English

The Classics and English Departments present the following Jasper Jacob Stahl Lecture:

Richard F. Thomas
George Martin Lane Professor of the Classics
and Harvard College Professor at Harvard University

"Virgil, Spenser and Marvell"

Thursday, February 8th, 5 p.m., Lancaster Lounge, Moulton Union

Prof. Thomas teaches and writes on Hellenistic Greek and Roman literature, intertextuality,translation, aesthetics, reception, and the lyrics of Bob Dylan.  Publications include several books on Virgil and the forthcoming Virgil Encyclopedia.  He is Trustee of the Loeb Classical Library.

This Stahl lecture is offered in conjunction with Latin 307, Young Virgil, taught by Barbara Weiden Boyd, and English 207, The Uses of Nostalgia: Studies in the Literary Pastoral, taught by Bill Watterson, both of which focus on pastoral poetry.  Prof. Thomas's lecture will look at Virgilian pastoral and its reception in Renaissance English literature.

This event is co-sponsored by the Stahl lectureship, and the Classics and English Departments.  Free and open to the public.

Lecture by Matthew Reeve (Associate Professor and Queen's National Scholar, Queen's University): "Horace Walpole, Strawberry Hill, and the Queerness of Gothic."

Scholars have long recognized that the Gothic Revival of the nineteenth century synthesized politics, religion and architecture into a cohesive argument about the supremacy of the medieval past over a debased modern present. It has not been satisfactorily understood that in doing so, the movement profoundly reshaped, obfuscated or erased eighteenth-century modes of viewing and describing the Gothic, in which the style was used as a vehicle for discussions of human alterity. This paper considers one moment in this early history of the Gothic: the building of Horace Walpole's 'villa' or castle at Strawberry Hill in Twickenham (London) from 1747. Beginning with the observation that the revival of the Gothic in the early eighteenth century paralleled the codifications of a new sexuality now known as "homosexuality", this paper explores interrelationships between sexuality, taste and the Gothic at Strawberry Hill.

Sponsored by the Department of Art History

Gus Stadler, associate professor at Haverford College and scholar of American literature and queer studies, is one of the strongest emerging voices in the field of sound studies - a sub-discipline that synthesizes work in music, literature, literary theory, history of technology studies, and, in Stadler's work particularly, gender and sexuality studies.

Gus Stadler is co-editor of the Journal of Popular Music Studies, and a galvanizing figure in recent queer/sound-studies work. He will speak about Andy Warhol's penchant for capturing the quotidian, and often tedious, passages of personal and professional life on crude cassette-tape recorders.

Stadler reads these famously "diaristic" recordings through the lens of their outmoded technologies, and offers an account of them as a part of Warhol's career-wide engagement in questions of market-mediated reproduction, nostalgia, sexuality, and - especially - childhood.

For more information, contact Laurie Holland, English department coordinator, at 725-3552.

About Daniel M. Jaffe’s recently published novel, “The Limits of Pleasure”, Jerry Wheeler in Out in Print says, “(the book) is a satisfying and thought-provoking read that will echo in your consciousness long after the surprisingly uplifting ending. Jaffe is a major talent."

An internationally known fiction writer and translator, Jaffe has also published a short story collection, “Jewish Gentle and Other Stories of Gay-Jewish Living” (2011) as well as numerous translations.

Jaffe's translation of the Russian-Israeli bestselling novel “Here Comes the Messiah!” by Dina Rubina was published in 2000. He has also translated numerous shorter works from Russian and Spanish, where they have appeared in such places as Toronto Slavic Quarterly (Canada), Rossica (UK), Translation and elsewhere.

In 2001 he compiled and edited “With Signs and Wonders: An International Anthology of Jewish Fabulist Fiction.”

Jaffe holds a BA from Princeton University, a JD from Harvard Law School, and an MFA from Vermont College. He teaches in the UCLA Extension Writer’s Program.

Sponsored by the English Department, the Gay and Lesbian Studies Program, the Department of Religion, Lectures and Concerts, Bowdoin Hillel, and the Bowdoin Queer Student Alliance.

For more information, contact Laurie Holland at lholland@bowdoin.edu or 725-3552.

Sarah Blackwood, a feminist culture critic and assistant professor of English and American Studies at Pace University will speak about the Twilight Saga, femininity, and styles of female heroism in popular American literary narrative, from Mary Rowlandson's 1682 captivity narrative to The Hunger Games.

Join us for a book release celebration and discussion of Belinda Kong's new book "Tiananmen Fictions Outside the Square - The Chinese Literary Diaspora and the Politics of Global Culture," moderated by English professor David Collings and associate professor of Asian Studies Shu-chin Tsui.

English and Asian Studies assistant professor Kong's book is an exciting analysis of the literary effects of Tiananmen and the first full length study of fictions related to the 1989 movement and massacre. The book redefines Tiananmen's meaning from an event that ended in local political failure to one that produced a vital dimension of contemporary transnational writing today.

Compelling us to think about how Chinese culture, identity, and politics are being defined in the diaspora, Kong's book candidly addresses issues of political exile, historical trauma, global capital, and state bio-power.