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!

“A Shade or a Shape of You: Theory of Mind in Lily Briscoe’s Vision,” a talk by Professor Sowon Park (English, UCSB)

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frank-auerbach-reclining-head-of-gerda-boehm

The Literature and the Mind Initiative will host its Inaugural Talk on Monday, October 24th at 5:30 in South Hall 2635. Professor Sowon Park (UCSB, English) will deliver a lecture on Theory of Mind in To the Lighthouse that will be of great interest to all COMMA members.

Professor Sowon Park specializes in British Modernism, Political Fiction, World Literature, and the relationship between Literature and other forms of knowledge, in particular Cognitive Neuroscience. Before coming to UCSB, she taught at Oxford University for over a decade, where she was Lecturer and Tutor in English at Corpus Christi College. Her previous academic appointments were at Cambridge University and Ewha University, Seoul. She has also held visiting appointments at UCSD and ZFL, Geisteswissenschaftliche Zentren, Berlin. She received an M.Phil and D.Phil in English from Oxford. Recently, she was awarded a four-year AHRC grant to work on “Prismatic Translation’. Her latest publication is a special issue of The Journal of World Literaturethat she guest-edited, titled, The Chinese Scriptworld and World Literature (June, 2016). She has published her academic work in The Review of English Studies, MLQ, ELT, European Review, Arcadia,Neohelicon and Comparative Critical Studies.

“A Shade or a Shape of You: Theory of Mind in Lily Briscoe’s Vision”:

In the last fifteen years, “Theory of Mind (ToM)” has been the object of intense investigation in developmental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, anthropogeny, philosophy and literary studies, producing a number of related concepts to develop our understanding of how we impute mental states to ourselves and others. The first part of the paper will provide a brief overview of current research and consider issues that emerge when these terms are translated across disciplines. The second part will discuss relevant findings in ToM research in neuroscience and bring them to bear on the private vision of Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse. The aim of the paper is to reflect on what ToM might mean for literary research that makes it distinct from other lines of inquiry and to consider Intersubjectivity from a ToM angle.