STC major Brandon Martinez has been selected as the 2015 Humanities Departmental Scholar. He will be recognized, along with the other departmental scholars, at the 21st Annual Student Leadership Awards, to be held on Friday April 17, 2015 at 6:00 pm in the Memorial Union Ballroom.
Congratulations, Brandon!
The Humanities Department’s Rhetoric, Theory and Culture 2014-15 Colloquium Series is pleased to welcome Gareth Williams, Professor of Spanish and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Michigan. Professor Williams’ talk is entitled “2666, or The Novel of Force.” It will take place on Friday, April 3rd, at 5 pm, in Forestry G002 (refreshments will be available). All are welcome!
Here is the abstract for Professor Williams’ talk:
Upon the Nazi invasion of France in 1940, Simone Weil penned one of her most renowned essays dealing with the relation between force and the foundation of the city, titled “The Iliad, or the Poem of Force”. Roberto Bolaño’s 2004 novel 2666 is a fictionalized attempt to approach the murder of hundreds of working class women in and around the city of Santa Teresa (Ciudad Juárez) in the deserts of northern Mexico from the 1990s to the present. The novel also offers a sustained reflection on the double originality of the political, that is, the constitutive relation between reason and force. At the heart of the novel’s aesthetic is the questioning of the relation between war as the register and experience of the everyday and the contemporary grasped as (im)possible metaphorization, which in turn raises the question of what is possible in literature, in life, in the face of death.
Professor Williams is the author of The Other Side of the Popular: Neoliberalism and Subalternity in Latin America (2002), The Mexican Exception: Sovereignty, Police, and Democracy (2011), and numerous articles examining the relation between cultural history, literature, and political philosophy. He is one of today’s key thinkers about Latin American politics and culture.
For more information, please contact Marcelino Viero-Ramos.
Photo credit: Shaul Schwarz for The New York Times
Dana Van Kooy, Assistant Professor of Transnational Literature, has received an appointment as a Huntington Library Mayers Fellow along with a grant to support her archival research this summer. The Huntington Library is one of the largest and most complete research libraries in the United States. The Huntington is known for its extraordinary collection of rare books and manuscripts in the fields of British and American history and literature.
Bob Johnson (Humanities) recently published a Symposium essay in College Composition and Communication (February 2015) titled “The Fault in Our Interdisciplinarity: A Reflection on the 1987 ‘Scholarship in Composition’ Guidelines.”
Laura Kasson Fiss (HU) published a paper entitled “Pushing at the Boundaries of the Book: Humor, Mediation, and Distance in Carroll, Thackeray, and Stevenson” in The Lion and the Unicorn.
Alice pushes at the boundary of the book as she travels through the looking glass. John Tenniel’s twin illustrations of her journey in the first edition of Through the Looking Glass (1872) occur on either side of a single page (see Figs. 1 and 2). The mirrored orientation of the two images means that each pair of objects is printed back-to-back. Only Alice travels in one side and out the other, her head piercing the page. Her extended right hand presses on the surface of the looking glass, which ripples before giving way. That ripple on the surface of the page suggests that the page, like the looking glass, is a semipermeable membrane that the right reader can enter. Indeed, on the other side of the looking glass, Alice meets creatures out of storybooks, such as Humpty Dumpty and the Tweedles, whose stories she recalls. As readers follow Alice’s immersion, they too must place a hand upon the page—but the page turns precisely because they encounter solid resistance.
Alice’s journey through the page literalizes the metaphor of reading as immersive that has characterized descriptions of Victorian reading starting in the period itself. Yet calling attention to the mechanism of immersive reading paradoxically breaks the illusion. Nicholas Dames addresses this issue in the works of W. M. Thackeray and others by arguing that Victorians conceived of attentive reading not as a steady state but as cycling between intense involvement and contemplative reverie (82–83). This intriguing theory takes on additional ramifications when considered in relation to Victorian children’s literature, especially humorous material such as Carroll’s Alice books. The conceit of the child reader enables an additional level of play. Naturally, the cautionary notes sounded by Jacqueline Rose and James Kincaid about the problematic roles of child muses also apply to implied child readers, but so does Marah Gubar’s response that authors, aware of their own totalizing authority, created space for collaboration (Artful Dodgers, passim), in this case with and among child and adult readers. In addition to Carroll, two authors of humorous children’s texts who made their reputations by writing for adults, William Makepeace Thackeray and Robert Louis Stevenson, use humor and depictions of reading to represent both the immersive Wonderland of fiction and the material, mediated pleasures of getting there.
The Modern Language program is excited to kick off its bi-annual Film Series this semester on the theme “Alternate Realities.” The films selected for this semester are Africa Paradis, The Wall, and The German Doctor. All have English subtitles.
The first event is the French-language film Africa Paradis, which will screen this Thursday, February 12 at 7:00 pm in Walker 134. Africa Paradis turns our worldview on its head by imagining the Africa of the future as a world economic power, prosperous and united, while Europe has suffered a devastating political and economic crisis. When an unemployed French couple illegally enter the “United States of Africa” to find work, they encounter the politics of racism and tolerance.
There will be opportunities to learn more about our language programs and study abroad opportunities, as well as refreshments.
The event is free and open to the whole campus and the community. For more information, please email Dr. Ramon Fonkoué.
Twenty-first century research and scholarship is changing. At one time, researchers could only submit written manuscripts to academic journals. The journals would send copies of the text to experts in the field who would determine if the manuscripts were fit for publication (peer review). Nowadays, both the content of those manuscripts and the process for evaluating them is changing.
Cheryl Ball is a 2005 PhD alumna of MTU’s RTC graduate program, and she’s now an associate professor of digital publishing studies in the Department of English in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences at West Virginia University.
Ball has been rethinking the process for publishing multimedia-rich scholarship. Along with Andrew Morrison, professor of interdisciplinary design and director of the Centre for Design Research at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design in Norway, Ball is co-principal investigator for a project that that will build a digital tool that will allow experts in a variety of disciplines to review, critique and edit these 21st-century manuscripts.
To support these innovations the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded West Virginia University a $1 million grant, the University’s first Mellon grant. The three-year Mellon Foundation grant will support the development of Cairn, an online, free and open-source system that will help editors of scholarly multimedia journals, books and data sets engage in building and reading multimedia-rich, peer-reviewed content.
You can learn more about the Ball’s work and the grant here.
The William G. Jackson Center for Teaching and Learning (CTL) has announced its 2015 grant recipients. The grants support course/program reform or expansion projects using blended and online learning. A committee assembled by the Provost and the CTL Director selected this year’s grant recipients from among many proposals.
Lauren Bowen, Assistant Professor of Composition and Director of First-Year Composition in the Humanities Department, was awarded a $10,000-level grant for her Composition in Digital Elements Environments proposal.