Upcoming Events:
Spring 2010
Gregg Flaxman
“Out of Field: The Future of Film Studies”
Thursday, January 21, 2010
4:30pm
Upper East Side, East Union Building
While every discipline in the humanities worries about its future, film studies entertains a particular anxiety: today, the field confronts the possibility that it lacks a consistent object and a compelling reason. Behind the question of film studies looms the question of cinema itself, an aging techne, in the midst of new(er) media that lay claim to the image as their province and power. Why cinema? Most recently, James Cameron’s Avatar seems to have provided a rejoinder to this skepticism, but this talk contends that the reason to return to the cinema, far from consisting in the promise of an immersive spectacle, can be grasped in light (or lieu) of what the film effaces—the off-screen or what Gilles Deleuze calls the "outside of the image.”
Gregory Flaxman is an Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina. The editor of The Brain is the Screen (Minnesota, 2000), he is the author of a two volume study of Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of fabulation, Powers of the False, and co-editor of a two volume anthology, The Film Philosopher Reader (all forthcoming from Minnesota). He is currently writing a monograph on Chinatown.
For more information, please contact Maria Maschauer at 684-5255.
Fall 2009:
1. Pizza Party!
Looking for a major?
If so, bring your questions about
The Literature Program, Cultural Anthropology, and Latino/a Studies
October 21
5:00-6:30pm
Friedl Building, Room 225
For more information, please contact Karen Bell at 684-1969
2. Eleanor Kaufman
“The Leaping of Objects in French Phenomenology”
Thursday, October 22, 2009
4:30pm
Friedl Building, room 107, East Campus
Click on the website below for a map to the
Friedl Building
http://map.duke.edu/search?q=friedl+building
Alumna Eleanor Kaufman received her PhD from the Literature Program at Duke University!
This talk is part of a larger project entitled “The Incorporeal” that examines the significance of minerals, plants, and objects in French phenomenological writings that extend from Sartre, Beauvoir, and Merleau-Ponty to Lacan and Deleuze. It argues that the phenomenologists, often in spite of their stated goals, developed some of the most sophisticated systems for imagining what a non-human ontology would look like.
Eleanor Kaufman is professor of Comparative Literature and French and Francophone Studies at UCLA. She is the co-editor of Deleuze and Guattari: New Mappings in Politics, Philosophy and Culture (Minnesota, 1998) and the author of The Delirium of Praise: Bataille, Blanchot, Deleuze, Foucault, Klossowski (Johns Hopkins, 2001) and At Odds with Badiou: Politics, Dialectics, and Religion from Sartre and Deleuze to Lacan and Agamben (forthcoming, Columbia University Press). She is currently pursuing studies of Medieval philosophy and Latin under the auspices of a Mellon New Directions fellowship.
For more information, please contact Maria Maschauer at 684-5255
Past Events For Spring 2009:
Undergraduate Commencement Ceremony
and Reception
May 10, 2009 at 12:00 noon
In the Richard White Auditorium, Richard White Building,
on East Campus
Parking is in front of the East Duke Building
(next to the Richard White Building)
(The Commencement Ceremony and Reception is for Literature only)
Lucian Chaffey
April 13, 2009
4:00pm
Upper East Side, East Union Building
East Campus
"Teleodyssey: Screen Seriality and
Televisual Consciousness”
This paper will address the notion of a televisual consciousness, and will establish and respond to a relationship between screen seriality and contemporary subjectivity production. With reference to the TV series Farscape, and other more recent texts emerging out of Western machinic culture and economies of expenditure, Chaffey will offer a set of concepts that she has invented for the analysis of fantasy / science fictional series television.
Lucian Chaffey completed her doctoral thesis in 2007 at the University of Melbourne and have taught there since 2002 in the areas of Hollywood and European film history & theory, and television studies. Her principal research areas are screen seriality, and young adult screen & commodity cultures. Lucian Chaffey is also a practicing photographer with an interest in the politics and practices of portraiture, social documentary photography, and pornography.
