Faculty News
www.clas.wayne.edu/languages
Summer 2012
Figueroa Publishes El Regicida Y Su Sombra
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ith El regicida y su sombra (Regicide and Its Shadow), Victor Figueroa’s first book of poetry is outstanding for its handling of poetry’s primordial purpose: to name the unnamable, to draw us closer to the abyss and to what links poetry to the very essence of myth. His work is endowed with a certain quality of verse in which the essential air of poetry stands out; even in the more lyrical poems, it would seem that the poet transforms himself in wounded verse. It is
a poetry that cuts with precise, painful, and forceful language. Without a doubt, Caribbean poetry written from the Diaspora revives itself in hybrid forms, creating new possibilities for this literary genre born from the necessity of language. “El regicida y su sombra was a very special and personal project for me,” said Figueroa. “I regard my creative writing as a fundamental expression of my deep love for literature, of which my critical writing is simply another manifestation.” Victor Figueroa is Associate
Professor of Spanish. His areas of research include Caribbean and Latin-American literature. After finishing his undergraduate studies in comparative literature at the University of Puerto Rico in 1992, he obtained his doctorate from Harvard University in 2000. His book, Not at Home in One’s Home: Caribbean Self-Fashioning in the Poetry of Luis Pales Matos, Aime Cesaire, and Derek Walcott was published in 2009 by Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. n
De Benedictis Proposes Semiotic Approach to Dante In Wordly Wise: The Semiotics of Discourse in Dante’s ‘Commedia,’ Raffaele De Benedictis proposes a new critical method in the study of the Divine Comedy and Dante’s minor works. “This absolutely original research,” writes Umberto Eco of the University of Bologna, “...is the first complete attempt to analyze the whole of Dante’s poetical achievements and theoretical views by using intensively the instruments provided by semiotics.” It systematically and comprehensively addresses the discursive aspect of Dante’s works and focuses mainly on the reader, who, along with the author and the text, contributes to the making of discursive paths and discoursegenerating functions through the act of reading. According to Jacques Fontanille of the University of Limoges and Institut Universitaire de France, “Heuristic and hermeneutic effects of contemporary semiotic approach appear here so fully. It is not the semiotics of discourse that imposes rules on Dante’s work, but the reverse occurs: artwork appears in all its innovative strength and in the creative power with which it imposes its law on the analysis grid.” De Benedictis’ work allows the reader
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to become acquainted with how meaning is generated and whether it is granted legitimacy in the text. Also, in a system of signification, sign function and sign production are not limited to the properties of the mind but are the result of working interactively with the properties of discourse, which provide directionality for the reader’s enunciation(s) in action. “Perhaps more rigorously than many previous studies,” Giuseppe Mazzotta, of Yale University writes that “De Benedictis’ book succeeds in capturing the novelty of Dante’s discourse. Basing himself on seminal theories of allegory as a discourse that overlaps with hermeneutics and calls into question the role of the reader, De Benedictis, in this splendid work that combines scholarship and a sense of complexity of literary texts, has written an excellent, exciting study of medieval semiotics.” Reffaele De Benedictis is Associate Professor of Italian. He teaches courses on Dante, literary criticism, and Italian culture. He is the author of Ordine a struttura musicale nella ‘Divina Commedia’ (2000) and of various articles on Dante, semiotics, and Italian culture. n
World Talk 7/27/12 10:00 AM
Faculty News
www.clas.wayne.edu/languages
Summer 2012
Past Publishes Methods of Murder in Italian Crime Fiction In Methods of Murder: Beccarian Introspection & Lombrosian Vivisection in Italian Crime Fiction, Elena Past rewrites the frame of analysis for Italian crime fiction. While the publication of crime fiction by Italian authors has increased exponentially, some have argued that detective fiction did not exist in Italy until 1929, when Mondadori published the Libri Gialli detective crime series. Others have also insisted that the genre was an AngloSaxon one, and not relevant to the Italian peninsula. In Methods of Murder, Past proposes a new frame of analysis for Italian crime fiction by examining the findings of classical criminologists
Cesare Beccaria and Cesare Lombroso. In her examinations of works by Carlo Emilio Gadda and Leonardo Sciascia, contemporary authors Andrea Camilleri, Gianrico Carofiglio, and Carlo Lucarelli, and director Dario Argento, she raises the stakes for crime fiction by arguing that Beccarian and Lombrosian analyses bring to light critical aesthetic and ideological dynamics that drive the tales of Italian crime. In essence, if Italians did not begin writing codified crime fiction until many years after its emergence on the global scene, they had been theorizing wrongdoing and actively contributing to international understandings of crime and punishment
long before 1841. Early reviews have been positive. Charles Klopp of Ohio State University has written that “Elena Past provides fresh perspectives on Italian crime fiction in Methods of Murder. This excellent, provocative critical investigation should find a wide audience, as it treats concerns at the cutting edge of critical inquiry with verve and eloquence, and with no recourse to jargon.” Elena Past is Associate Professor of Italian. Her research interests include contemporary Italian crime fiction, cinema and the environment, and eco-criticism. n
