Monthly Archive for May, 2011

Tickets Available–Humanities Conference Dinner

Published on May 31, 2011 in Headline and Newsletter. 0 Comments

The 2011 Humanities Conference delegates and plenary speakers will gather together for the conference dinner on Thursday, 9 June at the Hotel San Antón.

The hotel is located in the historical and commercial center of Granada. Opposite the Conference Centre, it offers lovely views of the Alhambra and Sierra Nevada. The evening will include a five course meal, wine and champagne, beer, sodas, coffee, and live musical entertainment from local performers.

To reserve your place at the dinner, or for more information, please visit the Activities & Extras webpage.

The Novel Is Not Dead: Despite Critics’ Best Attempts

Published on May 26, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Jess Row at the Boston Review…

In 1941, as Panzer divisions closed in on Moscow, as Virginia Woolf slipped stones into her pockets and disappeared into the Ouse, Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin huddled in his room at the Gorky Institute of World Literature and wrote:

The novel comes into contact with the spontaneity of the inconclusive present; this is what keeps the genre from congealing. The novelist is drawn toward everything that is not yet completed. He may turn up on the field of representation in any authorial pose, he may depict real moments from his own life or make allusions to them. . . . After all, the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, between literature and nonliterature, are not laid up in heaven. Every specific situation is historical. And the growth of literature is not merely development and change within the fixed boundaries of any given definition; the boundaries themselves are constantly changing.“Epic and Novel” was not published in Russian until 1975 (in the book The Dialogic Imagination) or in English until 1981. Thereafter, in academic circles, it became a seminal text, even something of a craze. In the broader culture, however, and especially in criticism of the contemporary novel, Bakhtin’s influence hardly registers. Perhaps because he arrived late on the scene, or because his work is dense, abstract, Hegelian, philological, and, on the surface, not very interested in the twentieth century—whatever the reason, it’s a shame, because in 2011 “Epic and Novel” still feels like news. More…

Humanities Conference–Walking Tour Available

Published on May 25, 2011 in Headline and Newsletter. 0 Comments

The 2011 Humanities Conference has organized two walking tours of Granada during the conference – Wednesday, 8 June at 18:00 & Saturday, 11 June at 18:00.

Join us on for a walking tour of Granada. The route will take us through the three major historic areas of Granada – the Jewish Quarter, the Arab Quarter and the Christian Quarter. We will look at the contrast between modern Granada and old Granada and learn a little about the history of Granada. We will have the opportunity to peep into the enclosed “carmens” or gardens and see spectacular views of Granada and beyond. The itinerary is flexible depending on the group but normally takes around 3 hours. The price of the tour includes two drinks and two tapas at a local tapas restaurant.

To reserve your place on a tour, or for more information, please visit the Activities & Extras webpage.

The Travails Of Our Post-Colonial Subconscious: Or What Does The English Language Have To Do To Be Recognized As An Indian Language?

Published on May 23, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

From The Spinning Head…

A very curious essay appeared in the recent issue of The Caravan magazine. Written by Nilanjana S. Roy, titled ‘How To Read In Indian‘, it veered uncertainly between discussing the emergence of the phenomenal success of Indian writers writing in English, and a discussion of outsiders writing stories about India. Subtitled The Long History of a Literary Argument That Refuses to Go Away it clearly meant to be a literary discussion, but in fact it quickly diverged into a discussion about the outsider writing about India.

Roy begins by recounting some of the debates at a gathering of Indian writers and intellectuals at Neemrama Fort Palace, and moves towards the criticism that so-called Indian critics have made of those from the so-imagined outside writing about India. Roy mentions Mulk Raj Anand’s criticisms of Salman Rushdie, various criticisms hurled against V.S. Naipual and his works on India, and a strange reference to Pankaj Mishra’s recent critical study of Patrick French’s new book on India. More… (Image available here)

Harold Bloom: An Uncommon Reader

Published on May 21, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Sam Tanenhaus at The New York Times…

At the age of 80, with almost 40 books behind him and nearly as many accumulated honors, Harold Bloom has written, in “The Anatomy of Influence,” a kind of summing-up — or, as he puts it in his distinctive idiom, mixing irony with histrionism, “my virtual swan song,” born of his urge “to say in one place most of what I have learned to think about how influence works in imaginative literature.”

Influence has long been Bloom’s abiding preoccupation, and the one that established him, in the 1970s, as a radical, even disruptive presence amid the groves of academe. This may surprise some who think of Bloom primarily as a stalwart of the Western canon, fending off the assaults of “the School of Resentment” and its “rabblement of lemmings,” or as a self-confessed Bardolator, swooning over “Hamlet” and “Lear.”

