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A piece from TheNational:

For centuries Germans united around the tale of Hermann, a chieftain who rallied his fellow tribesmen to defeat the Roman army. But this founding national myth, cherished by Romantic poets and Nazi ideologues, was banished from memory in the postwar era. As Hermann-mania returns to a wary Germany 2000 years after his victory, Clay Risen considers the search for national identity in a post-national age.

Atop a forested hill a few kilometres outside the sleepy west German town of Detmold stands a 19-metre high statue of Hermann, the Germanic chief whose forces annihilated nearly 20,000 Roman legionnaires at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9AD. Gazing toward the French border, the copper statue, wearing a jaunty winged helmet, holds an upraised sword, whose blade bears the inscription “German Unity is my strength, and my strength is Germany’s power”. More…

An essay by Damion Searls from The Quarterly Conversation:

Modest in aim, New Aestheticist art does not want to change the world—to bear witness, deconstruct, problematize. It does not batten onto greater social goals, the kind responsibly fundable with tax dollars. It wants merely to be beautiful.

It differs from the old Aestheticism, “art for art’s sake,” in that it no longer believes in Art as a sake either, as a holy cause. New Aestheticism is art for people’s sakes. It is not antisocial; it aims to please. It is elitist but not discriminatory, for it is open to any and all who care to love it.

MFA programs teach the craft of plot or of poetic epiphany, and a pared-down, smooth style that seems embarrassed of beauty. The dictum to show not tell has led downward to darkness, from, say, Madame Bovary and The Sun Also Rises to a prose that is all shown, that walks on ice in socks: all surface and no depth, like TV at its worst. Quote examples here. But I cannot bring myself to write an ode to dejection.

Nor can writers today draw their aesthetic calling from the visual arts, as Barbara Guest did from Matisse, Frank O’Hara from de Kooning, Rilke from Rodin, . . . Museums have turned away from beauty toward a misdirected populism whose logic Proust refuted 90 years ago already (the people, not the elite, he argues, are the only ones intelligent enough to appreciate so-called-elitist high art; in terms of content, it is plumbers who want to read about princesses, just as much as princesses want to read about plumbers). In truth museumgoers go, when they go, for art, not for pandering and exhibits of billionaires’ speedboats. More…

19 June-14 August 2009

Indiana University, Bloomington, USA

www.indiana.edu/~iuslavic/swseel/

Complete  1 full academic year of language study in 8 weeks!

Continue reading ‘Indiana University’s 59th Summer Workshop in Slavic, Eastern European, and Central Asian Languages’

Schedule of Events: March 23-24, 2009. ALL ARE WELCOME

2009 is the tercentenary of the birth of Samuel Johnson, one of the great writers of eighteenth-century England. The Bucknell Humanities Institute – supported by the Office of the Provost, and with additional support from the University Lectureship Committee, the Department of English, the Ellen Clarke Bertrand Library, and the Bucknell University Press – commemorates Johnson’s life and work, his contribution to the western literary tradition, to the American tradition of liberal education, and to his continuing place in the curriculum on college campuses such as Bucknell.

EXHIBIT:  The Bertrand Library will feature an exhibit of Johnsonian first editions and other rare books, images, and related materials, March 2 – April 30, 2009, in the exhibit space on the lower level of the library. All are welcome to visit the exhibit during library hours.

LECTURES:  On March 23, 2009 Bucknell hosts lectures on Johnson by three eminent men of letters: Christopher Ricks, Leo Damrosch, and David Ferry. ALL ARE WELCOME TO ATTEND THE LECTURES AND RECEPTION. The lecturers:  Christopher Ricks. Sarah B. Warren Professor of the Humanities and co-director of the Editorial Institute, Boston University, Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford, and formerly King Edward Professor of English Literature at the University of Cambridge. Leo Damrosch. Ernest Birnbaum Professor of English, Harvard University. David Ferry. Sophie Chantal Hart Professor Emeritus of English at Wellesley College, Visiting Lecturer in Creative Writing at Boston University, and Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

SCHEDULE of LECTURES:  March 23, 2009, 4.00 – 7.00 pm, BUCKNELL HALL

4.00 pm. Reception begins

4.30 pm. Michael Smyer, Provost of Bucknell University, Welcome

4.35 pm. Greg Clingham, Professor of English, Introductions

4.45 pm. Leo Damrosch, “Doctor Johnson vs Jean Jacques: Two Styles of Thinking and Being”

5.20 pm. Short Break

5.30 pm. David Ferry, Poetry Reading and Remarks on Johnson and Tolstoy

6.05 pm. Christopher Ricks, “Sound and Sense”

7.00 pm. Reception ends

FURTHER EVENTS:

March 24, 2009, 10.00 – 11.00 a.m. SPECIAL COLLECTIONS READING ROOM, ELLEN CLARKE BETRAND LIBRARY

Conversations with Christopher Ricks, Leo Damrosch, Greg Clingham, Philip Smallwood, and Adam Rounce. (Recorded event. Audience welcome.)

March 24, 2009, 12.00 noon – 2.00 pm, WILLARD SMITH LIBRARY

Informal buffet lunch for STUDENTS with Professors Ricks, Damrosch, and Ferry. Students interested in attending this lunch might send their name and e-mail to Professor Clingham at clingham@bucknell.edu

To see the brochure that has been distributed on campus click on the link below: http://www.bucknell.edu/Documents/UniversityPress/Johnson%20Humanities%20Institute%20brochure.pdf