James Chandler on Sentimentality (Rutgers)

The Rutgers British Studies Center presents

James Chandler
"Sight Lines and Sentiment: Schiller, Shaftesbury, Sterne, Cinema"

Thursday, March 3, 2011

4:30 pm

Teleconference Lecture Hall

Alexander Library

169 College Avenue
Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ

Griffith and Capra—filmmakers strongly associated, respectively, with two important moments in the classical system of narration in Hollywood (1910s silent film and 1930s talkies)—have long been casually called “sentimental.” But when Eisenstein famously argued that one couldn’t understand the cinema of Griffith and his disciples without coming to terms with Dickens,
he programmatically refused to concern himself with the sentimentalism of the connection, arguing instead for a particular genealogy of montage that he saw leading to his own practice and that of other Soviet filmmakers. Professor Chandler’s aim is to take seriously the complex legacy of the sentimental to classical Hollywood cinema, by going back not just to what is sentimental Dickens but to the eighteenth-century emergence of the category: especially to how the sentimental constructs spectators, articulates space, redeems the concept of the soul from materialist challenges, and negotiates canons of probability.

Prof. Chandler will be introduced by Michael McKeon of the Department of English. A reception will follow the lecture.


James Chandler is the Barbara E. and Richard J. Franke Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English at the University of Chicago, where he is the Director of the Franke Institute for the Humanities and Co-Director of the Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture. Prof. Chandler is the author of Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (1984), England in 1819: The Politics of Literary Culture and the Case of Romantic Historicism (1998), and the forthcoming The Sentimental Mood: From Sterne to Capra. Prof. Chandler also has edited or co-edited Questions of Evidence: Proof, Practice, and Persuasion Across the Disciplines (1994), Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene in British Romanticism, 1780-1840 (2005), The Cambridge Companion to Romantic Poetry (2008), and The New Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature (2008).

Penn talks this week

Tomorrow, Wed., Feb. 23, Tanji Gilliam, a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, will be giving a colloquium talk titled, "or colored girls who also saw PRECIOUS and the rainbow is always outside":

Left, after the historic stereotyping of black women's bodies as sexually available, and the disciplined silences around rape and other forms of domestic violence, is the project of sharing black women's intimate experiences with violence when they have, however uncharacteristically, permitted this. This must be done in a way that makes use of silence, an agency that black women have historically enacted. This talk is excerpted from a larger manuscript, do you have any scars?/The Architecture of Violence. It looks at the cartographic record of domestic violence in Brooklyn’s Marcy Houses and maps popular representations of vernacular architecture in film and video in relationship to that media.

Wednesday, February 23, 2011 - 12:00pm
330 Fisher-Bennett Hall

Friday, Dan Cohen from George Mason University will be giving a lecture on "The Ivory Tower and the Open Web":

Dan Cohen will share insights from his new book The Ivory Tower and the Open Web. The Web is now over twenty years old, and there is no doubt that the academy has taken advantage of its tremendous potential for disseminating resources and scholarship. But a full accounting of the academic approach to the Web shows that compared to the innovative vernacular forms that have flourished over the past two decades, we have been relatively meek in our use of the medium, often preferring to impose traditional ivory tower genres on the Web rather than import the open web's most successful models. For instance, we would rather digitize the journal we know than explore how blogs and social media might supplement or change our scholarly research and communication. In this talk, Dan explores what might happen if we reversed that flow and more wholeheartedly embraced the genres of the open Web.

Friday, February 25, 2011 - 10:30am
Class of '55 Conference Room, Van Pelt Dietrich Library Center

Jonathan Katz on David Wojnarowicz

Tyler School of Art's Department of Art History presents

Dr. Jonathan Katz
Co- Curator, “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture”
& Chair, Visual Studies Doctoral Program, SUNY, Buffalo

“Eleven Seconds out of 113 Years: An(ant)tomy of a Conflict”

In this talk, to be followed by a question-and-answer session, Katz, co-curator of “Hide/Seek” and Queer studies scholar, will address the stakes of our repeated cultural skirmishes over the depiction of same sex desire and why he now understands this latest flare up as an unprecedented, and definitive, victory. Temple University has a particular involvement in this issue: exactly twenty years ago at the height of the “culture wars,” Temple Gallery presented the exhibition: “David Wojnarowicz: Tongues of Flame” and in conjunction, held a symposium “AIDS: Issues in Representation.” Wojnarowicz, who in art and writing boldly addressed issues of same sex desire and the response to the AIDS crisis, was embroiled in several controversies. These include his essay, “Post Cards from America: X-Rays from Hell,” for the exhibition, “Witnesses: Against our Vanishing”; his suit against the misleading use of cropped elements of his art by a conservative group trying to whip up support to de-fund the NEA; and the recent removal of the display of an excerpt from his film, “A Fire in My Belly,” from the National Portrait Gallery “Hide/Seek” show.