Not that Bloom abjures these subsequent selves. There is much canon fodder in this new book, along with re­affirmed vows of fidelity to Shakespeare, “the founder” not only of modern literature but also, in Bloom’s expansive view, of modern personhood and its “infinite self-consciousness.” More…

Excavation: Lila Azam Zanganeh interviews Amitav Ghosh

Published on May 20, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

From Guernica…

Many novelists start out dreaming in their bed at night. As Sartre describes in The Words, they dream of how they’ll write these wild romantic novels. But Amitav Ghosh seems to come from quite a different place. As a young man he worked as a journalist; his first job was at the Indian Express newspaper, based in New Delhi. He next earned a PhD at Oxford in social anthropology, followed by a stint in Egypt. As he tells Lila Azam Zanganeh, our “Nabokovian“ interviewer, his background in anthropology—as opposed to, say, an MFA—might have been the best training imaginable for his fiction and essays: “What does an anthropologist do?” he asks. “You just go and talk to people, then at the end of the day you write down what you see.… It trains you to observe, and it trains you to listen to the ways in which people speak.”

Ghosh published the first of his six novels, The Circle of Reason, in 1986, and his career was given a boost when France awarded the book a prestigious Prix Médicis Etranger. While he lives in Brooklyn, writes in English and feels at home in the New York publishing scene, his sensibility is clearly that of an internationalist. Enabled in his career by writers such as Salman Rushdie and V.S. Naipaul, he cares almost nothing about identity in its narrowest sense. Why? Because of India. “One of the reasons why is because anybody who’s lived in India knows that India is incredibly, incredibly diverse.… That’s one of the wonderfully liberating things about India; it lets you be exactly who you want to be.” More…

From revolution to Enlightenment

Published on May 19, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Dan Hind at Aljazeera…

Scientific enquiry and politics have always been bound together. The birth of a recognisably modern scientific establishment in Britain coincided with the end of absolute monarchy. An oligarchy of landed and learned gentlemen oversaw the creation of the Royal Society in 1660.

The origins of this institution lay in the secretive world of magical research and court politics. But its founders now aspired to work for the good of all mankind in a spirit of fellowship, and they used the open surveillance of peer review to enforce honesty. These men identified with the state – indeed they saw it as their ally in the great work of human progress, but they no longer risked torture or exile if their work offended an all-powerful monarch.

‘Silting up’

Over time, the system created in the seventeenth century opened its ranks to talent from all over the world. Women and men without property can now become scientists, a development that would have astonished many of the first members of the Royal Society. But in important respects science still belongs to a pre-democratic age. More…

Humanistic Ecology: The Integration of Magic, Medicine, and Science

Published on May 19, 2011 in Book and Newsletter. 0 Comments

Humanistic Ecology: The Integration of Magic, Medicine, and Science by Paolo Palmieri is now available from The Humanities imprint.

This book is a work of cultural, pedagogical, and social advocacy. It sketches the project of humanistic ecology, the idea that cultural, social, and educational renewal can and should be pursued within a humanistic framework. Humanistic ecology builds on the interrelatedness of traditions such as
magic, medicine, and science, as exemplified in the history of Western civilization. Humanistic ecology aims at integrating forgotten or marginalized pathways to knowledge and wellbeing. It emphasizes their transformative power for the betterment of our lives.

The book looks at the future but is informed with the spirit the past. Knowledge, happiness, and health are not inscribed in our genes, or in the social institutions of industrialized societies. In a nutshell, humanistic ecology envisions holistic forms of inquiry, learning, and healing, beyond the sectarian divisions of contemporary social and intellectual life.

Paolo Palmieri is a historian and philosopher of science at the University of Pittsburgh.


The Quiddities

Published on May 14, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From Joe Milutis at Triple Canopy…

A search for the word this on the Web will get you RickRoll’D. The various unrelated hits that appear include This American Life, This Is Why You’re Fat, and a site that asks: “If you are feeling suicidal now, please stop long enough to read this.” When one takes advantage of a more sophisticated Google device, the increasingly popular Ngram Viewer, the statistical portrait served up from the depths of Google’s digitized book collection is just as opaque. Even though it carries with it an aura of the scientific, this Ngram tells us no more about the demonstrative pronoun’s most interesting uses than do even the ridiculously irrelevant top search results for this.

Yet this is a piece of literary minutiae, which, while straining the capacities of any search engine, has had a profound effect on literary experimentation. Why, for example, is our search not topped with William Carlos Williams’s:

—of this, make it of this, this
this, this, this, this

More…

Humanities Journal, Volume 8, Number 12 now available

Published on May 14, 2011 in Journal and Newsletter. 0 Comments

humanities_frontThe twelfth issue of Volume 8 of The International Journal of the Humanities has now been published.

Volume 8, Number 12 contains: