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<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 16pt"><I><FONT
face=Times>Professor J Hillis Miller at the Centre for Ideas <BR>3
-5 August 2009 . <BR><BR></FONT></I></SPAN><FONT size=2><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"><BR></SPAN><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"><FONT
face=Times><B><I>Professor J Hillis Miller</I> </B>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.<BR><BR></FONT></SPAN></FONT><FONT
face="Calibri, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt"></SPAN></FONT>
<P align=center><FONT size=5><FONT face="Times, Times New Roman"><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 16pt"><I>Free Public
Lecture:<BR></I></SPAN></FONT></FONT><FONT
face="Times, Times New Roman"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt"><B>Wednesday 5
August, 6-8.00pm</B> <BR>Venue: Federation Hall, Victorian College of the
Arts<BR>234 St Kilda Road Southbank 3006<BR></SPAN></FONT><FONT
face="Calibri, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt"></SPAN></FONT>
<P><FONT face="Calibri, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><FONT size=2><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 10pt"><BR></SPAN></FONT></FONT><FONT
face="Times, Times New Roman"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt"><B>“The Whole
Earth as Garbage Dump: Stevens’s ‘The Man on the Dump’ and
<I>Wall-E”<BR> <BR></I></B>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, <I>Wall-E</I>, and
in many photographs and other graphic
representations.<BR><BR><BR></SPAN></FONT><FONT
face="Calibri, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt"></SPAN></FONT>
<P align=center><FONT size=5><FONT face="Times, Times New Roman"><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 16pt"><I>Seminars August 3-5, 2009<BR>The Conflagration of
Community:<BR>Fiction Before and After
Auschwitz<BR></I></SPAN></FONT></FONT><FONT
face="Calibri, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt"></SPAN></FONT>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt">“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 <I>Amerika</I> (or <I>The Man Who Disappeared</I> [<I>Der
Verschollene</I>], and Imre Kertész’s <I>Fatelessness</I>
(<I>Sorstalanság</I>). 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. <BR></SPAN></FONT><FONT size=5><FONT
face="Times, Times New Roman"><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 16pt"><I><BR></I></SPAN></FONT></FONT><FONT
face="Times, Times New Roman"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt"><B>Monday 3 August
3.00-5.00 pm<BR></B>Venue: Seminar Room Arts Hub VCA<BR><B>Seminar One:
The Conflagration of Community<BR><BR></B>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.<BR><BR><B>Tuesday 4 August 12.00
-2.00pm<BR></B>Venue: Seminar room Arts Hub VCA<BR><B>Seminar Two: Kafka’s
<I>Amerika</I> (<I>The Man Who Disappeared</I>) as a forshadowing of
Auschwitz.<BR> <BR></B>This seminar will read Kafka’s <I>Amerika</I>,
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.<BR><BR><B>Wednesday 5 August 3.00-5.00pm<BR></B>Venue:
Seminar Room VCA Arts Hub<BR><B>Seminar Three: Imre Kertész’s
<I>Fatelessness</I>: Fiction as Testimony<BR> <BR></B>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:
<I>Fateless</I>. <BR><B><BR> <BR></B>Readings: The central texts to
read are the last chapter of Kafka’s <I>Amerika</I> (in the new Michael
Hofmann translation of the complete manuscript, including fragments), and
Imre Kertész’s <I>Fatelessness</I> in the Tim Wilkinson translation. The
Hungarian original is available online (</SPAN></FONT><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt"><FONT face="Times New Roman"><A
href="http://dia.pool.pim.hu/html/muvek/KERTESZ/kertesz00004_kv.html">http://dia.pool.pim.hu/html/muvek/KERTESZ/kertesz00004_kv.html</A>
Accessed July 2009.)<BR> <BR></FONT><FONT
face="Times, Times New Roman">Here is a more extensive
bibliography.<BR> </FONT></SPAN><FONT
face="Calibri, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt">
</SPAN></FONT>
<P align=center><FONT face="Times New Roman"><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt">Bibliography<BR> </SPAN></FONT><FONT
face="Calibri, Verdana, Helvetica, Arial"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 11pt">
</SPAN></FONT>
<P><FONT face="Times New Roman"><SPAN style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt">*Agamben,
Giorgio. 2002. <I>Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive</I>.
Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen. New York: Zone Books.<BR><I>Bibliography of
Works by and about Imre Kertész, A</I>. Compiled by Tötösy de Zepetnek. <A
href="http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/library/imrekerteszbibliography(totosy).html">http://clcwebjournal.lib.purdue.edu/library/imrekerteszbibliography(totosy).html</A>
(Accessed Spring 2007.)<BR><I>Blanchot, Maurice</I>. 1980. <I>L’Écriture
du désastre</I>. Paris: Gallimard.<BR><I>Blanchot, Maurice</I>. 1995.
<I>The Writing of the Disaster</I>. New ed. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln and
London: University of Nebraska Press.<BR><I>Blanchot, Maurice</I>. 1995.
“Kafka and Literature,” in <I>The Work of Fire</I>, 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, *<U>De
Kafka ŕ Kafka</U> (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
<I>Selected Writings, Vol. 2:1927-1934 (</I>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 <I>Premises</I>, trans. Peter Fenves (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1996). Stanley Corngold has done much good work
on Kafka. His <I>Kafka’s Selected Stories</I>, trans. and ed. Stanley
Corngold, Norton Critical Edition (New York: Norton, 2007) is an exemplary
collection.<BR>, Efraim. 2005. <I>The Holocaust Novel.</I> New York and
London: Routledge.<BR>*Spiegelmann, Art. 1997. <I>Maus: A Survivor’s
Tale.</I> New York: Pantheon.<BR><BR></SPAN></FONT><SPAN
style="FONT-SIZE: 12pt"><FONT
face="Times, Times New Roman"><BR></FONT></SPAN></P></FONT></DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial></FONT> </DIV>
<DIV><FONT size=2 face=Arial>Dr Ashley Woodward<BR>The Melbourne School of
Continental Philosophy<BR><A
href="http://mscp.org.au/">http://mscp.org.au/</A><BR>Editor, Parrhesia: A
Journal of Critical Philosophy<BR><A
href="http://www.parrhesiajournal.org/">http://www.parrhesiajournal.org/</A><BR></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>