Contemporary Literature Colloquium
Submit Events
The Contemporary Literature Colloquium welcomes suggestions for topics and speakers. If you are interested in organizing a colloquium roundtable, panel, discussion, or lecture, please contact Rebecca Walkowitz.
Workshops
Monthly dissertation workshops provide graduate students in the dissertation stage with an opportunity to present their written work for critically engaged peer review with graduate students and faculty working in contemporary literature. Participants are encouraged to attend regularly. If you are a dissertator who is interested in participating in or presenting a work-in-progress for the CLC Dissertator Workshop, please contact Taryn Okuma with a brief description of your work/project.
Thursday, September 14, 4 pm
Forum: "Global Interiors " Roundtable discussion.
Room: 7191 Helen C. White. Organizer: Amy Johnson.
Thursday, September 21, 4pm
Workshop: “'I suppose we would not act at all': Irony and Land Claim in Louise Erdrich's Four Souls." Timothy Glenn.
Room: 7101 Helen C. White. Organizer: Tim Glenn.
Thursday, October 12, 4pm
Workshop: “Henry Green and the Perspective of the Non-Combatant." Taryn Okuma.
Room 7101. Organizer: Tim Glenn.
Thursday, October 26, 4pm
Film showing: Michael Haneke's Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys.
Room 7191. Organizers: Taryn Okuma and Amy Johnson
Thursday, November 2nd, 4 pm
Public Lecture: "Cosmopolitan Interiors: Derrida, Haneke, and the Politics of Hospitality"
Jacques Derrida's "On Cosmopolitanism" raises the possibility of a new instantiation of the historical "cities of refuge," an "open city" emerging out of and requiring a new "cosmopolitics" that encompasses both the duty of and the right to hospitality. Michael Haneke's 2000 film "Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys" offers a compelling depiction of our current distance from such a vision of the city and of the difficulties we would have to overcome to bring it about in our era of heterogeneous globalization. To speak of cosmopolitanism and hospitality, I will argue, is inevitably to speak of what is simultaneously a politics and ethics of exteriority and interiority, of otherness both without and within. This problematic also compels us to develop a more complex understanding of "exteriority" and "interiority" themselves.
Professor Paula Geyh. Co-sponsored by the Anonymous Fund, the Americanist Literature, and Culture Research Circle. Room 7191. Organizer: Taryn Okuma.
Friday, November 3rd, 11am
Roundtable with graduate students: “Postmodernism and the City.”
Professor Paula Geyh (Yeshiva College). Co-sponsored by the Anonymous Fund, the Americanist Literature and Culture Research Circle. Room 7101 HCW. Moderator: Brian Williams.
Thursday, November 9, 4 pm
Forum: "Contemporary Literature and Pedagogy," Roundtable Discussion.
Room 7191. Organizer: Mitch Nakaue.
Thursday, November 30, 4 pm
Public Lecture: "What's Global about Modernist Interiority? Narratives of Colonialism and Consciousness"
Professor Jed Esty. Co-sponsored by the Anonymous Fund, the Modernisms/Modernity Colloquium, the Border and Transcultural Studies Research Circle, the Global Studies program, the Department of History (pending), and the Cosmopolitan Culture, Cosmopolitan Histories Mellon Workshop. Room 7191. Organizer: Kevin Piper.
Friday, December 1, 12:30 pm
Roundtable with graduate students: “Modernism and Modernity: Singular, Plural, and Alternative”
Professor Jed Esty. Co-sponsored by the Anonymous Fund, the Modernisms/Modernity Colloquium, the Border and Transcultural Studies Research Circle, the Global Studies program, the Department of History (pending), and the Cosmopolitan Culture, Cosmopolitan Histories Mellon Workshop. Room 7101. Moderator: Mitch Nakaue.
Thursday, December 7, 4 pm
Workshop: “Biological Thresholds of Modernity: Camp Life as Critical Ontology of the Present in Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go." Mark Pettus.
Room: 7101 HCW. Organizer: Tim Glenn.
Thursday, January 25, 4 pm
Workshop: "'I might have been no more than a flaw in the air': Confession, Faith, and Meaning in The Book of Evidence" Mitch Nakaue.
Room: 7101 Helen C White. Organizer: Tim Glenn.
Thursday, February 8, 12:30 pm
Roundtable with graduate students: “The Economy of Prestige"
Professor James English (University of Pennsylvania). Co-sponsored by the Anonymous Fund, the Americanist Literature and Culture Research Circle, the Border and Transcultural Studies Research Circle, the Global Studies program, and the Cosmopolitan Culture, Cosmopolitan Histories Mellon Workshop. Room 7101. Organizer: Amy Johnson.
