Book Chat with David Marno

Join David Marno for a discussion of his recent book

Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention

Wednesday, Feb 7, 2018 | 12:00 pm to 1:00 pm
Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall, UC Berkeley

The seventeenth-century French philosopher Nicolas Malebranche thought that philosophy could learn a valuable lesson from prayer, which teaches us how to attend to, await, and be open for what might happen next. In his book Death Be Not Proud (Chicago, 2016), Marno explores the precedents of Malebranche’s advice by reading John Donne’s poetic prayers in the context of what Marno calls the “art of holy attention.”

The event is one in a series of lunchtime Book Chats sponsored by the Townsend Center for the Humanities at Berkeley.

After an introduction by Representations editorial board co-chair Niklaus Largier, Marno will speak briefly about his work and then open the floor for discussion.

David Marno, Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley, has recently joined the Representations editorial board. He has published on religious and secular concepts of attention, on apocalypse as a literary and political figure, and on philosophy of history and comparative literature. His current project focuses on prayer in the aftermath of the Reformation.

Gallagher on Counterfactuals

New from Catherine Gallagher!

Telling It Like It Wasn’t: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction

The topic of counterfactual histories has engaged Catherine Gallagher for some time. In addition to the essays in this new book, her “When Did the Confederate States of America Free the Slaves?” was published in the special forum Counterfactual Realities in Representations 98, and “The Formalism of Military History” appeared in our 25th anniversary special issue On Form.

Catherine Gallagher is professor emerita of English at the University of California, Berkeley and a founding member of the Representations editorial board. She is the author of many books, including The Body Economic: Life, Death, and Sensation in Political Economy and the Victorian Novel.

“Sound, Media, and Literature in the Americas”: A Conversation with Tom McEnaney

Tom McEnaney, assistant professor of Comparative Literature and Spanish & Portuguese at the University of California, Berkeley, will participate in an upcoming event in celebration of his new book, Acoustic Properties: Radio, Narrative, and the New Neighborhood of the Americas. The event features McEnaney in conversation with José Quiroga (Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature, Emory University) and Freya Schiwy (Associate Professor of Media and Culture Studies, UC Riverside).

The conversation will take place on Monday, December 4, at 5pm, in the Morrison Library (101 Doe Library) at UC Berkeley.

McEnaney is the co-editor, with Michael Lucey and Tristram Wolff, of the Representations special issue “Language in Use and the Literary Artifact” (Winter 2017). Read McEnaney and Lucey’s introduction to the special issue here and read McEnaney’s essay, “Real-to-Reel: Social Indexicality, Sonic Materiality, and Literary Media Theory in Eduardo Costa’s Tape Works” here.

“‘Splendid Propaganda’: Henry V at War,” A Public Lecture by Kent Puckett

Kent Puckett, associate professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley, and member of the Representations editorial board, will speak at an upcoming event co-sponsored by the Institute on World War II and the Human experience and Fordham University Press. His lecture, “‘Splendid Propaganda’: Henry V at War,” will focus on Laurence Olivier’s 1944 film Henry V in the context of British cinematic style, wartime writing about Shakespeare, and the philosophy of propaganda and its effects on the British homefront.

The public lecture will take place on Thursday, November 9, from 6-8pm, at the Lowenstein 12th Floor Lounge (113 West 60th Street) in New York City.

Puckett’s most recent contribution to Representations was his edited “Search Forum,” which appeared in Representations 127 (Summer 2014). Read his introduction here.

Form and Reform Conference

Representations editorial board member Ian Duncan will be presenting a keynote lecture at the upcoming Form and Reform conference on 19th-century literature, art, and history.

 

The conference will be held at UC Santa Cruz from July 27-29, 2017, and is free and open to the public. Duncan’s lecture, on the topic of “The Natural History of Form: From Aesthetic Education to Sexual Selection,” will take place at 8pm on Friday, July 28th. For more information, visit the conference website.

 

Michael Lucey Translation Reviewed

Michael Lucey’s translation of The End of Eddy by Édouard Louis, published earlier this month, has just been reviewed in both the New Yorker and the New York Times

An autobiographical novel about growing up gay in a working-class town in Picardy, The End of Eddy at once captures the violence and desperation of life in a French factory town and provides a sensitive portrait of boyhood and sexual awakening.

