Spotlight: CLS Postdoctoral Fellow, Wenhan Zhang

Comparative Literary Studies welcomes CLS Postdoctoral Fellow Wenhan Zhang! In 2023-24, Wenhan will teach COMP_LIT 398, Senior Seminar in Fall Quarter, and COMP_LIT 201-0-20, Interpreting Culture in Winter Quarter.

From Wenhan:

I am planning to defend my dissertation “Conscience under Tyranny: Resistance and the Problem of Judgment in Sixteenth-century English and Scottish Thought” in September 2023. This project was conceived during my graduate study at Northwestern when worldwide political conflicts became increasingly more palpable. We experience, unfortunately, how different forms of tyranny keep posing threats to our society throughout the world; and fortunately, we witness individual consciences heroically—though also problematically in their own ways—resist against their chains. This contemporary reality found its distant echoes on the British Isles in the sixteenth century, which impelled me to research and write with a sense of urgency and curiosity, trying to make sense of the two worlds that oppose yet also resemble each other. The very purpose of comparative literature, I think, is that by placing texts of different time periods, cultural backgrounds and languages against each other, we learn how to make sense of the world around us, and eventually ourselves. I am thrilled to continue my journey at Northwestern as a postdoctoral fellow in CLS this Fall as I work with the brilliant community of scholars and students at Northwestern. This position provides me an invaluable opportunity to revise my dissertation into a monograph and teach four courses: two undergraduate seminars, an introductory course to literary theory, and a course on world literature. I am more than excited to be among friends, and am looking forward to meeting new students.  

2022-2023 EVENTS SUMMARY

Spring Quarter 2023

May 19 and May 23, 2023 | Reading Group and Workshop with R.A. JUDY, University of Pittsburgh, author of Sentient Flesh: Thinking in Disorder, Poiesis in Black (2020)

R.A. Judy, U. of Pittsburgh. Brought to you by Comp. Lit.

Friday, May 19th: Reading Group on R.A. Judy's Sentient Flesh

Monday, May 22nd: R.A. Judy Lecture

Tuesday, May 23rd: Graduate Student Workshop

CLS, MENA, and African American Studies co-sponsored a graduate student workshop with Professor R.A. Judy from the University of Pittsburgh. His research engages Black Critique, the history of ideas, cultural studies, contemporary Arabic literature and thought, political philosophy, epistemology, and poetics. Professor Judy gave a talk as part of the MENA Monday series on Monday, May 22nd, and the graduate student workshop on Tuesday, May 23th from 11am – 1pm.

May 9 and 10, 2023 | Let’s Hear About It! Podcasts, Literary Studies, and the Public Humanities

Three events organized by Mauricio Oportus Preller:

PODCASTS IN THE CLASSROOM I Tues., May 9, 2023 
A Graduate Student Workshop with ELIZABETH HOPWOOD, Director of the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities, Loyola University Chicago.

GRADUATE PODCASTERS WORKSHOP I Wed., May 10, 2023
Discussion led by:

• Ulrich C. Baer, Professor of Comparative Literature, German, and English, University of New York
• Christopher D. Cantwell, Assistant Professor of Digital Public History, Loyola University Chicago

• Consuelo Diaz de Valdés I Te leíste el texto? I Loyola University Chicago
• Andrés Mendieta I Fuera de margen I Northwestern University
• Yasmin Portales–Machado I Otras voces del caribe I Northwestern University
• Imani Warren I Ice Cream Social I Loyola University Chicago

TWO LECTURES I Wed., May 10

Literature, Identity and Deep Podcasting in a Divided Age
A lecture by ULRICH C. BAER, Professor of Comparative Literature, German, and English, University of New York 

Sound History: The Case for Audio Scholarship
A lecture by CHRISTOPHER D. CANTWELL, Assistant Professor of Digital Public History, Loyola University Chicago

April 17, 2023 | A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Agora: On Queer Theory as Literary Theory

Lee Edelman, Tufts University, Graduate Student Workshop and Public Lecture

Graduate workshop: A discussion with Lee Edelman on his recent book Bad Education. CLS students Micol Bez and Jesús Munoz organized a reading group ahead of the April 17th workshop. The public lecture, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Agora: On Queer Theory as Literary Theory, was an overview of Professor Edelman’s career in queer theory and literary studies as a way of understanding the central place of catachresis in his thinking of queerness. Lee Edelman is Fletcher Professor of English Literature at Tufts University.

April 25, 2023 | CLS Undergrad Film Screening

The Comparative Literary Studies Program’s Student Advisory Board screened the documentary Concerning Violence (2014) on Tuesday, April 25, 2023.

The film is about 90 minutes, and the remaining time was reserved for discussion facilitated by Professor Jeong Eun Annabel We, as well as some of their graduate students.

Concerning Violence is based on Frantz Fanon's essay of the same title from The Wretched of the Earth. It narrates nationalist and independence movements in Africa in the 1960s and 1970s.

April 7, 2023 | CLS Grad Cinema Night

Thanks to the concerted efforts of Youssef, Xena, Laiba, and Micol, CLS offered the community a  serious film marathon, with food, drinks, and a really good selection of shorts and features.

