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”

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”

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”

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)