Rev. Marta Valentin invites us to witness Mardi Gras beads thrown as gifts for the chosen in New Orleans, to see the sacredness of yellow taxi cabs in dark nights, to bless the transitions of adolescence into adulthood, of life into death. These are words, prayers and meditations for Unitarian Universalism now—alive with bold images and offering an openhearted spirituality that acknowledges pain and hope, roots and possibility.—Rev. Elizabeth Nguyen, Community Minister, BostonA Long Time Blooming is a rich blend of blends: multiple identities; English spiced with Spanish; reflection, poetry, prayer, litany; layers of metaphor doubling as straight talk. In this slim volume, a "Latina lesbian Unitarian Universalist minister" lifts up the paradoxes, ambiguities, and complexities of her insight and experience: making "my religion with the light and the dark" in order to be whole. She captures at once the limits placed on her freedom in these "un-United States" and her commitment to "account for every act of free will" she exercises. She remains deeply rooted in relationships, family, culture, history, and God while taking us to places as diverse as Venezuela, New York City, New Orleans, and Cuba. In describing the particularities of her own complex experience, she succeeds in helping us notice that as different as we sometimes are, "there is much about our lives as human beings that serves to connect us."—Meck Groot, Justice Ministries Coordinator, Clara Barton and Massachusetts Bay Districts
A Long Time Blooming: Meditations (meditation manual) Marta I. Valentn
Rev. Dr. Natalie M. Fenimore offers a reflection on OUR 8th Principle as part of the Monday series, Meditations and Poetry. "It should mean an always and all-the-time commitment to justice, diversity, and equity in our UU association."
CL 79500: Theory and Practice of Literary Criticism, GC: Thurs, 4:15pm-6:15pm, 4 credits, Prof. Bettina LernerOver the last three decades, the field of Comparative Literature has gone through a period of rapid and radical expansion. What we study as comparatists is commonly (if problematically) held to be world literature, but now also includes a wide array of non-traditional media and new forms of self-expression. At the same time, how we study and interpret these texts has moved away from a well-established hermeneutics of suspicion toward distant, surface, reparative and other forms of reading, while increasingly embracing affects, objects and ecologies that exert significant pressure on discourses of race, gender, and sexuality. What defines the work that comparatists do and how might we continue to think about relationality when faced with modes of storytelling that seem unrelatable, untranslatable or illegible? This course considers what it means to read and write critically as comparatists today by engaging with current debates about the state of the discipline, the fate of the humanities in our universities, and the place and purpose of criticism and interpretation in our social and political landscapes as a whole. Through its written assignments and oral presentations, it also provides a space from within which to practice some of the key rhetorical exercises that have become, for better or worse, the benchmarks of professionalization including abstracts, conference presentations, project proposals, and a 20-25 page paper.
This course will examine theories and practices of festive and ritual performance in a range of times and places and will explore their implications for theatre as both an aesthetic object and an efficacious performative enactment. Topics for discussion may include: religious ritual and popular devotion; dance, gesture, and movement; games and sports; roleplaying, especially in relation to race, gender, sexual identity, and class; icons and objects; magic, astrology, and witchcraft; birth and funeral rites; nonlinear temporalities; ritual space and place; holidays and calendar customs; animals and environment; food and drink; violence and combat; erotics and sexuality. Each class session will bring together disparate theatre and performance practices by centering on a particular theme. For instance, we might consider Mardi Gras and Carnival in relation to racial impersonation; movement and religious space in Christian and Hindu processional drama; audience participation and community formation in contemporary queer theatre; site-specific performance, ecocriticism, and the history of modern pagan witchcraft; poverty and charity in mumming and other holiday begging customs; mock combat, blood sports, and dramas of ritual sacrifice; and animal masks and puppetry in diverse dance traditions. Culturally specific theatre and performance practices will be analyzed in relation to theoretical work by writers such as Joseph Roach, Diana Taylor, Max Harris, Claire Sponsler, Richard Schechner, Victor Turner, Mikhail Bakhtin, Catherine Bell, Kay Turner, Marina Warner, Johan Huizinga, Brian Sutton-Smith, Carlo Ginzburg, Peter Burke, and Ronald Hutton. Evaluation: active class participation, short weekly response papers, possible brief in-class presentation, research proposal with annotated bibliography, and a final paper.
Over the last three decades, the field of Comparative Literature has gone through a period of rapid and radical expansion. What we study as comparatists is commonly (if problematically) held to be world literature, but now also includes a wide array of non-traditional media and new forms of self-expression. At the same time, how we study and interpret these texts has moved away from a well-established hermeneutics of suspicion toward distant, surface, reparative and other forms of reading, while increasingly embracing affects, objects and ecologies that exert significant pressure on discourses of race, gender, and sexuality. What defines the work that comparatists do and how might we continue to think about relationality when faced with modes of storytelling that seem unrelatable, untranslatable or illegible? This course considers what it means to read and write critically as comparatists today by engaging with current debates about the state of the discipline, the fate of the humanities in our universities, and the place and purpose of criticism and interpretation in our social and political landscapes as a whole. Through its written assignments and oral presentations, it also provides a space from within which to practice some of the key rhetorical exercises that have become, for better or worse, the benchmarks of professionalization including abstracts, conference presentations, project proposals, and a 20-25 page paper.
CL 88500: Gender and Genre: Writing the SelfGC:, Mondays, 2:00pm-4:00pm, Prof. Charity Scribner, 2/4 creditsThe question of autofiction has become dominant in the study of contemporary literature and culture, and it is particularly germane to the subject of gender. Writing of the self spans from autobiography to the novel, crossing into the subgenres of the memoir and the roman à clef. Its production establishes an interplay between the documentary and the aesthetic; its critique analyzes the dialectic between authority, authorship, and identity. This seminar reads these literary forms together in order to open new lines of inquiry into sexual politics. Beginning with psychoanalysis, the course puts a German accent on signal moments of European modernity, from the late eighteenth century to the present. They include: masterworks by Goethe, Proust, Kafka, and Nabokov; experiments in political philosophy (Rousseau, Engels, Hitler, Butler); modern and contemporary literary fiction (Beauvoir, Handke, Sebald, Cusk, Knausgaard); and autotheory (Woolf, Barthes, Cixous, Nelson). Focusing on the body in time, the seminar also considers the relationship of autofiction to recent tendencies in cinema and performance art.
Our aim is not only to acquire a deepened understanding of the interactions between individual subjectivities, social conditions, and ideological formations (and to consider how psychoanalysis-inspired commentators have theorized these interactions), but to inquire into whether and, if so, how the mechanisms of these interactions may perhaps themselves have changed over time (and this will require situating the assigned texts contextually, but also often reading them against their own grain).
The jewelry and the small object glass, much of it wearable, is splendid! Lawrence Tuber, outstanding contempo-rary glass artist from LT Glass in the Arena District, is well represented. Tuber will serve as a juror during the Columbus 2004 Arts Festival. In October, his gold-stone bowls were on view, along with his designer collaborations with Kelsey Murphy, Cameo's founder and owner. 2ff7e9595c
Comments