OCCT HT 2021 Week 2 Updates
In Week 2 we enjoyed the Discussion Group’s first session of term where Eleonora Colli discussed her review of Douglas Robinson’s Transgender, Translation, Translingual Address (2019).
Next week, Raphael Lyne and Marzia Baltrami will speak on the theme of Unnatural Pluralities for the Fiction and Other Minds seminar. All events will require registration: please consult the website directly for further information.
EVENTS
1.You are warmly invited to Comparative Literature Research Seminars hosted by King’s College London during this spring term. All sessions take place on Wednesday afternoons at 4.30pm on MS Teams unless otherwise specified. All are welcome to join!
The programme
27 January 2021 – Dr Rosa Mucignat and Dr Sanja Perovic, ‘Translating Revolution: Texts, People, Commitments and Methods’
To join, please copy and paste the following onto a web browser (no log in or institutional affiliation required): https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_YjhlZWIzNzEtOGYyNy00NDE3LTlkYjUtZmY0NDk2NmZhYjU3%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%228370cf14-16f3-4c16-b83c-724071654356%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22da737018-5262-4df4-9926-f0b566f95af0%22%7d
10 February 2021 – Dr Madhu Krishnan, ‘Literary Activism, Ecologies of Production and Networks of Practice in Contemporary Africa’
A joint event with SOAS that takes place at 5pm and can be joined via Zoom.
Meeting ID: 938 7314 8746 and Passcode: CCLPSTerm2
Join Zoom Meeting: https://soas-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/93873148746?pwd=WkF6SVp4c0RrT0NSKzgxWlcyQ3JYZz09
3 March 2021 – Dr Sebastian Truskolaski, Book launch: Adorno and the Ban on Images
17 March 2021 – Haya Alfarhan, ‘Poetics of Cyclical Violence in Lebanese Autographics’ and
Shadya Radhi, ‘The Stagnant Present: Critiquing the Arabian Gulf through Magical Realism and Irrealism’
31 March 2021 – Professor Julia Waters, Title TBC
All March sessions can be joined via this link: https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3ameeting_ODE1M2I1MGYtNDE3My00MmMyLWJkYjktMDk4Mzc4MjE0NTQw%40thread.v2/0?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%228370cf14-16f3-4c16-b83c-724071654356%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22da737018-5262-4df4-9926-f0b566f95af0%22%7d
The seminars encourage friendly academic dialogue between participants. Each event lasts for approximately 90 minutes and consist of a paper or panel followed by a long Q&A at the end.
For further information or questions, please email to: anna.katila@kcl.ac.uk or maria.marino@kcl.ac.uk.
2. ‘What is (asbestos) québécois literature? Confinement and Resource in André Langevin’s Poussière sur la ville (1953) and Cassie Bérard’s Qu’il est bon de se noyer (2016)’
https://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/events/event/23900
18 February 2021
3.00pm - 4.30pm GMT
Online
Part of Confinement in French and Francophone Literature and Film
Speaker: Arthur Rose (Bristol)
Taking Rosemary Chapman’s provocation, “what is québécois literature?”, as my starting point, I want to look at some literary responses to Quebec’s long political economic relationship with asbestos: André Langevin’s Poussière sur la ville (1953) and Cassie Bérard’s Qu’il est bon de se noyer (2016). Bérard’s tale about a series of mysterious drownings and Langevin’s existential novel about a failing doctor are both set in asbestos mining towns in South Eastern Québec. Written in the aftermath of 1949 Asbestos miner’s strike, an event that Pierre Trudeau would call “a violent announcement that a new era had begun,” Poussière sur la ville offers a rebuttal to optimistic accounts of the strike as a modernizing revolution. Set in 2012, as what was then Asbestos, Quebec (recently renamed Val-des-Sources) awaited a $58 million loan to restart asbestos mining, Qu’il est bon de se noyer shows how nostalgia for industrial security comes hand in hand with trepidations about the diseases it causes. In each, the town, understood as a container, presents a case study for how economic entrapment acts, unsurprisingly, as the cause of apparent disregard for bodily consequences. And, although they straddle the period where knowledge about asbestos refigured the once magic mineral into a widely recognized source of disease, both can be read as accounts that fold together asbestos, illness and political economy. Read together, the two novels encapsulate the rise and decline of the asbestos industry, its affective push and pull, which, like many situations of single resource extractivism, can often feel as confining as it is liberating.
Arthur Rose is a Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Bristol and a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Exeter. He is currently completing Asbestos: The Last Modernist Object for Edinburgh University Press.
All are welcome to attend this free event, at 15:00 GMT.
3. Lydia Davis: Writing, Reading and Translation | Lydia Davis: Écrire, Lire et Traduire
11–12 February 2021
Online
https://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/events/event/23458
All times are in GMT
Online study days organised by | Journées d’études en ligne organisées par
Institute of Modern Languages Research, School of Advanced Study, University of London
Guest speaker: Lydia Davis
Keynote speakers | Conférenciers invités:
Emily Eells (University of Paris 10-Nanterre)
Jonathan Evans (University of Glasgow)
11 February 2021
13:30 Welcome by Jean-Michel Gouvard (University of Bordeaux Montaigne)
13:45-14:45 Session 1: Keynote 1
Emily Eells (University of Paris 10-Nanterre)
"The Way by Swann’s: In-between the lines of Lydia Davis’s Proust"
15:00-16:30 Session 2: (Very)Short Stories
Claire Fabre-Clark (Université Paris-Est-Créteil)
“Lydia Davis’s short stories: the (im)possibilities of fiction”
Ahlam Othman (British University in Egypt)
"Irony in the Microfiction of Lydia Davis’ Varieties of Disturbance (2007)"
Lynn Blin (Université Paul Valéry Montpellier III)
"Coherence in Lydia Davis’ Can’t and Won’t (2015)"
16:45-17:45 Session 3: Lydia Davis and the French writers
Véronique Samson (Sorbonne Nouvelle Paris 3 University)
"Lydia Davis’s Flaubert"
Ambra Celano (ILUM University)
"Lydia Davis and Maurice Blanchot: L’arrêt de mort"
12 February 2021
11:00-12:30 Session 4: Modernism and Modernity
Julie Tanner (Queen Mary University of London)
"The shape of feeling: Lydia Davis and the novel after postmodernism"
Elena Gelasi (University of Cyprus)
"Lydia Davis and postfeminism"
Jean-Michel Gouvard (University of Bordeaux Montaigne)
“'The Cows': Writing and Visual arts"
Break
13:45-14:45 Session 5: Keynote 2
Jonathan Evans (University of Glasgow)
"Non-exhaustion in the work of Lydia Davis"
14:45-15:45 Session 6: Writing and Translation
Fredrik Rönnbäck (Sarah Lawrence College and University of California)
"Excess and Restraint: Lydia Davis as Author and Translator"
Anna Zumbahlen (poet, University of Denver)
"Returning or Reawakening: Two Views of Swann’s Way in English"
16:00-16:45 Conclusion: A Talk with Lydia Davis
Moderator: Jonathan Evans (University of Glasgow)
To conclude our study days, we will have the honour and the pleasure to welcome Lydia Davis, who has kindly agreed to talk with us live from the US
All are welcome to attend this free event. You will need to register in advance to receive the online event joining link, which will be valid for both days. You are welcome to join just for the talk with Lydia Davis on 12 February.
Register online here: https://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/events/event/23458
All times are in GMT
