TT 2016 Week 3 Updates
The programme for Oxford Translation Day has been released! The programme is absolutely exhilarating, featuring practical translation workshops, readings by acclaimed international poets, and talks by esteemed academics and translators. See more here. In Week 4, we have the Fiction and Other Minds seminar. The seminar will explore the rich interplay between the rhetorical details of literary texts and the way they draw on and appeal to our embodied experience beyond literature. (Please note that the seminar will begin at 5pm, not 4:30pm as previously advertised).
In Week 3 Eric Hayot gave the paper “What Happens to Literature if People are Artworks?” at Ertegun House. We had two excellent linked translation and creative writing workshops “‘The Bearer-Beings’: Portable Stories in Dislocated Times". The OCCT Discussion Group on Multilingualism took place on Tuesday St Anne's College.
Events and Invitations
1) Invitation to a workshop on diplomacy, art and literature between the Ottomans and the West - 17th and 18th century
Professor Daniel O’Quinn, School of English and Theatre at Guelph University is currently visiting fellow at New College, Oxford. He has a book in manuscript entitled After Peace: Untimely Encounters in Ottoman Lands, which explores the relationship between diplomacy and artistic practice in the late 17th and early 18thcentury in order to offer new perspectives on the relationship between war and global modernity. I am organising a workshop/seminar to discuss two chapters from the draft with interested scholars in Oxford. A summary attached describes those two chapters – on the paintings of Vanmour and the letter-book of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. If you can only read one, please focus on chapter 2/Vanmour.
Please fill in the doodle poll indicating if you are able to attend at the times indicated on 9 or 10 June and we will confirm a date and arrange to pre-circulate materials via Dropbox. Please fill in the form before 15 May if only to let me know you cannot join us? The intention is to hold the discussion in Professor Ros Ballaster’s office at 6 Mansfield Road (directly opposite the University Club). If you know of other scholars likely to be interested then please do forward the doodlepoll link below.
All are welcome.
2) Graphic novel Aivali by Soloup, enjoying great success in Greece, France, and Turkey, is now seeking publishers in English
Aivali deals with the violent expatriation that took place during the war in Asia Minor between the Greeks and the Turks, in the wake of World War I. First the Christians were driven out of their ancestral lands in 1922, and then the Muslims were removed from their homes during the population exchange between Greece and Turkey. This graphic novel is a pastiche of 5 stories. One story deals with today (chapters 1 and 6), while the others (chapters 2 through 5) go back to the past, to the humanitarian disaster of 1922 in Asia Minor and to the population exchange (Greeks and Turks, Christians and Muslims) as stipulated by the Convention of Lausanne.
The book focuses on Aivali,a Greek city on the Aegean shore opposite Lesbos, where, after the expulsion of Greek Christians and the population exchange, the empty houses (still standing today) were inhabited by Turkish Muslims removed from Crete. So Ayvali is a city that both divides and unites the two peoples.
The chapters about the past are based on writings by three authors, two Greeks (Fotis Kontoglou, Elias Venezis) and one Turk (Ahmet Yorulmaz), shedding light on the drama of at least 2 million people, victims of nationalism and war, in both sides of the Aegean Sea. This graphic novel, however, doesn't limit itself to a “local” narrative, since the text deals with themes such as war, fanaticism, nationalism, brotherhood, coexistence and tolerance, which are timeless and concern everybody in Europe and the world, especially today, with the European crisis having awakened the sinister ghosts of nationalism, racism and hatred.
If you would be interested in collaboration or have suggestions about suitable publishers, please contact Catherine Fragou irislit@otenet.gr .
If you would like to find out more about Aivali, visit:
https://www.facebook.com/Aivali-Soloup-295309670679232/
http://www.irisliteraryagency.gr/en/index.php/comic-3/item/202-aivali
3) Please be reminded that the Inaugural Graduate Conference in Philosophy and Literature at Queen Mary, University of London, will be taking place on Friday, May 27, 2016.
