Robert Barsky's Vanderbilt Website

The Robert Penn Warren Center Seminar on Literature and Law
directed by: Professor Robert Barsky, Vanderbilt University

2011
Thursday October 22nd, 2011
speaker: Very Rev Dr Richard Finn OP, Regent, Blackfriars Hall, Oxford
title: George Pire OP: An Inspiration for Today?
description: George Dominique Pire is the only Dominican friar to have won the Nobel peace prize. His life reveals the deep connection between his intellectual formation as a friar in Belgium and his creative work on behalf of the victims of war and poverty. Awarded the Nobel prize in 1958 for his work with refugees whose re-integration into society he promoted, Pire went on to develop a philosophy of personal responsibility and dialogue in meeting the challenges of a fragmented global order. Largely forgotten in recent decades outside a small circle, he is one of the inspirations for the new Las Casas Institute at Blackfriars, Oxford. This talk sets out the story of his life, his leading ideas, and introduces a discussion of their relevance to contemporary issues that contribute to our understanding of how humanities or humanistic training can impact on how one understands the world.

2012
Friday January 13th, 2:30-4, Professor Michael Hodges, Philosophy, Vanderbilt University

Professor Hodges works in the areas of Wittgenstein, American Philosophy, Philosophy of Religion, and Philosophy of Education. Recent projects include a series of papers on transcendence and a book on philosophy of education. Professor Hodges regularly teaches courses in American Philosophy, Wittgenstein, and Philosophy of Religion.

Thursday January 26th, 11;30-1:30. Richard Green, Ohio State University
Speaker: Professor Richard Green, Humanities Distinguished Professor of English Richard Firth Green is the author of A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in RicardianEngland (1998), Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages (1980) and of numerous articles in such journals as Speculum, MediumAevum, Chaucer Review, and Studies in the Age of Chaucer. He is currently working on medieval popular culture.
Title: Public vs. Private Necessity, and on Legal Fiction
Fields of interest: Twentieth Century European and American intellectual and cultural history with particular interest in the history of intellectuals and education.

Friday, February 10th, 2:30-4:00. Lynn Ramey, French Department, Vanderbilt
title:
Speaker: Here at Vanderbilt, I am continuing my research on the French Middle Ages, looking at the development of racial consciousness in medieval European literature and the importance of the Middle Ages to modern notions of race. I teach courses in medieval and Renaissance French literature and culture, as well as introductory literature and grammar courses.

Friday, February 24th, 9:00-11:00 Chris Pexa, English Department, Vanderbilt

Friday, March 16th, Russell Jacoby, UCLA
Speaker: Professor Russell Jacoby, History Department, UCLA

Publications: The End of Utopia: Politics and Culture in the Age of Apathy (Basic Books, 1999)  Dogmatic Wisdom: How the Culture Wars Divert Education and Distract America (Doubleday, 1994) The Last Intellectuals: American Culture in the Age of Academe (Basic Books, 1987; new edition with new Introduction, Basic Books 2000) The Repression of Psychoanalysis: Otto Fenichel and the Political Freudians (Basic Books, 1983)  Dialectic of Defeat: Contours of Western Marxism (Cambridge University Press, 1981) Social Amnesia: A Critique of Contemporary Psychology (Beacon Press, 1975; Transaction, 1997) Anthology: The Bell Curve Debate: History, Documents, Opinions (Times Books, 1995). Articles and reviews in American Historical Review, Grand Street, Nation, Los Angeles Times, London Review of Books, New York Times, Harpers and elsewhere.
Awards: Guggenheim, NEH ,Mellon, Lehrman Fellowships.  Professional affiliations: American Historical Association and American Pessimist Society.

