Metagaming The Book of the Courtier

Julia Wold (Ph.D. Candidate, English, UConn)

with a response by Yohei Igarashi (English, UConn)

Wednesday October 9, 2024, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

This talk will focus on the “ludic” or gamified nature of the 16th century Italian courtly manual, The Book of the Courtier. As this text has long been read in a games studies context, this talk will both present the scholarly consensus on the ludic nature of the text and identify structural similarities (homologies) between the text and video games. In taking this next step, we can better understand not only the gamified structure of such early modern texts, but how and why those features appear and function in video game adaptations and appropriations of those texts.

Julia Wold is a PhD Candidate in the English department and Dissertation Fellow at the UCHI. Her research centers on Shakespeare/early modern drama and adaptation theory, with a focus on new media, specifically video games. Her work has recently been published in Adaptation, and she is the author of a forthcoming essay on Shakespeare as genre marker in Star Wars in a collection on Shakespeare and Science Fiction from Arden Bloomsbury. She is also the co-host and editor of the podcast Star Wars English Class, an ongoing public humanities project that recently started its fourth season.

Yohei Igarashi is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. His writing to date focuses on how literature has historically related to communication, information, and technology. He is the author of The Connected Condition: British Romanticism and the Dream of Communication (Stanford University Press, 2020), a prize-winning essay in Studies in Romanticism, and other writing. In the field of computational literary studies, his work includes collaborative papers on topics ranging from poetic form to plain writing, as well as a magazine piece in Aeon on computer-generated text. He is currently writing an account of the role of computing in the history of literary studies. From 2019–2023, he was Assistant then Associate Director at the UConn Humanities Institute, where he oversaw the Digital Humanities and Media Studies Initiative. In 2023–2024, he was the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Fellow at the National Humanities Center.

Access note

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.

Rethinking Vienna: Jewish Difference, the Evil Inclination, and the Study of Culture

Joscha Jelitzki (Ph.D. Candidate, LCL, UConn)

with a response by Sara Matthiesen (History & Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, George Washington University)

Wednesday September 11, 2024, 3:30pm, Humanities Institute Conference Room (HBL 4-209)

The event will also be livestreamed with automated captioning.

Register to attend virtually

Inside the prolific scholarship on the cultural history of fin-de-siècle Vienna, there is a methodological debate on what to make of the high percentage of Jewish authors, artists, and thinkers on its forefront. Methodologically, the challenge is how to give an account of secularized Jewish culture without falling into the essentialism of constructs like “the Jewish mind.” The challenge becomes even more delicate when we turn to the prominent subject of sexuality and desire in Viennese cultural productions, as that field of association was historically strongly exploited by antisemitism. Jelitzki’s dissertation studies Viennese Jewish literature on sexual desire at this fraught intersection of antisemitic attribution and Jewish self-representation.

This presentation, “Rethinking Vienna: Jewish Difference, the Evil Inclination, and the Study of Culture,” will take specifically the Jewish concept of the Evil Inclination, the “Yetzer Hara,” as a starting point and make it into a case study in these larger methodological questions. The Evil Inclination goes back to Talmudic sources, and, handed down by Jewish folk traditions, worked as a shorthand for sexual drive. Interestingly, this remnant of religious culture was secularized and taken up by a number of Viennese and Habsburg Jewish writers when addressing sexuality and Jewish-Catholic differences. This talk will survey these sources and discuss their implications for the study of Jewish Vienna.

Joscha Jelitzki is a scholar of German Jewish literature, and a PhD candidate in German and Judaic Studies at UConn at the Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages. Before joining UCHI as the Richard Brown Dissertation Fellow, he completed his research in Vienna as the 2024 Franz Werfel Fellow. He previously studied in Berlin, Frankfurt (Oder), and Jerusalem, and worked as an assistant from 2016–2019 for the critical edition of the works of Hannah Arendt. His focus is on modern German and Austrian Jewish literature and thought, theories of sexuality and secularization. He has published articles on Martin Buber and literature, the biblical figure of Job in modern Jewish literature, and on German-Jewish gangsta-rap.

Sara Matthiesen is Associate Professor of History and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at George Washington University. Her first book, Reproduction Reconceived: Family Making and the Limits of Choice after Roe v. Wade (University of California Press, 2021), shows how incarceration, for-profit and racist healthcare, HIV/AIDS, parentage laws, and poverty were worsened by state neglect in the decades following Roe. In 2022, Reproduction Reconceived received the Sara A. Whaley Prize for best monograph on gender and labor from National Women’s Studies Association. Professor Matthiesen’s current project, “‘Free Abortion on Demand’ after Roe: A Reproductive Justice History of Abortion Organizing in the United States,” traces the multi-racial feminist activism that opposed state and medical control of abortion throughout the era of choice. At GWU, she regularly teaches Introduction to Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, for which she was awarded the Kenny Teaching Prize in 2022.

Access note

If you require accommodation to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860) 486-9057. We can request ASL interpretation, computer-assisted real time transcription, and other accommodations offered by the Center for Students with Disabilities.