Guest Lecture by Michael Collins on 4 May 2017: “Culture, Anarchy and the Modern City in John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer”

Guest Lecture by Michael Collins on 4 May 2017: “Culture, Anarchy and the Modern City in John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer”

Events, Lectures

Dr. Michael Collins (University of Kent)

“Culture, Anarchy and the Modern City in John Dos Passos’ Manhattan Transfer”

In this talk Dr. Collins considers the relationship between cultural traditions that were hostile to city life in the American experience and Dos Passos’ aesthetics of modern urban crowd in Manhattan Transfer. Additionally, he reads Dos Passos through traditions of geometric abstraction, film and left wing politics that helped shape his rewriting of dominant trends in American literary and artistic culture in the 1920s.

SB II, 04-432, Colonel Kleinmann-Weg 2

Thursday, 4th May 2017, 10 c.t. a.m.

(Dr. Collins is visiting Mainz as part of the Erasmus+ Programme and Inter-institutional Agreement)

Guest Lecture by Michael Collins on 4 May 2017: “Like Lava in a Coffee Cup: Class and Culture in the American Gilded Age”

Guest Lecture by Michael Collins on 4 May 2017: “Like Lava in a Coffee Cup: Class and Culture in the American Gilded Age”

Events, Lectures

Dr. Michael Collins (University of Kent)

“Like Lava in a Coffee Cup: Class and Culture in the American Gilded Age”

This talk compares the aesthetic responses of two major postbellum authors, the American W.D. Howells and the Cuban José Martí, to the civil disorder and subsequent trial that followed the Haymarket riot in Chicago on May 4th 1886. Using a combination of close readings of Howells’s letters in defence of the Haymarket “anarchists”, his novel A Hazard of New Fortunes and Martí’s reportage of the events for La Nacíon newspaper, Dr. Collins explores the ways in which these two writers respond to the Haymarket affair as symptomatic of a larger crisis of sympathy and sentimental connection in Gilded Age America.

Philosophicum, P 103

Thursday, 4th May 2017 4 p.m. (c.t.)

(Dr. Collins is visiting Mainz as part of the Erasmus+ Programme and Inter-institutional Agreement)

Guest Lecture by Michael Collins on 3 May 2017: “Transnationalism and the Short Story”

Guest Lecture by Michael Collins on 3 May 2017: “Transnationalism and the Short Story”

Events, Lectures, News

Dr. Michael Collins
(University of Kent)

“Transnationalism and the Short Story”

This lecture challenges a critical consensus about the relationship of the short story to national literary traditions through a reading of works by Benjamin Franklin and James Hogg. Dr. Collins suggests that the reliance upon bardic nationalism in readings of Scottish short fiction, the German folk psychology tradition, and American Studies methodologies have historically misrepresented the centrality of the Atlantic World System and interconnected imperial cultures to the shaping of the form of the short story. In its place he proposes a version of short story criticism informed both by transnationalism and performance studies.

Reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Speech_of_Polly_Baker

Philosophicum, Faktultätssaal Wednesday, 3rd May 2017
6 c.t. p.m.

(Dr. Collins is visiting Mainz as part of the Erasmus+ Programme and Inter-institutional Agreement)

Guest Lecture by Jessica Conrad (University of Delaware) on 3 May 2017: “Polluted Luxuries: Consumer Resistance, the Senses of Horror, and Abolitionist Boycott Literature”

Guest Lecture by Jessica Conrad (University of Delaware) on 3 May 2017: “Polluted Luxuries: Consumer Resistance, the Senses of Horror, and Abolitionist Boycott Literature”

Events, General, Lectures

„Polluted Luxuries: Consumer Resistance, the Senses of Horror, and Abolitionist Boycott Literature“

Jessica Conrad – PhD Candidate

University of Delaware

 

Away! ‘tis loathsome! bear me hence!
I cannot feed on human sighs
Or feast with sweets my palate’s sense,
While blood is ‘neath the fair disguise.
No, never let me taste again
Of aught beside the coarsest fare,
Far rather, than my conscience stain,
With the polluted luxuries there.
_”Oh Press Me Not to Taste Again,”

Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, Poetical Works (1836)

 

Polluted luxuries, stained consciences, shuddering senses – these were compelling reasons to abstain from the products of slave labor which, in 1836, at the time of Elizabeth Margaret Chandler’s writing, already proliferated in an expanding American market. Writers such as Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and John Greenleaf Whittier imagined a world of goods haunted by the touch of enslaved laborers – goods which in turn haunted consumers. By parsing out the language of abolitionist boycott literature alongside its historical and material cultural moment, this talk will examine the ways in which abolitionist literature posits a very literal and as yet unaccounted for version of material relations. Those material relations, it seems, collapse the boundaries between consumer and producer, self and other, in ways that have horrific, haunting implications for market society, then and now.

 

Wednesday, 3rd May 2017 – 4 c.t. p.m.

Philosophicum, P 110

Guest Lecture by Falk Schacht on 11 May 2017: “Die Allschool HipHop Theorie. Ketzerische Geständnisse eines geläuterten Real Keepers”

Guest Lecture by Falk Schacht on 11 May 2017:
“Die Allschool HipHop Theorie. Ketzerische Geständnisse eines geläuterten Real Keepers”

Events, Lectures, News

Falk Schacht
Musikjournalist und Dozent
an der Leuphana Universität Lüneburg

 

Die Allschool HipHop Theorie:
Ketzerische Geständnisse eines geläuterten Real Keepers

 

Philosophicum, P 6
11. Mai 2017
18 Uhr (c.t.)

Vor über 40 Jahren entstand die HipHop Kultur und bis heute streiten sich Dogmatiker darüber, was HipHop ist. Mit jeder Generation tauchten (vermeintlich) neue Konflikte auf. Diese Streitigkeiten werden hoch emotional und ideologisch geführt. Der einzige Ausweg heraus aus diesem Generationenkonflikt ist eine ganzheitliche Betrachtung der HipHop Geschichte und aller bisherigen Schulen des HipHops. Von der Old School zur New School bis in die Gegenwart. Dabei zeigen die Urquellen, dass alle Probleme und Widersprüchlichkeiten der heutigen HipHop Kultur bereits seit den Anfangstagen ein (Streit) Thema waren. Der (ketzerische) Versuch einer Annäherung an die wa(h)re HipHop Geschichte und ihrem Weg nach Deutschland.

 

Falk Schacht kommt in den frühen 80er Jahren mit der HipHop Kultur in Kontakt. Er beginnt zu breaken und zu sprühen und ab 1989 ist er auch als DJ tätig. 1994 beginnt er mit seiner journalistischen Tätigkeit, die bis heute anhält. Er verfasst Texte, Interviews und Kolumnen für Musik, Magazine und Zeitungen aller Art. Vom Ende der 90er Jahre bis heute arbeitet er für diverse Radio & TV Sender. Dabei moderierte er eigene Formate oder war als Redakteur tätig und ist als HipHop-Experte in Interviews zu aktuellen Themen gefragt. Diese reichen von HipHop und Jugendkulturen bis hin zu Journalismusthemen. Von 2004 bis 2013 war er Chefredakteur des Video Interview Formats Mixery Raw Deluxe, das exklusiv im Internet verbreitet wurde. Er interviewte Künstler von Eminem zu Bushido, über 50 Cent zu Sido bis Casper, Marteria oder Jay Z. Seit 2011 ist er als Lehrbeauftragter an der Leuphana Universität Lüneburg tätig.