is open to students and faculty in the Graduate Program in Humanities (GPH) and the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages (DLCL). Graduate students and faculty outside the GPH and DLCL may join the Colloquium by sending a request to Monica Moore.
________________________
April 17, 2009, 12:00 - 2:00. Bldg 50, Rm 51A
Aestheticism, Messianism, and the (Socio-) Biological Paradigm
(Mandelstam, Benjamin, Mazlish)
Moderators:
Marton Dornbach (German), Grisha Freidin (Slavic), Peter Mann (History)
A round-table kicks off the discussion, an opportunity to reflect on this year's colloquium and our own work.
Click Here for the Advance Reading
________________________
February 28, 2009, 12:00 - 2:00. Bldg. 50 / Rm. 51A
Yuri Slezkine
Professor of History, University of California at Berkeley
History, Fiction, and Babel's First Love
Advance Reading
________________________________________________
January 23, 2009, 12:00 - 2:00
Bissera Pentcheva
Assistant Professor of Art History, Stanford University
The Other Mimesis:
The Byzantine Icon as Simulation and the Limits of Pictorial Naturalism
Advance Reading
________________________________________________
November 14, 2008 12:00 - 2:00
James Sheehan
Dickason Professor in the Humanities
Professor of Modern European History, Emeritus
Reflections on History
Advance Reading
________________________________________________
October 10, 2008 12:00 - 2:00
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
Albert Guerard Professor in Literature
How Can You Pinpoint What Is Latent in the Text--or in the Air?
Advance Reading
_________________________________________________
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht
Albert Guerard Professor in Literature
How Can You Pinpoint What Is Latent in the Text--or in the Air?
Advance Reading
_________________________________________________