MLA 2013: two panels on periodization

by ehayot Posted on November 13, 2012

I’ll be speaking on Friday at 10:15 as part of a panel called “What Does Comparative Literature Do for, against, after Periodization?”; and then participating in a roundtable, “Parsing World Literature in the Twenty-First Century: Alternatives to Period, Region, and Genre,” on Saturday at 8:30. Following that I’ll be at the panel on “Teaching Arabic Literature,” which is sponsored by the MLA Publications Committee.

I’m also hoping to attend a session on “Periodization and its Discontents,” which takes place Thursday evening at 7pm.

Beyond that I’ll be doing interviews for our two searches, and having a book party with my friend Sianne to celebrate the recent publication of our books.

Update: First talk, with the official title “After Periodization”: meh. I didn’t close well. Second talk (“Parsing World Lit”), done in an adrenaline-fueled craze after I lost all my notes: excellent. Close not fantastic but everything else felt solid. Lesson learned.

I missed the “Periodization and its Discontents” session, which I heard went well, because I was at the ACLA board meeting.

Also, Arabic Lit panel: very good! I learned a great deal.

Posted in Ephemera | Leave a comment

The disappointments of fiction

by ehayot Posted on November 11, 2012

If you have time this Sunday please read Walter Kirn’s review of Samson Graham-Muñoz’s new novel, The String Theory Quartet. 

The following quotations are from the novel:

“The weather today was the weather of yesterday and tomorrow it would be the weather again: mummifyingly dry and hot and whipped by cyclones of toxic pink particulates that settled on the brown fields like vile confetti. Buddy Dean was up early, roaming about the house in a pair of patched digital overalls and a pre-diaspora Chicago Cubs cap. ‘Don’t be downhearted,’ came the leader’s voice over the old RCA tube radio. ‘The soil may be dust and the rains a memory, but courage is the crop that never fails.’ Buddy listened, too weak even to nod. Out the window a pair of skinny crows pecked for quarks and bosons in the yard.”

… and from a very different section, stylistically (Kirn compares it to Hemingway):

“He picked up his instrument. He drew the bow. He drew it across the strings. Some sounds came out. The leader was moved. His voice boomed through the envelope. An old voice, like music. But not music. A voice. ‘Keep playing, my boy,’ it commanded. And so he played. While amethyst planets burned coolly in the dusk and children who’d never seen whales or dreamed of unicorns imagined they had. Seen whales. Dreamed unicorns.”

And from an interview with the author:

“When I used to cut hair in my father’s Miami barbershop I learned something true about scissors: they have two blades. One for stretching the strand until it’s taut, the other for lopping it off. Two blades, one purpose. That’s how I write fiction. With my scissors-mind.

Good lord, I wish this guy existed. I spent 5 minutes searching for Graham-Muñoz and The String Theory Quartet on Amazon before realizing that the whole thing is a mirage. Well done, Walter Kirn!

Source: Printculture

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

The miracles of human creativity

by ehayot Posted on November 11, 2012

One of the most amazing things about the digital age’s redistribution of the means of aesthetic production and distribution is that it reveals how much love and ambition remain connected to the work of making. Here you have, for free, a remaking of Star Wars entirely in ASCII. The hours it must have taken to do this are astonishing.

I dream of a world in which copyright, which has become a way for corporations to develop a stranglehold on innovation (and functions, as with Disney, in the manner of primitive accumulation), disappears in the wake of content freely produced for others out of this form of love, and the beauties that attend to it.

For that to happen we must, however, have leisure.

