Works in Progress Series, Spring 2008
Kelly S. Walsh will share a draft of his current dissertation chapter, “The Unbearable Openness of Death: The Elegies of Rilke and Woolf” on Wednesday, May 21 at 3:30 in Communications 202. Click here for a PDF of his chapter draft.
Kelly S. Walsh is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature. His dissertation, No Cure for That: Modernism and the Poetics of Insufficiency,situates literary modernism as an aesthetic, but still vital, reflection of a philosophical or theological problem: a profound disenchantment with the world as it is. Modernism, he contends, can thus be reconceived as a multitude of imaginative responses to a finitude that cannot be transcended. What emerges in its confrontations with limits, transience, and interminability is a poetics of insufficiency, which takes on a void of meaning by using insufficiency and lack as the material with which to, in Beckett’s words, “go on.”
Schedule of Events for Sean Latham’s visit to the UW
Reading Group Meeting One – History, Criticism, Context
(Friday, March 14, 3:30pm, Denny 213)
Sean Latham, "Hating Joyce Properly," Journal of Modern Literature 26.1 (Fall 2002): 119-131. [Project Muse]
Sean Latham, “Deadly Pretensions: Dorothy L. Sayers and the Ends of Culture,” in “Am I a Snob?”: Modernism and the Novel (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2003), 169-213. [sayers1.pdf; sayers2.pdf]
Lawrence Rainey, “Consuming Investments: Joyce’s Ulysses,” in Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (New Haven: Yale UP, 1998), 42-76. [rainey1.pdf; rainey2.pdf; raineynotes.pdf]
Reading Group Meeting Two – Scandal, Law, and Literature
(Friday, April 11, 3:30pm, Denny 213)
Sean Latham, “The ‘nameless shamelessness’ of Ulysses: Libel and the Law of Literature,” in Scandalous Fictions: The Twentieth-Century Novel in the Public Sphere, ed. Jago Morrison and Susan Watkins (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 27-47. [scandalous.pdf]
Aaron Jaffe, “Imprimaturs,” in Modernism and the Culture of Celebrity (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005), 18-57. [jaffe1.pdf; jaffe2.pdf; jaffenotes.pdf]
Paul K. Saint-Amour, “James Joyce, Copywright: Modernist Literary Property Metadiscourse,” in The Copywrights: Intellectual Property and the Literary Imagination (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2003), 159-198. [saint-amour1.pdf; saint-amour2.pdf; saint-amournotes.pdf]
Optional Readings – Digital Archives
Sean Latham and Robert Scholes, “The Changing Profession: The Rise of Periodical Studies,” PMLA 121.2 (March 2006): 517-531. [riseofps.pdf]
Sean Latham, “New Age Scholarship: The Work of Criticism in the Age of Digital Reproduction,” New Literary History 35.3 (Summer 2004): 411-42. [Project Muse]
Session with Sean Latham on the Modernist Journals Project
Thursday, April 17, 10:00am, Communications 202.
Reception prior to event.
Professor Sean Latham is Director of the Modernist Journals Project (MJP), an initiative to preserve English language periodicals as a resource for the study of the rise of modernism. At this session Professor Latham will give a history of the MJP and demonstrate its online digital archive of periodicals dating from 1904 to 1922 (www.modjourn.org), which will serve as the starting point for a roundtable discussion centered on the value and logistics of building and studying archives such as the MJP.
Public Lecture with Sean Latham, “Selling Out: Modernism and the Business of Revenge”
(Thursday, April 17, 3:30pm, Communications 226.
Reception to follow.
In this lecture, Sean Latham advances a relatively simple claim with far-reaching consequences for modernist studies: writers throughout the early twentieth century revived the long despised roman a clef to launch a thorough-going assault on the institutions of Victorian realism and the pretensions of modernist impersonality. In the process, this resurgent genre took on a life of its own, reconfiguring the intricate relationship between literature, celebrity, and the law. This talk untangles this dense web by mixing archival research with close readings of works by Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, and Jean Rhys. In the elite coteries and rough bohemias of the early twentieth century, it concludes, the roman a clef allowed writers to develop new ways of engaging the public sphere amidst the complexities of a mass-mediated cultural marketplace.
Graduate Student Discussion Session with Sean Latham
(Friday, April 18, 9:30am, Communications 202)
Works in Progress Series, Winter 2008
The Work in Progress Series provides a forum for graduate students to discuss the process of research, writing, and publication, and to learn more about the ongoing work of UW faculty and graduate students who study modernism and modernity.