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

4 pm
Tyler Building, B004 (South Basement)
Temple University

Norris St. , between 12th and 13th Streets

On Feb. 14 and 15, from 10am to 5pm, Temple Gallery will screen, "A Fire in My Belly."

Jess Dobkin at Bryn Mawr

Toronto-based performance artist Jess Dobkin will be speaking at Bryn Mawr College (Carpenter Hall 21) next Tuesday, February 15, at 7pm.

In this talk, Jess Dobkin speaks on intervening in social spaces and creating intimate encounters with audiences.

Touring internationally, Jess Dobkin has performed, lectured, and conducted performance art workshops in US, Canada, Germany, Belgium, and the UK. Her performance have been presented at renowned avant-garde venues in New York and Toronto.

Stan Douglas in Conversation

(cross-posted with the Philly Repertory Film Blog)

Stan Douglas in conversation with Diedrich Diederichsen and Nora Alter


Monday, February 14, 2011
6:30 pm
Slought Foundation (4017 Walnut)
Free; reservation not required

Slought Foundation and the Temple University Department of Film and Media Arts are pleased to present artist Stan Douglas in conversation with Diedrich Diederichsen and Nora Alter on Monday, February 14, 2011 from 6:30-8:30pm at Slought Foundation. This program has been organized by Nora Alter, Chair of Film and Media Arts at Temple University. The conversation will engage Douglas’ Vidéo (2007), an audio-visual meditation on Samuel Beckett’s Film (1965), as well as the artist’s more recent public art project Abbott and Cordova (2009), a photo reenactment of the Gastown riot of 1971. The event will begin with a special screening of Vidéo (35 min; 2007).

"I'm always looking for this nexus point, the middle ground of some kind of transformation. I guess this accounts for the embarrassingly consistent binary constructions in my work. Almost all of the works, especially the ones that look at specific historical events, address moments when history could have gone one way or another. We live in the residue of such moments and for better or worse their potential is not yet spent."
-- Stan Douglas in conversation with Diana Thater (London: Phaidon Press, 1998).

Stan Douglas was born in 1960 and attended the Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver. His film and video installations, photography, and work in television address the history of literature, cinema and music, the technical and social aspects of mass media, and modernism in terms of its failures as a theoretical utopian concept and its manifestation in present day urbanism. His work frequently engages in subtle societal criticisms and investigations of authorship and subjectivity, and has often been imbued with tropes associated with Blues and Jazz. They are media machines, Automats of a sort, which involve the viewer in their mechanics; they reflect an era of transition from literally mechanical reproduction to electronic saturation. Douglas's widely appreciated work has appeared in the 1995 Whitney Biennial and three Venice Biennales; at Documenta 9, 10 and 11; at the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao; and at the Museums of Modern Art in San Francisco and New York. He has had solo exhibitions at the Dia Foundation for the Arts in New York, The Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, among others. His work has also been shown in New York at The Studio Museum, Harlem, The Art Institute of Chicago and the Dia Center for the Arts.

Diedrich Diederichsen was editor of two music magazines in the 1980s (Sounds, Hamburg; Spex, Cologne) and taught at several academies in the 1990s in Germany, Austria, and the U.S. in the fields of art history, musicology, theater studies, and cultural studies. He was Professor for Cultural Theory at Merz Academy, Stuttgart from 1998 to 2006, and is currently Professor of Theory, Practice, and Communication of Contemporary Art at the Academy of Fine Art in Vienna. Recent Publications include Psicodela y ready-made, Buenos Aires 2010; Utopia of Sound, Vienna 2010 (co-edited with Constanze Ruhm); Rock, Paper, Scissor—Pop-Music/Fine Arts, Graz 2009 (co-edited with Peter Pakesch); On Surplus Value (of Art), Rotterdam/New York 2008; Eigenblutdoping, Cologne 2008; Kritik des Auges, Hamburg 2008; Argument Son, Dijon 2007; Personas en loop, Buenos Aires 2006; Musikzimmer, Cologne 2005.

