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From the Warring Factions, Tuesday, February 5th, 6:30pm at The James Gallery

Adding to the political speech acts in Maja Bajević’s exhibition “To Be Continued,” the tenth-anniversary reprint of Ammiel Alcalay’s from the warring factions (2003), a book-length poem dedicated to Srebrenica, provides an occasion to engage in conversation about public and private speech as well as representations of catastrophe. Join us as Ammiel Alcalay and Bosnian poet Semezdin Mehmedinović, author of Sarajevo Blues (1992) and Nine Alexandrias (2003)—both translated by Alcalay—read and talk about their work.

 

Cosponsored by the Narrating Change Seminar in the Humanities

http://centerforthehumanities.org/james-gallery/events/From-the-Warring-Factions

Free and open to the public. All events take place at The Graduate Center, CUNY, 365 Fifth Ave btwn 34th & 35th. The building and the venues are fully accessible. For more information please visit http://centerforthehumanities.org/ or call 212.817.2005 or e-mail ch@gc.cuny.edu

Upcoming events, 10-4-12

1. Wed Oct 17, 12:00pm – 1:30pm
Love After Genocide
Join Damir Arsenijevic for this second seminar meeting of Narrating Change. He will discuss his writing on the topic of love after genocide and his work on an exhibition entitled Moments, which was on view at ZKM last spring.

2. Fri Nov 16, 10:00am – 12:00pm Working group meeting, Topic TBD.

3. Tues Dec 11, 6:00 – 7:30, Skylight Room
Adolescents Narrating Civic Action in Northern Ireland, South Africa and the United States,
What are the uses of narrative as a means of examining and participating in social and individual consciousness and change? Join Sarah W. Freedman (Professor of Education, University of California, Berkeley) and Karen Murphy (Director of International Programs, Facing History and Ourselves) as they talk about their ongoing collaboration focusing on possible processes of change in societies that have perpetuated long-term narratives of division, conflict, and violence.

Summary of Narrating Change Meeting with Jerome Bruner and the Working Group, 9-28-12

Summary of 9-28-12

Today, in spite of early morning torrential rains, a lively group of faculty and students from across CUNY and NYC identifying as scholars in English, literary studies, sociology, developmental psychology, anthropology, political science, fine arts, digital technology, and education met to launch the “Narrating change” Center for the Humanities Seminar.
Professor Jerome Bruner, New York University Law School, one of the most brilliant and influential contemporary writers about culture, thinking, and narrative, joined us to offer inspiring remarks. The agenda for this inaugural session of the seminar was to hear Professor Bruner’s reflections on history and the ongoing interest in narrative, to introduce participants, to discuss readings by Jacques Ranciers and Bruner, as well as his live remarks, and to propose ideas for goals and activities of the working group this 2012-2013 academic year.
Jerome Bruner, internationally acclaimed public speaker, author, and thinker, chose to meet with the working group for our first meeting, rather than doing a large public event. This was a rare and precious opportunity for our seminar. Professor Bruner offered a range of personal and studied insights about narrative and narrating from childhood observations about the multiple meanings of symbols (like U.S. MAIL), participation in political, academic, and everyday life, to favorite literary works (Death in Venice) and favorite stanzas of poetry (including lines from Prufrock and Renascence).
Professor Bruner’s prepared remarks highlighted the uniqueness and internal tensions of narrative as a social and reflective means of human culture – embodying some of the mysteries of conscious life with the beauty and challenges of its ambiguous nature, including the fanciful and the literary, deviations from the expected, possibility and norms, paradigmatic factual which can close and narrative possibility which can open alternatives, disciplinary pressures like that in psychology to be “scientific” and thus to explain and focus on givens, while at the same time in physics, the culturally canonical and contrasts/alternatives to the canons as narrative does both, scholars were seeking unknown possibilities, ambiguity and normality, resistance to closure, tricks with narrative structure to take the obvious and how that/how it did not happen, and more.

Group discussion extended these ideas, reversed them, and marked their place for our ongoing play and reflection. Insights the group offered included the appeal of narrating in psychology to foreground personal marginalized voices while then closing down tensions like contradiction and alterity in favor of coherent, authentic selves reflected in narratives; the literary studies perspective that complicates author, narrator, character, and meaning; the exploitation of the possible, ambiguous, non-dualistic and over-rationalized qualities of narrative by hegemonic powers that can use those qualities to mask inequalities and injustices; the diverse scales of the conflicts within narrative (among perspectives, uses of historical genres [such as paintings of catalogues]), tensions between presumed reality, fiction, and falseness; the use of alternative stories; how context including power around narratives figures into narratives; how different narrative genres (literature, pulp fiction, mystery, autobiography) figure into these tensions; the importance of narrative detail for lived experience in the reader/listener; questions about whether and how digital life experiences today are narratively drenched; the politics of narrating, whether and how it is/is not/can be subversive; whether/how narrative conditions us to the powerful realities; whether/how the postmodern turn embracing narrative for how it opens alternatives and ambiguity also take us away from ability to make assertions, disruptions in narrative and what these can do to help us see anew.