For more information, please contact Maria Maschauer at 684-5255
Roberto Esposito
April 15, 2009
12:00 noon
Nelson Music Room, East Duke Building
East Campus
"Community and Violence"
An exchange with by Roberto Esposito
Discussant: Timothy Campbell
Before the event please read Roberto Esposito’s essay, “Community and Violence,”
The essay will serve as the basis of the discussion.
Roberto Esposito Essay
(Essay starts at the bottom of the first page.)
In the essay Roberto Esposito summarizes his principal arguments concerning the constitutive relation between community and violence as he has developed across his trilogy, Communitas, Immunitas, and Bios. In particular Esposito elaborates his reading of the immunitary paradigm in terms of globalization and argues essentially that globalization represents a return of sorts to an originary community and, with it, outbreaks of violence.
Roberto Esposito teaches contemporary philosophy at the Italian Institute for the Human Sciences in Naples, Italy. His book Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy has been translated into English (Minnesota 2008), as well as Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, which is forthcoming from Stanford.
Timothy Campbell is an Associate Professor in the Department of Romance Studies at Cornell University. He translated Roberto Esposito’s books, Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy and Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community
This lecture is co-sponsored by Marxism and Society, Romance Studies, and Women’s Studies
For more information, please contact Maria Maschauer at 684-5255
Other events at UNC-Chapel Hill with Roberto Esposito:
Monday, April 13
Keynote Lecture
5:00pm
Roberto Esposito: “Biopolitics and Philosophy”
Hyde Hall, University Room, Institute for the Arts and Humanities,
UNC-Chapel Hill
Tuesday, April 14
Roundtable Discussion: “Biopolitics and Biopower”
4:00pm
Roberto Esposito, Timothy Campbell (Cornell University)
Michael Hardt (Duke University), Sofia Nasstrom (University of Stockholm)
University Room, Hyde Hall, Institute for the Arts and Humanities,
UNC-Chapel Hill
Wednesday, April 15
5:00pm
Sofia Nasstrom, “Defending the People: Reason and Self-Preservation in Communicative Action”
Room 1005, FedEx Global Education Center,
UNC-Chapel Hill
For more information about these events, please write to clct@unc.edu or visit www.unc.edu/clct
For more information about the April 15, 12:00 noon event, please contact Maria Maschauer at 684-5255.
Cesare Casarino
"Marx Before Spinoza"
April 2, 2009
4:00pm
Nelson Music Room, East Duke Building
East Campus
What does it mean to read Spinoza with Marx? After half a century of Spinozist Marxism--whose philosophical foundations are at stake in this question--we have yet to come to terms adequately with the ways in which these two thinkers share not only in common intellectual genealogies but also in common political projects. This lecture addresses this question, and, in particular, it brings Spinoza and Marx together by considering them as early theorists of the phenomena we now refer to as globalization.
Cesare Casarino is Associate Professor of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota.
He is the author of Modernity at Sea: Melville, Marx, Conrad in Crisis as well as of numerous articles on literature, cinema, and philosophy. He is also co-editor (with Saree Makdisi and Rebecca Karl) of Marxism Beyond Marxism, and co-author (with Antonio Negri) of In Praise of the Common: A Conversation on Philosophy and Politics. At present, he is working on a book manuscript on Gilles Deleuze's two-volume study of the cinema.
Cesare Casarino received his PhD from the Literature Program at
Duke University!
For more information, please contact Maria Maschauer at 684-5255
An opening reception for the exhibit, "PreMeditated: Meditations on Capital Punishment" by Malaquias Montoya
Deans Davis and McLendon will be dedicating
the space in honor of Professor Fred Jameson,
and we will have great food/drinks, and a gallery talk led by the artist.
March 4th at 5:00pm in the Fredric Jameson Gallery,
Friedl Building, Room 115, Duke East Campus
The Program in Latino/a Studies in the Global South invites you to an opening reception for the exhibit, PREMEDITATED: MEDITATIONS ON CAPITAL PUNISHMENT by MALAQUIAS MONTOYA.
