OCCT HT2021 Week 5 Updates
In our next Discussion Group session, on Monday 22 February at 1pm, we will host Professor David Karashima who will talk about Translating Haruki Murakami and his book Who We Are Reading When We Are Reading Murakami. In the session, David will discuss the translator (Alfred Birnbaum) and editor (Luke Elmer) who first introduced Murakami to an English-speaking audience. Registration required: http://www.occt.ox.ac.uk/discussion-group-%E2%80%93-translating-haruki-murakami.
The programme for OCCT’s virtual workshop, Fictions of Retranslations: Retranslating Language and Style in Prose Fiction, is now available here: https://www.occt.ox.ac.uk/fictions-retranslations-retranslating-language-and-style-prose-fiction. If you would like to attend as an external participant, please contact anna.saroldi@ell.ox.ac.uk and rowan.anderson@ell.ox.ac.uk.
Events and CFPs
1. «La Morte! La Morte!» Mapping Italian Death Cultures from the Late Eighteenth Century to the Present
CAIS 2021 Panel
Organised by Simona di Martino (U Warwick, UK) and Mattia Petricola (U L'Aquila, Italy)
https://canadianassociationforitalianstudies.org/Session-Proposals-2021#la_morte
The global cultural transformations imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic are drastically reshaping the construction of death, dying and disposal in the North Atlantic world. A systematic, interdisciplinary exploration of the modern thanatological imagination is thus urgently in order in every field of the humanities. This panel aims to provide an opportunity for such an investigation from the perspective of Italian studies. What are the features that characterise the Italian thanatological imagination? How can we trace its diachronic evolution? And what role did (and do) literature, arts and the media play in shaping it? In other words: how can we map the Italian cultures of death, grief, and memory?
The relation between death and literary and artistic creations has inspired some of the most relevant products of Italian culture since the Middle Ages—suffice to think of the Tre corone, or mementos such as the popular theme of the Dance macabre. However, the emergence of a modern thanatological imagination in Italy can be traced back to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These decades are indeed dense of artistic, sociological, and political changes. A minor stream of authors finds its way on the market with melancholic and sepulchral poems, while a fashion for nocturnal atmospheres flourished in prosaic works such as Le notti romane by Alessandro Verri and Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis, a novel that Ugo Foscolo quilted with premonitions of death, graveyards, and stormy, sublime nights. Concurrently, the Napoleonic Edict of St Cloud imposed to bury the dead outside cities, triggering a lively debate on burial sites and public health—a pioneer work was Scipione Piattioli’s Saggio intorno al luogo di seppellire. From that moment on, monumental cemeteries were created in response to changes in Italian politics—such as the fight for independence and the establishment of a nation state. Hygienic matters around burials ignited the creativity of novelists: cases of premature burials became the twist in the plots of popular feuilleton, as demonstrated by the great success of Carolina Invernizio’s eerie stories. Finally, the interest in psychological turns, scientific experiments and anatomical dissections lead to works by the Scapigliati, contemporary sci-fi, fantasy and murders’ stories.
These premises invite us to look at the Italian thanatological imagination from multiple interdisciplinary perspectives, highlighting how fictions and media actively contributed to the elaboration of a number of its essential traits while exploring (non-)fictional characters and histories that still remain in the shadows.
Themes for paper proposals include (but are not limited to):
- Italian death cultures and the medical humanities
- Italy and the Gothic
- Cemeteries, monuments, cenotaphs, and their representation across media
- Mediums, séances, mesmerists
- The elegy, the componimento in morte, the necrologio
- Italian sepulchral literature
- Thanatological crossings between fiction, anthropology, and ethnography: ritual weeping, funeral rites and dirges
- Suicide
- Heroic deaths and war memorials
- The representation of partigiani
- Journeys through the afterlife, from A. Varano’s Visioni sacre e morali to F. Fellini’s Il Viaggio di G. Mastorna through
D. Buzzati’s Viaggio agli inferi del secolo
- The reception of Danze macabre and Trionfi della Morte across media
- Pestilences, epidemics, and catastrophes
- Death in Italian crime fiction
- Death and the supernatural in Italian fiction
- Death, esotericism, and the occult
- The undead in Italian literature and media
- Folk horror
- Death in Italian speculative fiction
If you are interested in contributing with a paper (in English or Italian) please send a short abstract (250 words) and a bio (150 words) to S.Di-Martino@warwick.ac.uk and mattia.petricola@univaq.it by 1st March.
