“Savage Words: Invective as a Literary Genre”
Thursday, February 5 – Saturday, February 7, 2009
Together with the insult and the verbal attack, invective inhabits the most antisocial sphere of language—a sphere one might expect to be ungoverned by any rules or conventions of genre, where scathing ridicule is unleashed with the same heated anarchy that animates its devoted practitioners.
And yet, upon closer examination, invective reveals itself to be one of the most tightly regulated of the literary genres, in which genealogies and norms have been strictly codified since the time of Cicero and Sallust. In fact, manuals of rhetoric, meant for students at all levels, formalize its every aspect—even determining, with clinical precision, the kind of shortcomings to be excoriated in one’s colleagues. Notwithstanding the ironclad regulations to which it is subjected, or possibly because of them, invective has enjoyed continuing favor throughout European circles, being always rediscovered, revisited, and rekindled.
From Cicero and Sallust then, to the literary polemics of the twentieth century, passing through medieval patristics and Petrarch’s reformulations, this conference will bring together an international array of scholars to delineate the rules of the invective genre, showing its evolution and expressive ductility, analyzing that vast corpus of texts, which, over the centuries, individuals of every provenance (civil or ecclesiastic) have discharged in an effort to vilify either the ideas or the character of their colleagues, to demonstrate their superiority in the art of rhetoric, or, perhaps simply to vent their genuine loathing for those same colleagues. Organized by Professor Massimo Ciavolella
(UCLA, Italian).
“The Book of Royal Degrees and Russian Historical Consciousness”
Tuesday, February 26 - Saturday, February 28, 2009
This three-day international conference, organized by Professor Gail Lenhoff (Slavic Languages and Literatures, UCLA), marks the publication of a critical edition of Russia’s first narrative history, The Book of Royal Degrees, produced in the Moscow metropolitan’s scriptorium between 1555-1564, during the reign of Ivan IV “the Terrible.” The edition was made possible by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and CEERS, with support from CMRS and the UCLA Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures.
Invited speakers, representing various academic disciplines, will present papers on the book’s treatment of Muscovite history, politics, theology, literary production, artistic subtexts and reception. Other questions to be considered include: 1) religion and governance; 2) preconditions for a “culture of history”; 3) ways in which pre-modern writers of history seek to understand, legitimize and influence the present; 4) the ways in which historical narratives such as the Book of Royal Degrees contribute to the rise of nationalism and the survival of absolute monarchies; and, 5) the uses of historical narratives in the building of a civil, democratic society.
The program is cosponsored by CMRS, the Center for European and Eurasian Studies, and the UCLA Departments of Slavic Languages & Literatures and History.
A CMRS Ahmanson Conference
“Medieval Sexuality: 2009”
Friday, March 6 and Saturday, March 7, 2009
Considering that the history of sexuality as a more or less coherent intellectual project is only a few decades old, what we have learned about medieval sexuality so far is remarkable. Precisely because the investigations have only just begun, however, whole areas have yet to be explored. To further this exploration, this conference will bring together fourteen scholars from various disciplines and nationalities to take stock of what is being done now and to investigate new areas in the history of medieval sexuality. Attention will be focused on two primary issues: First—what is this thing we call “medieval sexuality”? Does it have any medieval coherence, or, despite what scholars claim to have learned from Foucault, is it just modern sexuality in medieval drag? Second—what can be learned by studying points of exchange, by studying the movement of sexual knowledges or representations across various boundaries? Studies of text and image have played an increasingly important role in medieval studies: how does sexuality figure in these relations? Much work has been done on the learned, Latin traditions, somewhat less on the court or the urban laity: what are the tensions and exchanges between sacred and secular sexualities? Some of the earliest work on the history of medieval sexuality came from nineteenth-century physicians and archeologists: how has the emerging scientia sexualis of the nineteenth century defined our ways of understanding medieval sexuality?
This program is supported by a grant from The Ahmanson Foundation, with matching funds provided by CMRS, the UCLA Vice Chancellor for Research, and the Humanities Division of the UCLA College of Letters and Science; cosponsored by the UCLA Dean of Humanities, and the UCLA Departments of English and History. Organized by James Schultz (UCLA, Germanic Languages) and Zrinka Stahuljak (UCLA, French and Francophone Studies).
A CMRS Ahmanson Conference
“Writing Down the Myths: The Construction of Mythology in Classical and Medieval Traditions”
Friday, April 16 – Sunday, April 18, 2009
Contemporary scholarly definitions of and approaches to myth, though influenced by the fieldwork and findings of anthropologists and folklorists working with living oral traditions over the last hundred years, are still grounded in venerable literary classics that purport to sum up ancient traditional stories about gods and goddesses, heroes and heroines, primal events, and the beginnings of the world. Such texts, which assemble related narratives into “mythologies,” become canonical formulations that can function as sources, templates, and inspirations for other literary and scholarly works, both within their own literary-historical contexts and beyond them. There are cases, however, where these codified mythologies serve as epitaphs, seemingly marking the end of particular (oral) traditions instead of their (literary) revival.