Hebrew Poet’s New Publications Edith Covensky has recently published Allusion to Auschwitz (in Hebrew), published by the San Van Galder Center for Holocaust Research and Teaching at Bar-llan University, 2012; and Matters of Sand, a bi-lingual edition (Hebrew-English), published by Eked/Gvanim, 2012. The epilogue to Allusion to Auschwitz, written by Professor and noted critic Yair Mazor, emphasizes the metonymic character in Covensky’s Holocaust poems. Mazor writes: “Her poems don’t correspond
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directly with the Holocaust, but rather indirectly by metonyms alluding to the horrific events of the Holocaust. These metonyms include ‘great fire,’ ‘smoke,’ ‘black flowers,’ ‘howling lament,’ ‘shadow,’ ‘crushing light,’ ‘an old black train,’ ‘the stench of war,’ and more.” Eduard Codish, in his preface to Matters of Sand, informs us about a particular aspect of the poems included in this collection. Codish proposes that Edith Covensky’s poems are about connections. He lauds her remarkable ability to maintain her focus on the point of connection. Even poems of love are not really about the beloved, but about how to exist in the sphere of the beloved, or to create a space in which both lover and beloved can relate.
Edith Covensky is editor of Pseifas, a literary publication with an impressive section on Hebrew poets and critics in English speaking countries. Her poem “A Reality that is Not” is featured in the Winter 2012 issue. Other poems by Covensky are forthcoming this year in Hador, a Hebrew Annual of America, edited by Professor Lev Hakak at UCLA. Edith Covensky teaches Hebrew language, literature, and Israeli studies. She has published 27 books and received many honors, including the International Poet of Merit award and Editor’s Choice medallion by the International Library of Poetry. Her next volume, At Water’s Edge, is to be released later this year. n
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www.clas.wayne.edu/languages
Faculty News
Summer 2012
Anne Rothe Publishes Book Anne Rothe has recently published Trauma Culture: Selling the Pain of Others in the Mass Media with Rutgers University Press. She argues that American Holocaust discourse has a particular plot structure, characterized by a melodramatic conflict between good and evil and embodied in the core characters of victim/ survivor and perpetrator, and that it provides the paradigm for representing personal experiences of pain and suffering in the mass media. The book begins with an analysis of Holocaust clichés, including its political appropriation, the notion of vicarious victimhood, the so-called victim talk rhetoric, and the infusion of the composite survivor figure with Social Darwinism. Readers then explore the embodiment of popular trauma culture in two core mass media genres: daytime TV talk shows and misery memoirs. The author conveys how victimhood and suffering are cast as trauma kitsch on talk shows like Oprah and as trauma camp on modern-day freak shows like Springer. The discussion also encompasses the first scholarly analysis of misery memoirs, the popular literary genre that has been widely critiqued in journalistic discourse as pornographic depictions of extreme violence. As they constitute the largest growth sector in book publishing worldwide, many fictional and therefore fake misery memoirs appeared. And since forgeries reflect the cultural entities that are most revered, the book concludes with an examination of fake misery memories. Historian Wulf Kansteiner (SUNY Binghamton) commented
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that “this is a passionate book of exemplary moral integrity. Anne Rothe provides a straightforward, unflinching indictment of the way that contemporary mass culture gorges itself on the display of human suffering.” And former CMLLC PhD student Pauline Ebert, who wrote her dissertation with Professor Rothe and now teaches at Occidental College in Los Angeles, used Popular Trauma Culture as one of the required readings in her course on “Memory, Trauma, and Victim Culture.” With the help of Skype, the author gave a video presentation and participated in a lively class discussion with Dr. Ebert’s students on ideas developed in the monograph. After completing an oral history project on German Gentiles and converts to Judaism currently living in Israel, the author will extend the discussion of her first book in a monograph tentatively titled The Survivor Figure in American Culture: Intersections between Holocaust Memory, Social Darwinism, and Popular Culture. Anne Rothe is Associate Professor of German. Her overall research agenda includes American and German popular culture, television and media studies, popular psychology and self-help culture, collective memory, Holocaust representation, and oral history. n
World Talk 7/27/12 10:00 AM
www.clas.wayne.edu/languages
Faculty News
Summer 2012
Stivale Translates Gilles Deleuze from A to Z With the translation of Gilles Deleuze from A to Z by Charles J. Stivale, and subsequent release of a DVD of the eight-hour interview by the MIT Press, scholars may now gain a deeper insight into the thought of Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995), one of the most influential French philosophers of the latter half of the twentieth century. A prolific writer, Deleuze conceived of philosophy as the production of concepts, and characterized himself as a “pure metaphysician.” Although Deleuze never wanted a film to be made about him, he agreed to Claire Parnet’s proposal to film a series of conversations, directed by Pierre-André Boutang, in which each letter of the alphabet would evoke a word and theme using letters from A to Z. The DVD is elegantly translated by Charles Stivale and subtitled in English, making these conversations available to Englishspeaking audiences for the first time.