Thursday, February 8, 4 pm
Public Lecture: "UK America: Centers of Power and Problems of Translation in the Empire of Global English."
Description: Focusing on the films of Ken Loach and his attempt, in Bread and Roses, to export a specifically British method of cinematic production to the USA, this paper explores some of the problems of translation that arise even within the sphere of Anglophone culture. In particular, the paper argues that where race and language are more pertinent and
readable lines of social division than class and accent, and where the mobility that is chiefly aspired to is as much lateral, across national borders, as it is vertical, economically upward, the British form of cinematic realism loses its formal rigor and its political significance.
Professor James English (University of Pennsylvania). Co-sponsored by the Anonymous Fund, the Americanist Literature and Culture Research Circle, the Border and Transcultural Studies Research Circle, the Global Studies program, and the Cosmopolitan Culture, Cosmopolitan Histories Mellon Workshop. Room 6191 HCW. Organizer: Taryn Okuma.
Wedesday, February 28th, 7pm
Film Screening: "Dirty Pretty Things" dir. Stephen Frears.
Location: 6191 Helen C White Hall. Organizers: Amy Johnson and Krista Kauffmann.
Thursday, March 1, 12:30 - 1:30 pm
Forum: "The Global Space of Film," A Roundatable Discussion of Filmic Narrative in Stephen Frears “Dirty Pretty Things” (2002)."
Come participate in a roundtable discussion of film as a global space and a projection of globalization. How might we conceive of film as a global space and a place in which contemporary writers and directors stage issues of globalization: immigration, refugees, spaces that are homely and spaces that are alien? What specifically filmic aspects of “Dirty Pretty Things” help us to think about “global interiors”? How do films imagine and project spaces in ways different from literature? In other words, how are film narratives different from literary narratives? Stephen Frears’ film is able to narrate surveillance, for example, in ways that literature can’t—how does that alter our sense of the forms and consequences of surveillance? How is Frears' film able to narrate experiences of immigration, the nation, and globalization in ways that literature can't? How do films produce global narratives or narratives of the global in ways that literature doesn’t or isn’t able to?
Room 7191 HCW. Organizers: Amy Johnson and Krista Kauffmann.
Thursday, March 8, 4 pm
Workshop: "French Decadence, English Aestheticism: Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot" Amy Johnson.
Room: 7101 HCW. Organizer: Tim Glenn.
Thursday, March 22, 12 pm
Roundtable with graduate students: "Bloomsbury Rooms"
Professor Christopher Reed (Lake Forest College). Sponsored by the Anonymous Fund, the Middle Modernity Group and the Modernisms/Modernities Colloquium; co-sponsored by the Contemporary Literature Colloquium, Visual Culture, and the Department of Art History. Room 7101. Moderator: Kevin Piper.
Thursday, March 22, 4 pm
Public Lecture: “Japonisme and Occidentalism"
Professor Christopher Reed (Lake Forest College). Sponsored by the Anonymous Fund, the Middle Modernity Group and the Modernisms/Modernities Colloquium; co-sponsored by the Contemporary Literature Colloquium, Visual Culture, and the Department of Art History. Room 7191. Organizer: Kevin Piper.
Thursday, March 29, 12:00 pm
Roundtable with graduate students: “The Sense of an Interior." Professor Diana Fuss (Princeton University).
Co-sponsored by the Anonymous Fund, the Middle Modernity Group, the Americanist Literature and Culture Research Circle, the Department of Comparative Literature, and the Women’s Studies Program. Room 7191. Moderator: John Bradley.
Thursday, March 29, 4 pm
Public Lecture: "Last Words"
Description: Why is poetry so fascinated by the drama of the deathbed and the power of last words? Hundreds of British and American lyrics take as their central subject the dying words of the unhappily condemned, mortally ill, or piously prepared. This talk aims to map the richness of an unsung elegiac tradition of last word poems, in which poets imagine the dying hour to address a specifically literary problem: the challenge of dying a linguistically meaningful death.
Co-sponsored by the Anonymous Fund, the Middle Modernity Group, the Americanist Literature and Culture Research Circle, the Department of Comparative Literature, and the Women’s Studies Program. Room 6191. Organizer: Taryn Okuma.
Thursday, April 26, 4 pm
Workshop: "Visualizing Britain." Krista Kauffmann.
Room: 7101 HCW. Organizer: Tim Glenn.
Thursday, May 10, 4pm
Workshop: "Ian McEwan's Modesty: The Limits of Fiction in Atonement's Ends.” Thom Dancer.
Room: 7101 HCW. Organizer: Tim Glenn.