news and events

2013-2014 Reception Studies Talks

April 18, 2014, 6 PM, Putah Creek Lodge

Prof. Lisa Owen, University of North Texas

“Caves, Monks, and Brahmacarins: Seeing Ellora through its Jain Monuments”

May 6, 2014, 4 PM, TBD

Prof. Zhang Longxi, City University of Hong Kong

“Meaning, Reception, and the Use of Classics:Theoretical Considerations in a Chinese Context”

Reception seems to have invigorated classic studies and become a major way to talk about the history and function of classics in the past and in our own time. Reception theory maintains that meaning is always mediated, and that there is no originary moment when the classics are what they really are before any reading and interpretation. In the history of reception, classics have indeed been interpreted from different ideological and political stances and made use of in different time periods. Facing the various uses of classics, some of which evidently deviate from the textual meaning in an allegorical interpretation, a significant problem necessarily arises how does one define the validity of interpretation and guard against overinterpretation (Umberto Eco) or hermeneutic nihilism (H. G. Gadamer)? This talk will discuss such theoretical issues in the context of Chinese reading and commentaries on Greek and Roman classics, and suggest a way to reach a balance between the classics and their interpretations.

ZHANG Longxi holds an MA in English from Peking University and a Ph. D. in Comparative Literature from Harvard University. He had taught at the University of California, Riverside, and is currently Chair Professor of Comparative Literature and Translation at the City University of Hong Kong. He is an elected foreign member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Letters, History and Antiquities and also Academia Europaea, and he serves as an Advisory Editor of New Literary History. He has published 20 books and numerous articles in both English and Chinese, and his books in English include The Tao and the Logos: Literary Hermeneutics, East and West (Duke, 1992); Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China (Stanford, 1998); Allegoresis: Reading Canonical Literature East and West (Cornell, 2005); Unexpected Affinities: Reading across Cultures (Toronto, 2007); an edited volume, The Concept of Humanity in an Age of Globalization (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2012); and From Comparison to World Literature (SUNY, forthcoming).

Thursday, March 6, 4 PM, 53A Olson

Prof. Timon Screech, SOAS, London

Art Exchanges Between Japan and England 1613-1616

Although the early history of the English East India Company is well studied, cultural manifestations in the interactions that such voyages provoked have not been investigated in any detail. Particularly, it has been entirely forgotten that the Company engaged in an art trade, specifically with its last port of call, Japan, where it both imported and exported paintings, prints and high-grade craft objects. This paper will retrieve lost information, but will go further in assessing layers of intention, and of deferred and contested understanding, that the works gave rise to outside their original spaces of creation and consumption.

About the Speaker

Timon Screech is Professor of the History of Art and Head of the School of Arts at SOAS, University of London. He has also taught at numerous universities including Chicago, Heidelberg, Meiji and Waseda. He is an expert on the art and culture of the Edo Period, including its international dimension, and has published some dozen books in the subject.

His best-known work is probably Sex and the Floating World, a study of erotica, and he has recently competed a field-defining overview of the Edo arts, Obtaining Images. His work has been translated into French, Japanese, Korean, Polish and Romanian.

Friday, February 14, 4 PM, 912 Sproul

Prof. Stefan Uhlig, Kings College, Cambridge

Goethe and Literary Studies After 1800.”

Stefan Uhlig is a Lecturer in English literature at King’s College in the University of Cambridge. His work and teaching focus on eighteenth-century and Romantic writing. He is completing a book on the history of modern literary studies, and has co-edited Wordsworth’s Poetic Theory (2010) and Aesthetics and the Work of Art: Adorno, Kafka, Richter (2009).

January 16, 4 PM, 912 Sproul

Prof. Cesar Dominguez. University of Santiago de Compostela (USC), Spain

“Reception in Medieval Contact Zones. The Case of Outremer”

César Domínguez is associate professor of comparative literature at the University of  Santiago de Compostela (USC), Spain, where he holds the Jean Monnet Chair “The Culture of European Integration”. His teaching and research focus upon theory of comparative literature, comparative literary history, comparative European literature, and comparative studies in medieval literatures. In addition to numerous articles and books on these topics, he is co-editor of the International Comparative Literature Association Coordinating Committee’s two-volume Comparative History of Literatures in the Iberian Peninsula. His two most recent books are World Literature: A Reader (Routledge, 2013) and Literatura europea comparada (Arco/Libros, 2013). As for professional services, he is Vice-President of the Spanish Society of General and Comparative Literature, Chair of the ICLA Research Committee, member of the ICLA Coordinating Committee, member of the Academia Europaea, General Coordinator of the European Network of Comparative Literary Studies, and Fellow of the Stockholm Collegium of World Literary History. He is now working on the project Crossing Medieval Boundaries.