(Please see full list of co-sponsors below.)
The opening reception will begin at 5:00pm, with a gallery talk by the artist, Malaquias Montoya, at 6:00pm.
This event is free and open to the public.
Parking will be available on the East Campus Quad.
See map at http://latino.aas.duke.edu/about/contact.php.
This exhibit is presented by the Program in Latino/a Studies in the Global South at Duke University and is co-sponsored by: the UNC Chapel Hill Program in Latina/o Studies and the following Duke University units: Duke Human Rights Center; the Spanish Service Learning Program; the Program in Literature; the Departments of Cultural Anthropology, African & African American Studies, and History; the Archive for Human Rights and Duke University Libraries; the Franklin Humanities Institute; the Institute for Critical US Studies; and the Kenan Institute for Ethics.
Contact jennysw@duke.edu for more information.
The Literature Program invites you to a
Book Reception!
Friday, Feb. 27, 2009
2:00 - 3:30pm
In Friedl Building, room 115
Professor Fredric Jameson will speak about the new edition of his book,
“Ideologies of Theory”
Professor Negar Mottahedeh will speak about her books,
“Displaced Allegories: Post-Revolutionary Iranian Cinema”
and
“Representing the Unpresentable: Historical Images of National Reform from the Qajars to the Islamic Republic of Iran”
Books by Professors Jameson and Mottahedeh will be available for purchase!
Light refreshments will be available
For more information, please call Maria Maschauer at
(919) 684-5255
Stephanie Strickland
February 19, 2009
4:30 pm
In the Upper East Side, East Union Building,
on Duke's East Campus
This lecture is free and open to the public.
"Poety and Code: An Interactive Digital Reading"
Stephanie Strickland will read from four digital poems she wrote and made collaboratively, each of which uses the screen in a different way to offer non-print reading experiences. Hypertext, Flash, Director, and motion tracking coding are used in the design of these poems, and Strickland will discuss the implications of her various interfaces.
Stephanie Strickland will read from four digital poems she wrote and made collaboratively, each of which uses the screen in a different way to offer non-print reading experiences. Hypertext, Flash, Director, and motion tracking coding are used in the design of these poems, and Strickland will discuss the implications of her various interfaces.
Stephanie Strickland’s fifth book of poems, Zone : Zero (book + CD), was just published by Ahsahta Press. Her prize-winning poetry volumes include V: WaveSon.nets / Losing L’una (Penguin), True North (University of Notre Dame Press), and The Red Virgin: A Poem of Simone Weil (University of Wisconsin Press). Her latest collaborative hypermedia work, slippingglimpse, was introduced in Paris and shown at the Zaoem poetry festival in Ghent. She teaches experimental poetry and e-lit at many colleges and universities, most recently the University of Utah.
Jonathan Beller
January 22, 2009
"The Martial Art of Cinema: Modes of Virtuosity a la Hong Kong and the Philippines"
4:30pm
Upper East Side, East Union Building
East Campus
Jonathan Beller received his PhD from the Literature Program at Duke University!
Professor Beller's talk considers emergent relationships among
visuality, corporeality, choreography, digitization and capitalism
in these regions. Cinema is understood here as at once a form of
social programming and a weapon, as well as a symptom of the
transformed metaphysics and politics wrought by the relentless
capitalization of sensuality. These vectors are discernible as new forms
of spatialization, temporality, action, movement, inscription and affect,
and other experiential moments as yet unnamed.
Jonathan Beller is Professor Humanities and Media Studies and of
Critical and Visual Studies at Pratt Institute. Beller has taught at
UC Santa Cruz, San Francisco State University, the University of
the Philippines and Barnard College, and has been the recipient of
Fulbright, Getty and Mellon grants. His research intersects with
visual culture, media theory, geopolitics, anti-imperialist cultures
and struggles, third cinema and transformations of the form of
value under contemporary media-capitalism. Recent articles include
“The Art of War, Or, Coco Fusco’s Occupation,” NKA Journal of
Contemporary African Art (forthcoming), and “Iterations of the
Impossible: Questions of Digital Revolution in the Philippines,
Postcolonial Studies", (Vol. 11, No. 4, pp. 435-450, 2008).
