This local poet, a 2-time Pushcart Prize nominee, reads from his new chapbook, The Continuing Adventures of Orthomax: Now with Bombastic Pentameter! His poetry is marked by a self-deprecating sense of humor that is by turns intellectual and playful. Also, readings by other writers TBA. Signing.
Craig Dionne will present from his title Posthuman Lear: Reading Shakespeare in the Anthropocene.
Approaching King Lear from an eco-materialist perspective, Posthuman Lear examines how the shift in Shakespeare’s tragedy from court to stormy heath activates a different sense of language as tool-being — from that of participating in the flourish of aristocratic prodigality and circumstance, to that of survival and pondering one’s interdependence with a denuded world. Dionne frames the thematic arc of Shakespeare’s tragedy about the fall of a king as a tableaux of our post-sustainable condition. For Dionne, Lear’s progress on the heath works as a parable of flat ontology.
At the center of Dionne’s analysis of rhetoric and prodigality in the tragedy is the argument that adages and proverbs, working as embodied forms of speech, offer insight into a nonhuman, fragmentary mode of consciousness. The Renaissance fascination with memory and proverbs provides an opportunity to reflect on the human as an instance of such enmeshed being where the habit of articulating memorized patterns of speech works on a somatic level. Dionne theorizes how mnemonic memory functions as a potentially empowering mode of consciousness inherited by our evolutionary history as a species, revealing how our minds work as imprinted machines to recall past prohibitions and useful affective scripts to aid in our interaction with the environment. The proverb is that linguistic inscription that defines the equivalent of human-animal imprinting, where the past is etched upon collective memory within ‘adagential” being that lives on through the generations as autonomic cues for survival.
Dionne’s reimagining of this tragedy is important in the way it places Shakespeare’s central existential questions — the meaning of familial love, commitments to friends, our place in a secular world — in a new relation to the main question of surviving within fixed environmental limits. Along the way, Dionne reflects on the larger theoretical implications of recycling the old historicism of early modern culture to speak to an eco-materialism, and why the modernist textual aesthetics of the self-distancing text seems inadequate when considering the uncertainty and trauma that underscores life in a post-sustainable culture. Dionne’s final appeal is to “repurpose” our fatalism in the face of ecological disaster.
Craig Dionne is Professor of Literary and Cultural Theory at Eastern Michigan University, where he teaches Shakespeare and Early Modern English Literature. He specializes in Shakespeare and popular culture, early modern literacies and cultural studies. He has co-edited Disciplining English: Alternative Critical Perspectives (with David Shumway, SUNY Press, 2002), Rogues and Early Modern English Culture (with Steve Mentz, University of Michigan Press, 2005), Native Shakespeares: Indigenous Appropriations on a Global Stage (with Parmita Kapadia, Ashgate, 2008), and Bollywood Shakespeares (with Parmita Kapadia, Palgrave, 2014). He was senior editor of JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory for ten years, and he also co-edited the inaugural issue of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies (with Eileen Joy, Palgrave, 2010).
One MFA student of fiction and one of poetry, each introduced by a peer, will read their work. Tonight: fiction writer Allie Tova Hirsach and Warner James Wood.
The Mark Webster Reading Series presents emerging writers in a warm and relaxed setting. We encourage you to bring your friends – a Webster reading makes for an enjoyable and enlightening Friday evening.
Owen Laukkanen is the author of The Professionals, Criminal Enterprise, Kill Fee, and The Stolen Ones. The Professionals was nominated for the Anthony Award, Barry Award, Spinetingler Magazine Best Novel: New Voices Award, and the International Thriller Writers’ Thriller Award for best first novel. Criminal Enterprise was nominated for the ITW Thriller Award for best novel. A resident of Vancouver, British Columbia, he is now at work on the next book featuring Stevens and Windermere.
Book:
This is a heart-pounding new Stevens and Windermere thriller from the award-winning author of The Stolen Ones and The Professionals. Kirk Stevens and Carla Windermere of the joint BCA-FBI violent crime task force have handled shocking cases before, but this one is different. Stevens’s daughter, Andrea, is distraught over a classmate’s suicide, but what the two investigators find is even more disturbing—an online suicide club of unhappy teenagers, presided over by an anonymous presence who seems to be spurring them on. Soon, it becomes apparent that the classmate wasn’t the first victim—and won’t be the last, either, unless they can hunt down this psychopath once and for all.
http://owenlaukkanen.com/
Sweetland’s Word²: Writer to Writer series lets you hear directly from University of Michigan professors about their challenges, processes, and expectations as writers and also as readers of student writing. Word² pairs one esteemed University professor with Sweetland faculty member for a conversation about writing.
