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Calendar
CMRS Roundtable: “From Dualisms to Convergences” Professor Ricardo Quinones' (Claremont McKenna) recently-published Dualisms: The Agons of the Modern World centered on differences, deeply-rooted, contentious and recurrent, and on enmities that were unending, not even abbreviated by death itself. In that book, aroused by the strange neglect of Erasmus and Voltaire, he promised a second study, now completed, that would focus on similarities, on the convergences across the centuries that bring two such preeminent intellectuals together in their fates and fashions. At this Roundtable, Prof. Quinones will read some snippets from Dualisms and answer questions before outlining the major convergences that make Erasmus and Voltaire, if not brothers under the skin, at least kindred spirits, who may be joined together in what has been heralded as the "second Reformation."
CMRS Ahmanson Conference Series
This CMRS Ahmanson Conference, organized by advanced graduate students in medieval studies, coincides with the completion of a two-year project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to create a digital database of the ninth-century “Plan of St. Gall,” an elaborate two-dimensional plan for a monastic complex. The conference will focus on the roots of medieval culture found in Carolingian monasticism, the reforms of the eighth and ninth centuries, and their impact in later periods. It offers an opportunity for scholars from a variety of disciplines to share current scholarship on medieval monasticism as well as to familiarize themselves with digital resources for the study of monasticism. This conference is made possible by a generous grant from the Ahmanson Foundation, and cosponsored by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and the Dean of Humanities of the UCLA College of Letters and Science, and the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. It was organized by UCLA graduate students Leanne Good, Ned Schoolman, and Sarah Whitten, all of the History department, with the assistance of Dr. Barbara Schedl (UCLA and the University of Vienna) and Professor Patrick Geary (UCLA). Abstracts of the conference talks are listed at www.cmrs.ucla.edu/programs/medieval_monasticism_conf.html.
CMRS Co-sponsored Lecture Micha Perry (UCLA) speaks at this UCLA Center for Jewish Studies and Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies co-sponsored Faculty/Student seminar.
CMRS Ahmanson Conference Series This roundtable will bring together a small group of medievalists who are working collaboratively on a book on Chrétien de Troyes, the foremost author of the French Middle Ages. The corpus of texts attributed to him has been the object of the earliest and longest medieval criticism. Just as Chrétien worked within networks of exchange, this project starts from the premise of collaboration and interdisciplinarity, each scholar from her own theoretical and intellectual perspective, but in a collective effort to understand the larger cultural, historical, and literary moment of the second half of the twelfth century. Participants will include Professors Virginie Greene (Harvard University), Sarah Kay (Princeton University), Sharon Kinoshita (University of California, Santa Cruz), Peggy McCracken (University of Michigan-Ann Arbor), and Zrinka Stahuljak (University of California-Los Angeles).
CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture: “Translated Turks on the Early Modern
Stage” When Othello referred to himself as a “malignant and a turban'd Turk,” what would his audience have understood? How did the term “Turk” travel from language to language, between one cultural context and others, from one European stage to another? What did it gain, and what did it lose in its travels? The “Turk”--an infamously composite figure, sodomitical, cruel, generous, lascivious, scheming, spectacular--also stepped on stage to represent theatrical representation itself. What does the stage “Turk” tell us about the way in which the early European theater imagined itself? Professor Jacques Lezra (Comparative Literature, Spanish & Portuguese; NYU) considers these questions in this lecture.
CMRS Sawyer Seminar, “John Trevisa v. Lord Berkeley: Controlling the Language of Dispute” With Professor Rita Copeland (English, Classical Studies, & Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania). Under the patronage of Lord Thomas Berkeley, a powerful aristocrat, John Trevisa (1342 -1402) translated important Latin texts into English at a time when English itself could be seditious, when people were arrested just for carrying the Wycliffite Bible in English. One of the works that Trevisa translated is a dispute, the Dialogue between a Knight and a Clerk. And in the prologue to his version of a universal history, Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon, Trevisa stages a debate between a lord (his master, Berkeley) and a clerk (Trevisa himself), raising questions of linguistic access against hermeneutic control, English insularity against Latin internationalism. The lord finally wins when proto-national political prestige prevails against the claims of an international ecclesiastical class. Download the readings in advance at www.cmrs.ucla.edu/disputation_readings/index.html#trevisa_berkeley. You will need to contact CMRS for the user name and password to access the files. Call 310-825-1880 or email cmrs@humnet.ucla.edu.
CMRS Roundtable, "The Devil's Interval" Professor Jacques Lezra (Comparative Literature, Spanish & Portuguese; NYU) discusses Adorno and music. In Minima Moralia, Theodor Adorno writes: “‘I have seen the world spirit,’ not on horse-back, but on wings and without a head, and that refutes, at the same stroke, Hegel’s philosophy of history.” Adorno’s thought-image places “Hitler’s robot-bombs” alongside the images of Alexander’s corpse, Caesar’s murder or Napoleon’s exile in St. Helena’s, with the goal of “refuting” the Hegelian claim that at certain privileged moments “world-spirit manifests itself directly in symbols” [unmittelbar symbolisch sich ausdruckt]. It is a disquieting, searching image, and it is associated with Adorno’s running critique of the “immediate” presentation of aesthetic experience generally, and of “symbols” particularly. Nowhere does Adorno more emphatically treat the temptation, and the danger, of immediacy than in his writing on music, and in particular in his understanding of the function of rules and of rule-following in modern music. Can we derive a “philosophy of history” from these writings? What principles of change, internal to modern music, take the place of the direct, symbolic manifestation of world-spirit that one finds in Hegel? Edward Said’s late return to the concept of humanism arises from a symptomatic misreading of Adorno’s answer to these questions. (Said’s humanism may amount to a disavowal of the diabolical principles he encounters in Adorno’s work.) This talk approaches the problem through a discussion of the concept of “interval” that develops in Adorno’s account of Wagner and Schoenberg’s different responses to Beethoven’s rethinking of the so-called devil’s interval, or tritone (one might say: from Fidelio through the “Tristan” chord to Moses und Aron).
CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Lecture, “Feasting with the Gods: Ovid, Bellini, Shakespeare” This talk by Professor Susanne Wofford (Dean, The Gallatin School, and Professor of English, New York University) will look at the treatment of the near rape of Lotis by Priapus in Giovanni Bellini's great painting The Feast of the Gods (parts of which were later repainted by Titian) and at the episodes in Ovid's Fasti on which it is based in order to consider the Roman roots of Shakespearean pastoral and festive drama, in this case especially in A Midsummer Night's Dream.
UCLA English Department Lecture by CMRS Distinguished Visiting Scholar Professor Susanne Wofford will take up the relation of Twelfth Night to humanist ideas of festivity via the humanist comedy Gl’ingannati, written in 1531 by the Academy of the Intronati in Siena, and performed (as well as set) on the day of Carnival (Mardi Gras). Professor Wofford will continue her discussion of how to interpret Shakespearean festivity from the point of view of classical sources. Here she will again be thinking of different kinds of “foreign” sources and intertexts for “English” notions of festivity as embodied in Shakespearean comedy, and about the kind of foreign emotions and foreign models for the self made possible if we read these comedies as bilingual or multilingual texts. Prof. Wofford will be reading Shakespeare as a translator and as a dramatist of and within a culture of translation where both classical and continental models are overlaid on native practices.
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University of California, Los Angeles
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