Announcing a Conference Sponsored by New York University, Fordham University, and the Modern Language Initiative

Friday, May 4: New York University
Silver Center (100 Washington Square East), 1st floor Jurow Hall

9:30 – 10:30
Editors’ Panel: Publishing Comparative Studies I
Cathie Brettschneider (University of Virginia Press)
J. Michael Dash (New York Universiy)
Helen Tartar (Fordham University Press)
chair: Fredric Nachbaur (Fordham Univeristy Press)

Points for discussion on this panel might include what comparative literature means today; how it has changed and why; how the Modern Language Initiative presses are responding to these changes; and what would constitute a compelling submission to any one of our five presses, depending on the focus and scope of the particular project.

11:00 – 12:45
When Did the Past Become Modern?
Jody Greene (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Kathleen Davis (University of Rhode Island)
John M. Archer (New York Univerity)
chair: Jerome Singerman (University of Pennsylvania Press)

What does it mean to call anything "early modern?" How did we come to apply these words to the period formerly known as the Renaissance, for example, and what can this tell us about our notions of both modernity and periodization? Why did theory come relatively late to medieval and early modern studies? And what is not modern about the early modern?

12:45 – 2:00
Lunch

2:00 – 3:45
Against Modernism
Toral Gajarawala (New York University)
Joseph Slaughter (Columbia University)
Ben Tran (Vanderbilt University)
chair: Fawzia Mustafa (Fordham University)

Where in the world is modernism? And more importantly, why? This panel will consider the literary turn toward modernism as a politics, as an aesthetics, and as an ideology. But it will also suggest its theoretical fracture, particularly in its new “worldly” incarnation. While recent discussions have heralded colonial, alternative, subaltern, and vernacular ways of being modernist in the world, this panel asks: What is at stake in this intellectual gesture in a moment of literary worldliness?

3:45 – 4:30
Refreshments

4:30 – 6:00
Roundtable Dialogue: Comparative Modernisms, Global Methodologies
Susan Stanford Friedman (University of Wisconsin–Madison)
Rebecca L. Walkowitz (Rutgers University)
chair: Ana Dopico (New York University)

When and where is modernism? How do global approaches to modernism alter our methodologies, our principles of analysis, and our most basic reading strategies? What new methodologies do we need to develop? This roundtable session will explore how the analysis of modernism on a global scale challenges our assumptions about the proper time, place, and objects of modernist studies.

Saturday, May 5: Fordham University, Lincoln Center
Lowenstein Building, 60th Street and Columbus Ave, 12th Floor Lounge

9:30 – 10:30
Editors’ Panel: Publishing Comparative Studies II
Henry Carrigan (Northwestern University Press)
Edward Dimendberg (University of California, Irvine)
Richard Terdiman (University of California, Santa Cruz)
chair: William Germano (Cooper Union)

Challenged by the downsizing of the research university and rapid changes in the book business, scholarly publishers and series editors in comparative literary studies today work differently from how they have in the past. The goal of this panel is to explore the possibilities of the present moment and to suggest how manuscript acquisition, academic disciplines, networks of scholars, information technologies, book marketing, and reading itself shape and respond to current conditions and portend a distinctively twenty-first-century mode of scholarly communication.

11:00 – 12:45
Translating Modernities
Susan Gillman (University of California, Santa Cruz)
Michelle Clayton (University of California, Los Angeles)
Crystal Parikh (New York University)
chair: Arnaldo Cruz-Malave (Fordham University)

Translation produces a comparison and works comparatively, both a product and a process, material and method. The critique of comparison is generally about its use as a formal method, with the isolation of cases, the establishment of variables, factors, and elements of difference and similarity. Eschewing the notion of a universal method in favor of an approach built to suit a particular problem, comparison becomes less a method and more a perspective, a way to bring together the local and the global, the past and the present. In this context, translation as comparison brings into view the critical question of first and seconds, of originals and copies, and their unexamined assumptions and potential uses. The translatability of keywords for race, place and ethnicity raises a different set of questions about the limits and possibilities of inter-medial and inter-cultural comparison. Thinking through comparative modernities allows us to hear and see the role of language in culture, the ideology of monolanguage and national cultures.

12:45 – 2:00
Lunch

2:00 – 3:45
New Media and Literary Theory
Lydia Liu (Columbia University)
McKenzie Wark (New School)
Timothy C. Campbell (Cornell University)
chair: Emily Apter (New York University)

Has literary theory lost touch with the evolving technology of writing in new media that is rapidly transforming our social life? This panel will reevaluate the goals and tasks of literary theory and raise some fundamental issues about their relevance to today's world. The panelists will consider, for example, in what ways the unfolding of digital media might make the conditions of its own critique legible or illegible, and to what extent the limits of our understanding are imposed by our writing machines and the minds that have invented such machines.

3:45 – 4:30
Refreshments

4:30 – 6:00
Keynote Address: Languages Other than English
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Columbia University)
respondent: Kyoo Lee (CUNY Graduate Center and John Jay College)
chair: Chris GoGwilt (Fordham University)

6:15 – 7:30
Reception

Conference sponsored by Fordham University's Comparative Literature Program, New York University's Comparative Literature Department, Fordham University Press, and the consortium of presses participating in the Modern Language Initiative. Co-sponsored by Fordham's English Department, Modern Languages & Literatures Department, and American Studies Program. Funding generously provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Fordham University Arts & Sciences Deans, and the New York University Department of Comparative Literature. For information contact: gogwilt@fordham.edu.