Friday April 6th, noon. Kaius Tuori, Academy of Finland title: “Dysfunctional Despots and Virtuous Rulers: The Making of the Legal Capabilities of the Roman Emperor”

speaker: 2012- Academy Researcher, Academy of Finland; 2011-2012 Senior Researcher, University of Helsinki, Center of Excellence in Global Governance

May 1,
1-3PM Robert Penn Warren Center Peter Hitchcock (CUNY) will give a talk, followed by responses from Michael Holquist, at the Robert Penn Warren Center  4:30PM-6:30PM, catered meeting at the Curb Center  

May 2nd
MORNING (9-12)
1. introduction to the Curb Center (Bill Ivey) and Quebec/Canadian Studies (Robert Barsky) and Quebec Government Delegation (M. Boyer and Andrée Tremblay)   2. discussion amongst all participants of possible points of interaction between IPLAI and Vanderbilt’s Curb Center and Robert Penn Warren Center.  3. Roundtable discussion on “Towards a definition of the humanities”, circulated by Paul Yachnin, McGill.  4. discussions of Quebec’s approach to arts funding and the role that arts play in policy, featuring talks from Ms. Boyer and Andrée Tremblay, Délégation du Québec, Atlanta   LUNCH at the Curb Center  Then after lunch:  1:30-5:00  1. I would like for each participant to give a prepared 8-10 minute or so talk on the current crisis in the Humanities, and/or arts policy and funding from their specific perspective (discipline, province, research). This will be filmed, and put up as a special issue of AmeriQuests (www.ameriquests.org <http://www.ameriquests.org/>) devoted to these questions. Readers will be able to watch the video of each speaker, as well as reactions from the group. I envision 3-4 of these presentations, followed by comments from the group, 4 or 5 times in the afternoon.  2. I will outline our plans to use AmeriQuests to advance the discussion through a “portal” we are building, in collaboration with Duke UP, and I’d love to have input about how to advance our respective goals with the aid of a tool for diffusion like this portal.  

2010-2011

Friday September 17th. Professor Andrea Mirabile (Italian, Vanderbilt) and Professor Matteo Soranzo, (Italian, McGill University), who discussed justice in the context of Quattrocento Naples. This is part of his visit to Vanderbilt to present some new findings on specific authors ( Giovanni Pontano and Jacopo Sannazaro) and some constant features in the modes of cultural transmission in Renaissance Italy. Co-sponsored by the Vanderbilt McGill Initiative.

Wednesday, October 6. l Decameron. Presented by: Andrea Mirabile, Assistant Professor of Italian, Department of French & Italian, Italy (1971) Dir: Pier Paolo Pasolini. This adaptation of nine stories from Bocaccio's Decameron renders the tales of lecherous clerics, scheming merchants, and errant lovers in an era of budding industrial capitalism, sexual repression, and moral hypocrisy. Italian, German with English subtitles. 112 mins.

Friday October 15th, 9:30 a.m. in the Warren Center, with guest Andrea Mirabile (French and Italian), who will lead a discussion on Pier Paolo Pasolini and censorship. For any inquiries, contact seminar coordinator Robert Barsky (French and Italian), robert.barsky@vanderbilt.edu.

Friday, November 5th. The 18th-/19th-Century Colloquium and the Literature and Law Seminar will host an extended visit with guest Caleb Smith, "‘At the Court of Hell’: Enthusiasm, Blasphemy, Exhortation.”Caleb Smith is an Assistant Professor in English at Yale University. The Literature and Law Seminar will host an extended visit with Smith after his talk. This event is co-sponsored by the Department of English and the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities. For additional information, please contact one of the seminar coordinators: Gabriel Cervantes (English), gabriel.cervantes@vanderbilt.edu <gabriel.cervantes@vanderbilt.edu%20> , Rachel Teukolsky (English), rachel.teukolsky@vanderbilt.edu, or Robert Barsky (French and Italian) robert.barsky@vanderbilt.edu.

Friday, November 19th, 9:30 a.m. in the Warren Center, with guest Professor Ed Rubin (former dean of law, Vanderbilt University; currently professor of law and political science), who will lead a discussion on Sir Gawain, the Green Knight, and Kafka. For any inquiries, contact seminar coordinator Robert Barsky (French and Italian), robert.barsky@vanderbilt.edu.

