English

Emily Sun on On the Horizon of World Literature

Posted on August 26, 2021September 23, 2021 by Della Zazzera, Elizabeth

The UConn Humanities Institute is proud to cosponsor

A talk by Emily Sun

on her recent book On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China.

September 30th, 4:00–5:30pm
UCHI Conference Room (Homer Babbidge Library 4-209)
Professor Sun will be joining us via Zoom. If you prefer to attend the event remotely, you can register to attend on Zoom.

On the Horizon of World Literature compares literary texts from asynchronous periods of incipient literary modernity in different parts of the world: Romantic England and Republican China. These moments were oriented alike by “world literature” as a discursive framework of classifications that connected and re-organized local articulations of literary histories and literary modernities. World literature, in this sense, provided and continues to provide a condition of possibility for conversation between cultures as well as their mutual provincialization.

The book examines a selection of literary forms–the literary manifesto, the tale collection, the familiar essay, and the domestic novel–that serve also as textual sites for the enactment of new socio-political forms of life. These forms function as testing grounds for questions of simultaneously literary-aesthetic and socio-political importance: What does it mean to attain a voice? What is a common reader? How does one dwell in the ordinary? What is a woman? In different languages and activating heterogeneous literary and philosophical traditions, works by Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lu Xun, Charles and Mary Lamb, Lin Shu, Zhou Zuoren, Jane Austen, and Eileen Chang explore the far-from-settled problem of what it means to be modern in different lifeworlds.

Emily Sun is Associate Professor in Comparative Literature and Translation Studies at Barnard College. She is the author of Succeeding King Lear: Literature, Exposure, and the Possibility of Politics (Fordham UP, 2010), and On the Horizon of World Literature: Forms of Modernity in Romantic England and Republican China (Fordham UP, 2021). She has co-edited The Claims of Literature: A Shoshana Felman Reader (Fordham UP, 2007) and “Reading Keats, Thinking Politics,” a special issue of Studies in Romanticism (Summer 2011). She received her Ph.D. in comparative literature from Yale University and has taught English and comparative literature in colleges and universities in the U.S. and Taiwan.

This event is cosponsored by the English Department’s 18th/19th Century Colloquium and the Department of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages.

Download the flyer.

If you require an accommodation, including live captioning, to attend this event please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu.

UCHI Assistant Director Author of a New Book on the Romantic Period

Posted on December 4, 2019December 4, 2019 by

Yohei Igarashi, the Assistant Director of Digital Humanities and Media Studies at the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute (UCHI) is the author of a new book entitled The Connected Condition: Romanticism and the Dream of Communication (Stanford University Press). According to the website of the publisher, “the Romantic poet’s intense yearning to share thoughts and feelings often finds expression in a style that thwarts a connection with readers. Yohei Igarashi addresses this paradox by reimagining Romantic poetry as a response to the beginnings of the information age. Data collection, rampant connectivity, and efficient communication became powerful social norms during this period. The Connected Condition argues that poets responded to these developments by probing the underlying fantasy: the perfect transfer of thoughts, feelings, and information, along with media that might make such communication possible.” Igarashi, also an associate professor of English at UConn, has authored many articles on Romanticism and poetry, including in New Literary History, Romantic Circles, and Studies in Romanticism; the latter of which received the Keats-Shelley Association of America annual essay prize in 2015.

Fellows Talk: Laura Godfrey on “Astonishment in Late Medieval English Literature”

Posted on November 25, 2019November 25, 2019 by

‘Being Wholly Out of Body’: Astonishment in Late Medieval English Literature

Laura Godfrey, Ph.D. Candidate in Medieval Studies, University of Connecticut
December 4, 2019 – 4 to 5PM (UCHI Conference Room: Babbidge Library, 4th Floor South)

This talk brings together medieval medical and literary descriptions over overwhelming bodily experiences. In medieval literature, when a subject encounters a divine figure, they lose all physical and mental faculties, and after a period of stasis, these faculties are restored, often with heightened senses of perception or newly gained insight. Middle English texts describe this as astonishment, a phenomenon described in medieval medicine as a cerebral malady similar to paralysis or epilepsy. By enmeshing themselves in this cultural rhetoric of dramatic change, medieval authors use literary descriptions to extend the pathology of astonishment and to investigate the effects of this state on the mind and soul.

If you require accommodations to attend this event, please contact us at uchi@uconn.edu or by phone (860)486-9057.

Fellows Talk: Hayley Stefan on Black Feminist Epistemologies and Reparative Justice

Posted on November 4, 2019November 4, 2019 by

Black Feminist Epistemologies & Reparative Justice

Hayley Stefan, Ph.D. Candidate in English, University of Connecticut
November 13, 2019 – 4 to 5PM (UCHI Conference Room: Babbidge Library, 4th Floor South)

Hayley’s work examines how cultural reactions to national traumas evaluate embodied experience. In her talk, she will focus on the long refusal to recognize anti-Black oppression and violence as national tragedies. Black Feminist epistemologists such as Patricia Hill Collins, bell hooks, and Safiya Umoja Noble argue that reparative and restorative justice must value the Black body. This talk brings together legislation, literature, and digital archives to show how Black activists and scholars have used different methods to authorize Black knowledge. These artifacts suggest that reckoning with Black trauma means embracing communal knowledge and privileging the emotional and embodied effects of daily atrocities.