Friday, September 16 through Thursday, September 22
Professor Claire Colebrook, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, is a prolific scholar, publishing twelve monographs and four edited book collections in the past seventeen years, in addition to almost ninety articles and book chapters, on a range of subjects including gender studies, feminist theory, the work of Gilles Deleuze and other continental philosophers, ethics, contemporary music and dance, visual culture, political theory, irony, literary history, and the work of poets John Milton and William Blake. Professor Colebrook's most recent publications include: Gender (Palgrave 2004), Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum 2006), Milton, Evil and Literary History (Continuum 2008) , and Deleuze and the Meaning of Life (Contiuum 2010). She has two forthcoming volumes: William Blake and Digital Aesthetics (Continuum 2011) and Theory and the Disappearing Future: On De Man on Benjamin (Routledge 2011), the latter co-authored with Tom Cohen and J. Hillis Miller.
Professor Colebrook will present several major talks during her week in the department, as well as smaller sessions with scholars. She will also hold office hours for individual meetings on Tuesday and Thursday mornings (to be confirmed).
Lecture 1: "Posthumous Literature: Framing the End of the Species"
Monday, September 19, 3:30 pm, HC L-3
Mikhail Bakhtin remarked that the problem with the Ancient Greeks is that they didn't know they were ancient Greeks. The notion of being the first humans, for all its Eurocentrism, marked the ways in which we read the Greek legacy, including (today) some appeals to retrieving the origin of politics. If we were today to conduct a thought experiment and imagine ourselves as the last humans (who couldn't possibly know we were the last humans) how would we read?
Lecture 2: "The Disembodied Eye: Images without Bodies"
Wednesday, September 21, 3:30 pm, HC L-3
There has, for at least the last decade or so, been both a lament and celebration of the end of the reading eye. On the one hand it is possible to imagine specular culture as a proto-extinction event: the human brain is so focused on the consumption of images that it is destroying its long-developed powers of retention and syntax. On the other hand, it is possible to regard the possibility of detached images - for which we have no context of interpretation - as a genuine thought of the future.
Lecture 3: "The Theory of Man and the Ends of the Planet"
Thursday, September 22, 3:30 pm, HC L-3 (reception will follow)
Anthropologists have begun to pose the possibility of the 'anthropocene era'. 'Man' may not only be a species within the history of organic life, but may also imagine his own species as a geological event. Such a possibility poses new possibilities for the conception of (and relation between) time and reading.
Two graduate seminars have also been scheduled as follows:
Friday, September 16, 10:00 am, Salter Reading Room (HC 3-95)
Jacques Derrida, "No Apocalyse, Not Now"
Tuesday, September 20, 2:30 pm, Salter Reading Room (HC 3-95)
Derrida on Derrida's "Paul de Man's War" and "Biodegradables: Seven Diary Fragments"
Registration for the two graduate seminars is requested and can be confirmed by email to kris.calhoun@ualberta.ca. Interested graduate students from all departments are invited to attend either or both sessions. Readings are available as preparation for each seminar. They will be provided at the time of registration; register early to allow time for this preparation.
Date and Time
Friday, September 16, 2011 - Thursday, September 22, 2011
Contact Information
Host: Elena del Rio, Visiting Speaker Chair, English and Film Studies (elena.delrio@ualberta.ca)
Location
Humanities Centre
Lecture Theatre 3