Fall 2009 Course Offerings

(also VISST 4821, ARTH 4821)
Fall.  4 credits.  
Limited to 15 students.  
M. Fernández  
T 2:30 - 4:25

From the 1940’s to the present, numerous artists and intellectuals from various parts of the world emigrated or resided outside of their home countries for extended periods in large urban centers, especially in Europe and the United States. Many of these artists and intellectuals significantly contributed to the formation of new fields of knowledge and practice in the sciences and the arts. While the mobile figure of the migrant has been discussed at length in light of theories of hybridity, resistance and cosmopolitanism, scholars have paid little attention to the migrant as inventor or creator. Are there conditions specific to the experience of migration that foster the generation and actualizations of new ideas? In the study of mobility and invention how might one theorize the interplay among individual experiences and inclinations and social and political conditions in the home and adopted countries? Are theories of cosmopolitanism and translation sufficient to theorize immigrants’ creativity? This seminar will function as a transdisciplinary laboratory for the exploration of these questions. Students from diverse fields and schools are welcomed.

María Fernández is Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Studies at Cornell University.  She received her doctorate in art history from Columbia University in 1993. Her research interests include the history and theory of digital art, postcolonial studies, Latin American art and architecture and the intersections of these fields. She has published essays in multiple journals including Art Journal, Third Text, nparadoxa,  Architectural Design (AD), Fuse and Mute. Her work appears in several volumes including the Companion of Contemporary Art since 1945 edited by Amelia Jones (Blackwell 2006) and At a Distance: Precursors to Art and Activism on the Internet edited by Annmarie Chandler and Norie Neumark (MIT Press, 2005.) With Faith Wilding and Michelle Wright she edited the anthology Domain Errors: Cyberfeminist Practices published by Autonomedia in 2002.  Recently she completed a book on Mexican Cosmopolitanism in the Visual Artsunder contract with Texas University Press and now she is working on a book on the work of the British cybernetician, Gordon Pask.

(also ENGL 4072, FREN 4824, DANCE 4384)
Fall.  4 credits.  
Limited to 15 students.   
S. Chaganti  
M 10:10 - 12:05

This seminar will use movement and movement studies to explore medieval traditions of translation. Etymologically a “carrying across,” translatio as word and concept always asks us to consider its foundations in both literal and figurative movement, as well as the meanings of those literal and figurative forms of movement relative to each other. The concepts of translatio studii and translatio imperii were central to medieval thought and relied deeply on a vision of culture in motion. By foregrounding the role of movement in a few particularly resonant networks of medieval texts, the class will investigate how we might understand translation in terms of spatial as well as textual materiality. In addition to literary readings, the syllabus will include a combination of historical and theoretical foundations. These will include classic studies of medieval translation theory, such as Copeland’sRhetoric, Hermeneutics and Translation; more recent work on translatio and cultural movement, such as Ingham and Warren’s Postcolonial Moves: Medieval through Modern; and critical theorists of space, translation and motion, such as Bachelard, Lefebvre, Benjamin, Derrida, Deleuze, Massumi, and Gil. In addition to providing medievalist students with a new perspective on some important texts, the course will also offer nonmedievalists a critically inflected view of early literary self-reflection on translation.  This course aims to help students find innovative ways to theorize historical material.

Seeta Chaganti is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Davis. She teaches medieval European literature. Her first book, The Medieval Poetics of the Reliquary: Enshrinement, Inscription, Performance, was published in 2008 by Palgrave Macmillan. Her current project is tentatively entitled The Past in Motion: Dance, Memory, and the Middle Ages. It examines medieval literary and artistic depictions of dance, arguing that dance and movement practices give form to memory practice both within and of the Middle Ages.