Nora Alter talk at Swarthmore

The Lang Center for Civic and Social Responsibility Presents a Lecture by

Nora Alter

Chair and Professor of Film and Media Arts
Temple University

The Cat Has Nine Lives: Chris Marker and the Essay Film

Wednesday, February 9, 7pm
Scheuer Room, Swarthmore College

Elusive French filmmaker (and cat lover) Chris Marker has produced a remarkable body of politically engaged film and media over the past four decades. Nora Alter, author of a monograph on Marker, will speak informally about his work and the essay film in conjunction with the Documentary Practicum taught by Louis Massiah, this year's Lang Professor for Issues of Social Change.

Nora M. Alter is Chair and Professor of Film and Media Arts at Temple University. Her teaching and research have been focused on twentieth and twenty first century cultural and visual studies from a comparative perspective. She is author of Vietnam Protest Theatre: The Television War on Stage (1996), Projecting History: Non-Fiction German Film (2002), Chris Marker (2006) and co-editor with Lutz Koepnick of Sound Matters: Essays on the Acoustics of Modern German Culture (2004). She has published over fifty essays on German and European Studies, Film and Media Studies, Cultural and Visual Studies and Contemporary Art. She is completing a new book on the international essay film and has begun research on a new study devoted to sound.

Penn Colloquia: Caitlin McGrath and Tim Murray

University of Pennsylvania's Cinema Studies continues its colloquium series with two talks this week:

Caitlin McGrath
"'Seasickness is Decidedly Pleasant': Display and Movement in Late-Silent-Era Film Aesthetics"

What connects the rollercoaster in Hindle Wakes, the display window in Asphalt, and the trolley in Sunrise? They all use mobile camera work and experimental editing techniques to recreate the perceptual experience of modern life for the viewer. This paper will consider the role of these three sites in the modern urban environment—the department store, the city street, and the amusement park – in cinematic visualizations of modernization and industrialization. Examining this mix of pleasure and discomfort through the lens of the history of perceptual psychology becomes a means of exploring the affective dimension of the history of film style from early cinema through to Classical Hollywood.

Wednesday, February 9, 2011

12:00pm
330 Fisher-Bennett Hall

University of Pennsylvania

Timothy Murray (Cornell Univ.)
"Performing the Future, or Longing in the Age of New Media"

The talk will consider "longing" within the context of a psycho-philosophical approach to new media studies. The place of longing will be discussed not so much in a material context (the vanishing of materials) but more in a spectral sense: from consideration of models of mourning and melancholia in relation to the "loss" of analogue textual and cinematic formats to a reformulation of the dynamics of "analogy" in the digital age. In considering a number of performance pieces and new media artworks from Asia, the talk will raise the possibility of a flexible model of "the fold," in contrast to the mechanics of perspective, while positioning the valence of longing in relation to the future pull of informatics rather than the past lament of lost artifacts.

Thursday, February 10, 2011

5:00pm
401 Fisher-Bennett Hall

University of Pennsylvania

Yunte Huang on Charlie Chan

The Center for Humanities at Temple is holding a talk by Yunte Huang on the flamboyant cinematic and cultural icon, Charlie Chan and his influence on American culture.

Center for Humanities at Temple University

Gladfelter Hall, 10th floor lounge

Thursday, February 10

12:30pm

Still from DVD Beaver

Yunte Huang is Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He came to the U.S. in 1991 after graduating from Peking University with a B.A. in English. He received his Ph.D. from the Poetics Program at SUNY-Buffalo in 1999 and taught as an Assistant Professor of English at Harvard University from 1999-2003. He is the author of Transpacific Imaginations: History, Literature, Counterpoetics (2008), CRIBS (2005), Transpacific Displacement: Ethnography, Translation, and Intertextual Travel in Twentieth-Century American Literature (2002), and Shi: A Radical Reading of Chinese Poetry (1997), and the translator into Chinese of Ezra Pound's The Pisan Cantos. His new book, Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History, is to be published by W. W. Norton in August 2010.