By Associate Professor Carolyn Vellenga Berman Feb. 16, 2016. In a striking inaugural lecture for the Literary Studies Department’s new series on Literature and... Read More
The UC Berkeley Comparative Literature Undergraduate Research Symposium 2016 committee is currently accepting proposals for its 5th annual conference. The conference will take place... Read More
by Hilary Ilkay In case you missed our big symposium on Emma at 200: Fiction, Fashion, Feminism, in the fall of 2015, the video... Read More
October 10, 2019
Ann Snitow May 9, 1943-August 10, 2019 Ann Snitow, a founding faculty member of Lang College and the creator of the Gender Studies Program at the New School, passed away on August 10, 2019. She was a beloved member of the Literary Studies faculty. While indeed her books and essays are crucial texts in feminist studies and in the life of the mind, as Literary Studies colleagues our remembrances here are more personal, testaments not just to her work but to the power of her being.
October 5, 2016
Literary Studies’s very own Mark Greif has received a lot of attention for his new book Against Everything. Read the New York Times book review here, the higher education supplement here and the Literary Hub interview here. […]
By Associate Professor Carolyn Vellenga Berman
Feb. 16, 2016. In a striking inaugural lecture for the Literary Studies Department’s new series on Literature and Design, Fordham Professor Christopher GoGwilt reframed Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness on the page and on the screen. Eschewing the customary method of projecting quotes from a prose text, GoGwilt foregrounded the spacing and the effects of print by offering side-by-side views of a scanned page of the novella in book form alongside his own “starling” rearrangements of Conrad’s sentences in a non-European poetic form, to be read in vertical columns from right to left. For example:
GoGwilt had enough material in this single reframed quotation to speak for forty-five minutes about the “blank spaces” on imperial maps and the linguistic transpositions involved in map-naming, but instead he urgently refocused our attention on a seemingly transparent frame within the passage that readers of Heart of Darkness tend to overlook: the “shop-window.” He traced the implicit frames provided by Conrad’s series of overlooked windows in the text, drawing upon Isobel Armstrong’s imperial history of nineteenth-century “Victorian Glassworlds,” and Deborah Silverman’s history of Belgian Art Nouveau stained glass, with its use of the “primitive” imagery of imperial exploitation – in particular, elephant tusks – before closing with the “fading and narrow sheen of the window” where the Intended stretches her “pale hands” at the end of the narrative.
The microphone buzzed loudly at the opening of the talk, until an A/V staff member came out to adjust it. Professor GoGwilt asked, “Shall I begin again?” Although we had heard enough at that point to go on, the answer would now be: Yes.
