Lecture with Prof. Dr. Martin Jay on 06/07/16: “The Truth about Lying in Politics”

Events, Lectures, News

Lecture with

Professor Dr. Martin Jay

(University of California, Berkeley)

“The Truth about Lying in Politics”

June 7, 2016; 4 pm (16 Uhr c.t.)
Philosophicum, Fakultätssaal
Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz

The persistent and ubiquitous presence of hypocrisy, spin and even outright mendacity in political life requires more than moral disapproval. Instead, it is necessary to examine its multiple functions and perhaps even virtues, which will depend in turn on an analysis of what politics itself might mean in its various manifestations. By exploring competing definitions of “the political” and the permeability of its boundaries with what is alleged to be outside them, this talk will try to move beyond conventional deontological or consequentialist considerations of lying in politics.

Download the poster here.

Lecture with Prof. Xu Dejin on 05/24/16: “Slave Narrative and African American Autobiography”

News

Slave Narrative and African American Autobiography

Prof. Xu Dejin (University of International Business and Economics, Beijing)

May 24, 2016, 4.15-5.45 p.m., Fakultätssaal

Professor Xu Dejin got his Ph.D. in Literature from Peking University, Beijing. In January 2007 he completed his post-doc fellowship at Beijing Normal University. Dr. Xu is now professor of English and former Deputy Dean at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing China. His academic interests include Cultural studies, Cross-cultural Communication, Cultural Capital studies, Translation studies, African American studies, and Narrative studies.

Professor Xu serves as member of the editorial committee of Biographical Literature Newsletter, Deputy Director of China Auto-/Bio-graphy Studies Association. Up till now he has published over 40 essays in various leading academic journals around the world. He has also authored, compiled and translated dozens of books and dictionaries into Chinese. His works include Race and Form: Toward a Contextualized Narratology of African American Autobiography by Peter Lang (2007) and “Intratextuality, Extratextuality, Intertextuality: Unreliability in Auto-biography Versus Fiction” an essay published in Poetics Today co-authored with Professor Shen Dan (2007).

Professor Xu offers courses in Western Literary Theory, British and American Literature, C-E/E-C Contrastive Studies in Translation, Stylistics, Cultural Studies, and Cultural Capital.

Guest Lecture with Prof. Dr. Ryan Cordell on 02/02/16: “Vignettes: Micro-Fictions in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers”

Events, Lectures, News

Guest Lecture with

Professor Dr. Ryan Cordell (Northeastern University)

“Vignettes: Micro-Fictions in Nineteenth-Century Newspapers”

February 2, 2016; 6 pm (18 Uhr c.t.)
Philosophicum P12
Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz

Drawing from the findings of the Viral Text Project at Northeastern University (http://viraltexts.org/), this talk describes and theorizes a prototypical but largely unstudied newspaper genre, the vignette. These are very short prose pieces, typically a few paragraphs, that mark themselves simultaneously as fact and fiction and embody a complicated negotiation between objective truth and subjective fiction that underlay much of the period’s literature.

This talk situates the vignette as an essential genre in antebellum American letters, both influential in the development of sentimental fiction and a precursor to the prose writing later styled „literary journalism.“ The vignette in many ways encapsulates the medium of the nineteenth-century newspaper: it is both fact and fiction, operating in the gray space produced by a medium through which news, poetry, fiction, and countless other genres jostled for readers’ attention on the same pages. Through its form and situation, vignettes demonstrate similarly deep entanglements between the newspaper’s informational mode and the emotional mode of contemporaneous fiction.

Download the poster here.

Lecture with Prof. Dr. Margaret Stephenson on 12/15/15: “Comparative Perspectives on Indigenous Rights: Australia and North America”

Lecture with Prof. Dr. Margaret Stephenson on 12/15/15: “Comparative Perspectives on Indigenous Rights: Australia and North America”

Events, Lectures

Lecture with

Professor Dr. Margaret Stephenson

“Comparative Perspectives on Indigenous Rights: Australia and North America”

 

The Atlantic Academy and the Transnational American Studies Institute at Mainz University jointly invite you to this event.

December 15, 2015; 4-6 pm
Senatssaal NatFak-Gebäude
Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz

For indigenous communities in the U.S. and around the globe, the question of rights has been a central one. In recent debates, this question has been closely connected to issues of land and water rights, as well as to concepts of indigenous sovereignty.

Margaret Stephenson (University of Queensland, Australia), a renowned expert in comparative indigenous law, will compare current debates on indigenous rights in Australia and North America, looking both at the specificity of national histories and at the possibility of a comparative, transnational perspective on indigenous rights.

For more information, download the poster here.

CfP: “The American Short Story: An Expansion of the Genre” Symposium, Oct. 20-22, 2016

Call for Papers, Conferences, Events, News

CALL FOR PAPERS

The American Short Story: An Expansion of the Genre

A Symposium of the American Literature Association organized by

The Society for the Study of the American Short Story (SSASS)

October 20-22, 2016

Hyatt Hotel, Savannah, GA

The Society for the Study of the American Short Story (SSASS) requests proposals for papers and presentations at an international symposium on the short story to be held in Savannah, October 20-22, 2016, at the Hyatt Hotel.

Proposals need be only a single page with one paragraph that describes the subject of the paper and another that gives the credentials of the speaker. In addition to traditional panels, the symposium will also hold discussion forums, seminar conversations, and roundtable sessions. Creative writers are also invited to present work in progress. All papers will also be considered for publication in the first volume of the new Society journal scheduled to appear in 2018.

A central focus of the symposium will be the expansion of the genre through the discovery of new writers from all racial and ethnic groups, the development of innovative types of stories (flash fiction, micro-fiction, and other forms), the recovery of fiction published in languages other than English, and the reconsideration of the contributions of other writers to the expansion of the genre. Close readings of stories by any American author are appropriate as are broad discussions of historical periods and movements. Examinations of the contributions of minority authors are especially welcome as are explorations of stories originally written in languages other than English.

The Savannah symposium will be followed a year later by an international conference in Germany, October 26-29, 2017, directed by Professor Oliver Scheiding, University of Mainz. More details about this event will be posted on the society website late in 2016.Please send all proposals and program suggestions for the Savannah symposium to the president of the society, Jim Nagel, at jnagel@uga.edu.

Deadline for proposals: July 1, 2016

Dowload the full CfP here.