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.
We are hosting a Jeopardy Style Literature Trivia night on April 2 @ 5:00-6:00pm in 14N-417 Come play with us and test your knowledge of pop culture, MIT history, movies, music, and Literature Please bring friends you have met in your Literature classes. Cookies will be served.
Litshop is by invitation only. Presented by: Jessica Ruffin Assistant Professor of Literature, Literature Section at MIT Abstract: The sublime, as figured by Immanuel Kant, is constituted by reason’s capacity to overcome an encounter with the unrepresentable and incalculable through a movement of abstraction. For rational subjects of Enlightenment, this movement of abstraction becomes a universal ground for an imagined community, attended by the pleasure of belonging. For those lacking Enlightenment, according to Kant, what would be sublime is only experienced as terror. This paper explores the legacy of Kant’s figuring of the sublime in white supremacist aesthetics and white epistemologies of race, space, and time. Carrying David Marriot’s concept of the abyssal into the sedimented coastlines of the Black Belt, this paper performs a media archaeology— interrogating the question of overcoming for the inassimilable subject of the infinite, ever-present terrors of white supremacy and anti-Blackness. Bio: Jessica Ruffin is a critical philosopher, media historian, and moving-image enthusiast. Her research focuses on white supremacist aesthetics in post-Enlightenment German-language media and philosophy, as well as their legacies in popular culture, US film, and media theory. She has particular interest in how Arthur Schopenhauer’s and Friedrich Nietzsche’s engagements with counter-Enlightenment methods share poetic and temporal […]
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.
How does Afrofuturist cinema, by showcasing alternative African futures, contribute to the evolution of the cinematic art form and postcolonial narratives? Filmmaker Jean Pierre Bekolo will present his book Cinema as a Transformative Tool for the Therapeutic Intellectual: Putting Postcolonial Theories in Motion. Drawing on his practice and theoretical work, Bekolo will show that cinema is a platform for intellectual exploration, rooted in the probing question of "What if?" often found in science fiction." Inspired by Giordano Bruno's philosophy, Bekolo likes speculating with images, combining "motion telling" and "motion thinking." A pivotal question thus emerges: Are filmmakers "therapeutic" intellectuals capable of not only fostering understanding but also transforming Africa and the world? When applying this cinematic framework to Africa, a continent entangled in the collision with the West, Bekolo advocates for reintroducing motion into a narrative that has stagnated, impeding the progress of its history and clouding the way forward. The pivotal question emerges: How can Afrofuturist cinema, supported by "therapeutic" intellectuals, inject motion – analogous to a "coup" – disrupt its static post-colonial narrative, and recommence the march of history after a prolonged hiatus? Bekolo envisions this approach as a dynamic framework capable of not only fostering understanding but also […]
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.
Abstract: Written in 1984, Samuel Delany’s The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals became the first novel about AIDS published by a major US publisher. The ninth installment in his Return to Nevèrÿon sword-and-sorcery series, Delany’s tale continues the story of Gorgik the Liberator’s movement to abolish slavery in a society with a brown ruling class and a blond slave caste. However, unlike earlier entries in the series, the novel alternates between present-day New York and prehistoric Nevèrÿon, both afflicted by a mysterious new disease that seems to affect mostly men who have sex with men. This talk will examine the relationship between the representation of AIDS in The Tale of Plagues and Carnivals and the Nevèrÿon series’ overarching meditation on freedom and slavery. Drawing on Delany’s extensive theoretical production from that period, I will show how his text critiques racialized formations of desire at the moment in which an antiblack discourse about the epidemic began to coalesce in the medical literature and the media. Bio: Joaquín Terrones holds an S.B. in Literature from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a Ph.D. in Romance Languages and Literatures from Harvard University.
Wednesday, May 1st @ 1:00-2:30PM Building 14, 14N-417 Lemonade Iced Tea Free Books Citrus & Treats Info about Lit@MIT this Fall 2024 for undergrads!
Literature Section
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Massachusetts Avenue 14N-407
Cambridge, MA 02139
tel: (617) 253-3581
