Department of Comparative LiteratureLecture Series |
||
|---|---|---|
 |
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, "The Occupation of the Senses: Aesthetic of State Terror" November 29, 2016.
| |
 |
Nasrin Rahimieh, "Iranian Culture: Representation and Identity" May 9, 2016.
| |
|
Ackbar Abbas, "Slowness and Volatility, or, "Waiting for the World to Writhe in Ecstasy at Your Feet," December 2, 2015. Part III Q&A This lecture traces a history of volatile space through a discussion of the poetics of the 'Long Take,' the problematic subjectivity of the 'Dividual,' the politics of the 'Occupy Movement' in Hong Kong, as well as Kafka's aphorism written in Zurau alluded to in the title. | |
 |
Catherine Malabou, "Epigenesis of the Text: New Paths in Biology and Hermeneutics," April 22, 2015 Part III Q&A In paragraph 27 of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant makes use of the expression "system of the epigenesis of pure reason." This biological analogy is meant to affirm that the categories of our understanding are not innate or preformed, but develop themselves just like an embryo, that is through self-differentiation and addition of new parts. To what extent is this idea of self-formation of the transcendental prefiguring the current definition of epigenetics, the science which studies the wide range of non-genetic modifications of the living being? It seems that the raging debate that opposed epigeneticism to preformationism in Kant's time finds its current version in the contrasted relationship of genetics and epigenetics. Far from concerning only the biological field, these confrontations also have a central hermeneutical meaning, as it appears in Paul Ricoeur's thinking: interpretation, he claims, has to do with the epigenesis, not the genesis, of a text. Are we facing the emergence of an epigenetic paradigm in culture? | |
|
Beryl Schlossman, "Reading Paris Spleen with Walter Benjamin," February 18, 2015 Part III Q&A Part IV Q&A
| |
|
BIOSECURITIES, February 5, 2015: Cary Wolfe, "(Auto)Immunity, Control, and Social Theory" Gregg Lambert, "On the Old Refrain: 'No More Nukes!'" A UCI inter-School collaborative event on Biosecurities organized and sponsored by the School of Social Sciences' Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies and the School of Humanities' Department of Comparative Literature. Part IV Q&A Part V Q&A |
|
|
Aijaz Ahmad, "On World Literatures: Chronicles of European Time," November 5, 2014
Vigorous debates over the category of 'World literature' have raged over roughly two decades now. Initial articulations of the category go back to Goethe, Marx and others in the 19th century. Professor Ahmad's lecture is an intervention in more recent debates that arose very much out of a sense of a crisis of the academic discipline of Comparative Literature as such ("Death of A Discipline" in Spivak's provocative phrase), some of it provoked by the much discussed work of authors such as Franco Moretti in English and Pascale Casanova in French. |
|
|
Gregg Lambert, "Two Images of Global Violence: Marxism and Psychoanalysis," April 3, 2014 |
|
|
Ngugi wa Thiong'o,"Metaphysical Empires: Language as a War Zone," March 5, 2014 Part 4 Q&A |
|
|
||
