September 2006

As part of the Centenary Year of Samuel Beckett, the Departments of Comparative Literature and French will host a symposium on Saturday September 30th, “Samuel Beckett between Languages and Genres: Translation, Bilingualism, Transposition.” Centered around the theme of the multiple languages and literary forms in which Beckett worked throughout his career, the event will feature five speakers covering both an academic as well as an artistic approach to the wide range of Beckett’s work. There will be talks given by:

 10am - 12pm:

Jean-Michel Rabaté, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University, whose publications include The Ghosts of Modernity, Joyce and the Politics of Egoism, Jacques Lacan and Literature, The Future of Theory, as well as numerous publications on Beckett. His paper will be called “Beckett’s Purgatorial Translations.”

 Branka Arsic, Professor of English at SUNY Albany. Her publications include The Passive Eye: Gaze and Subjectivity in Berkeley (via Beckett). Her writing has dealt largely with Beckett and his film projects. She will be giving a talk entitled: “The Seen and the Said: Beckett’s Film.”

1:15 - 2:15pm:

Walter Asmus, a premier German theatre director, who worked closely with Beckett beginning with the famous production of Waiting for Godot in Berlin in 1974. He has produced Beckett’s plays for French television, staged performances throughout Germany and the U.S., and, recently, toured throughout China with Godot. He was close friends with Beckett until the writer’s death in 1989. He will be staging a series of productions for Seven Stages, Theatre du Reve and the Goethe-Institut in Atlanta through the summer and fall of 2006.

2:30 - 4:30 pm:

Ann Banfield, Professor of English and French at the University of California – Berkeley, whose publications include Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction, The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell, and the Epistemology of Modernism. Her current area of research is Beckett, Joyce, and “the mother tongue.”  Her talk, largely concerning How It Is/Comment c'est, is titled: "A Few Images On and Off in the Mud" .

Corinne Scheiner, Professor of Comparative Literature at Colorado College, who has published widely on Beckett, Nabokov, and questions of bilingualism and self-translation in their work. Her talk will be entitled: “ ‘Un peu de vraie conversation…un peu de colloque’: Samuel Beckett’s Bilingual Production and Poetics of Self-Translation.”

The symposium will take place Saturday, September 30th, in Anthropology Building 303, from 10:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., with a reception to follow. We look forward to seeing everyone there.

For more information, contact Jacob Hovind, jhovind@emory.edu.

November 2006

The Comparative Literature Graduate Student Colloquium will be held on November 1, 2006 at 4:15pm in N106 Callaway Center.

Naomi Beeman presenting Writing with One's Foot

Kris Mayrhofer presenting Belle of the Ball, Man of the Hour: The Transgender Adventures of Belle Edmondson

John Steen presenting Because it is a witness: Gertrude Stein in The Differend

Leah Wolfson presenting A Rope to the Other Side: The Poetics of Abba Kovner and a Language between Life and Death

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The Comparative Literature Speakers Committee sponsors:

Professor Patricia Dailey is Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her work on gender in medieval literature has produced a book manuscript entitled Promised Bodies: Time and Embodiment in Women's Mystical Texts and Anglo-Saxon Poetry and her recent translation of Agamben's The Time that Remains was published by Stanford University Press.

Lecture on Thursday, November 16th entitled Questions of Dwelling in Anglo-Saxon Poetry at 4pm in White Hall 103.

Seminar on Friday, November 17th entitled Unlived Experience: Lyotard, Agamben, and Medieval Mysticism at 11am in Callaway N106.

 

Spring 2007

The Comparative Literature Speakers Committee sponsors:

Professor Rei Terada is Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Irvine. She teaches and writes on theory, 19th and 20th century lyric, psychoanalysis and the history of philosophy. Her 2001 book, Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the Death of the Subject won the 2002 Rene Wellek Prize. Phenomenality and Dissatisfaction: Kant to Adorno , is forthcoming.

Lecture and Seminar are scheduled on April 13, 2007 - titles, date, and location TBA.

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Reading On: A Journal of Theory and Criticism