He is the author of The Cinematic Mode of Production: Attention
Economy and the Society of the Spectacle (Lebanon,NH: Dartmouth
and
UPNE, 2006) and Acquiring Eyes: Philippine Visuality, Nationalist
Struggle and the World-Media System (Manila: Ateneo de Manila
University Press, 2006).
Past Events For Fall 2008:
Fredric Jameson
November 10, 2008
4:30pm
Room 240, John Hope Franklin Center, Duke University
Winner of the Holberg International Memorial Prize!
Introduction by Richard Brodhead, President, Duke University
Commentators:
miriam cooke, Professor of Modern Arabic Literature and Culture, Duke University
Ariel Dorfman, Walter Hines Page Professor of Literature and Latin American Studies, Duke University
Ranjana Khanna, Margaret Taylor Smith Director of Women's Studies, Duke University
Wole Soyinka, Nobel Laureate in Literature
To be followed by a reception celebrating the award of the Holberg International Memorial Prize to Professor Jameson!
Presented by the Franklin Humanities Institute, the Program in Literature, the Department of Romance Studies, and the College of Arts and Sciences
The Holberg International Memorial Prize is awarded annually for outstanding scholarly work in the fields os the arts and humanities, social sciences, law and theology. Previous winners include Ronald Dworkin, Shmuel Eisenstadt, Jurgen Habermas, Julia Kristeva.
Rey Chow
Professor of Comparative Literature, English, and
Modern Culture and Media at Brown University
She will be giving a talk entitled
"Translator, Traitor; Translator, Mourner
(or, Dreaming of Intercultural Equivalence)"
Oct. 27, 2008 at 12:00 noon
Nelson Music Room, East Duke Building
A lunch reception will follow in the Women's Studies Parlors,
East Duke Building
With reference to literary and theoretical texts, this
lecture will explore the problematics of translation
and mourning in terms of their mutual implications,
in particular their ramifications for global cultural
politics. The lecture is part of an ongoing new project
on language as a postcolonial experience.
Rey Chow is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of the Humanities
at Brown University where she holds appointments in
Comparative Literature, English, and Modern Culture and
Media. In Fall 2008 she is Class of 1932 Fellow in English
and Visiting Professor, the Council for the Humanities,
Princeton University. Her more recent book publications include
The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (2002),
The Age of the World Target (2006), and Sentimental
Fabulations, Contemporary Chinese Films (2007).
For more information, please contact Maria Maschauer at 684-5255
Pizza Party!
Looking for a major?
Bring your questions about:
African & African American Studies
Cultural Anthropology
Latino/a Studies
and the Literature Program
October 23, 2008 from 5:00-6:30pm
In room 225, Friedl Building (formally Science Building)
Faculty, graduate students, and staff of these departments and programs are welcome and encouraged to attend!
The Literature Program and Romance Studies are proud to present
Kristin Ross
Professor of Comparative Literature at NYU
She will be giving a job talk entitled
"Democracy for Sale"
Sept. 26, 2008 at 4:00pm
Nelson Music Room in the East Duke Building
Reception will follow in the Women's Studies Parlors
in the East Duke Building
This talk argues the relevance of Rimbaud to
contemporary theoretical and political debates
in France regarding democracy and the new Europe.
Kristin Ross is professor of Comparative Literature
at New York University. She is the author of
The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris
Commune (Minnesota, 1988; Verso, 2008); Fast Cars,
Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of
French Culture (MIT, 1995); and May '68 and its
Afterlives (Chicago, 2002).
For more information, please contact
Maria Maschauer (Literature Program) at 684-5255
or Cathy Knoop (Romance Studies) at 660-3102
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