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In the extensive discussion with Parnet (a sociologist and former student of Deleuze), the philosopher exhibited the same sense of modesty and insight so often seen in his major works, including Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus (co-authored with Félix Guattari). According to Stivale, the interview sessions were produced when Deleuze had retired from teaching in 1988, and Deleuze and Parnet agreed that the film would not be shown publicly until after his death. As a result, the video (produced in French) was not available publicly until after Deleuze died in 1995. “When I viewed the VHS version in 1997, I decided to make the text useful and accessible for my own research purposes,” said Stivale. “I realized that since very few non-Francophone people would ever have access to this video, a translation would be very useful.” Subsequently, Stivale was approached
by Sylvère Lotringer of Semiotext(e) publishing about preparing a translation for publication. When Semiotext(e) was unable to secure an exception to Deleuze’s strict rules, the translation remained unused for nearly ten years. But when Semiotext(e) joined the MIT Press for distribution purposes, Stivale’s translation made the subtitling for the proposed zone 1 DVD a very feasible project. Thus, after more than fifteen years and several turns in the road, Stivale’s translation became a reality, providing ready access to this scholarly resource as well as contributing to the legacy of a challenging philosopher. Charles J. Stivale is Distinguished Professor of French. His research areas include nineteenth-century French studies, contemporary French and cultural studies, Deleuze & Guattari, Cajun dance and music, and text-based VR research. n
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Faculty News
www.clas.wayne.edu/languages
Summer 2012
Ronnick Presents Photo Installation and Lecture in Florida
A
photo installation created by Michele Valerie Ronnick, profiling African-American classical scholars who made groundbreaking achievements in education at the end of the Civil War, was on display in the Armacost Library at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida from January through February. Titled “14 Black Classicists,” the exhibition focused on the lives of African-American men and women who taught Greek and Latin at the college and university level, and whose academic accomplishments helped pave the way for future generations of African-Americans entering American universities. “With them,” says Ronnick, “begins the serious study and teaching of philology (the study of language) by African-Americans.” African-American academics featured
in the photo exhibit included William Sanders Scarborough, Lewis Baxter Moore, Wiley Lane, and John Wesley Gilbert. The exhibit was funded by the James Loeb Classical Library Foundation at Harvard University and in part by the Classical Association of the Middle West and South. Ronnick also presented a College Program Series lecture, “William Sanders Scarborough and the Study of Greek and Latin by People of African American Descent,” in Eckerd’s Fox Hall to an audience of 200. A reception and book signing of Professor Ronnick’s award-winning book, The Autobiography of William Sanders Scarborough: An American Journey from Slavery to Scholarship, followed. n
Higuero Publishes Groundbreaking Study With the publication of Argumentaciones Perspectivistas: Pensamiento español del siglo XXI, (Ediciones del Orto, Madrid, 2011), Francisco Javier Higuero has produced the first book on Spanish thought of the 21st century. The text covers seven main movements, including ontological search, Spanish thought related to ethical approaches to philosophy; Philosophy of History; Philosophy of Language; Philosophy of Science; Phenomenological Perspectivism; and postmodern thought. “Argumentaciones Perspectivistas is meta-philosophy,”
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says Higuero. “It is a book about philosophy produced by recent Hispanic thinkers with the intention of establishing inter-textual connections between the essays studied in the book and the thought developed by several philosophers during the history of the western world.” Among those philosophers are Michel Montaigne, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Gottfried Leibniz, Charles S. Peirce, Walter Benjamin, John L. Austin, and Georges Bataille. With its thoughtful analysis and depth, Higuero’s book will be a necessary tool for any researcher
interested in the contemporary intellectual history of Spain. It should also assist scholars not only in the technical fields of philosophy, but also in the humanities and social sciences disciplines. Francisco Javier Higuero is Professor of Spanish. He is the author of numerous books and publications, book reviews and conference papers. His research areas include essay, fiction and narrative of ideas; the detective and historical novel; short story, poetry, theater, and philosophical approaches to literary theory and criticism. n
World Talk 7/27/12 10:00 AM