Friday, December 3rd. Robert Barsky, Vanderbilt French/English, on “Conversational Strategies for Front Line Interviews With Refugees and Undocumented Immigrants”.
Abstract
The hypothesis that guides this work is that although it may be valuable to lobby for competent translators to help vulnerable foreigners in cross-cultural settings, such as Convention refugee determination hearings or criminal trials, it is nevertheless too late to make much of a difference at that point, because most of the incriminating damage is done in the initial encounter between claimant/defendant and authority. Approaching a discussion about the relative merits of translation versus interpretation from this perspective, that emphasizes the TIME at which the conversation occurs, would suggest that linguistic accuracy is much more important in formal hearings, while interpretation is crucial during the initial encounter, because it is during this period of negotiation that a sensitive and qualified interpreter can keep a claimant from incriminating herself or mis-communicating the situation to authority. The literature/law overlap is in the invention of the person as character, or character as person, a process that occurs in language and, by extension

Friday, January 14 – Gabriel Cervantes, post-doctoral student, Vanderbilt Department of English, will speak on "Clemency and the Colonies in Aphra Behn’s America." 10:30 a.m. at the Warren Center.

Friday January 21 – Desmond Manderson (McGill Law and the Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas) and Paul Yachnin (Chair, McGill English). The talk will be based on work with the Shakespeare Moot Court, which has a website at http://www.mcgill.ca/shakespearemoot/. That teaching gave rise to a series of co-written presentations and essays and also a book in progress which will serve as the basis for the talk. We will also outline information concerning the new Institute for the Public Life of Art and Ideas, which features interdisciplinary teaching and research on Law. 10:30 a.m. at the Warren Center.

Friday Feb. 11, Robert Watson (PhD student, Vanderbilt University Department of French and Italian) 10:30AM “Identities Before the Law: Questions of Nationality and Citizenship in Maghrebi Jewish Autobiography”
In addition to the fraught coexistence of multiple languages, Maghrebi Jews were caught among competing cultural and political projects. While Maghrebi Jewish life-writing celebrates the diversity of its origins and influences, the political and legal constraints of identity in the postwar period forced Jews to take sides. George Cohen underscores the impossibility of the situation of Tunisian Jews buffeted by Zionism, Arab nationalism, and French colonialism: “to take sides was to betray someone, and nobody wanted to do this.” While coexisting in the 1920s and 1930s, these nationalist movements created huge tensions when their utopian goals became reality, embodied by Israel’s Law of Return (1950)—which guaranteed citizenship to any Jewish immigrant—and Moroccan and Tunisian Independence in 1956. How could Moroccan and Tunisian Jews fight against the French, who were their cultural and intellectual model? How could they be full citizens of newly independent countries whose constitutions inscribed Islam as the official religion? Maghrebi Jewish identity had to be deformed to fit into the exclusionary
definitions of belonging that Morocco, Tunisia, France, Israel and Canada imposed on them. Finally I examine how the pull of their multiple attachments continued with them as they left the Maghreb into exile.
Bio: Robert Watson is a PhD Candidate (ABD) in French Literature and Jewish Studies in the Department of French & Italian. His dissertation project is entitled "Cities of Origin, Cities Exile: Writing Maghrebi Jewish Identity in French, 1985-2010" focusing on the autobiographical literature produced by the last generation of Francophone Jewish writers born in colonial Morocco and Tunisia. These writers remember the (Jewish) Maghreb from Paris and Montreal, giving birth to and interrogating a fragile Maghrebi Jewish Diasporic identity. His other projects include studies of Francophone Cultural Production in Israel, Queer Maghrebi and Israeli Cinemas, and Theories of Decolonization.

Feb. 25, 10AM. Professor Michel Pierssens, Université de Montréal «Literary History's many ‘Turns’» (in conjunction with French and Italian)
Biography: Michel Pierssens teaches modern French literature at Université de Montréal. He has taught extensively in French (Aix, Paris 3, Paris 8) and U.S. universities (U. of Wisconsin-Madison, U. of Michigan-Ann Arbor, UC San Diego, Harvard). A proponent of «épistémocritique» (the study of literary consequences of the development of scientific culture from the 19th c.), he founded and edited SubStance (UW Press), co-founded and co-edits Histoires Littéraires (Paris) and the e-journal Épistémocritique (www.epistemocritique.org http://www.epistemocritique.org. The author of numerous articles and several essays (La Tour de Babil, Savoirs à l'Oeuvre, Lautréamont. Éthique à Maldoror, Ducasse et Lautréamont) he also co-edited the 14 volumes of Colloques des Invalides. The proceedings of a recent international colloquium on Scientific Poetry are soon to be published.