6:00PM  A Gentle Night, Qiu Yang
6:20PM  Wasp, Andrea Arnold
7:00PM  Holy Spider, Ali Abbasi
9:10PM  Starfuckers, Antonio Marziale
9:30PM  Adam, Mariam Touzani
11:20PM  Towards tenderness, Alice Diop
12:00AM   Don’t Believe in Monuments, Dušan Makavejev
12:10AM  I and the stupid boy, Kaoutar Ben Hania
12:35AM  Joyland, Saim Sadiq

Winter Quarter 2023

February 24, 2023 | Haunting Friendships: Notes on the Sovereignty of the Image in Cold War Modernism

Public lecture by Maziyar Faridi, Assistant Professor of English and World Cinema in the College of Architecture, Arts, and Humanities at Clemson University.

Synopsis: Soon after WWII, Iran became the battleground of the East and West blocks in a chain of confrontations that triggered what today we recognize as the Cold War. This presentation traces the trajectory of a notion of friendship-as-haunting that emerged at the onset of the Cold War in Iranian Modernism in the writings and films of the poet-filmmaker Férydoun Rahnéma (1930-1975). Rahnéma’s techniques of cinematic editing foreground the very spectrality that drives the semiotics of film—the haunting of every passing image/frame by the previous ones, a passing that haunts the image that is yet to come, and the memory of a past image transformed by the contingency of the future ones. Although highly formalist and often criticized during their time as apolitical, these techniques bear the mark of Rahnéma’s poetic engagement with red internationalism. Specifically, my presentation traces the roots of Rahnéma’s theory and practice of montage in two sources: (1) His internationalist French poetry in the early 1950s in dialogue with Paul Éluard’s conception of poésie engagée as friendship with the specters of those who are no more and those yet to come; and (2) Rahnéma’s reinterpretation of Eisenstein’s theory of montage by problematizing the “sovereignty” of the image in post-1953-Coup Iran. Underlining this formalist spectrality, I argue that Rahnéma’s cinematic language foregrounds the disjointedness of the present at a time when competing discourses of colonial modernity and anticolonial authenticity aimed to produce notions of a unified historical subject.

January 27, 2023 | Translation Practices Across Institutional Borders: From the Scholar to the Public

Brought to you by The Comparative Literary Studies Program and the Institute for the Study of Islamic Thought in Africa. Co-sponsored by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities and the Department of Asian Languages & Cultures. Organized by Xena Amro.

EVENT SCHEDULE
10:00-10:15 Breakfast and Welcome Remarks by Xena Amro
10:15-11:45 Panel I: Faculty in Dialogue // Translation Practices and Pedagogy

• Moderator: Clare Cavanagh | Frances Hooper Professor in the Arts & Humanities
• Laura Brueck | Chair, South Asian Literature & Culture
• Rebecca Johnson | Director, Middle East & North African Studies, Associate Editor of the Journal of Arabic Literature
• William N. West | Department of English
• Ryan Dohoney | Department of Musicology

11:45-12:45 Lunch Break
12:45-2:30 Panel II: Graduate Students in Dialogue // Experiences, Challenges, & Methodologies

• Moderator: Rebecca Johnson | Director, Middle East & North African Studies, Associate Editor of the Journal of Arabic Literature
• Ishan Mehandru and Soumya Shailendra | Nnorthwestern University: Translators’ Adda: Notes Towards Finding a Translational Public
• Xena Amro | Northwestern University: On Translating an Arab Surrealist Magazine
• Micol Bez | Northwestern University: Translation, (In)commensurability and Epistemic Virtues

2:30-2:45 Coffee Break

2:45-4:15 Panel III: Editors and Translators // Bridging the Divide Between Academia and the Public

• Susan Harris | Editorial Director, Words Without Borders: Reading the World: Publishing Literature in Translation
• Yopie Prins | English and Comparative Literature, University of Michigan: Translating Michigan
• Mukhtar H. Ali | Department of Religion, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign: Knowledge Transmission and the Art of Translating Islamic Mystical Texts
• Mauro Nobili | Department of History, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; and Paul Naylor  | Cataloger of West  African Manuscripts at HMML: Maktaba: Making West African Manuscripts Accessible in the Classroom

5:00-7:00 Reception in Harris Hall, 108

January 25, 2023 | Fellowships Workshop

Featuring Stephen Hill, Office of Fellowships, Northwestern University.

Brought to you by The Program in Comparative Literary Studies, The Department of German, The Middle East and North African Studies Program

January 20, 2023 | CLS Book Launch!

