When: Every Monday (except Holidays) during the semester Time: 4:15pm – 5:45pm Where: Room 14N-417 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.
Presentation and discussion in English Location: Building 14, 14E-304 (map) Abstract: His most recent book, De langue à langue, l’hospitalité de la traduction presents translation as humanism. In other words, if our primary human condition is to constitute multiple cultures and speak different languages carrying different worldviews and different epistemes, then translation, which the philosopher Paul Ricœur has said is both an impossible and a sublime task, is the ongoing creation of an open human society oriented towards the same horizon of universality, not in spite of the plural nature of the world, but starting from it and building on it. Bio: Souleymane Bachir Diagne is a professor in the departments of French and of Philosophy at Columbia University. His areas of research and publication include History of Philosophy, History of Logic and Mathematics, Islamic Philosophy, African Philosophy and Literature. His latest publications in English include: The Ink of the Scholars. Reflections on Philosophy in Africa, Dakar, Codesria, 2016; Open to Reason. Muslim philosophers in conversation with Western tradition, New York, Columbia University Press, 2018; Postcolonial Bergson, Fordham University Press, New York, 2019 ; In Search of Africa(s). Universalism and Decolonial Thought, (a dialogue with Jean-Loup Amselle), Polity Press, 2020; African art as philosophy. Senghor, Bergson, and the idea of Negritude, The […]
When: Every Monday (except Holidays) during the semester Time: 4:15pm – 5:45pm Where: Room 14N-417 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.
When: Every Monday (except Holidays) during the semester Time: 4:15pm – 5:45pm Where: Room 14N-417 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.
John Murillo is an associate professor of English and director of the creative writing program at Wesleyan University. He is the author of the poetry collections Up Jump the Boogie (Cypher, 2010; Four Way Books 2020), which was a finalist for both the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Pen Open Book Award, and Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (Four Way, 2020); the winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Poetry Society of Virginia’s North American Book Award; and a finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, Believer Poetry Award, Maya Angelou Book Award, Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award, and the NAACP Image Award. The People’s Poetry Archive is a 2023-24 Mellon Faculty Grant Project by Professor Joshua Bennett. It is a public humanities project setting out to digitally preserve canonical and contemporary poems from across the African diaspora, as well as historically under-theorized works in the realm of spoken word performance. Inspired by the Black feminist poet and educator June Jordan’s vision of “a people’s poetry”—a term she traces to the democratic imaginings of Walt Whitman—the creation of the archive represents an opportunity to address modern questions about the vitality and utility of poetry through sustained cross-pollination between institutions and social scenes. The project is an opportunity for […]
Abstract: Conjectural emendation is one long-established method of last resort by which editors deal with nonsensical or missing portions of ancient and medieval texts. It is often controversial even as a last resort because it relies upon conjecture—the editor’s subjective sense of the text or author in question—rather than the empiricism by which textual editing has tended to define itself. This talk uses a single contested word in line 735 of the medieval poem Pearl to propose ’speculative expansion’ as an alternative to conjectural emendation. I ground this proposal in theories of speculation as developed by medieval philosophers and theologians, for whom it served as a midpoint between cognition and contemplation, subtended by both thought and feeling. I propose expansion rather than emendation so as to respect the inherent multiplicity of literary and aesthetic meaning, which Pearl in particular performs with exquisite beauty. With the audience’s help, I also hope to think through the practical ramifications of such theories upon readers today. Bio: Arthur Bahr is the author of Chasing the Pearl-Manuscript: Speculation, Shapes, Delight (Chicago, 2024) and Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London (Chicago, 2013). With Alexandra Gillespie, he co-edited a special issue of The Chaucer Review (47.4, 2013) on “Medieval English Manuscripts: Form, Aesthetics, and the Literary Text.” […]
Join the MIT Community for a (Mysterious) Book Exchange! Statement of Purpose: Strengthen Community Relationships and Foster a Love of Reading. If you could pick one book to recommend to someone at MIT, what would you choose? For the second time we are asking MIT community members this question and collecting hundreds of recommended favorite books for the second MIT (Mysterious) Book Exchange! This event, launched by an MIT graduate student, aims to strengthen community relationships and foster a love of reading. But there’s a twist: All the books will be wrapped and organized by genre, with only the recommendations written by community members printed and shown on the books. Attendees will select books based solely on the genre and recommendation. Attendees will walk away with a mysterious new treasure to brighten your day! We invite you to recommend a book on our Google Form that you would like to share with the MIT community, and write a short blurb that describes it without giving away the title or author! We welcome as many recommendations as you have to give. We also invite you to rejoin us later in the year to pick up one of these cherished books that was recommended by […]
When: Every Monday (except Holidays) during the semester Time: 4:15pm – 5:45pm Where: Room 14N-417 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.
Literature Section
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Avenue 14N-407
Cambridge, MA 02139
tel: (617) 253-3581
