October 19, 2009
African-American poetry, Shakespeare's Shylock, literary prizes and Freud
A list of fall events sponsored by Clark's Higgins School of Humanities
Monday, October 26
"Approaching the Age of Phillis Wheatley"
Dana Commons, Second Floor lounge, corner of Maywood and Florence Streets
7:30 p.m.
Professor and poet Honoree Jeffers will present from and discuss her latest project, a book-length series of poems that imagines the life and cultural milieu of the 18th-Century African-American poet Phillis Wheatley, and addresses the challenges of scholarly research when engaging an artistic subject.
Honoree Jeffers is an accomplished poet whose works highlight the struggles of African Americans and women. She has published two collections of poems, the first, The Gospel of Barbecue, published in 2000, was awarded the 1999 Stan and Tom Wick Prize for Poetry. Her second collection, entitled Outlandish Blues was published in 2003. Jeffers currently serves as assistant professor of English at the University of Oklahoma, teaching poetry and creative writing.
Lecture
"Shylock's Turquoise Ring: Jane Austen, Romanticism, and Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice"
Thursday, November 5
Dana Commons, second floor lounge, corner of Maywood and Florence Streets
7:30 p.m.
On January 26, 1814, an unknown provincial actor, Edmund Kean, made his debut at Drury Lane in the role of Shylock from Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. Later that year in March, just as Jane Austen was completing her novel Mansfield Park, she saw Kean's performance and commented on his "exquisite acting." Professor Judith Page will consider the representation and interpretation of Shakespeare's Jew in the Romantic period through the lens that Austen and other writers provide. No longer a comic villain, Shylock emerges as a flawed but sympathetic
character, and also as a cultural figure who haunts the various discourses about and representations of Jews in the Romantic period and beyond.
Lecture
"The Booker Aesthetic: Global Literature and the Politics of Literary Prizes"
Tuesday, November 17
Dana Commons, second floor lounge, corner of Maywood and Florence Streets
7:30 p.m.
Literary Prizes repeatedly catapult new and largely unknown writers onto bestseller lists, and in the process raise essential questions of prize-worthiness. What ideals and aesthetic criteria are employed to judge novels by contemporary writers? With a particular focus on the Booker Prize, Britain's most prestigious annual literary honor, Professor Steve Levin will explore the politics of literary prizes and consider their implications for shaping the way we view global literature.
Steve Levin specializes in Contemporary British and postcolonial literature, Transnational cultural studies, and critical and literary theory.
Symposium
"Global Freud Symposium"
Saturday, November 21
Dana Commons, second floor lounge, corner of Maywood and Florence Streets
9 a.m. to 5 p.m.
In 1909, Sigmund Freud delivered a series of lectures at Clark University that helped introduce his ideas to the United States and began to give psychoanalysis a global reach. As part of the celebration of the centennial of Freud's visit to Worcester, this symposium brings together
scholars who study a variety of different national, linguistic and cultural traditions in order to study how Freud's ideas were received in areas as diverse as China, Japan, Mexico, the French Caribbean and Germany. This lecture is also sponsored by the Henry J. Leir Chair in Foreign Languages and Cultures.
For more information, call x7479.
These events are free and open to the public.