Announcing Advanced Seminars at 2012 AATSEEL Conference, Seattle

[Katya Hokanson]

Advanced Seminars to be held at Seattle AATSEEL Conference, Jan. 5-8, 2012
 
AATSEEL announces two innovative Advanced Seminars to be held at the Seattle conference, led by renowned scholars who will provide AATSEEL members with the opportunity to participate in and gain from their knowledge, expertise and practice.
 
Advanced Seminar I:  "Pushkin's Poetry and its Romantic Contexts," focusing on placing Pushkin within the culture of early European Romanticism, led by Professor Boris Gasparov, Columbia 
					University.
                    
Advanced Seminar II:  "Reading Too Closely," focusing on the topic of close reading and challenges to that approach, led by Professor Eric Naiman, University of California at Berkeley.
 
 
The Pushkin seminar will be limited to 20 participants and the Reading Too Closely seminar will be restricted to 15 participants.  Participants must be current members of AATSEEL and pre-registered for the 2012 Conference.  Please see the overview of each seminar below; more details will be forthcoming from the seminar leaders in the next few weeks.
 
To register:  Email Katya Hokanson at hokanson at uoregon.edu.  Be sure to indicate in your email:

1) that you are a current member of AATSEEL,
2) that you have pre-registered for the 2012  AATSEEL Conference in Seattle,
3) which Advanced Seminar you would like to attend.

Please note that seminars may fill up quickly, but I will keep a running waiting list.  If you sign up for a seminar but later find you are unable to attend, please contact me right away so that we can allow someone else to take your place.  I will also be verifying that participants are indeed AATSEEL members and are pre-registered for the conference.
 
Advanced Seminars will continue to be offered at next year’s AATSEEL Conference in Boston in January 2013, when Professr Stephanie Sandler of Harvard University will offer an advanced seminar on contemporary Russian poetry, with a second seminar likely to focus on film.  The AATSEEL Executive Council welcomes suggestions for future topics and leaders.  Suggestions or questions should be directed to Katya Hokanson at hokanson at uoregon.edu.
 
Detailed descriptions of each seminar:
 
Advanced Seminar I, led by Prof. Boris Gasparov, Columbia University
 
            "Pushkin's Poetry and its Romantic Contexts"

The seminar will make an attempt to map Pushkin’s place in the culture of early European Romanticism (1800s-1830s). The problem in question goes beyond Pushkin’s particular works representing conventional Romantic genres (such as his “Southern poems” and elegies), or his indebtedness to particular Romantic figures, such as Byron, Chateaubriand, or Walter Scott. Rather, the seminar is aimed at exploring various aspects of Pushkin’s oeuvre at large in the framework of major categories of contemporary European literature. Among the problems to be considered: constructing the self (Romantic personal mythology), fragmentariness, Romantic irony, dialogism (the role of the “other”), the role of language. 

 Suggested reading:

 1. Pushkin’s works:

            Eugene Onegin, The Prisoner of the Caucasus, The Stone Guest, The Bronze Horseman, selected elegies, epistles, epigrams.

 2. European Romanticism:

            Byron, Don Juan

            Constant, Adolphe

            Chateaubriand, Atala

            Büchner, The Death of Danton

            Austen, Pride and Prejudice

 3. Secondary literature:

            Bethea, David, Realizing Metaphors: Alexander Pushkin and the Life of the Poet (U of Wiconsin Pr, 1998)

            Greenleaf, Monika, Pushkin and Romantic Fashion (Stanford UPr, 1994)

            Ram, Harsha, Imperial Sublime: a Russian Poetics of Empire (U of Wiconsin Pr, 2003)

            The Pushkin Handbook, ed. by David Bethea (U of Wiconsin Pr, 2005): articles by Douglas Clayton, Leslie O’Bell, David Bethea, Harsha Ram, Alexander Dolinin, Boris Gasparov


Advanced Seminar II, led by Prof. Eric Naiman, University of California at Berkeley
 
            "Reading Too Closely"

	This session will consider several aspects of  (im)properly close reading.
	We will take Nabokov as our model for an author whose fiction constantly
	entices, teaches and punishes his best students.  We will consider the
	similarities suggested by his work between close reading and sexual arousal,
	and then, with a paradigm of "abusive [Humbertian] reading" formulated, we
	will proceed to examine the work of a critic - Jane Gallop - whose writing
	operates along potentially similar lines.  We will also look at several
	recent challenges to close reading.  Finally, I will turn my attention to
	two canonical nineteenth century texts and suggest ways to read them
	improperly. I will ask several of the participants, who will be limited to
	fifteen, to suggest in advance a couple texts for improperly close
	collective reading, an enterprise these volunteers will lead.  We will
	constantly keep the following questions in mind - is such work primarily
	performative, or does it leave lasting value, and if so, how can it be best
	presented for a specific field.  Readings to be provided to participants by
	December 1, earlier if participants really intend to start before that date.
.
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