2. Please find below details of the next 'Theory in Crisis' online seminar at ULIP, a talk by Etienne Balibar entitled 'Critical Reflections on the New Definition of the Human Species', taking place on Friday 19 February at 4pm (CET).
Follow the link to register: https://london.ac.uk/institute-in-paris/events/theory-crisis-seminar-etienne-balibar-critical-reflections-new-definition-human
Abstract
The pandemic is crystallizing a new understanding of the Human as a “Species-being”, as well as the very category of the "species" itself, which connects biological, medical, anthropological definitions. A new material unity, a new commonality with other species, but also a destructive character and a rising to the extremes of anthropological differences themselves. As a consequence, biopolitics, cosmopolitics, and necropolitics become a single problem, which calls for a genealogy and a critical reflection
Speaker
Etienne Balibar teaches at Columbia every Fall semester. He is Professor Emeritus of moral and political philosophy at Université de Paris X – Nanterre and Professor Emeritus of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. He also holds a part-time Anniversary Chair in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University, London. He has published widely in the areas of epistemology, Marxist philosophy, and moral and political philosophy in general. His works include Lire le Capital (with Louis Althusser, Pierre Macherey, Jacques Rancière, Roger Establet) (1965); The Philosophy of Marx (1995); Spinoza and politics (1998); Politics and the Other Scene (2002); We, the People of Europe? (2003) ; Equaliberty (2014); Violence and Civility. On the Limits of Political Philosophy (2015); Citizen Subject. Foundations for Philosophical Anthropology (2017); Secularism and Cosmopolitanism (2018).
3.‘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 Seminar
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. You will need to register in advance to receive the online event joining link. Click on the event page below to register.
https://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/events/event/23900
4. MULTINOVEL. Dialogues on the multilingual novel with contemporary authors
Università Ca' Foscari Venezia
Department of Linguistics and Comparative Cultural Studies in collaboration with Incroci di Civiltà and SEM Libri
A dialogue with Edwidge Danticat moderated by Alessandro Raveggi, Università Ca’ Foscari
FEBRUARY 26, 2021, 5 PM (Rome CET), ONLINE
MULTINOVEL is a series of dialogues on multilingualism in the novel form with contemporary authors from the Americas to Europe, curated by Università Ca’ Foscari research fellow and author Alessandro Raveggi.
MULTINOVEL aims to reflect on the topic and its theoretical consequences, fostering an interdisciplinary debate with the help of the genuine voice of internationally renowned authors.
The event (in English) will be online on Zoom. Registration required at this link:
https://unive.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEqfumvrjwqGt080KlB3hIAy3da_wzFNa0A
Edwidge Danticat is an Haitian American author whose works focus on the lives of women and their relationships, addressing also issues of power, injustice, and poverty. She is the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah Book Club selection, Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist, The Farming of Bones, The Dew Breaker, Create Dangerously, Claire of the Sea Light, and most recently Everything Inside (in Italian: La vita dentro, Sem, 2020). She has written seven books for children and young adults. She is a 2009 MacArthur fellow, a 2018 Ford Foundation “The Art of Change” fellow, and the winner of the 2018 Neustadt International Prize and the 2019 St. Louis Literary Award.
Next event: April 16, 2021, 5 PM (Rome CET) ONLINE - A Dialogue with Gina Apostol
5. British Association for Holocaust Studies Postgraduate Conference
Friday 11th June 2021
Theme: Research Showcase and Challenge Discussion
Call for Papers
Abstracts are invited from participants who would like to contribute to the BAHS Postgraduate Conference that will be taking place online on Friday 11th June 2021.
The BAHS Postgraduate Conference will provide postgraduates with the opportunity to showcase their research to other academics in their field. This can include a summary of research aims and/or hypotheses, research methods, progress to date and how research will contribute to the academic field of Holocaust Studies. Contributors will also be invited to discuss any challenges that they have faced in the last academic year and ways in which these have been overcome.
We welcome abstracts from academics from a range of disciplines that encompass Holocaust studies. This may include, but not exclusively, history, philosophy, genocide studies, the representation of the Holocaust in multimedia, museum studies and narratives of the Holocaust.
Abstracts of proposed papers should be no more than 300 words in length and should be accompanied with a short biography of the author.
These need to be submitted to Karen Treby and Sophie Bayer, BAHS Postgraduate Representatives via email to:
Deadline for abstracts: Friday 26th February 2021