Source: Printculture

Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Printculture

by ehayot Posted on November 2, 2012

Printculture is a collaborative blog/magazine that a few friends of mine and I started in early 2005, back when people still did that kind of thing. It features short posts and longer essays on contemporary culture and politics, indie music, cities, murder, teaching, and video games, among other things. I stopped writing for it around the time that my daughter was born in 2008, then started again in 2012. Printculture remains widely admired by those in the know for its dogged eclecticism and its savvy readership. Kidding.

printculture.com

Posted in Writing | Leave a comment

On Literary Worlds (2012)

by ehayot Posted on October 2, 2012

On Literary Worlds (Oxford UP, 2012) argues that contemporary debates about world literature and world literary systems can be rethought through an attention to the world-creating force of aesthetic objects. The book re-describes the history of modern literature as we know it (or as we think we know it), developing new concepts and new formal languages to describe the aesthetic “physics” of the socially and imaginatively possible. Purchase from Amazon.com

Posted in Writing | Leave a comment

Comp Lit 490: Video Game Studies

by ehayot Posted on August 2, 2012

This course is a comparative introduction to the nature and history of video games as cultural artifacts, from Pong to online role-playing. It introduces students to academic discussion on and creative work in new digital forms including hypertexts narrative, video games, machinima, and more. Students will survey major debates over the meaning and value of video games, and study some of the major theoretical terms and perspectives developed to elaborate the cultural and sociological value of video games.

Download the course syllabus

Posted in Penn State University | Leave a comment

Summer 2012: Two Talks in Nanjing

by ehayot Posted on June 19, 2012

I gave two talks this summer at Nanjing University, both on chapters of On Literary Worlds (the first and the third chapters, respectively). First time giving talks in Chinese, which worked so-so for the first talk (about 90 percent Chinese, the rest English) and much better for the second (80-85 percent Chinese… apparently this is my comfort level). Slides below the break. Continue reading →

Posted in Ephemera | Leave a comment

Comp Lit 503b: Reading Capital

by ehayot Posted on March 19, 2012

Books

Marx, Capital Volume 1 (Penguin 978-0-14-044568-8)

Harvey, A Companion to Marx’s Capital

Jameson, Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume 1

I thought originally we might do some reading from Althusser, but it seemed like too much. I recommend the book, but you don’t have to buy it.

Course information:

We’re reading the first volume of Marx’s Capital, which is, according to the back cover, “one of the most notorious works of modern times.” So you have that to look forward to.

Download the syllabus.

Posted in Courses, Penn State University | Leave a comment

Comp Lit 122U: Global Science Fictions

by ehayot Posted on January 2, 2012

What could or would it mean to think science fiction globally? Among other things it would mean considering both (a) the near-total dominance of English in the canonical histories of the genre, and the resulting effects of that dominance on practices of translation, hence the nature of science fiction’s global production; and (b) the nature of the global in science fiction, hence the nature of sf’s global imagination or representation. These questions reify (casually) allegories of domination and of possibility, to some extent respectively, but also, of course, mutually. To think about them means thinking about the politics of sf, indeed of thinking about how we understand the relation between self-consciously political sf and the politics of the vast majority of contemporary sf literature. We will begin with politics, use it to frame history, and use both to parse, over the course of nine novels and two or three films, some preliminary answers to the question with which we began.

Download the course syllabus

Posted in Penn State University | Leave a comment

Against Periodization Talk

by ehayot Posted on September 12, 2011

I spoke in the universe’s longest-running comparative literature talk series here at Penn State to present part of what became “Against Periodization” (and of course the third part of On Literary Worlds). I start out nervous, but at some point things smooth out; the Q&A is quite good and in fact the question from Chris Reed produced a fairly significant change between the NLH article version and the version that went into the book.

Posted in Ephemera | Leave a comment

Comp Lit 504: Prose Fiction

by ehayot Posted on August 2, 2011

This is a course in the history of prose fiction from the eleventh century to 1880. Among other things it aims to destabilize the category of the “novel,” and to ask whether the structure that would separate the novel from its predecessors can be justified on grounds beyond the ideological.  Readings will come from a variety of novelistic (or para-novelistic) forms, including the monogatari, the romance, the picaresque, the xiaoshuo, the maqama, the historical novel, the epistolary novel, the fictional memoir, and the bildungsroman. We will also study theories of narrative and narratology, theories of genre, and theories of literary history. Readings from: Murasaki, Malory, de Quevedo, Al-Hamadhani, Rabelais, Cervantes, Richardson, Cao Xueqin, Sterne, Goethe, Scott, Sand, Balzac, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Machado de Asis, and others.

Download the Course Syllabus

Posted in Penn State University | Leave a comment