Marxism in Reverse – First Talk

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Marxism in Reverse
 
COMMA invites you to a talk by Professor Ben Olguin, Robert and Liisa Erickson Presidential Chair in Latinx Literary and Cultural Studies, English Department, UCSB.
 
“The (Trans)National Question: Regionalism, Nationalism, and Internationalism in Pan-Latina/o War Testimonios”
 
Friday, November 17, 3:00pm in The Sankey Room, South Halll, 2nd Floor
 
Professor Olguin specializes in Chicanx and Latinx Literary and Cultural studies, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, American and Latin American Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Human Rights Theory and Praxis, Marxist and Materialist Theories.
 
The talk is part of Prof. Olguin’s new book Violentologies: Violence and Ontology in Latinx Literature, Film, and Popular Culture.
 
We hope to see you there.
Reception will follow

Marxism in Reverse – Third Reading Group

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Marxism in Reverse
 
Welcome to the COMMA 2017-2018 Reading Group and Lecture Series MARXISM IN REVERSE. Through the year we will read the work of major Marxist critics “in reverse”, starting from the contemporaries and working our way back to Marx. Our third meeting will be Friday November 10th, at 3:00pm in the Sankey Room, South Hall second floor.
Reading for Nov 10: 
Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” 
Refreshments will be served. We hope to see you there!

Marxism in Reverse – Second Reading Group

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Marxism in Reverse
 
Now announcing the second meeting of the COMMA 2017-2018 Reading Group and Lecture Series MARXISM IN REVERSE. Through the year we will read the work of major Marxist critics “in reverse”, starting from the contemporaries and working our way back to Marx. 
 
Our second meeting will be on Friday October 27th, at 3:00pm in the Sankey Room, South Hall second floor.
 
Readings:
Frantz Fanon, “The Pitfalls of National Consciousness” (from _The Wretched of the Earth_)
 
Raya Dunayenskaya, “Nationalism, Communism, Marxist Humanism, and the Afro-Asian Revolution”
 
Refreshments will be served. We hope to see you there!

Marxism in Reverse – First Reading Group

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MARXISM IN REVERSE 
 
Now announcing the first meeting of COMMA 2017-2018 Reading Group and Lecture Series, MARXISM IN REVERSE. Through the year we will read the work of major Marxist critics “in reverse”, starting with the contemporaries and working our way back to Marx. We will read Silvia Federici, Selma James. Louis Althusser, Angela Davis, Frantz Fanon, Georg Lukacs, Adorno and Horkheimer, Antonio Gramsci, Rosa Luxembourg, and Karl Marx.
 
Our first meeting is on Friday October 13th, 3:00 in South Hall, the Sankey Room.
 
Readings:
 
Silvia Federici, _Caliban and the Witch. Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation_ (2004), Introduction and Ch. 2. “The Accumulation of Labor and the Degradation of Women”
 
Maria Rosa Dalla Costa and Selma James, _Women and the Subversion of the Community_( 1971)
 
Refreshments will be served. We hope to see you there!

Film Screening of Jessica Hausner’s “Lourdes” (2009)

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Please join us for COMMA’s next event of the 2016-17 series, Modernist Energies, with a screening of Jessica Hausner’s Lourdes (2009) on Friday, May 5th at 1:00 in South Hall 2714.

Lourdes is a sober film shot through with miracles, hope, and events inexplicable to the modern sensibility. Sylvie Testud stars as Christine, a reluctant pilgrim to the famous Catholic shrine who, despite her lack of faith, seems to have her multiple sclerosis miraculously cured. Lourdes won the Vienna Film Prize for best film. The screening will be followed by discussion and pizza will be served.

Reading Group Meeting for “An American Utopia” by Fredric Jameson

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On Friday, April 21st we will be meeting in South Hall 2623 to discuss the Fredric Jameson’s “An American Utopia.”

“Fredric Jameson’s pathbreaking essay “An American Utopia” radically questions standard leftist notions of what constitutes an emancipated society. Advocated here are—among other things—universal conscription, the full acknowledgment of envy and resentment as a fundamental challenge to any communist society, and the acceptance that the division between work and leisure cannot be overcome. To create a new world, we must first change the way we envision the world. Jameson’s text is ideally placed to trigger a debate on the alternatives to global capitalism. In addition to Jameson’s essay, the volume includes responses from philosophers and political and cultural analysts, as well as an epilogue from Jameson himself.

Many will be appalled at what they will encounter in these pages—there will be blood! But perhaps one has to spill such (ideological) blood to give the Left a chance.” (Verso)

PDF is available in the Collaborative Research Commons in South Hall or by emailing Chris Walker (caw2105 at gmail dot com).

