December 2, 2014: Justin Sider

Parting Words: Valedictory Performance in Victorian Poetry

Drawn from my dissertation project, this talk explores the relationship among leave-taking, self-presentation, and public address in Victorian poetry. From Tennyson’s “Ulysses” to A.C. Swinburne’s “Anactoria,” the era’s poems of retreat and departure, I argue, take the measure not only of poets’ disenchantment or exclusion from the public sphere, but more importantly, of their engagement with poetry’s changing status in an emergent mass culture. When critics have attended to Victorian poetry’s role in the public sphere, it has generally been through that poetry’s engagement with political or cultural discourse. My project considers instead the rhetorical possibilities that poets employed to grapple with the idea of publicness itself. In their valedictory poems, poets present speakers who imagine leave-taking as their entrance into circulation as exemplary figures and cultural icons. As scenes of performance, their speeches manage problems of distance and relation: taking leave makes public the personal and, in doing so, comments on the forms of publication—the books and pages and print—that are presumed to survive the departure of the speaker.

Justin Sider is a PhD candidate in English at Yale University and will receive his degree this December. He has recently completed his dissertation, entitled “Parting Words: Address and Exemplarity in Victorian Poetry,” which explores the relationship among poetic address, public speech, and cultural authority in Victorian poetry’s valedictions and scenes of leave-taking. He has published articles on Alfred Tennyson and John Ruskin in Victorian Poetry and Studies in English Literature respectively.

November 18, 2014: William Fleming

Restaging the Forty-Seven Rōnin: Performance and Print in Late Eighteenth-Century Japan

As two of the principal spheres of cultural production in early modern Japan, performance and print naturally developed a close relationship. In the case of pictorial fiction, which rose to enormous popularity in the mid- to late eighteenth century, this relationship is particularly complicated, with performance informing many aspects of such works. This talk explores this dynamic through an examination of a “comicbook” parody of the play Chūshingura, or A Treasury of Loyal Retainers (1748). Almost from its premiere, Chūshingura became the definitive version of the story of the forty-seven rōnin, a group of masterless samurai who carried out a sensational vendetta at the dawn of the eighteenth century. The play quickly became the most popular in the repertoire, and inspired numerous adaptations and parodies. As one such parody, the comicbook considered in this talk has a debt to the stage that is, on the surface, obvious. Yet it is precisely as a parody of a play that it offers valuable insights into the relationship between performance and the printed page. There are many ways one might retell a play in fiction, but the author and illustrator instead rely extensively on kabuki visuality, performance practice, and even specific performances. At the same time, the comicbook, like other works in its genre, is a richly allusive, witty, and palimpsestic text in its own right that is by no means reducible to a representation of the stage. Kabuki and other forms of performance are appropriated as organizing principles, but the end result is an altogether unique form of performance that weaves together many of the diverse strands of Japan’s eighteenth century.

William Fleming is assistant professor of East Asian Languages and Literatures and Theater Studies at Yale. His writings have appeared in journals including Sino-Japanese StudiesAsian Theatre JournalJapan Forum, and The International Journal of Comic Art. He is currently working on a book exploring aspects of the reception of Chinese fiction in early modern Japan, and his co-authored catalogSamurai and the Culture of Japan’s Great Peace, written in conjunction with an exhibition he is jointly curating at Yale’s Peabody Museum of Natural History (opening early next year), is forthcoming in February, 2015.

November 11, 2014: Kate Kokontis

Cultivating Critical and Humane “Young Intellectuals”:

or, how some formal and conceptual mandates from performance studies have contributed to NOCCA’s Integrated Humanities curriculum

 

In this talk, Dr. Kate Kokontis will discuss how an innovative interdisciplinary humanities curriculum – which was created collaboratively by scholars with backgrounds in fields such as performance studies, critical race theory, history, and literature – has been implemented at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. The Integrated Humanities program is a four-year course that meets Louisiana state requirements for History and English/Language Arts (ELA) coursework; it is a unique, and uniquely interdisciplinary, high school humanities program framed around four years of world history or global studies.  Students read literature, examine visual culture, study the arts, look at primary documents, and read social and political theory that is situated historically or thematically within our field of study at any given time, so that their encounters with the arts, governments, economies, religions, social life, and cultural production are contextualized.  It is, at its heart, a critical cultural studies program.  The faculty members have PhDs in humanistic and social science disciplines and expect a level of intellectual rigor and critical thinking that is in keeping with what students do in colleges and universities.  Dr. Kokontis will attend both to the particularities of the curriculum itself – its content, arc over four years, interdisciplinary structure, team-teaching model, pedagogical approaches, implementation of differentiated learning, and examples of the questions and projects that students engage – and to the ways in which it is both indebted to, and aspires to challenge some of the limitations of, the epistemological, pedagogical, and political frameworks that are articulated within critical humanistic disciplines in universities.

Kate M. Kokontis earned her Ph.D. in Performance Studies at UC Berkeley in 2011, a post-baccalaureate certificate in painting from Studio Art Centers International | Florence in 2005, and her B.A. from Yale in 2004. Currently she teaches and develops curriculum at the New Orleans Center for Creative Arts (NOCCA), a public arts conservatory high school.  There she is Assistant Chair of the Humanities department, and was founding member of the Academic Studio.  She teaches Integrated Humanities, and is very involved in the Plessy Project, an endeavor shared by the Plessy & Ferguson Foundation, the Crescent City Peace Alliance, the NOCCA Institute, students, and other community organizations to commemorate and continue the long history of the Black freedom struggle in New Orleans and beyond. She is working on a novel and an academic book project emerging from her dissertation, “Performative Returns and the Rememory of History: genealogy and performativity in the American racial state,” and is involved in anti-racist organizing in New Orleans, within and outside her home institution.