Mar. 4, Michelle Shepherd, the Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor, Vanderbilt University), 10:30 AM will present on:“Gender and Citizenship in Spain”

This paper examines the juxtaposition of "foreign" women with Spanish women from a previous generation in Lucía Etxebarria's "La negra" [Black Girl] and Iciár Bollain's film Flores de otro mundo [Flowers from Another World]. Connecting characters who appear to be radically different is a textual maneuver that allows the reader/viewer to perceive remarkable similarities in their life opportunities despite the generation gap that separates them. Specifically, women living during Franco’s dictatorship (1939-1975) and women perceived to be Others of Spain both experience limited forms of citizenship that position them in the private sphere. These relationships can be explained through the legal discourses that outline how women are imagined to occupy Spanish national space; hence, Franco's Leyes Fundamentales del Reino [Fundamental Laws of the Realm] and the Ley de Extranjería (2000) [Aliens Law] inform my readings as these laws similarly shape how women are "read" as subjects in Spain. In “La negra” and in Flores de otro mundo, the question of how women are written or inscribed into legal doctrine, the social landscape, and cultural production continually arises. The national identities conceivable for these women inhere in gendered identities that undermine their inclusion in the national project. With the advent of democracy and a putative shift to gender equality, the permanence of a gendered Other both in legal discourse and in cultural production evinces the internal contradictions and limitations of contemporary Spanish nationalisms.
Biography: Michelle Shepherd is an Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor of Spanish. She studies twentieth and twenty-first century Peninsular literature and film. She is currently completing a book on gender, national identity, immigration, and domesticity in contemporary Spain. This project analyzes transnational literature and films in which conceptualizations of gender and citizenship are contested and reshaped through immigration.

Wednesday, March 16
Literature & Law and Postcolonial Theory Seminars, noon in the Warren Center with guests Dr. Clifford Canku, Reverend Michael Simon, and Dr. John Peacock. "Owasin cante wasteya iyuskinyan nape ciyuzapi do: Translating Each Dakota Letter," Dakota Prisoners of War Letters from the 1862 Dakota Minnesota Conflict. The panelists are a team of scholars who have been working for the past decade on translating letters written by Dakotah (Sioux) prisoners of a US military concentration camp, circa 1865. The lead translator is a Dakotah elder and educator, Dr. Clifford Canku. This event is co-sponsored by the Postcolonial Theory Seminar, the Literature & Law Seminar, the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, the Department of English, the Department of History, and the Quebec and Canadian Studies Program. For any inquiries, contact seminar coordinator Robert Barsky (French and Italian), robert.barsky@vanderbilt.edu.