“T. S. Eliot and the Dynamic Imagination,” a talk by Dr. Sarah Kennedy (Cambridge)

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Continuing our series on “Modernist Energies,” COMMA is pleased to announce the first event in our Spring calendar. Dr. Sarah Kennedy (Cambridge) we deliver a talk from her forthcoming book, T. S. Eliot and the Dynamic Imagination (Cambridge UP, 2017) on Monday, April 10th at 3:00 in South Hall 2623 (Sankey).

“T.S. Eliot and the Dynamic Imagination” considers Eliot’s poetic rendering of light through the evolving medium of the eye. The eye became for Eliot an increasingly contested symbol of empirical vision and its opposite, the inner vision, which may or may not reveal the “truth” the eye conceals. Charting Eliot’s engagement with the science of optics and color perception, the analysis extends from the eye to vision (in parallel with the poetic movement from depictions of the physical eye to psychological symbols of inner vision). It considers Eliot’s wavering between imagining the universal aspect of vision (he once wrote that “Speech varies, but our eyes are all the same”), and an awareness of the propensity for vision to play tricks with the specters and shadows of its own casting.

Dr Sarah Kennedy is a Research Fellow in English at Downing College, Cambridge, specializing in modernist and contemporary Anglophone poetry. Her research interests include metaphor, landscape, and literary selves.

As always, refreshments will be provided! We hope to see you there.

Image: Umberto Boccioni, “The City Rises” (1910).

Film Screening of Yorgos Lanthimos’s “The Lobster” (2015)

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Please join us for COMMA‘s next event in our “Modernist Energies” program with a screening and discussion of Yorgos Lanthimos’s 2015 dystopian comedy, The Lobster, on Friday, March 17th at 1:00 in South Hall 2635.

Yorgos Lanthimos’s dystopian comedy centers on the frantic search for love and meaning in a strictly hierarchized world in which failure to find companionship results in exclusion from the human species. Colin Farrell and Rachel Weisz star as outcasts, living on the fringes of society to avoid capture and to discover alternatives to state-sanctioned romance. The Lobster won the Jury Prize at Cannes Film Festival and was nominated for Best Original Screenplay at the Academy Awards. The screening will be followed by discussion.

As always, Pizza and drinks will be provided, so come hungry!

Reading Group Meeting for “Dying Modern”

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On Friday, February 17th we will be meeting in South Hall 2623 to discuss the Diana Fuss’s Dying Modern: A Meditation on Elegy (2013).

“In Dying Modern, one of our foremost literary critics inspires new ways to read, write, and talk about poetry. Diana Fuss does so by identifying three distinct but largely unrecognized voices within the well-studied genre of the elegy: the dying voice, the reviving voice, and the surviving voice. Through her deft readings of modern poetry, Fuss unveils the dramatic within the elegiac: the dying diva who relishes a great deathbed scene, the speaking corpse who fancies a good haunting, and the departing lover who delights in a dramatic exit.

Focusing primarily on American and British poetry written during the past two centuries, Fuss maintains that poetry can still offer genuine ethical compensation, even for the deep wounds and shocking banalities of modern death. As dying, loss, and grief become ever more thoroughly obscured from public view, the dead start chattering away in verse. Through bold, original interpretations of little-known works, as well as canonical poems by writers such as Emily Dickinson, Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Wright, and Sylvia Plath, Fuss explores modern poetry’s fascination with pre- and postmortem speech, pondering the literary desire to make death speak in the face of its cultural silencing..” (Duke University Press)

PDF is available in the Collaborative Research Commons in South Hall or by emailing Chris Walker (caw2105@gmail.com).

Film Screening of Yung Chang’s “Up the Yangtze” (2007)

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Please join us for COMMA’s next event of the 2016-17 series, “Modernist Energies.” We will be screening Yung Chang’s Up the Yangtze (2007) on Friday, Jan. 27th at 1:00 in South Hall 2635.

Friday, January 27th at 1:00 in South Hall 2635Yung Chang’s first full length film documents the hope and despair attending the construction of the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest power station. The project, a central component of the infrastructure boom fueling China’s advance in the world economy, displaced over 1 million people and submerged important archeological sites, even as it provided significant access to power for an entire province. The Dam likewise signaled a shift from rural agriculture to a new relation between the rural hinterlands and the metropole. Up the Yangtze offers a sobering account of the cost of high energy capitalism and takes place at the center of contemporary debates about social, economic, and environmental justice.

As always, pizza and drinks will be provided!