Stay on-site and book your accommodations for the conference at UCLA. You may book your reservation during registration or through the conference secretariat.
Monthly Archive for March, 2010
Harry Lewis was a Plenary Speaker at the 2009 Conference.
Harry Lewis is the author of several influential computer science texts, including “Elements of the Theory of Computation,” with Christos Papadimitriou. His 2007 book about higher education, “Excellence Without a Soul: Does Liberal Education Have a Future?,” is a provocative challenge to institutions of higher learning to help students develop a philosophy of life and to value enduring wisdom. It has been translated into Chinese (in both Taiwanese and mainland editions) and Korean. Lewis is coauthor with Hal Abelson and Ken Ledeen of “Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness After the Digital Explosion” (2008), a guide for the general reader to the origins and public consequences of the explosion of digital information worldwide.
Harry Lewis’ paper Digital Books has been published as part of The International Journal of the Humanities.
Abstract: Digital books are potentially the realization of a grand dream–that all the world’s learning might be accessible to anyone on earth at virtually no cost. The Internet and mass magnetic storage devices have in a very short time period made the dream both technologically and economically feasible. Of course, its feasibility as a world-wide social reality remains very much in doubt. Political censorship in repressive societies has become, if anything, more aggressive with the rise of electronic communication, and even democratic societies are fighting the electronic spread of sexual material in ways that threaten open communication of other unpopular ideas. But there is another threat to knowledge ubiquity, unexpected and little-noticed: the potential creation of a de facto corporate monopoly on digital books. That would be the practical effect of the settlement, now pending judicial approval, of a copyright infringement suit against Google precipitated by its program of book scanning. The reading public of the entire world has a very large and long-term stake in the terms of this deal, which has been worked out between private parties and needs only the signature of a single federal judge to take effect.
www.Humanities-Conference.com
2010 Humanities Conference
University of California, Los Angeles, USA
29 June-2 July
Plenary Speakers
- Joyce Appleby, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
- Douglas Kellner, University of California, Los Angeles, USA
- Jodie Parys, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, Whitewater, USA
- David G. Stork, Stanford University, Stanford, USA
- Edward A. Tiryakian, Duke University, Durham, USA
- Tricia Wang, University of California, San Diego, USA
Call for Papers
If you intend to present a paper at the conference, your participation begins by submitting a paper proposal. More information on proposals, presentation types, and other options available here. If your proposal is accepted, you will then need to register for the conference.
Registration
Those who submit paper proposals should register following the acceptance of the proposal. Conference delegates who do not intend to present may register at any time. 2010 Humanities Conference registration options.
Themes
Accommodation
Conference Dinner and Tours
From Marina Warner at The Liberal…
Writers don’t make up myths; they take them over and recast them. Even Homer was telling stories that his audience already knew. If some individuals present weren’t acquainted with Odysseus’s wanderings or the Trojan War, and were listening in for the first time (as I was when a child, enthralled by the gods and goddesses in H.A. Guerber’s classic retelling), they were still aware that this was a common inheritance that belonged to everyone. Its single author – if Homer was one at all – acted as a conduit of collective knowledge, picking up the thread and telling it anew.
In an inspired essay on ‘The Translators of The Arabian Nights’, Jorge Luis Borges praises the murmuring exchanges of writers across time and cultures, and points out that the more literature talks to other literatures, and reweaves the figures in the carpet, the richer languages and expression, metaphors and stories become. Borges wasn’t a believer in anything – not even magic – but he couldn’t do without the fantastic and the mythological. He compiled a wonderfully quixotic and useful bestiary, The Book of Imaginary Beings, to include the fauna of world literature: chimeras and dragons, mermaids and the head-lolling catoblepas whose misfortune is to scorch the earth on which he tries to graze with his pestilential breath. But Borges also included some of his own inventions – The Creatures who Live in Mirrors, for example, a marvelous twist on the idea of the ghostly double. More…
An interview from the series ‘The Books Interview’ at the NewStatesman by Jonathan Derbyshire…
There’s a good deal of nostalgia in your new book, The Task of the Critic, for the “socialist culture” of the Seventies.
What’s wrong with a bit of nostalgia between friends? I think nostalgia sometimes gets too much of a bad press. One of Walter Benjamin’s extraordinary achievements, for example, was to make a kind of revolutionary virtue out of a certain concept of looking back, or nostalgia. As a tutor at Oxford during that period, I could see all kinds of energies that simply had no outlet - all kinds of radical impulses that were rather inchoate, but certainly present. So I think nostalgia is justified to some extent.There was at least one outlet for those energies, though: the Marxism seminar you ran at Wadham College, which you describe as a “hostel for battered leftists”. The left took even more of a battering in the intervening 30-odd years, didn’t it?
I think the Gramsci formula about pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will gets at something. But I was struck, when I spoke recently at King’s College London, by the extraordinarily diverse number of militant projects and campaigns that were being either conducted or planned. It was like being back in the Seventies, or the late Sixties. For the full interview…
Is true translation impossible?
From the Poetry Foundation: Ilya Kaminsky and Adam Kirsch…
ADAM KIRSCH: First of all, let me say congratulations on The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry. It’s a moving and impressive book, and I hope you’ll be able to talk a bit about how you edited it—there are so many poets from so many parts of the world, I wondered how you found them all. There are famous poems here—one of Rilke’s Duino Elegies, Akhmatova’s “Requiem,” Celan’s “Deathfugue”—but I think every reader will make a lot of discoveries, too. I particularly liked W.S. Merwin’s translations of the Argentine poet Roberto Juarroz, whose “Life Draws a Tree” is a wonderfully spare defense of art as the third force that balances life and death.
