Every Monday (except Holidays) during the semester
Come by for snacks, and tea with Literature Section friends, instructors, students, etc. What are you reading? What 21L classes are you taking or hoping to take? This event is specifically geared towards undergrads; but open to friends of the community that engage in the literary and humanities at MIT.
ABSTRACT: Book History, an interdisciplinary field of scholarship that became recognized as such in the second half of the twentieth century, relies on stories that scholars repeat until they have become truths. Among these stories are teleologies that rely on genealogical formulas of development: “from orality to literacy”; “from manuscript to print”; and “from roll to codex.” This talk will focus on the last of these formulas. Over the last two decades, an efflorescence of scholarship devoted to the abundant variety of scrolls and rolls in medieval Europe has offered welcome pushback to the supersessionist model that has reigned. Yet, the roll and the codex were not the only formats available for the book arts of the Middle Ages. Focusing on examples of books that are neither roll nor codex, and which played a decisive part during the Wars of the Roses, this talk will show the profound discrepancies between book history and the history of books and why these discrepancies matter. BIO: Sonja Drimmer is Associate Professor of medieval art history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and is the author of The Art of Allusion: Illuminators and the Making of English Literature, 1403-1476 (University of Pennsylvania, 2018). IMAGE CAPTION Genealogical Chronicle of the Kings of England. London, after 1461. Metropolitan Museum of Art. Acc 2018 631. Genealogical Chronicle of the Kings of England. London, after 1461. Oxford […]
Recuperating Black Women’s Wisdom in Maria Firmina dos Reis’ Úrsula Presented by Danielle Dorvil Diversity Predoctoral Fellow at the Literature Section, MIT Abstract: Maria Firmina dos Reis’ debut novel has been acclaimed for her innovative depictions of enslaved Black subjects in nineteenth-century Brazilian literature. While the conversation has mostly centered on Reis’ Black male characters, I propose to examine her older, African female character’s unconventional—perhaps radical—view of emancipation. I will show how Susana’s thoughts on slavery and freedom betray Reis’ stance on the larger abolitionist debate occurring in Brazil at the time. --- Pleasuring Pan-Africanism: The Sexual Politics of the Zimbabwe International Book Fair Presented by Tadiwanashe Farida Madenga Diversity Predoctoral Fellow at the Literature Section, MIT Abstract: Created in the wake of Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980, the annual Zimbabwe International Book Fair was a space for national and Pan-African identities to be performed and re-invented. In 1995, former President Robert Mugabe banned the Gay and Lesbian organization from participating in the fair, provoking global debates on homosexuality and national sovereignty. In the midst of this censorship, Zimbabwean writers staged a political, social, and aesthetic critique of the state that centered on sexuality, or what some dreamers called erotic liberty, as a lens to reimagine national identity and […]
Every Monday (except Holidays) during the semester
Come by for snacks, and tea with Literature Section friends, instructors, students, etc. What are you reading? What 21L classes are you taking or hoping to take? This event is specifically geared towards undergrads; but open to friends of the community that engage in the literary and humanities at MIT.
Presented by Wendy Wall Avalon Professor of the Humanities Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence Professor of English at Northwestern University Abstract: The boundaries of the world exploded in early modern England. With telescopes aimed at the stars, microscopes revealing unseen elements of life on earth, and colonial encounters reconfiguring what Europeans knew about cartography and ecosystems, writers and artists grappled with uncertainty on many fronts. Shakespeare and Donne, for instance, offer rich meditations demonstrating the exhilaration and fear involving in imagining brave new worlds. How do newly audible literary voices in the early modern archive alter our understanding of this time of political, scientific, and religious transformations? The discovery of a seventeenth-century poet named Hester Pulter––a writer fascinated by Galileo’s findings, dancing atoms, and natural philosophy–– offers an occasion to reflect on what it means to push the limits of the known world, both in early modern terms – and our own. Bio: Wendy Wall is Avalon Professor of the Humanities, Charles Deering McCormick Professor of Teaching Excellence, and Professor of English at Northwestern University. Professor Wendy Wall researches topics as wide-ranging as Renaissance poetry, recipes, literature and science, women’s writing, digital humanities, gender, authorship, print culture, and theater. She specializes […]
Every Monday (except Holidays) during the semester
Come by for snacks, and tea with Literature Section friends, instructors, students, etc. What are you reading? What 21L classes are you taking or hoping to take? This event is specifically geared towards undergrads; but open to friends of the community that engage in the literary and humanities at MIT.
Presented by Annabel Kim Roy G. Clouse Associate Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University Abstract: Readers and critics have too long overlooked excrement’s vital role in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century French canon. In a stark challenge to the tendency to view this literature through sanitizing abstractions, in my book Cacaphonies: The Excremental Canon of French Literature, I take fecal matter and its place in literature seriously to argue for feces as a figure of radical equality, both a literary object and a reflection on literature itself, without which literary studies is impoverished and sterile. The shit in the canon expresses a call to democratize literature, making literature for all, just as shit is for (or of) all. Shit’s presence in this prized element of French identity is a continually uttered desire to manifest the universality France aspires to—as encapsulated by the slogan Liberté, égalité, fraternité—but fails to realize. In shit there is a concrete universalism that traverses bodies with disregard for embodied differences. Literature, and the ideas to be found therein, cannot be separated from the corporeal envelopes that create and receive them. In reminding us of this fact, Cacaphonies reveals the aesthetic, political, and ethical potential of shit and its capacity […]
Ross Gay is the author of four books of poetry: Against Which; Bringing the Shovel Down; Be Holding, winner of the PEN American Literary Jean Stein Award; and Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award and the 2016 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award. His first collection of essays, The Book of Delights, was released in 2019 and was a New York Times bestseller. His new collection of essays, Inciting Joy, was released by Algonquin in October of 2022.
Every Monday (except Holidays) during the semester
Come by for snacks, and tea with Literature Section friends, instructors, students, etc. What are you reading? What 21L classes are you taking or hoping to take? This event is specifically geared towards undergrads; but open to friends of the community that engage in the literary and humanities at MIT.
Presented by Erik Dempsey Senior Lecturer at the Thomas Jefferson Center for the Study of Core Texts and Ideas, University of Texas at Austin Abstract: Why did St. Thomas Aquinas, a theologian, think it was so important to study philosophy? Why was he so committed to it that he continued to study and teach the writings of Aristotle, even in the face of condemnation? And why was there such a controversy about studying Aristotle in the 13th century Catholic university? In brief, the central issue was that the god described by Aristotle was thought to be different from God as described in the Bible. This talk will seek to show how Thomas sought to reconcile those two notions of the divine, and will ask whether his reconciliation was successful. The discussion will rely largely on Thomas's remarks in his two Summas and Maimonides's treatment of similar issues in a text that Thomas studied closely, the Guide of the Perplexed.
Literature Section
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Avenue 14N-407
Cambridge, MA 02139
tel: (617) 253-3581
