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Bakhtin’s Approach to Dialogicity, Rhetoric, and the Fantastic |
March 7, 2007 4:00 p.m.
Location: Institute for the Humanities (Lower Level of Stevenson Hall) 701 South Morgan Chicago, IL
Speaker: Renate Lachmann (University of Konstanz, Germany)
For further information, contact the Department of Slavic and Baltic Languages and Literatures at (312) 996-4412.
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A S T E V E N T S |
Grammar without Gravity:
Russian Aboard The International Space Station |
Tuesday, October 24 2006, 10:00 am
329 Cardinal Room, Student Center East
Speaker: Leroy Chiao, Ph.D. U.S. Astronaut
 Dr. Chiao will discuss the important role of Russian language study in his training and in his ability to successfully perform his duties as Commander of the International Space Station.
A veteran of four space missions, Dr. Chiao served as Commander and NASA Science Officer of Expedition 10 aboard the International Space Station in 2005. He has logged over 229 days in space.
He is currently the Smiley and Bernice Romero Raborn Distinguished Chair Professor, honoring Max Faget, in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Louisiana State University.
For further information, please contact the Department of Slavic and Baltic
Languages and Literatures at (312) 996-4412 |
From Bambo the Black to Hans Castorp: Polish literature from a postcolonial perspective |
Thursday, November 4 2006, 3:00pm
Institude for the Humanities, Stevenson Hall, UIC
Speaker: A Lecture by Dr. Dariusz Skorczewski, Kosciuszko Fellow
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| Upton Sinclair: The Lithuanian Jungle |
Saturday, March 25 2006, 11:00 am
Speaker: Giedrius Subacius, University of Illinois at Chicago
In the fall of 1904, a young man breezed into the offices of The Independent, a Chicago newspaper. "Hello!" he greeted editor Ernest Poole, "I'm Upton Sinclair! And I've come to write the Uncle Tom's Cabin of the labor movement." When Sinclair's The Jungle was published as a book in 1906, it led to the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act and became a classic piece of American fiction. To write The Jungle, Sinclair spent seven weeks in Chicago among the stockyard workers. In his talk, Giedrius Subacius explores why Sinclair selected Lithuanians as his protagonists and how he used the Lithuanian language and real people and places to craft a powerful and influential novel.
Admission is free. No reservations are required. |
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| An
Evening of Poetry with Tomas Venclova |
When: Tuesday, May
3, 2005 at 7:00 pm
Where: Institute for Humanities,
Lower Level, Stevenson Hall
Tomas Venclova is Professor of
Slavic Languages and Literature at Yale University.
He is the authoer of Winter Dialogue (a volume
of poetry) and Forms of Hope (essays)
Click picture on the right to get full page poster.
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| Julia
Vaingurt Lecture |
| Julia Vaingurt Lecture - Writing
as Bodily Technology in Yevgeny Zamyatin's We
When: Thursday, April 7, 2005 at
2:15 pm
Where: UH 1650
Click picture on the right to get full page poster.
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| Jelena
Grigorjeva's Lecture |
| Jelena Grigorjeva's Lecture - VIRTUAL
IDENTITY IN THE EPOCH OF GLOBALIZATION
When: Tuesday, April 5, 2005
Where: Institute for the Humanities
Click picture on the right to get full page poster.
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| "House
of Fools" film projection |
| "House of Fools" film by
Andrey Konchalovsky.
When: Thursday, February 10, 2005
Where: Room 1650 University Hall.
Click picture on the right to get full page poster.
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| Alexandra
Kirilcuk Lecture |
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Lecture by Alexandra Kirilcuk (Harvard University)
When: Thursday, Nov. 18, 2004, 2:15
p.m.,
Where: Room 1650 University Hall.
The title of her lecture will be "Moving Mountains:
The Spiritual Topography of Marina Tsvetaeva's Poema
kontsa"
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| Prof.
Dominic Pacyga Lecture |
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Professor Dominic Pacyga (Columbia
College) will present a lecture
When: Thursday, Oct. 21, 2004, 4:00
p.m.,
Where: Room 1650 University Hall.
The title of his lecture will be "Slavic Chicago:
Creating Community Among Chicago's Poles and Czechs
Before World War I"
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| Prof.
Thomas Lecture at University of Essex |
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Prof. Thomas will participate in conference titled:
“Platform to Prague: an International Conference
on Czech Surrealism."
The title of Prof. Thomas lecture is "Between
Paris and Moscow: Sexuality and Politics in Interwar
Czech Poetry and Film"
(time as yet unknown).
Where: University of Essex, UK
When: Sept. 29 - 30, 2004 |
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| Talk
by Susan Mc Reynold |
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Talk by Susan Mc Reynolds (Northwestern University)
"Disraeli and the Merchant God: Christian vs.
Jew in Dostoevsky's Historical Eschatology
When: Thursday, April 22, 2004 at 2:15 p.m. |
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What
is the significance of Dostoevsky’s anti-Semitism
for his writings? Belief in an impending apocalyptic
confrontation between what he calls the Russian and
Jewish ideas is central to Dostoevsky’s imagination,
informing his novels as well as his immensely popular
monthly journal, the Diary of a Writer. Despite the
voluminous critical literature dedicated to Dostoevsky,
however, this question remains unanswered. When Western
critics do on rare occasions turn their attention to
the presence of anti-Semitism in his novels, they dismiss
it as the puzzling but essentially meaningless intrusion
of a biographical enigma into literary texts. The Diary
contributed more to Dostoevsky’s success among
his contemporaries than any other text except The Brothers
Karamazov, which rode on its coattails; yet the potential
implications of the Diary’s anti-Semitism are
contained by anachronistically dismissing it as inconsequential
marginalia.
In this paper, I read the Diary and novels as redemption
narratives. Both fiction and journalism, I show, are
preoccupied with the Christian vehicle of redemption,
the crucifixion. The crucifixion presents Dostoevsky
with an untenable combination of what he perceives to
be the essence of the incompatible Russian and Jewish
ideas. The crucifixion joins what must remain separate:
the Jewish idea—sacrificial exchange logic, God’s
sacrifice of his child to benefit others—and the
Russian idea of self-sacrifice. The Diary fixes the
problem of the crucifixion’s contamination with
the Jewish idea by advancing alternative vehicles of
redemption, offering redemption through Russia, art,
and war as pure self-sacrifice, purged of any Jewish
element.
Reading the novels and Diary together shows that Dostoevsky
constructs clear associations between the God against
whom his fictional characters rebel and the Jewish authority
figure, Disraeli, against whom Russia rebels in the
Diary. Readers are led to associate the God who sacrifices
his child with the Jew orchestrating the sacrifice of
innocents in the Balkans; Dostoevsky leads us, in other
words, to think of God as a bad father and a bad Jew.
This association imbues the rebellions of characters
such as Raskolnikov, Stavrogin, and Ivan Karamazov against
paternal, political, and divine authorities with new
significance. Through the seeming detour of what Dostoevsky
scholarship has marginalized as his inconsequential
anti-Semitism, we can understand the center—the
struggle with faith and authority portrayed in his novels—for
the first time. |
| E
C S T A S Y |
| The Cinema
of Central and Eastern Europe Series presents:
ECSTASY
dir. Gustav Machaty (1932), starring Maria Kiesler
(Hedy Lamarr)
introduced by Professor Alfred Thomas
Thursday, Feb. 26, at 5:00 p.m.
Location: UH 1650
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