Reception Studies Talk, Friday, November 15, 4 PM, 126 Voorhies

Dr. Uwe Vagelpohl

The Imprisoned Translator: Reading and Commenting on Aristotle’s Rhetoric in Arabic

The strange and fascinating reception history of Aristotle’s Rhetoric could be described as a tale of failure and frustration. To a modern reader, its translation must seem flawed, its commentaries misguided: the Rhetoric is too deeply rooted in ancient Greek culture to be understood without knowing about contemporary literature and the political and legal system of the day.

Attracted by Aristotle’s reputation as the final authority on virtually everything, Arabic translators and commentators still mounted a vigorous effort to decode this enigmatic text. The talk surveys this reception tradition and argues that, in spite of their frequent failure to grasp Aristotle’s meaning, the work of Arabic translators and commentators became a tremendous success story.

Reception Studies Talk, Thursday, October 24th 12-1 PM, Voorhies, 228

Latin America and its literature in contemporary Tamil

This talk will present the influence Latin America politics -Che Guevara, Castro, Cuba, Allende, Chile, Sub Marcos, Chiapas- and its literature – Pablo Neruda, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Juan Rulfo- had on the contemporary Tamil literature through the English translations and the traces it leaves in the writings of Tamil writers.

About the Speaker

M.Kannan is researcher and Head of the research program on Contemporary Tamil at the French Institute of Pondicherry. He is the author and editor of various books, articles, essays, and poems, both individually and in collaboration. He has organized various conferences and workshops involving contemporary Tamil literature and its place in the contemporary social milieu, and its links with Classical Tamil literature. He has published translations of literary works from Tamil into both English and French, and from English into Tamil. He has guided the research of many doctoral students from India and abroad, and established a large collection of books, articles, and manuscripts in the IFP library’s Contemporary Tamil section, working toward building a Centre for Contemporary Tamil at the IFP.

2012-2013 Reception Studies Talks and Events

Reception Studies Talk, Friday April 5, 1230-2 pm, 912 Sproul

Prof. Olga Stuchebrukhov

Crimes Without Any Punishment at All:Dostoevsky and Woody Allen in LIght of Bakhtinian Theory.”

Separated by more than a decade, Woody Allen’s Crimes and Misdemeanors (1989) and Match Point (2005) are similar not only in their recourse to Dostoevsky’s classic Crime and Punishment, but in their anti-Dostoevskian artistic method. I attempt to challenge the entrenched view of Allen’s style as polyphonic. My main concern is not to privilege the novel over the films, or Dostoevsky over Allen, but to show the fallacy of applying the terms polyphony and dialogism, in their true Bakhtinian meaning, to Allen’s oeuvre. Bakhtin defines polyphony as all-inclusive and profoundly life affirming; as such, it is incompatible with existentialist nihilism, despair, or hollow playfulness.  In the broader sense, Allen’s reading of Dostoevsky and modern critics’ application of Bakhtin to Allen expose the problem of dialectical reception of dialogic authors.

Reception Studies March 1

March 1, 2013 12:30-2:00 p.m, Andrews Conference Room, Social Science & Humanities Bldg

Presenters’ Paper Abstracts:

Tori White, Comparative Literature

Zhen Zhan, Comparative Literature

Ryan Wander, English

Wagner Goes East: Chinese Interaction with Europe’s Opera

Prof. Barbara Mittler, University of Heidelberg

Monday, Feb. 11, 4:10-6:00 pm, 53A Olson

Winter 2013 Speaker Series: Part 1

January 25, 2013 12:30-2:00 p.m. 912 Sproul

David Dennen, Music, “Reception in and of a 19th-Century Odia Song Cycle”. Moderated by Prof. Henry Spiller

“Kishorachandrananda Champu” was composed in the early 19th century in what is now southern Odisha, India. In thirty-four Odia-language songs interspersed with sections of Sanskrit verse and prose, it tells the well-known story of the love of Radha and Krishna. Very popular in its author’s own time, with the emergence of the modern Odia public sphere in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the “Champu” was soon established as a canonic work of classical Odia literature. Despite being criticized for its eroticism and difficult language, it was taught in schools, eulogized by modern poets, and provided a cornerstone for the revival of Odissi music (proclaimed as the “classical music” of Odisha). This talk explores a few of these moments in the modern reception of the work and suggests possible reasons for its attraction to modern writers and cultural revivalists.