Eric Ames
Assistant Professor, UW Department of Germanics
"The Case of Herzog: Re-Opened"
Thursday February 14, 3:30-5:30, Communications 202
Eric Ames is Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanics, where he teaches courses in film, literature, and cultural studies. His essay, “The Sound of Evolution,” appeared in the April 2003 edition of Modernism/Modernity. He has published on various forms of nineteenth-century display culture, including zoological gardens, ethnographic exhibitions, and Wild West shows in Germany. He is co-editor of Germany’s Colonial Pasts (Nebraska, 2005), and his research monograph, Carl Hagenbeck’s Empire of Entertainments, is forthcoming from the University of Washington Press.
Eric Ames will share an article-in-progress called “The Case of Herzog: Re-Opened.” This article is also the basis for his new book project on Werner Herzog and documentary film, so he is especially interested in discussing how it might be further developed and expanded.
James Tweedie
Assistant Professor, UW Department of Comparative Literature
“The Age of New Waves: The Globalization of Art Cinema from the 1950s”
Tuesday, February 26, 3:30-5:30, Thomson 235
James Tweedie will share the introduction to his book manuscript, currently titled “The Age of New Waves: The Globalization of Art Cinema from the 1950s.”
James Tweedie is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature and a member of the Cinema Studies faculty at the University of Washington. He was previously a post-doctoral fellow at the Yale Center for International and Area Studies, where he coordinated the Crossing Borders Initiative, an interdisciplinary program designed to facilitate the study of globalization in the humanities and social sciences. He has published essays in Cinema Journal, Screen, SubStance, and Twentieth Century Literature, and is currently completing a book on European cinema in the 1980s. He is also working on a comparative study of cinematic new waves from the late 1950s to the 1990s.
Matt Levay
PhD Candidate, UW Department of English
"Late Modernism's Killers"
Tuesday, March 4, 3:30- 5:30, Communications 202
Matt Levay will share a portion of his newest dissertation chapter, called "Late Modernism’s Killers."
Matt Levay is a Ph.D. Candidate in the English Department. His dissertation, Modernism's Crimes: Violence, Degeneracy, and Detection, presents an extensive genealogy of the representation of crime and criminality in Anglo-American modernism, exploring the ways in which twentieth-century British and American authors utilized a pervasive anxiety about criminal behavior in an effort to theorize the functions of violence, rationality, subjectivity, and psychological motivation in literature.
Defining Literature
and its Values, Modernism and Today
A Colloquium with Derek Attridge
Organized for faculty and graduate students by the Modernist Studies Group
Thursday, October 18 – 10:00am to 12 noon, Communications 202
In their critical writing, several modernist authors rethought accepted cultural values in order to establish a place in the tradition for innovative works of the period. Whether they viewed these original and experimental works as signaling a break from the norm or the inevitable unfolding of literary history, they did conclude that theirs was a time of widespread formal experiment appreciated for its difference. Some avant-gardists criticized literature as a dead institution suffering from an inward turn that seemed to insulate works from the contemporary moment. Yet others found certain modernist literary works to be profound responses to changing social conditions provoked by rapid modernization.
In his recent book The Singularity of Literature, Derek Attridge outlines a program that accounts for the literary work as a distinct cultural event. This colloquium will consider how the spirit and theory of his project intersects with modernist efforts to rethink and affirm the value of literature in its own time and beyond. Participants will discuss how his study revisits and revises concepts such as innovation and form, often privileged in modernist studies, and more generally examine with Professor Attridge the relation of literature to culture.
Derek Attridge is Leverhulme Research Professor and Chair of English at the University of York and the University of Washington Visiting Katz Lecturer in the Humanities for Fall 2007. He is the author of nine books, including How to Read Joyce (2007), Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction (1995), and The Singularity of Literature (2004), winner of the 2006 European Society for the Study of English Book Award.
Reading group: Professor Attridge's scholarship on definitions of literature
Friday, October 12— 10:00-11:30am, Electrical Engineering 025
"Originality and Invention" from The Singularity of Literature [PDF files: originalityinvention.pdf (4.3 MB), originalityinvention_notes.pdf (618 KB)]
Introduction to Peculiar Language (p. 1-10 suggested, 10-16 optional) [PDF files: peculiarlanguage_1-10.pdf (2 MB), peculiarlanguage_10-16.pdf (1.4 MB)]
"The Postmodernity of Joyce: Chance, Coincidence, and the Reader" from Joyce Effects [PDF file: postmodernityjoyce.pdf (1.9 MB)]
"Modernist Form and the Ethics of Otherness" from J. M. Coetzee and the Ethics of Reading (p.1-21 suggested, 21-31 optional) [PDF files: modernistform_1-21.pdf (4.4 MB), modernistform_21-31.pdf (2.1 MB)]
When you click on the links to the PDF files, you will be prompted for your UW NetID and password if you have not already entered them during your browser session. Those who access the files must agree to policies regarding fair use of reproductions outlined in United States copyright law.