Topic: The Problem of Mimesis in Literature
Our Keynote speaker is: Dr Paul Davies, University of Sussex
For any queries please contact queenmarymimesis2016@gmail.com
Schedule:
9.30 - 10 Registration and coffee
10 - 11 session 1
- Tom Stuart Marshall: Mimesis and Phenomenology in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria
- Bryan Norton: Shading, Syllepsis: Sketching Schelling’s Natural Philosophy
11 - 11.15 Short coffee break
11.15 - 12 (Keynote): Dr. Paul Davies
12 -13.30 Lunch
13.30 - 14.30 Session2
- Matthias Grüne: Mimesis of experienced reality. A new perspective on the poetics of German realism
- Stephen Klemm: Goethe, Mimesis, and the Operations of Nature
14.30 - 15 session 3 (1 paper)
- Florencia Sannders: The Reception of Jorge Luis Borges work in the GDR. A struggle for a mimetic literature?
15 - 15.30 Coffee
15.30 - 16.30 session 4
- Jakub Kowalewski: The destitution of words. The Aporia of Writing in Levinas’s Totality and Infinity
Jasmine Cooper: Mistaken Identity. Mimesis and (De)Constructing Identity
16.30 - 16.45 Short coffee break
16.45 - 17.30 Roundtable discussion and conclusion
Moderator: Dr. Angus Nicholls
Panellists: Dr. Paul Davies, Dr. Danielle Sands, Dr. Sean Gaston
4) Borders: 9th Skepsi Annual Interdisciplinary Conference
27th May 2016 - University of Kent, Canterbury
Woolf College, SR 5
09.30 – 10.00 Registration and coffee
10.00 – 11.30 Panel 1: Migration
Blanca E. Chavez (University of Kent): ‘En Transito: The Migrant Journey to the United States from Mexico’
Nadja Stamselberg (Regent’s University London): ‘Borders of Experiences’
Lauren E. Nuckols (Pennsylvania State University): ‘Violence, Erasure, Meaninglessness: Abjection at the American Borders’
11.30 – 11.45 Coffee break
11.45 – 12.45 Panel 2A: Historical Perspectives on Borders
Colin Elder (University of Kent): ‘Nature’s Resources: First Nations’ Negotiations of the Border on the St. Mary’s River, As a Social, Political, and Natural Conservation Movement, 1810-1880’
Peter Keeling (University of Kent): ‘An Arch of Alliance or a Military Frontier? British Politics and the Tunnel Under the Channel, 1880-1894’
Panel 2B: Borders and Languages (W1-SR 3)
Bharain Mac An Bhreithiún (Middlesex University London): ‘Nationalism, Collective Memory and Ghost Signage in the Linguistic Landscapes of the Carpathians’
Ai Zhong (UCL): ‘Crossing Language Borders: Research on the Similarities Between the English and Chinese Languages’
12.45 – 1.45 Lunch
1.45 – 3.15 Panel 3: Borders and Theory
Ben Turner (University of Kent): ‘On the Borders Between Conceptual Worlds: The Politics of Multi-Naturalism’
Jacob McGuinn (Queen Mary London): ‘No Man’s Land: The Poetics of Utopia’
Thanos Zartaloudis (University of Kent/AA School of Architecture): ‘Encountering Exodus’
3.15 – 3.30 Coffee break
3.30 – 5.00 Panel 4A: Rethinking Borders
Leila Essa (King’s College London): ‘Fissured Buildings and Futile Walls: Domestic Space as a Site of Border Allegories in Neel Mukherjee’s The Lives of Others and Eugen Ruge’s In Zeiten des Abnehmenden Lichts’
Paul Armstrong Leworthy (University of Edinburgh): ‘Borderline Emergent: Spatial Conception of Memory in Theory’
Steve Crawford (University of Kent): ‘Neal Stephenson and the Franchise State: Questioning Preconceptions of Nation States and Borders from a Legal Perspective’
Panel 4B: Borders in the Visual Arts (W1-SR 3)
Mathilde Poupée (Sciences Po Paris): ‘The Representation of Borders in the Arts’
Sarah Pogoda (University of Sheffield): ‘Art on Borders’ - Christoph Schlingensief’s Aesthetic Strategies to Address Borderline Fears’
Camille Prunet (Université Paris 3/Université de Caen): ‘Living and Non Living Boundaries in the Art: Issues on Virtuousness of Technology’
5.00 – 5.15 Coffee break
5.15 – 6.30 Keynote address
Glenn Bowman (University of Kent): ‘Identity Against: Border Formation and Perceived Antagonisms’
6.30 Wine reception
7.30 Conference dinner (city centre)
Registration
Please register by completing the registration form and sending it to skepsi@kent.ac.uk by 25 May 2016.
For any enquiries, please also contact skepsi@kent.ac.uk.
TORCH team
