Literature

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Poezye un iberzetsung vi a tsugang tsu yidishkayt un tsu der velt, a reading and discussion with Yiddish poet-translator Prof. Zackary Shalom Berger in conversation with University of Chicago’s own Kenneth Moss, Harriet and Ulrich E. Meyer Professor of Jewish History and the College, and Anna Torres, Assistant Professor, Department of Comparative Literature and the College. A reception will follow.

February 2, 2023
4:30pm CST
Social Science Research Building, Tea Room, Room 201, 1126 E 59th St.
For information, contact Nancy Pardee, npardee@uchicago.edu.

Please the Greenberg Center for this event, either in person or via Zoom.

If you will participate via Zoom, please register in advance for this meeting:
https://uchicago.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJAodOGvqTIiEtJUEK8cwpqx4dMaFG9CxqHk

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Please join CEERES for an in-person discussion with author Alex Popov about his new novel, Mission Turan.

Thursday, December 1 at 11 AM
Pick Hall Room 118
5828 S. University Avenue
Chicago IL, 60617

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Monday, November 7, 3PM, in Classics 110
Nicola Scaldaferri, Associate Professor, University of Milan, Italy presents his book Wild Songs, Sweet Songs: The Albanian Epic in the Collections of Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord.

In the 1930s, Milman Parry and Albert B. Lord, two pioneering scholars of oral poetry, conducted adventurous fieldwork in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia and northern Albania, collecting singularly important examples of Albanian epic song. Wild Songs, Sweet Songs presents these materials, which have not previously been published, for the first time.

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The Literature and Philosophy Workshop is pleased to announce our Autumn 2022 schedule. With one exception listed below, discussions will normally take place on Thursdays at 5pm. Please note that we typically meet in Foster 305, but dates marked with an asterisk (*) will take place in the Social Sciences Tea Room (Room 201 in the Social Sciences Research Building, next to Foster Hall).

 

Please keep an eye out for schedule updates and workshop papers posted to our website. To receive news immediately, we invite you to join our mailing list here. And please reach out to David Hernandez (davidahb@uchicago.edu) or Jimmy White (jjwhite@uchicago.edu) with any questions.

December 1

"Heidegger, Rilke, and Historical Crises"

David Kretz, PhD Candidate, Joint Program in Social Thought and Germanic Studies

Respondent: Margareta Ingrid Christian, Assistant Professor in Germanic Studies

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The Literature and Philosophy Workshop is pleased to announce our Autumn 2022 schedule. With one exception listed below, discussions will normally take place on Thursdays at 5pm. Please note that we typically meet in Foster 305, but dates marked with an asterisk (*) will take place in the Social Sciences Tea Room (Room 201 in the Social Sciences Research Building, next to Foster Hall).

 

Please keep an eye out for schedule updates and workshop papers posted to our website. To receive news immediately, we invite you to join our mailing list here. And please reach out to David Hernandez (davidahb@uchicago.edu) or Jimmy White (jjwhite@uchicago.edu) with any questions.

 

 

* October 27

"The Unsettling of the Human Form: Kafka’s ‘Trees’"

Florian Klinger, Associate Professor in Germanic Studies and the College

Respondent: TBD

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Elephant Steps: The Future of Queer Youth in Russia

Writer Maxim Sonin in conversation with Anne Eakin Moss and Angelina Ilieva

In person only -- While masks are not presently required they are strongly recommended.

Monday, May 23 at 4:30pm
Cobb 202
5811 S Ellis Ave
Chicago IL 60637

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Masha Gessen
Never Remember: Searching for Stalin's Gulags in Putin's Russia (Columbia Global Reports, 2018)

A haunting literary and visual journey deep into Russia's past–and present. 

The Gulag was a monstrous network of labor camps that held and killed millions of prisoners from the 1930s to the 1950s. More than half a century after the end of Stalinist terror, the geography of the Gulag has been barely sketched and the number of its victims remains unknown. Has the Gulag been forgotten? 

Writer Masha Gessen and photographer Misha Friedman set out across Russia in search of the memory of the Gulag. They journey from Moscow to Sandarmokh, a forested site of mass executions during Stalin's Great Terror; to the only Gulag camp turned into a museum, outside of the city of Perm in the Urals; and to Kolyma, where prisoners worked in deadly mines in the remote reaches of the Far East. They find that in Vladimir Putin's Russia, where Stalin is remembered as a great leader, Soviet terror has not been forgotten–it was never remembered in the first place.

Photographs by Misha Friedman. 

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Miljenko Jergović
Kin (Archipelago Books, 2021)

In this sprawling narrative spanning the twentieth century, Miljenko Jervović looks into the dusty corners of his family's past, illuminating them with a razor-sharp eye. Ordinary, forgotten objects – a grandfather's bee-keeping journals, a rusty benzene lighter, an army-issued raincoat – become the lenses through which Jergović investigates the joys and sorrows of three generations. Kin is in part an ode to Yugoslavia – taking us through the devastation of the First and Second World War, the Cold War, then the Bosnian War of the 1990s, through changing borders and perspectives, through social rituals at graveyards, through long walks within the labyrinths of Sarajevo and his own mottled memories, Jergović renders it all in candid detail. 

Translated by Russell Scott Valentino. 

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