2006-2007 MSG Visiting
Scholar
Professor Stephen Kern
(Humanities Distinguished Professor of History,
Ohio State University)
Click here for a complete event schedule and description of reading groups as a PDF
Public lecture:
"Modernism, Modernity, and Narrative"
Thursday, April 5– 5:00pm, Communications 226
Reception to follow
MSG discussion
with Professor Kern: "Writing Modernism's Cultural History"
Friday, April 6– 2:00-4:00pm, Communications 202
First reading group
Friday, March 9– 3:30-5:30pm, Communications 226
Click
here for the reading list and PDF files of readings
Second reading
group
Friday, March 30– 1:00-3:00pm, Communications 202
Blind Spots: Narrating
Modernism from the 21st Century
Monday, May 22, 2006 – 5:30pm, Communications 202
The Modernist Studies Group will hold a roundtable on May 22 to discuss new perspectives on the history of modernism. The discussion will focus on two main questions: What are the current ways in which we narrate modernism? What occlusions occur in these accounts and why? In order to facilitate our discussion we ask each participant to be prepared to discuss the way his or her research makes visible a blind spot in current narratives of modernism.
Each presenter will give a short, informal talk on his or her chosen subject, which might be a work of art (film, novel, painting, poem, etc.), a person, a location, a situation, a date, or even a concept (e.g. money, death, gender). We ask that each discussant bring one object or artifact to focus the talk, whether text, image, sound clip, film clip, or archival material. Our culminating discussion will focus on the extent to which we as scholars remain blinded in our understanding of the intricacies of modernism--in all its various forms, figures and strategic endeavors--by our historical position, inherited models and methodological commitments. Our ultimate goal is to gain a better perspective of where things are going in modernist scholarship, or better yet, point to where things could be going, especially in light of interdisciplinary connections.
Food and drink will be served at the reception, offering an opportunity for faculty and students to meet and talk in an informal setting.
Faculty, graduate students and upper level undergraduates from all departments are invited to attend, as either presenting or non-presenting participants. If you plan on presenting, RSVP to Matthew James Vechinski no later than May 18th, including your name, department, academic status, and the blind spot you intend to discuss. Please let us know at that time if you will need audio or visual equipment.
For additional information please contact Sacha Frey or Grant Mandarino.
Back to the Future?
Narrating Dada Today
Professor Hal Foster
(Townsend Martin Class of 1917 Professor of Art and Archaeology, Princeton
University)
NOTE: Professor Foster's visit and lecture have been cancelled. We will also not hold the last scheduled reading group of our series on German Dada.
Click here for a PDF file describing the reading groups
Reading Group 1:
Narratives of Dada, Past and Present
Friday, April 7, 2006 – Noon-2:00 pm, Communications 202
Click
here for the reading list and PDF files of readings
Reading Group 2:
Mapping German Dada: Berlin and Hannover
Thursday, April 20, 2006 – 3:00-5:00 pm,
Communications 202
Click
here for the reading list and PDF files of readings
Reading Group
3: Reading Foster Reading Dada: Psychoanalytic Narratives & Mimetic
Adaptation
Friday, May 5, 2006 – Noon-2:00 pm, Communications 202
Hal Foster's
Public Lecture: "Tales of Twentieth-Century Art"
Thursday, May 11, 2006 – 5:00pm, Smith 120
MSG Discussion
with Hal Foster
Friday, May 12, 2006 – 2:00pm, Communications 202
Modernist Studies Group Work in Progress Series
"The Hollywood Imagination: Realizing
Movie-Land"
Professor Jennifer Bean (Comparative Literature
and Cinema Studies, UW)
Friday 2/24/06 – 1:00-3:00 PM, Savery 211
Our first faculty presenter for the series will be Jennifer Bean (Asst. Professor, Comparative Literature and Cinema Studies). Professor Bean is co-editor of A Feminist Reader in Early Cinema (2002), of a special issue of Camera Obscura on "Early Women Stars," and the author of Bodies at Play: American Narrative Cinema and the Genres of Modernity (forthcoming, Duke UP). She is currently at work on a study of silent-era slapstick and the historical and theoretical implications of laughter. Her essay, "The Technologies of Early Stardom and the Extraordinary Body" (Camera Obscura 48 16:3 (2002)), received the Katherine Singer Kovacs award for "Best Essay in English Speaking Film and Media Studies" in 2003.
Professor Bean will discuss a chapter-in-progress that is an outgrowth of her essay "Technologies of Early Stardom and the Extraordinary Body," which she will be discussing in public for the first time since its publication. This event will be a unique opportunity for our group to discuss the process of research, writing, and publication with an established modernist scholar. Professor Bean will also be able to provide insight into the process of revisiting and expanding work done in a finished (and in her case, published) essay.