The author, Édouard Louis, is a novelist and the editor of a scholarly work on Pierre Bourdieu. He is the coauthor, with the philosopher Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, of “Manifesto for an Intellectual and Political Counteroffensive,” published in English by the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Michael Lucey, a member of the Representations editorial board, is a professor of French literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Never Say I: Sexuality and the First Person in Colette, Gide, and Proust and The Misfit of the Family: Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality and translator of Returning to Reims by Didier Eribon.

New Issue, Representations 138

Number 138, Spring 2017 (read at UC Press)

NOW AVAILABLE

1.cover-source

ADRIA L. IMADA
Promiscuous Signification: Leprosy Suspects in a Photographic Archive of Skin

CHRISTOPH HOFFMANN
Does a Glowworm See? Sigmund Exner’s Study of the Compound Eye

JOHN GUILLORY
Mercury’s Words: The End of Rhetoric and the Beginning of Prose

ANNE E. LINTON
Hermaphrodite Outlaws:Ambiguous Sex and the Civil Code in Nineteenth-Century France

ALEX ERIC HERNANDEZ
Prosaic Suffering: Bourgeois Tragedy and the Aesthetics of the Ordinary

Upcoming in Representations 139: Debarati Sanyal’s update on the Calais “Jungle” and Sylvain George’s 2010 film Qu’Ils reposent en révolte, Yoon Sun Lee on bad plots in the novels of Maria Edgeworth, Dahlia Porter on botanical collection and literary anthologies, Carmine Grimaldi on the use video in the Haight-Ashbury “Hippie Drug Ward,” and Justin Steinberg on legal and literary mimesis in the Decameron (coming in August).

News of Calais

Calais’s “Jungle”: Refugees, Biopolitics, and the Arts of Resistance

by Debarati Sanyal

This past spring, as the EU brokered its refugee deal with Turkey to “save lives” in theFig. 12 (Magnin - 'Dans le calme, le face à face entre migrants et CRS') Mediterranean, the French state razed a portion of Calais’s “jungle,” encampments that currently shelter 10,000 refugees, while building a container camp. In this essay, an analysis of recent film and photography highlights practices of resistance to the interplay of humanitarian compassion and securitarian repression, nuancing the view of borderscapes as sites of total biopolitical capture, and of refugees as bare life. Read the full advance version of this essay free of charge here.

A revised and updated version of this essay will be published in our Spring 2017 issue. This is unedited version is being posted in advance (October 24, 2016) in light of the swiftly changing circumstances in the Calais camps.  According to today’s Guardian, “Hundreds of migrants and refugees have left Calais on buses for accommodation centres elsewhere in France on the first day of an operation to clear and then demolish the refugee camp in the northern port town.”

DEBARATI SANYAL is a professor in the French Department at the University of California, Berkeley.

 

Bob Dylan: Nobel Laureate

Ain’t no use

…to sit and wonder why Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature yesterday. In the words of Sara Danius, Permanent Secretary of the Swedish Academy, he is honored for having “created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”

Timothy Hampton, author of  “Absolutely Modern” Dylan, Rimbaud, and Visionary Song” (Representations 132, Fall 2015), would certainly agree. As Hampton shows in this recent essay, the new Nobel Laureate is not just an American bard but also a modernist visionary. “Dylan’s work during the mid-1960s,” writes Hampton, “might be seen as a search for a set of forms that would keep faith with Rimbaud’s famous axiom, ‘One must be absolutely modern.’…Dylan’s version of Rimbaud’s modernism involves processing an entire phantasmagoria of raw material previously unexplored in American songwriting—movies, history, literature, legend, travel, exotica, cartoons, and so on. And Dylan’s self-creation in music includes the struggle to marshal this material. Thus we might posit Dylan, not as some mere ‘genius’ who simply outpaces the competition (though he certainly does that), but as a kind of site at which a newly complex image world is engaged and managed” (2-3).

Read more about this essay here.

 

“Maroons and World History”

maroon-web-urlRepresentations board members Stephen Best and Elisa Tamarkin, Associate Professors of English at UC Berkeley, will participate in an upcoming conference on “Maroons and World History.” The conference will take place on Thursday, May 5, at the Bancroft Hotel. Papers will be pre-circulated and registration is free, but required. More information and schedule details can be found here.

 

Other participants in the conference include Bryan Wagner (Associate Professor of English at UC Berkeley), whose essay “Disarmed and Dangerous: The Strange Career of Bras-Coupéé” appeared in Representations 92 (Fall 2005).