This session features a conversation with Robin Queen. Robin Queen is Arthur F. Thurnau Professor of Linguistics, Germanic Languages and Literatures, and English Language and Literature and Chair of the Linguistics Department at the University of Michigan. She is a sociolinguist with strong interests in the relationship of language variation and social cognition. She has done research on intonation and prosody; contact-related language change; language, gender, and sexuality; human-canine interaction involving language; and language variation in the mass media. Her most recent book, Vox Popular: The Surprising Life of Language in the Media (2015), is aimed at providing an informed lay audience a window into the many ways that language variation circulates in fictional television and film. She was the co-editor (with Anne Curzan) of the Journal of English Linguistics from 2005-2011.
This event is also broadcast live over the airwaves by WCBN (88.3FM or wcbn.org)
Former CIA daily intelligence briefer David Priess discusses his new book based largely on his experience working for the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations. Reception and signing follow.
Diane Wakoski won the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams prize with her selected poems, Emerald Ice. Most recent of her more than 20 poetry collections is Bay of Angels. Now retired, Wakoski was Poet in Residence and University Distinguished Professor at MSU, 1975-2012.
This presentation explores methodological questions for the interdisciplinary scholar who interprets archival documents and material culture for the recovery of trans-hemispheric links between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Lisa Lowe is Professor of English and American Studies at Tufts University and author of the recent book, “The Intimacies of Four Continents” (Duke University Press, 2015). In this uniquely interdisciplinary work, Lisa Lowe examines the relationships between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries, exploring the links between colonialism, slavery, imperial trades and Western liberalism. Reading across archives, canons, and continents, Lowe connects the liberal narrative of freedom overcoming slavery to the expansion of Anglo-American empire, observing that abstract promises of freedom often obscure their embeddedness within colonial conditions. Race and social difference, Lowe contends, are enduring remainders of colonial processes through which “the human” is universalized and “freed” by liberal forms, while the peoples who create the conditions of possibility for that freedom are assimilated or forgotten. Analyzing the archive of liberalism alongside the colonial state archives from which it has been separated, Lowe offers new methods for interpreting the past, examining events well documented in archives, and those matters absent, whether actively suppressed or merely deemed insignificant. Lowe invents a mode of reading intimately, which defies accepted national boundaries and disrupts given chronologies, complicating our conceptions of history, politics, economics, and culture, and ultimately, knowledge itself.
This talk is presented by IRWG’s Race, Colonialism, and Sexualities Initiative.
Lyrae Van Clief-Stefanon is the author of Open Interval, a 2009 National Book Award finalist, and Black Swan, winner of the 2001 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, as well as Poems in Conversation and a Conversation, a chapbook in collaboration with Elizabeth Alexander. Her work has appeared in such journals as African American Review, Callaloo, Crab Orchard Review, Gulf Coast, and Shenandoah, and in the anthologies Bum Rush the Page, Role Call, Common Wealth, Gathering Ground, and The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South. She is currently at work on a third collection, The Coal Tar Colors.
Tom Bissell will read from his latest, Apostle: Travels Among the Tombs of the Twelve, a journey into the heart of Christianity. The widely acclaimed author of”The Disaster Artist” explores the mysterious and often paradoxical lives and legacies of the Twelve Apostles a book both for those of the Christian faith and those who want to understand it from the outside in.
Peter, Matthew, Thomas, John: Who were these men? What was their relationship to Jesus? Tom Bissell gives us rich and deeply informed answers to these ancient and surprisingly elusive questions. He examines not just who these men were (and weren’t), but how their identities have taken shape over the course of two millennia. He makes clear that, ultimately, their story is the story of Christianity and its growth from an obscure Jewish sect to the global faith we know today. Bissell has visited holy sites from Rome and Jerusalem to Turkey, India, and Kyrgyzstan, and he vividly captures the rich diversity of Christianity’s global reach. Written with warmth, humor, and rare acumen, Apostle is a brilliant synthesis of travel writing, biblical history, and a deep lifelong relationship with Christianity. The result is an unusual, erudite, at times hilarious book a religious, intellectual, and personal adventure.
Tom Bissell was born in Escanaba, Michigan, in 1974. He has lived in New York City, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, Italy, Las Vegas, Estonia, Portland, and currently lives in Los Angeles. In 2006 he was awarded the Rome Prize, and in 2010 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has also done scriptwriting for several popular video-game franchises, including Gears of War, Battlefield, and Uncharted.
