The Fisher Center Fall 2008 Lecture Series will address the questions:
September 17
Do emergencies animate our thinking or send us into suspended animation? Or does our thinking animate emergencies themselves?
Walter M. Cabot, Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value at Harvard University, Elaine Scarry examines first temptations in emergencies (whether medical, legal or civil) to over-ride our normal procedures of deliberation, consultation, and consent. She asks: What practices of thinking are active and legitimate in the three mental realms of sensation, creation, and deliberation under emergency conditions? What crucial role is played by habit in each? Described in the New York Times Magazine as a public intellectual of interpretive daring, Scarry trains literary criticism's analytic power onto matters of social, cultural, and political concern as a civic duty. Author of numerous books and articles, including the widely acclaimed The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, as well as On Beauty and Being Just, Dreaming by the Book and Who Defended the Country?, Scarry's work has long concerned itself with imagination, representation and justice - with what, in short, breathes life into life in what ways. She has been awarded Best American Essays of 2007 ("Rules of Engagement: Why Military Honor Matters") and honoured with a Guggenheim Fellowship in addition to a number of distinguished visiting faculty posts. Scarry's recent essays include "Citizenship in Emergency," "Imagining Flowers: Perceptual Mimesis," "Resisting the U.S.A. Patriot Act" and "Philosophy and Human Rights."
October 8
When is war a science fiction? How do comic books and video games animate military nanotechnologies?
Colin Milburn discusses the digitally-animated worlds of nanowar video games, focusing on how the playability of high-tech soldier avatars and "smart materials" weaponry incarnates a logic of global politics turning nanowar into an everyday concern. At the same time, Milburn observes how such worlds challenge players to navigate the "crisis mode" of the male warrior in the era of digital matter. Milburn looks at how these technologies animate one another, from writings of military scientists and technological forecasters who present the notion of nanowar less in terms of a speculative risk than as a clear-and-present danger (a prophetic scenario rendered already inevitable) through to the more than three dozen recently issued videogames animated by military nanotechnology's hyperbolic rhetoric and imagery. Holding one Ph.D. in the History of Science and a second in English, University of California, Davis, Assistant Professor of English Colin Milburn's recent works include Nanovision: Engineering the Future, a forthcoming book Mondo Nano: Fun and Games in the World of Digital Matter, and articles "Science from Hell: Jack the Ripper and Victorian Vivisection," (Science Images and Popular Images of the Sciences), "Nano/Splatter: Disintegrating the Postbiological Body," (New Literary History). "Syphilis in Faerie Land: Edmund Spenser and the Syphilography of Elizabethan England,"(Criticism), and "Monsters in Eden: Darwin and Derrida," (MLN).
November 5
When impresario, curator, director, choreographer, dancer, and actor Richard Move steps onto the stage as dance legend Martha Graham, one has to ask: Who is animating whom?
Described as more Martha Graham than Martha Graham, Move's Martha@ was created in 1996 as an homage in word and dance. Reviewed as a "sophisticated, dead on, letter perfect parody. A dandy education in modern dance" and Move himself as "a perfect repository of all her glamour and camp genius," Martha@ has received two New York Dance and Performance Awards (a.k.a. "Bessie" Award), and been featured on the BBC's Bourne to Dance and Arts Express, MetroArts 13, and the PBS Television Program City Arts-The Best of Dance, which received an Emmy Award for "Outstanding Fine Arts Program." In 2005, the film Ghostlight starred Move as Martha to wide acclaim, and in the Spring of 2006, Move made his debut as 'Martha Graham' with The Martha Graham Dance Company on their 80th Anniversary Celebration. Move is the subject of a forthcoming British documentary Making Martha, and recently opened MoveOpolis!: Hostile Takeover, performance installations of collisions of sexual desire and violence, masculinity and femininity in real and imagined worlds.
November 19
Is there alchemy to making life graphic? Does making life graphic have the power to enchant and/or transform?
Acclaimed graphic novelist David Mack discusses these questions and more as he reads from his latest Kabuki novel, The Alchemy, and speaks on graphic art more broadly. Reflecting on his own process as artist and writer, Mack will explore graphic art storytelling as a sequential art fused in a multi-media crucible of imagination, history, culture, personal stories, passions, desires, mythologies, and wonder about who one is and if one can "evolve into something beyond...original programming." Regarded as re-imagining comic book art and storytelling, David Mack's Kabuki series takes readers into an underworld of secret societies and government operatives as it draws on Japanese culture and history to extend the metaphor of masks and gender performance to questions of humanity and the "fragility of perceived reality." Best known for his creator-owned project, Kabuki, (published first by Image Comics and now by Marvel's ICON imprint), Mack's work has enjoyed international acclaim for its innovative storytelling, painting techniques, and page design; the series is now under screen adaptation. David Mack has also written and drawn Daredevil for Marvel Comics, authored the children's book The Shy Creatures, and is currently adapting sci-fi author Philip K Dick's books to graphic novels for Marvel.
Presentations will be held at 7:30 p.m. in the Geneva Room of the Warren Hunting Smith Library, on Pulteney Street, on the HWS campus unless otherwise noted.
All morning roundtables will be held from 9 to 10 a.m. in Room 212 Demarest Hall, the Fisher Center.
