Fall 2021 organized by Professor Patrick Dove
October 29, 2021
Speaker: Tingting Zhang (Ph.D. candidate)
“Paranoia in the Transnational Space: A Reading of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Moronga”
Abstract:
This presentation discusses the theme of paranoia in Horacio Castellanos Moya’s 2018 novel Moronga. The novel tells the story of two Salvadoran immigrants in the U.S. whose condition of existence is marked not only by the realities of contemporary U.S. society but also by their memories about the Salvadoran Civil War. Using paranoia as a thematic and formalist narrative device, the novel depicts how the global and the local, the present and the past are simultaneously at play in the protagonists’ subjectivity. This presentation investigates what Castellanos Moya’s writing of paranoia informs us about the questions of totality, surveillance and historical memory in the transnational space between the U.S. and Central America.
November 12, 2021
Speaker: Deborah Cohn (professor)
“Crafting an ‘image of America’ in the 1960s: American studies and/as Cold War cultural diplomacy”
Abstract:
In 1953, the Association of American Universities issued a pamphlet, “The Rights and Responsibilities of Universities and Their Faculties: A Statement on Communism and the Colleges,” which described U.S. universities as “indispensable instruments of cultural progress and national warfare” (11). Such affirmations spoke to a McCarthy-era climate in which scholarly initiatives, including the expansion of academic fields, were intertwined with official Cold War policies and priorities. The postwar emergence of area studies was enabled and accelerated by precisely this political climate—indeed, the Cuban Revolution played an indispensable role in helping to institutionalize the field of Latin American studies. The field of American studies similarly emerged during this period. While area studies (as well as modern languages and literatures and anthropology) involved the study of international “Others” and could be used to train experts to assist the government in understanding strategic regions, American studies curricula and research had the potential both to convey factual information about the nation and to shape its image. This talk examines the history of an academic certificate in American studies that was developed and implemented by Robert Spiller (University of Pennsylvania) between 1960 and 1968 at the behest of the U.S. Information Agency, and targeted at non-U.S. citizens outside of the U.S. The certificate’s genesis and trajectory were rooted in and inflected by contemporary interest in the field of American studies as offering a means of conducting cultural diplomacy by disseminating information about the U.S., its way of life, and the benefits offered by the democratic system. The history of the program, like that of the field as a whole, thus reveals how American studies assumed an ambassadorial role abroad for the nation in its new capacity as a world power. At the same time, it also shows the fault lines between the images of the nation that scholars and U.S. officials sought to project, and what audiences abroad were most interested in knowing.
December 3, 2021
Speaker: Giovanni Molina Rosario (Ph.D. candidate)
“Tracing Feminine Materiality in Ancient Thought and Literature: An Essential Step to Understand the Celestinesque”
Abstract:
Since Antiquity, canonical authors within the Western literary and philosophical tradition tended to associate femininity and effeminacy with sensuous corporeality, fondness of objects, and mundane mutability. In turn, these associations influenced aesthetic developments around female characterizations or plots concerning materialistic and sensual characters. Eventually, this tradition entered Iberian literature, until La Celestina willfully turned it on its head. Afterwards, other Celestinesque works reacted to Fernando de Roja’s aesthetic and philosophical challenge by adapting literary devices and aesthetic choices more congruous with the Greco-Roman heritage, as was costmary in the Renaissance and Early Baroque. In this presentation I offer some instances of direct dialogue between Antiquity and the Celestinesque concerning feminine materiality to show how associations around it are vital to understand both La Celestina’s innovative approach and its ensuing literary reworkings.
The College of Arts