Apr. 22nd, Joint Session, 10AM-1:30: Prof. Richard Janda McGill Law School (Vanderbilt-McGill Initiative) will discuss "Justice foundations for ecological economics." In essence, if there were to be a shift from a market economy that generates dramatic sets of ecological externalities to an economy that operates within what have been called “planetary boundaries”,” what would the justice foundations of such an economy be and how would it handle the justice claims arising out of the transition from the old economy to the new economy. All of this is premised on the notion that the existing economy is unsustainable. Afterwards, Marc Angenot, McGill Department of French (Vanderbilt-McGill-Initiative) who will speak on “The Historian in Prosecuting Garb: The Concept of Moral Responsibility in Law and Historiography”
Biography for Marc Angenot:
Marc Angenot (born Brussels, 1941) is a Belgian-Canadian social theorist, historian of ideas and literary critic. He is a professor of French literature at McGill University, Montreal, and holder of the James McGill Chair of Social Discourse Theory there. He is a leading exponent of the sociocritical approach to literature.He studied at the Free University of Brussels (now split into the Université Libre de Bruxelles and the Vrije Universiteit Brussel) from 1959 to 1967. His dissertation on the rhetoric of surrealism placed him in the line of Chaïm Perelman , and the Groupe Mu of the University of Liège. Along with Claude Duchet, Pierre V. Zima, Jacques Leenhardt, André Belleau, Jacques Dubois and Régine Robin, Angenot made use of the sociological approach to texts. His influences were Pierre Bourdieu, the Frankfurt School, and Mikhail Bakhtin. He favoured the discourse concept over the structuralist position on “text”, of Gérard Genette and Tzvetan Todorov. His proposal to study the whole array of “social discourse” in a given state of society (1889: Un état du discours social, 1989) was a vast interdisciplinary project.
[edit] Discursive history In parallel, Angenot developed “discursive history”. Here he examined the grand narratives, but as a modernist, rather than postmodernist. He has been concerned with the nineteenth century, and representative thinkers around revolution and social struggles: Auguste Comte, Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Étienne Cabet, Pierre Leroux, Proudhon, the Belgian Hippolyte Colins, Jules Guesde, Georges Sorel, and others. His conclusions are on the complexities and breaks within this tradition of discourse. Angenot also published a number of books in rhetoric and argumentation, among which La Parole pamphlétaire in 1982, Rhétorique de l'anti-socialisme in 2004, and a treatise of "antilogical" rhetoric, Dialogues de sourds: Traité de rhétorique antilogique in 2008.
Publications
    •    Le Roman populaire. Recherches en paralittérature, Montréal: Presses de l’Université du Québec, 1975.
    •    Les Champions des Femmes. Examen du discours sur la supériorité des femmes, 1400-1800. Montréal : Presses de l'Université du Québec, 1977.
    •    La Parole pamphlétaire. Contribution à la typologie des discours modernes. Paris, Payot, 1982, 416 p. (Prix Biguet 1983 de l'Académie française).
    •    Critique de la raison sémiotique. Fragment avec pin up. Montréal: Presses de l'Université de Montréal, 1985, 134 p. Translated as: Critique of Semiotic Reason.
    •    Ce que l'on dit des Juifs en 1889. Préface de Madeleine Rebérioux. Paris, Presses de l'Université de Vincennes, 1989. (Collection « Culture et Société »).
    •    Le Cru et le faisandé: sexe, discours social et littérature à la Belle Époque. Bruxelles: Labor, 1986, 202 p. (Collection « Archives du futur »).
    •    Mille huit cent quatre-vingt-neuf: un état du discours social. Montréal: Éditions du Préambule, 1989, 1,176 p.
    •    Le Centenaire de la Révolution. Paris: La Documentation française, 1989. (Collection «Les Médias et l'Événement»)
    •    Topographie du socialisme français, 1889-1890. Montréal: 1991.
    •    L'Œuvre poétique du Savon du Congo. Paris: Éditions des Cendres, 1992.
    •    L'Utopie collectiviste. Le Grand récit socialiste sous la Deuxième Internationale. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1993.
    •    La Propagande socialiste: six essais d'analyse du discours. Montréal: Éditions Balzac, 1996.
    •    "Un Juif trahira" : l'espionnage militaire dans la propagande antisémitique 1884-1894. Montréal: CIADEST, 1994. Rpt. Montreal, 2003.
    •    Les idéologies du ressentiment. Essai. Montréal: XYZ Éditeur, 1996. (Prix « Spirale » de l’Essai 1996).
    •    La Critique au service de la révolution. Leuven: Peeters & Paris: Vrin, 2000.
    •    La démocratie c'est le mal, Québec, Presses de l'Université Laval, 2003.
    •    Antimilitarisme, idéologie et utopie, Québec, Presses de l'Université Laval, 2003.
    •    Rhétorique de l'anti-socialisme, Québec, Presses de l'Université Laval, 2004.
    •    Le Marxisme dans les Grands récits, Paris-Québec, L'Harmattan-PUL, 2005.
    •    Dialogues de sourds: traité de rhétorique antilogique, Paris, Mille et une nuits/Fayard, 2008.
    •    Vivre dans l'histoire au 20e siècle, Montréal, Discours social, 2008.
    •    Gnose et millénarisme ; deux concepts pour le vingtième siècle, Montréal, Discours social, 2008.
    •    En quoi sommes-nous encore pieux, Presses de l'Université Laval, 2009.
    •    L'immunité française envers le fascisme, Montréal: Discours social, 2009.
    •    El discurso social, Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2010.