Nicole Budrovich, Art History, “Virgil in Art: Roman Identity and Spectacle in Provincial Mosaics.” Moderated by Prof. Heghnar Watenpaugh

This paper examines the reception of a specific scene from Virgil’s Aeneid in provincial mosaics, and how the layered interpretation of the text made it a fitting representation of Roman identity in Southern Gaul. The mosaics represent the climax of the boxing match between Dares and Entellus described in Book 5 of the Aeneid. Virgil’s account of this episode is itself an example of reception that emulates and breaks from Homeric and Hellenistic models to establish a new Roman identity. Although the boxing match is one of many passages that illustrates Roman origins, it is the only Virgilian scene in the mosaics of southern Gaul. While the majority of provincial figural mosaics depict scenes from Greek myth and the pastoral imagination, the Dares and Entellus mosaics are striking in their Roman literary focus. Exactly why did this region have such an affinity for this athletic literary scene? In order to address this question, this paper explores both the literary receptions of Virgil and local context of southern Gaul: its Greek origins and influences, Roman urban developments, and most importantly, the increased popularity of athletics and spectacle. Although a provincial Roman would have appreciated the Dares and Entellus mosaics on multiple levels, the high density of amphitheaters in the region and the increased performance of Greek-style athletics during the first century may have contributed to the mosaics’ uncharacteristic popularity. An interesting example of reception, these mosaics draw on the literary tradition of Virgil in order to define local Roman identity and respond to the contemporary context.

Amanda Batarseh, Comparative Literature, “The Arab Renaissance (Al-Nahda) and the Reception of Greco-Roman Classical Antiquity.” Moderated by Prof. Brenda Schildgen

The history of the translation of classical texts into Arabic, primarily from Greek, originated and reached its peak in the Arab world in the eighth century during the reign of the Abbasid Dynasty (758-1258). These Arabic translations – primarily non-literary works of science, mathematics, philosophy and logic – are credited with allowing for the transmission of knowledge into Europe though Spain in the twelfth century, bringing Aristotle and others to European scholars, which ultimately contributed to the rebirth of classical studies in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in Italy. The translation of Greek and Roman classical works of poetry and prose into Arabic, however, came much later, primarily as a result of the Arab Renaissance, Al-Nahda, from 1870 to 1950. The first complete translation of Homer into Arabic, published in Egypt in 1904 by Sulayman al-Bustani, was part of a controversial discourse, taking place in the Arab world regarding the benefits of translating works popularly considered part of a Western tradition. This dialogue was further polemicized by the dilemma of Arab independence, nationalism and modernism, and the power struggle with the West. This paper examines the cultural and political circumstances of al-Nahda, which encouraged the study and translation of ancient Greco-Roman authors and the establishment of the field of Classics in the Arab world. The paper focuses specifically on the roles of the twentieth century Lebanese scholar, Sulayman al-Bustani, who completed the first translation of the Iliad into Arabic, and of the Egyptian scholar, Taha Hussein, greatly credited for the establishment of Greco-Roman classical studies within Cairo University, and the advancement of these studies in Egypt, and the Arab world.

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Call for papers for symposium “Entangled Landscapes: Rethinking the landscape exchange between China and Europe in 16th-18th centuries” Zurich, May 10-12, 2013. For further information see: http://www.asienundeuropa.uzh.ch/aboutus/persons/postdoc/zhuang.html

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The University of Zurich invites graduate students with an interest in exchanges and encounters between Asia and Europe to apply for fellowships. Further information can be found at: https://www.h-net.org/jobs/job_display.php?id=46068

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Grant Gives Reception Studies Room to Grow: Brenda Deen Schildgen and Archana Venkatesan discuss the value of Reception Studies to the study of the Humanities

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Cipriano de Rore’s Setting of “Dido’s Lament”

Dean Jessie Ann Owens

Friday, Nov 30th, 410-600 pm, 912 Sproul

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‘Reception and…’: Reception in Comparative Perspectives

Provost Ralph Hexter

Friday, Oct. 26th, 410-600 pm, 912 Sproul