Category Archives: News

Symposium: The Literary and Its Outsides

Posted on by

Denotatively, Technically, Literally
The Literary and Its Outsides
Tuesday, April 1, 5–7:00 pm
Geballe Room, 220 Stephens Hall
Townsend Center for the Humanities
UC Berkeley

Presenters:

Margaret Cohen (Stanford University)
Ian Duncan (UC Berkeley)
Elaine Freedgood (New York University)
Cannon Schmitt (University of Toronto)

Discussants:

Stephen Best (UC Berkeley)
Kent Puckett (UC Berkeley)
Four contributors to the current special issue of Representations (No. 125, Winter 2014), co-edited by Elaine Freedgood and Cannon Schmitt, will offer reflections on language–denotative, technical, literal–conventionally excluded from critical reading and, thus, from “literature.” Discussants include Stephen Best (editorial board, Representations, co-editor of the special issue “Surface Reading,” No. 108, 2009) and Kent Puckett (co-chair, editorial board, Representations).

Co-sponsored by:

Representations
The Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, UCB
The Nineteenth Century and Beyond Working Group, UCB
The Florence Green Bixby Chair in English, UCB

Becoming America: A History for the 21st Century

Posted on by

Henkin1e2015_Main_nm1

The way we once learned history is now history.

Representations editorial board members David Henkin and Rebecca McLennan have just published a new US history survey, Becoming America: A History for the 21st Century.

Developed for students and instructors of the twenty-first century, Becoming America excites learners by connecting history to their experience of contemporary life. You can’t travel back in time, but you can be transported, and Becoming America does so by expanding the traditional core of the US survey to include the most contemporary scholarship on cultural, technological, and environmental transformations. At the same time, the program transforms the student learning experience through innovative technology that is at the forefront of the digital revolution. As a result, the Becoming America program makes it easier for students to grasp both the distinctiveness and the familiarity of bygone eras, and to think in a historically focused way about the urgent questions of our times.

 

 

THE NEW AGE OF AUTOMATION: algorithms, data, individuations

Posted on by

Today in Paris!

David Bates, author of Cartesian Robotics, will be speaking in the session “L’Automatisation contra l’Autonomisation”  at  LE NOUVEL ÂGE DE L’AUTOMATISATION: Algorithmes, Données, Individuations at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Bates’s contribution is one of several talks by international scholars, who will be discussing automation as it affects the the human relation to work, time, and space in the evolution of the digital environment.

 

 

Colleen Lye on “Office Stories”

Posted on by

The UC Berkeley Consortium on the Novel presents The Immigrant Novel in America Wednesday, November 13, at 4 pm in 315 Wheeler Hall (The Maude Fife Room) at the University of California, Berkeley. Presentations include “The Void and the Missing: Memory’s Trace in Monique Truong’s Bitter in the Mouth” by Karl Britto (UC Berkeley French and Comparative Literature), “The Future as Form: Imagining the Abolition of Social Categories in Ana Castillo’s Sapogonia” by Marcial Gonzalez (UC Berkeley English), and “Office Stories” by Colleen Lye (UC Berkeley English and Representations editorial board). Katherine Snyder (UC Berkeley English), respondent.

office-300x223

Washington, 1923. “Stamp Division, Post Office.” National Photo Company Collection glass negative, Library of Congress.

In Memoriam Paul Alpers

Posted on by

Paul Alpers, a founding member of the Representations editorial board and a broadly influential scholar who changed how a generation of readers thought about pastoral poetry, passed away on May 19, 2013. In his honor, Representations 124 features a collective remembrance by four of the original members of the editorial board and reprints Alpers’s fine translation of Virgil’s Eclogue V.

paul_alpers

Recently Discovered Daguerreotype Sheds Light on Resemblance in Photography

Posted on by

Resemblance did not come naturally to photography. Soon after it became a public medium in 1839, photography’s ability to produce resemblant images—and therefore portraits—was widely challenged. Proponents of photography quickly responded to those challenges by developing more complex concepts of the new medium. Jan Von Brevern, in his “Resemblance After Photography” (Number 123, Summer 2013), argues that photography played an important part in evolving debates on resemblance. vonBrevernFig6

Charles Nègre, self-portrait in a miroir de sorcière, c. 1845-50 (details). Copyright Sammlung Herzog, Basel, Switzerland.