Otilia Baraboi

Lisa Connell

Yuqiu Meng

James Terry

The French Graduate Student Association at the University of Washington presents:

Aesthetics and (Self) Deception

October 12-13, 2007

Keynote speaker: Matei Calinescu,
Indiana University

Program

The nature and utility of representation are topics that have long been debated, in terms of their controversial power to blur the distinction between truth and lies, reality and illusion, pedagogy and pure entertainment. Looking back on the development of this debate, to what extent do we perpetuate, within a (post)modern and (post)colonial world, issues related to the dangers and shortcomings of representation?

Drawing on the rich potential of "aesthetics" and "deception," this graduate student colloquium seeks to investigate the nature and the politics of any act of creation as it relates to the tension between identity and representation, the individual and its social image, the original and the copy, and reality and its simulacrum, within a variety of fields such as art, literature, literary theory, history, the history of ideas, religion, cultural studies, film and theatre.

Keynote Speaker: Matei Calinescu

Since 1973, when he immigrated to the US from Romania, Matei Calinescu has been professor of comparative literature at Indiana University, Bloomington. His specializes in 20th-century literature and politics, modern intellectual history, the history of the idea of revolution, and literary theory. He is well-kown for his comprehensive study on modernity, Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde, Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism (Durham, North Carolina: Duke UP, 1987), which has been translated into several languages, including Japanese, Spanish, Chinese, Portuguese, Swedish, and Romanian. Other publications in English include Exploring Postmodernism (co-edited with D.W. Fokkema, Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1987); and Rereading (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale UP, 1993). He is also the author of numerous professional essays and articles in journals, books, and anthologies. His latest publication is a study of Ionescu's identity conflict: Ionesco- Recherches Identitaires, (Oxus Editions, Paris, 2005).