[csaa-forum] J Hillis Miller at the Centre for Ideas

[Ashley Woodward]

Professor J Hillis Miller at the Centre for Ideas   
3 -5 August 2009 . 


Professor J Hillis Miller  is Distinguished Research Professor of English and Comparative Literature  at the University of California Irvine. Miller taught at Johns Hopkins  University where he was heavily influenced by fellow Johns Hopkins professor  and French literary critic Georges Poulet and the Geneva School of literary  criticism, which Miller characterized as "the consciousness of the  consciousness of another, the transposition of the mental universe of an  author/artist into the interior space of the critic's mind." In 1972, he  joined the faculty at Yale University where he worked along side prominent  literary critics Paul de Man, Harold Bloom, and Geoffrey Hartman and is the  founder of the famous Yale School of Deconstruction. As a prominent American  deconstructionist, Miller defines the movement as searching for "the thread in  the text (work of art) in question which will unravel it all," and cites that  there are multiple layers to any text, both its clear surface and its deep  countervailing subtext. In 1986, Miller left Yale to work at the University of  California Irvine, where he was later followed by his Yale colleague Jacques  Derrida. Both at Yale and UC Irvine, Miller mentored an entire generation of  American critics including noted queer theorist Eve Kosofsky  Sedgwick.


Free Public  Lecture:
Wednesday 5 August, 6-8.00pm 
Venue:  Federation Hall, Victorian College of the Arts
234 St Kilda Road Southbank  3006



"The Whole  Earth as Garbage Dump: Stevens's 'The Man on the Dump' and  Wall-E"
 
This lecture reads Wallace Stevens's short  poem, "The Man on the Dump," as foreshadowing our epoch of catastrophic  climate change, as dramatized in Pixar's animated film, Wall-E, and in  many photographs and other graphic  representations.




Seminars August 3-5, 2009
The Conflagration of  Community:
Fiction Before and After  Auschwitz


"After Auschwitz  still to write a poem is barbaric," said Theodor Adorno. "Nach Auschwitz noch  ein Gedicht zu schreiben ist barbarisch." That stern prohibition has not  prevented a lot of poetry from being written since the Shoah, for example Paul  Celan's poems, as well as multitudes of novels. This has included novels about  Auschwitz by survivors, as opposed to memoirs and autobiographies. Are these  literary works acts of barbarism? If so, would it not be even more barbaric to  teach or to write analyses of such works? These questions will be addressed  this year both through theoretical reflection and, primarily, through the  reading of two novels, Franz Kafka's Amerika (or The Man Who  Disappeared [Der Verschollene], and Imre Kertész's  Fatelessness (Sorstalanság). Kafka's novel will be read as a  remarkably prescient "premonition of Auschwitz." Kertész's novel is one of the  best Holocaust novels by a survivor. The seminar will make reference to  theoretical reflections about these issues by Maurice Blanchot, Primo Levi,  Elie Wiesel, and Giorgio Agamben. The question of the effect of Auschwitz on  the possibility of representing communities in literature will be raised.  

Monday 3 August  3.00-5.00 pm
Venue: Seminar Room Arts Hub VCA
Seminar One:   The Conflagration of Community

After an introductory section  discussing Adorno's famous dictum about poetry after Auschwitz, the seminar  will begin the discussion of the way Kafka's work can be read as a premonition  of Auschwitz.

Tuesday 4 August 12.00 -2.00pm
Venue: Seminar  room Arts Hub VCA
Seminar Two: Kafka's Amerika (The Man Who  Disappeared) as a forshadowing of Auschwitz.
 
This seminar  will read Kafka's Amerika, especially the last unfinished chapter  (called by Max Brod "The Nature Theater of Oklahoma"), as a remarkable  prefiguration of the transportation of Jews to the death camps. The seminar  will interrogate what is at stake in reading a literary work as anticipatory  of events the author could not have foreknown.

Wednesday 5 August  3.00-5.00pm
Venue: Seminar Room VCA Arts Hub
Seminar Three: Imre  Kertész's Fatelessness: Fiction as Testimony
 
With some  reference to Agamben, Wiesel, Blanchot, and Levi, this seminar will read  Kertész's great novel in the light of a question: In what way can a work of  fiction be a way of bearing witness to the Holocaust. Some reference will be  made to the film made from the novel, with a script by Kertész:  Fateless. 

 
Readings: The central texts to read  are the last chapter of Kafka's Amerika (in the new Michael Hofmann  translation of the complete manuscript, including fragments), and Imre  Kertész's Fatelessness in the Tim Wilkinson translation. The Hungarian  original is available online (http://dia.pool.pim.hu/html/muvek/KERTESZ/kertesz00004_kv.html  Accessed July 2009.)
 
Here is a more extensive bibliography.
    

Bibliography
   

*Agamben,  Giorgio. 2002. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive.  Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books.
Bibliography of Works  by and about Imre Kertész, A. Compiled by Tötösy de Zepetnek. http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/library/imrekerteszbibliography(totosy).html  (Accessed Spring 2007.)
Blanchot, Maurice. 1980. L'Écriture du  désastre. Paris: Gallimard.
Blanchot, Maurice. 1995. The  Writing of the Disaster. New ed. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln and London:  University of Nebraska Press.
Blanchot, Maurice. 1995. "Kafka and  Literature," in The Work of Fire, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford,  California: Stanford University Press). All Blanchot's Kafka essays, which are  surely among the best readings of Kafka, have been conveniently collected, in  the original French, in a single volume, *De Kafka à Kafka (Paris:  Gallimard, 1981). The English translations of these essays are dispersed among  the various volumes of Blanchot's essays that have been recently published,  primarily by Stanford University Press. Other notable essays on Kafka are  Walter Benjamin's "Franz Kafka," in Selected Writings, Vol. 2:1927-1934  (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 794-818,   Jacques Derrida's "Before the Law," and Werner Hamacher's "The Gesture  in the Name: On Benjamin and Kafka," in Premises, trans. Peter Fenves  (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996). Stanley Corngold has done much  good work on Kafka. His Kafka's Selected Stories, trans. and ed.  Stanley Corngold, Norton Critical Edition (New York: Norton, 2007) is an  exemplary collection.
, Efraim. 2005. The Holocaust Novel. New York  and London: Routledge.
*Spiegelmann, Art. 1997. Maus: A Survivor's  Tale. New York: Pantheon.










Dr Ashley Woodward
The Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy
http://mscp.org.au/
Editor, Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy
http://www.parrhesiajournal.org/
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