This conference will examine the various factors (literary, cultural, political) that led to the production of mythological compendia in the Classical and Late-Antique world, and the extent to which the agenda that produced parallel works in certain medieval cultures of northwest Europe (Ireland, Wales, Iceland) operated along similar or even historically related lines. Papers and discussions will focus on the cultural and literary contexts behind the “mythographic urge” in Classical Greek and Latin literature, as well as in Western European traditions of the Middle Ages (particularly Celtic and Norse), and on the possible historical links and typological parallels among works such as Apollodorus’s Library, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Snorri Sturluson’s Edda, the Irish Battle of Mag Tuired, and the Welsh Four Branches of the Mabinogi. Some of the questions to be considered are: What was the transmission history of pre-medieval mythographic works in the Middle Ages, and to what extent and to whom were they available as models to the post-Classical world? How “authentic” are ancient and medieval mythographies, and how do we determine that authenticity? To what uses were they put? Are they attempts to negotiate received or developing concepts of history, or are they formulations of an anti-historical poetic? And what are the differences in function, approach, and subtext between these pre-modern “write-ups” of myth and modern learned and popular handbooks of mythology?
The conference was organized by Professors Joseph Nagy (English) and Kendra Willson (Scandinavian Section), and doctoral graduate students Malcolm Harris (English), Eric Kristensson (Germanic Languages and Literatures), Katherine McLoone (Comparative Literature), and Anna Pagé (Indo-European Studies). Guest speakers will include Professors Margaret Clunies-Ross (Sydney University), Sioned Davies (Cardiff University), William Hansen (Indiana University), Richard Martin (Stanford), Jan Ziolkowski (Harvard). Support for this program was provided by a generous grant from The Ahmanson Foundation, with matching funds provided by CMRS, the UCLA Vice Chancellor for Research, and the Humanities Division of the UCLA College of Letters and Science.
CMRS Annual Shakespeare Symposium
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Topic and program to be announced.
A CMRS Ahmanson Conference
“Mapping Medieval Geographies: Cartography and Geographical thought in the Latin West and Beyond, 300-1600”
Thursday, May 28 – Saturday, May 30, 2009
Geography as it was understood and practiced in the Middle Ages, within both eastern and western traditions, and as represented both graphically and textually, is a subject of renewed interest and importance among historians, philologists and geographers. This conference aims to promote an exchange between those of
different disciplines working on geographical ideas and thinking from late Antiquity to the Renaissance on two themes: “Translation, transmission, transculturation” will focus on the continuities in geographical knowledge from Antiquity into and through the Middle Ages; the complex transculturation of formal geographical and cartographic knowledge between Latin, Byzantine and Islamic scholars and travelers; and the copying and transmission of ‘key’ geographical texts and sources, and their selection and adaptation. “Mapping, imagining, placing” will consider questions of ‘scale, place, and the geographical imagination’ looking at the changing distinctiveness, character and uses of ‘geography’ in medieval thought; the intertextual nature of ‘medieval geography’ between visual (cartographic) and textual descriptions, and connections between “thinking geographically” (i.e., spatial sensibility) and ‘geographical thinking’ (i.e., writing and visualizing ‘geography’) in the Middle Ages.
Anticipated guest speakers include: Daniel Birkholz (University of Texas at Austin), Veronica della Dora (University of Bristol), Kathy Lavezzo (University of Iowa), Natalia Lozovsky (UC Berkeley), Andrew Merrills (University of Leicester), Meg Roland (Marylhurst University), Emilie Savage-Smith (University of Oxford), and Alessandro Scafi (The Warburg Institute, London). The conference was organized by Dr Keith D. Lilley (School of Geography, Archaeology & Palaeoecology, Queen’s University Belfast) and the late Professor Denis Cosgrove (Geography, UCLA). Support has been provided by a generous grant from The Ahmanson Foundation, with additional funding from CMRS, the UCLA Vice Chancellor for Research, and the Humanities Division of the UCLA College of Letters and Science. Advance registration requested. Papers will be distributed in advance to those registered to attend the conference.
Call for papers--closing date for abstract submissions is September 30, 2008.
CMRS Ahmanson Conferences
The Ahmanson Foundation, with the support of the Vice Chancellor for Research and the Dean of Humanities, has made it possible for CMRS to fund a number of conferences over the next several years on a well-planned and predictable basis. The series will be called “the CMRS Ahmanson Conferences.”
The first round of applications will be reviewed at the end of April 2007 for conferences to be held during the period from September 2007 to June 2010. Expenses to be supported by CMRS should not exceed $20,000. Applications are due in the CMRS office by Friday, April 27.
Applications should include:
A description, no longer than a thousand words, of (a) the topic of the conference; (b) the time of the conference; and (c) the expected consequences of the conference;
A list of participants, from UCLA or from elsewhere, to be invited (it is not necessary that invitations be made or accepted at the time of application);
A description, no longer than three hundred words, of how UCLA graduate students will be involved in the conference planning, implementation and follow-up.
All UCLA faculty are eligible, but preference will be given to faculty whose tenure-track appointments at UCLA are relatively recent. Preference will also be given to applications that make a strong and persuasive commitment to engaging graduate students in planning the conference, implementing the plan and following-up on it.