Celebration of recent publications by THREE Comp. Lit. Faculty members:

• Ryan Dohoney, Morton Feldman: Friendship and Mourning in the New York Avant-Garde (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022)
• Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb, Auden and the Muse of History (Stanford University Press, 2022)
• Tristram Wolff, Against the Uprooted Word: Giving Language Time in Transatlantic Romanticism (Stanford University Press, 2022)

Fall Quarter 2022

November 17, 2022 | CLS Senior Colloquium

Presentations by…

• Tomer Cherki, Setting Up the Punchline: Exploring the Dark Humor of Avimelech Goes Up by a Whirlwind to the Heavens in Translation.TOMER CHERKI contextualizes his process of translating the novel Avimelech Goes Up by a Whirlwind to the Heavens from Hebrew into English through the lenses of translation theory, history, Holocaust studies, and humor studies. He will argue that the novel’s use of dark humor calls for a translation style that captures the essence of the work as temporalized by the social and historical setting of its publication. 
• Inbo Gottlieb-Fenves // Striated and the Smooth // INBO GOTTLIEB-FENVES critically examines the mathematical and literary legitimacy of the fractal structures of “smooth space” presented as rigorous definitions within Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, as well as their relation to the literary works of mathematician Felix Hausdorff, and Jorge Luis Borges’s The Library of Babel.
• Rosalie Liu // Under the Webcam: Representation of Lesbian Character and Technological Surveillance in Spider Lilies // ROSALI LIU Rosalie Liu engages with critical theories and close readings of five shots in this presentation to show how the director of Spider Lilies, Zero Chou, problematizes surveillance of the lesbian character. Chou uses complex cinematic techniques to construct and disrupt surveillance and its power on the lesbian character.
• Madison McClellan // Counter Context: Max Aub’s Case for Time- and Spacelessness // MADISON McCLELLAN is writing on one entry in Max Aub’s Lamentos del Sinaí (2014). She will consider how pseudotranslation and lack of context relate to revolution, national culture, and the formation of collectivities.
• Samuel Rosner // Examining the Diasporic Dialectics of Samson Raphael Hirsch’s The Nineteen Letters of Ben Uziel // SAMUEL ROSNER argues that Samson Raphael Hirsch invokes a Hegelian philosophy of history in The Nineteen Letters of Ben Uziel to present Judaism as a historical phenomenon that has already overcome the source of its tension with German Bildung. He will then explore how Hirsch produces a text cognizant of its historicity and, in doing so, evades a New Historicist reading by rendering the reader’s contemporary lens dependent on a false historical context posited by the author.

November 14, 2022 | What We’re Working on Now

A series of informal, lunchtime (brown bag) talks featuring CLS faculty discussing what they’re working on… right now. This event featured the two newest CLS core faculty members, Jeong Eun Annabel We (ALC) and Ryan Dohoney (Musicology).

November 7, 2022 | A Conversation on the Futures of Comparative Literature

Featuring:

• Haun Saussy (University of Chicago)
• Harris Feinsod (NU)
• Jeong Eun Annabel We (NU)
• Moderated by Chris Bush and Corey Byrnes

Pics!
Synopsis: Since at least the 1950s, individual scholars and institutions such as the American Comparative Literature Association have engaged in periodic rituals of self-reflection and, sometimes, self-flagellation. They’ve written histories of comparative literature's various origins and founding myths, prescribed standards often against the backdrop of perceived deficiencies), claimed to offer descriptions of the discipline as defined by its actual rather than imagined practices, or called for the death of an old comparative literature to make way for a new comparative literature. Comparative literature has, it seems, taken many forms and died at least a few deaths; long live comparative literature. In speaking of this discipline that refuses to be disciplined and that never really seems to die, are we merely repeating the ritual without the religion? Or is there still a there there? And if there is still a there there, then what version of comparative literature do you want to practice here (or wherever it is you happen to stand)?

October 31, 2022 | Simone White Poetry Event

A Reading & Workshop featuring poet SIMONE WHITE. Brought to you by The Poetry & Poetics Colloquium and Comparative Literary Studies Program.

Simone White is the author of or, on being the other woman (Duke University Press, 2022), Dear Angel of Death (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), Of Being Dispersed (Futurepoem, 2016), and House Envy of All the World (Factory School, 2010), the poetry chapbook, Unrest (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013), and the collaborative poem/painting chapbook, Dolly (with Kim Thomas) (Q Ave, 2008). Her poetry and prose have been featured in Artforum, e-flux, Harper’s Magazine, BOMB Magazine, Chicago Review, The New York Times Book Review, and Harriet: The Blog. Her honors include a 2021 Creative Capital Award, a 2017 Whiting Award in Poetry, Cave Canem Foundation fellowships, and recognition as a New American Poet for the Poetry Society of America in 2013. A graduate of Wesleyan University, she holds a JD from Harvard Law School, an MFA from the New School, and a PhD in English from CUNY Graduate Center. She is the Stephen M. Gorn Family Assistant Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and serves on the writing faculty of the Milton Avery Graduate School of the Arts at Bard College. She lives in Brooklyn.   

October 28, 2022 | The Climate Crisis is also a Crisis of Culture: Arendt After Ghosh

• LECTURE: Pics!

A lecture by Benjamin Robinson, Assistant Professor of German, NYU. Which followed a graduate student workshop entitled Climate Justice, and included a discussion of Robinson’s article, Climate Justice: Walter Benjamin and the Anthropocene (The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory; 96:2, 124-142); as well as conversations on professionalization and the job market for Northwestern PhDs in Comparative Literary Studies.

September 23, 2022 | CLS Welcome Party!

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