Session I
9:30 a.m. - 10:30 a.m.
EAST ASIAN LANGUAGES & CIVILIZATIONS
Michael Bourdaghs (SESSION CANCELED)
WHAT DOES THE J IN J-POP STAND FOR?
Stuart 102
Over the last hundred years, Japanese musicians performing popular songs in genres commonly identified as being American - including jazz, blues, country, folk, rock, and hip hop, among others - have confronted a variety of demands for "authenticity." Should the real thing sound American, or should it sound Japanese? This talk will explore some of the creative responses Japanese musicians have made to these impossibly contradictory demands.
ENGLISH LANGUAGE & LITERATURE
Christina von Nolcken
BEOWULF AND ITS WORLD
Harper 140
As is now well known from films, graphic novels, and other popular adaptations, Beowulf, our most important Old English poem, treats a super-hero's fights against three monsters. Often overlooked, however, are its many allusions to historical events involving pre-English peoples still living in their continental Germanic homelands. We will consider how these allusions contribute to the poem's meaning. Man can sometimes defeat the monsters, the poem seems to tell us, but his is also a terrifyingly unstable world.
ENGLISH LANGUAGE & LITERATURE
Larry Rothfield
NOBODY THOUGHT OF CULTURE: BEHIND THE LOOTING OF THE BAGHDAD MUSEUM
Harper 130
The looting of the Iraq National Museum in the wake of the American invasion of April 2003 shocked the world. More than merely a symptom of a general failure to plan for the post-war period, the failure to secure the museum was a consequence of multiple shortcomings within government, the military, and even the archaeological and heritage-protection community. What has happened to Iraq's archaeological heritage since 2003? What can and should be done now to help Iraq protect what remains of its patrimony? And, beyond Iraq, what can we learn from what went wrong to avoid causing similar harm in any future conflict?
ENGLISH LANGUAGE & LITERATURE
Lisa Ruddick (REGISTRATION CLOSED)
HOW DO WE DISCOVER THAT OTHER PEOPLE ARE REAL?
Stuart 105
At this session, we will closely read two short poems, by George Herbert and Sharon Olds, which explore the process by which a human being comes to acknowledge the independent reality of others. What does it mean when someone thinks others are merely an extension of the self--what has gone wrong? Why is it worth developing an awareness that other people are independent agents, with their own vitality and their own fears and yearnings? In tandem with our reading of the two poems, I will introduce participants to recent psychoanalytic theories that accunt for this human capacity to nourish oneself on the separate existence and aliveness of others.
MUSIC
Philip Gossett
THE HOT AND THE COLD: DID VERDI COMPOSE AN OPERA ON SHAKESPEARE'S "KING LEAR"?
Fulton Hall, Goodspeed
That Verdi was interested in writing an opera based on Shakespeare's "King Lear" is well known, but scholars have been divided as to whether he iactually composed music for this project. My presentation will reconsider the matter on the basis of new information about the way Verdi interacted with his librettists (including those who supplied him with text for a "King Lear"), and will also draw important examples from two operas the composer did prepare: "Un ballo in maschera" and "La forza del destino."
ROMANCE LANGUAGES & LITERATURES/ ART HISTORY
Daisy Delogu and Aden Kumler
LOVE'S LOOKS, LOVE'S BOOKS: THE THIRTEENTH-CENTURY ROMANCE OF THE ROSE
Special Collections
The Romance of the Rose was arguably the single most influential text of the later Middle Ages, one that also inspired extensive programs of illumination, designed to visually identify, explicate, and at times reinflect the columns of verse in which they were painted. This talk will address both textual and visual aspects of this important work, using the University's own 1365 manuscript of the Rose as a point of reference.
SOUTH ASIAN LANGUAGES & CIVILIZATIONS
Gary Tubb
LOVE AND RELIGION IN CLASSICAL SANSKRIT POETRY
Stuart 104
The seventh-century Indian poet Bana was credited by many later writers with having introduced a new boldness into the already sophisticated tradition of poetry in classical Sanskrit. Although Bana is known primarily for his long prose poems, the short verses attributed to him show the special features of his style in especially compact form. This talk will present a few of these miniature poems, in the hope of showing what was so exciting about his approach to poetry, and the surprising ways in which layers of religiously oriented meaning contributed to the distinctive richness of his work.