But let me start by asking you about the book’s title, which points to one of my own persistent doubts about poetry in translation. Wouldn’t you agree that there is no such thing as an international poem? A poem can only be written in one language, just as it can only be written by one person at a given moment in history. This is, in fact, one of the great themes of twentieth-century poetry, as your anthology makes very clear—the obligation of the poet to his place and time. As opposed to Symbolist and Modernist poetry, which made art a separate kingdom, most twentieth-century poets reacted to the horrors of the age by insisting, as a matter of moral and aesthetic honor, that they too are casualties of history. This is a central concern of Czeslaw Milosz, whose “Bobo’s Metamorphosis” you include: “In every pocket he carried pencils, pads of paper / Together with crumbs of bread, the accidents of life.” For more…
Op-Ed by Alain Badiou at Infinite Thought….
For almost thirty years, the present, in our country, has been a disoriented time. I mean a time that does not offer its youth, especially the youth of the popular classes, any principle to orient existence. What is the precise character of this disorientation? One of its foremost operations consists in always making illegible the previous sequence, that sequence which was well and truly oriented. This operation is characteristic of all reactive, counter-revolutionary periods, like the one we’ve been living through ever since the end of the seventies. We can for example note that the key feature of the Thermidorean reaction, after the plot of 9 Thermidor and the execution without trial of the Jacobin leaders, was to make illegible the previous Robespierrean sequence: its reduction to the pathology of some blood-thirsty criminals impeded any political understanding. This view of things lasted for decades, and it aimed lastingly to disorient the people, which was considered to be, as it always is, potentially revolutionary.
To make a period illegible is much more than to simply condemn it. One of the effects of illegibility is to make it impossible to find in the period in question the very principles capable of remedying its impasses. If the period is declared to be pathological, nothing can be extracted from it for the sake of orientation, and the conclusion, whose pernicious effects confront us every day, is that one must resign oneself to disorientation as a lesser evil. Let us therefore pose, with regard to a previous and visibly closed sequence of the politics of emancipation, that it must remain legible for us, independently of the final judgment about it.
In the debate concerning the rationality of the French Revolution during the Third Republic, Clemenceau produced a famous formula: ‘The French Revolution forms a bloc’. This formula is noteworthy because it declares the integral legibility of the process, whatever the tragic vicissitudes of its unfolding may have been. Today, it is clear that it is with reference to communism that the ambient discourse transforms the previous sequence into an opaque pathology. I take it upon myself therefore to say that the communist sequence, including all of its nuances, in power as well as in opposition, which lay claim to the same idea, also forms a bloc. More…
The most recent issue, Volume 7, Number 12 , of The International Journal of the Humanities includes:
- The Politics of International Education by Melville Miranda.
- Permitting Beauty in Architectural Education by Ehud Belferman and Iris Aravot.
- The Importance of Non-Government Organizations in the Corporate Social Movement in China by Maria Lai-Ling Lam, Alice Lai-Heung Lam and Lewis Hon-Chung Lam.
- A Possible Strategy for Developing and Supporting Relevant Research in the Humanities: The Case of Stellenbosch University, South Africa by Maryke Hunter-Husselmann.
- The Study on Layout Styles and Patterns of Passports in Qing Dynasty by Tun-Chih Chang.
- The Role of Technology in Creative Productions by José Moreno Arenas and Pedro Almodóvar: Keep the Change, Doll and Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown by Polly J. Hodge.
From n+1 magazine:
To read the 1,802 pages of the Swedish crime novelist Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy is to be told that, for all their perceived virtue, the institutions of social democracy are a farce. In Larsson’s books, American readers will find the Sweden they expect: the welfare-state comforts, Volvo security, and Ikea practicality for which the country is known. But they will also find a country they didn’t expect. In this Sweden, the country’s well-polished façade belies a broken apparatus of government whose rusty flywheels are little more than the playthings of crooks. The doctors are crooked. The bureaucrats are crooked. The newspapermen are crooked. The industrialists and businessmen, laid bare by merciless transparency laws, are nevertheless crooked. The police and the prosecutors are crooked. And the criminals, of course, are crooked, though not always: it’s often the case that criminal acts committed by do-gooders in the name of justice—from petty larceny to massive bank fraud—are the only means by which to overcome the comprehensive failure of the world’s most comprehensive welfare system. More…
From It’s Nice That:
Feminist Press is an independent nonprofit publisher based in New York. Founded in 1970, they have a wide variety of material that ranges from fiction to feminist theory. Promoting freedom of expression and social justice, they now own a great collection of books from around the world and from diverse racial and class backgrounds, as well as a section on African Women’s Writing.
Recommended reading, Waiting, a novel by Goretti Kyomuhendo.
The final issue of Volume 7 of The International Journal of the Humanities has now been published.
Volume 7, Number 12 includes:
- A Socialist Feminist Reading of Doris Lessing’s the Grass is Singing by Wan Roselezam Wan Yahya and Pedram Lalbakhsh.
- Cultural Identity Past and Present: Poetic Imagination of Muhammad Haji Salleh by Wan Roselezam Wan Yahya and Pedram Lalbakhsh.
- Open for All: Open Spaces and New Urban Lifestyles by Kin Wai Michael Siu.
- The Gifts of Forgiveness by Rungpat Roengpitya.
- Malaysia’s Model of Political Coalition: What does Majority Win Mean? by Saadon Awang.
- The Rebirth of Phoenix: A Dying Cultures Chinese Opera by Thomas C. Blair, Meng-Dar Shieh, Kuo-Hsiang Chen and Shang-chia Chiou.