Our readings for this event will be "Technologies of Early Stardom and the Extraordinary Body" as well as her chapter-in-progress, "The Hollywood Imagination: Realizing Movie-Land." Click here for PDF files of the readings.
Money, Value, Modernism
Professor Michael Tratner (English, Bryn Mawr)
First Reading Group
Friday, November 11, 2005– 2:00pm, Communications 202
Click
for reading list and PDF files of readings
Second Reading
Group
Friday, December 2, 2005– 2:00pm, Smith 115
Click for reading
list and PDF files of readings
Michael Tratner’s
lecture: “Placing Modernism in a Long History: Love and Money
in Literature from the 1500s to the Present”
Thursday, December 8, 2005 – 4:00 PM, Communications 226
MSG Discussion with Michael Tratner
Friday, December 9, 2005 – 2:00 PM, Simpson Center Conference
Room (Communications 202)
Modernism and Phenomenology Reading Groups
Friday, May 6 and Friday, May 27, 2005-- 1-3pm
Smith 405
Reading list compiled by Ted Wayland. Readings available at Ave Copy Center (ask for the Modernist Studies Group packet).
The Pulse of Modernism: Experimental Physiology and Artistic Avant-Garde in the early 20th Century
Robert M. Brain, University of British Columbia
April 25, 2005 -- 4pm
Simpson Center for the Humanities, Communications 202
Stanley Cavell
Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value (Emeritus) at Harvard University
First
preparatory meeting
Tuesday, October 19, 2004
Second
preparatory meeting
Friday, November 12, 2004-- 1:30pm
Graduate
student discussion with Stanley Cavell
Monday, November 15, 2004-- 1:30pm
Simpson Center conference room, Communications 202
Danz
Lecture: "Opera and OR as Film"
Tuesday, November 16, 2004-- 7pm
Kane 130
As many of you already know, Stanley Cavell will be delivering his Danz Lecture on Tuesday, November 16. In conjunction with Professor Cavell's visit, the Modernist Studies Group (MSG) is hosting an informal discussion with Professor Cavell for all interested graduate students. This discussion will center around Cavell's early and more recent writings on Wittgenstein, especially the Philosophical Investigations, as well as some of his work that pairs Wittgenstein with other thinkers, such as Emerson and Walter Benjamin.
Adorno Summer Reading Meetings
Organized by Alyssa Karl
Modernist Studies Group Reading Meeting
Friday, June 4th, 2004-- 1-3pm
Simpson Center for the Humanities
Modernist Studies Group discussion with Marjorie Perloff
Tuesday, May 18, 2004-- 3:30pm
Communications 226
The Aura of Modernism
Marjorie Perloff, Professor Emeritus, Stanford University
Wednesday, May 19, 2004 -- 7 pm
Kane 110
Perloff is one of America’s most prominent critics of contemporary poetry, renowned for her study of the avant-garde. She is the author of many books and essays on poetry, among them, 21st Century Modernism: The “New” Poetics (2002). Check out the Modernist Studies Group schedule for this event.
Zola, Freud, and Obsessions About Obsession
Professor Lennard Davis
Thursday, April 22, 2004-- 3:30pm
The Smith Room: Suzzallo, 3rd Floor, Room 324
Davis is Professor of English, Professor of Disability and Human Development, and Professor of Medical Education at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he is also Director of the Center on Biocultures. His books include Bending Over Backwards: Disability, Dismodernism, And Other Difficult Positions (2002), foreword By Michael Bérubé; Resisting Novels: Ideology And Fiction; Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, And The Body; and My Sense Of Silence: Memoirs Of A Childhood With Deafness. He is editor of The Disability Studies Reader (1997) and Left Politics And The Literary Profession (1990)
The Image of Culture Or, What Muensterberg Saw in the Movies
Eric Ames, Department of Germanics, University of Washington
Friday, April 30, 2004 -- 1:30pm
William H. Rey Library, Denny 308
This paper will examine Hugo Münsterberg's 1916 "The Photoplay: A Psychological Study." Film scholars treat this book as the first serious argument for seeing the cinema in terms of the mind. At the time, however, there was more at stake in the American cinema than psychology. Münsterberg was not simply a Harvard psychologist; he was an outspoken German nationalist and cultural chauvinist in neutral America. By situating his comments on film and mass culture in a wider historical context, this paper demonstrates how Münsterberg's project was political--not psychological--in nature.
The Blue Angel / Der Blaue Engel
April 21, 2004 -- 7pm
Savery 239
A Joseph von Sternberg film (1933) starring Marlene Dietrich. Part of the Department of Germanics Spring Film Series.
