Written by Eric Dalle (Comparative Literature)Professor Illouz began her talk with an overview of her general research project which she describes as “how capitalism transforms the self.” That is an issue I have been struggling with in my own examination of Mainland Chinese literature beginning in the 1980s. This was, therefore, my personal point of departure in addressing some of the issues in...
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- Begging the Question of Emotional CapitalismWritten by Bianca Isaki (Asian American Studies Program)Eva Illouz’s Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism (2007) is a compilation of three Adorno Lectures she delivered in Frankfurt in 2004. This pedestrian statement, which I grabbed from an “About This Book” blurb from googlebooks.com, actually says a lot about the book’s pedagogical...
- Written by Jennifer Bliss (Comparative Literature)As someone with only partial knowledge of Kaja Silverman's books and the works of Gerhard Richter, I prepared myself for the possibility of a lecture that might fly right over my head. Instead, on Friday afternoon I listened to a deceptively clear and accessible talk by Silverman on Richter's work and his relationship to German history and the...
- Written by Dan Colson (English)In my literature classes, I teach authors like John Dos Passos, Michael Gold, Jack London, and Jack Conroy. We talk about socialism, communism, fascism, and democracy and invariably someone in the class (myself or one of the students) draws a comparison between the events and ethos of the pre-WWII United States and our present situation. The idea of teaching the...
- Written by Margaret C. Flinn, Dept. of French and Unit for Cinema StudiesLike many University of Illinois faculty members, I was perplexed by what I found in my email one day this September. “The Fourth Issue of Ethics Matters!” says that The law isn’t always as clear as we’d like, so here are a few specific...
- Written by Michael Rothberg, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive TheoryGreetings from Berlin, where I’m spending several months of my sabbatical. Among other things, I hope to use my time here to provide an outside-the-US perspective on some of the questions of theory, culture, and politics that concern us at Kritik and at the Unit for...
- Written by Roberto Dainotto, Department of Romance Studies, Duke UniversityIn a note on “Methodological Questions” penned in his Prison Notebooks around 1933, Antonio Gramsci wrote: “If one wants to study the conception of a world-view that has not been exposed systematically… (and whose essential coherence is to be found not in a single essay or in a series of essays, but in the entire...
- Written by Katia Curbelo (ICR/Cultural Studies/Italian and Spanish) and Amauri Serrano (Italian/MSLIS)In Europe (in Theory), Roberto Dainotto traces theorizations of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, singling out the surfacing structures and paradigms that have shaped current ideas of Europe and its cultural identity. He does so by attempting to provide a “genealogy of...
- Written by Carl Lehnen, EnglishOne of the primary goals of postcolonial studies has been to deconstruct articulations of cultural difference that depend on binaries like East and West, primitive and modern, colonizer and colonized. Such scholarship has shown that Europe does not exist in splendid isolation, but in complex networks of migration, imperialism, and capital. Yet, insofar as...
- Written by Lauren Goodlad, Interim Director, Unit for CriticismOn Monday September 15th the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory held the first of three Author's Roundtables: a discussion by Roberto Dainotto, professor of Romance Studies at Duke University, of his recent book Europe (in Theory) (Duke UP, 2007). The event also featured three respondents: Elena Delgado (Spanish), Manuel Rota...
- Written by Emanuel Rota, ItalianIn his latest book, Roberto Dainotto argues that, with the rise of modernity, European identity, hegemonized by French authors, acquires a Northern/Southern opposition, next to the traditional Orient/Occident opposition. Inspired by Gramsci, Dainotto uses his sharp philological tools to identify the emergence of such a tradition, convincingly showing that this new...
- Written by Kevin Healey, Institute of Communications Research“Political democracy is Christian in the sense that man, not merely one man but every man, is there considered a sovereign being, a supreme being.” - Marx, “On the Jewish Question”For her SCT lecture,...
- Written by Laurie Johnson, Germanic Languages and Literatures“Secrets are cool,” says Hubertus Hendrik Bigend, the mysterious advertising magnate and “nominal Belgian” whose role in William Gibson’s novel Pattern Recognition (2003) is reprised in Spook Country (2007, set in 2006). “Secrets are the very root of cool” (SC 108)....
- Written by Kevin Healey, Institute for Communications ResearchEditor's Note: This post is part of a summer-long series that includes the writing of Kevin Healey (Communications) and Martha Webber (English) as they attend Cornell's SCT (School of Criticism and Theory) during the summer of 2008. As always...
- Written by Michael Rothberg, Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory It’s not clear to me that there is a consensus definition of the humanities, especially among non-humanist colleagues, administrators, and citizens, but even among some humanities scholars themselves! According to the Oxford American Dictionary, the humanities are...