Talking War

The Center for the Humanities at Wesleyan sponsors a lecture series that convenes every Monday evening (time off for holidays and semester breaks) during the Fall & Spring semesters. Monday is usually a quiet day for the arts and humanities so, if you're a curious type, it would be worth your while to go to the Russell House, 350 High Street, for the 8 p.m. sessions.

For Fall 2009, the topic is "War." From the CHUM's website:

"Wars bring brutality, death, upheaval, and trauma. Participants and survivors bear witness to the disruptions of war in concrete detail. Nothing is so urgently documented as war, and war-making itself is often organized with reverence and precision. Yet accounts of war struggle with the limits of their narrative grasp. How might we make sense of the very breakdown of meaning and order? Can war be understood, as commonly claimed, to be the continuation of politics by other means or is it more accurate to understand politics as the continuation of war by other means? By virtue of the vivid struggles bound up in our ordinary and literal understanding of combat, war inevitably becomes the ground for metaphorical extensions, and these in turn affect our understanding of war in its most visceral form. The interaction between concrete and symbolic dimensions of war is far from simple.

The Center for the Humanities invites scholars and visitors for 2009-2010 to shed light on the realities and meanings of war, and to explore whether and how these are changing. Is war paradoxically presented as a state of exception, yet one from which there is no exit? What is the impact of bringing war home to civilian life, whether in the marketing of combat games and paraphernalia or in the involuntary re-enactments of post-traumatic stress disorder? What new responses to war are emerging in politics, theory, and religious and social movements?"

Tonight (September 21), the speaker is Catherine Lutz, Professor of Anthropology and International Studies at Brown University. Her most recent books include "The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle of US Military Posts" (NYU Press, 2009) and "Local Democracy Under Siege" Activism, Public Interests, and Private Politics" (NYU Press, 2007.) The title of her talk at Wesleyan is "The Military Normal and the Human Terrain of Warfare."

This event is free and open to the public. For more information, call 685-3044 or go to www.wesleyan.edu/chum.

Week in Preview 2/23 - 2/28 (Part 1)

The Center for the Humanities Spring 09 Lectures series continues this evening (Monday, February 23) at 8 p.m. in The Russell House, 350 High Street. Scheduled to speak is Katherine Maus, James Branch Cabell Professor of Renaissance Literature at the University of Virginia. Professor Maus is the co-editor of "The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Volume 1" (8th edition, 2005), "The Norton Shakespeare" (1997) and the forthcoming " The Oxford English Literary History, 1603-1660." Her talk, titled "Being and Having in Shakespeare's 'Richard II'", is free and open to the public. For more information, call 685-3004.

The Samuel Silipo Lecture Series at Wesleyan welcomes performance artist/ conceptualist/sculptor Dennis Oppenheim on Tuesday at 4:30 p.m. in the CFA Cinema. Oppenheim, whose career spans 4 decades, has become one of the leading figures in "public art", with large-scale works that fuse sculpture and architecture. In the late 1960s, many of his works used his body as the subject (see "Reading Position for Second Degree Burn", 1970, above) or larger installations that utilized wheat fields and snowy tracts of land. Later installations saw the artist working with puppets, building large "outdoor"sculptures, and more. Oppenheim will talk about how his work has developed and how his focus gas changed over the course of his career. The talk is free and open to the public. For more information, call 685-3355. To learn more about Oppenheim, take the time to wander through his website at www.dennis-oppenheim.com.

Mardi Gras, also known as "Fat Tuesday", will be celebrated in Middletown at Public, 337 Main Street. Tuesday Jazz series curator Trevor Davis assures us that there will be masks, beads, costumes, and, best of all, the music will be provided by the Heartbeat Dixieland Jazz Band featuring Bill Logozzo (drums), Bill Sinclair (piano), Art Hovey (bass, tuba), Andy Sherwood (clarinet), Skip Hughes (trombone), and Thomas Brown (trumpet.) Heartbeat DJB is one the area's finer ensembles, with members that are also involved in music education and social action. The party/music goes from 5:30 - 9 p.m. The Tuesday series has become quite popular and this is a night that should not be missed.

Talk is Free but Definitely Not Cheap

First a reminder - the Israel Studies Program at Wesleyan presents author Benny Morris in Room 108 of the Usdan Student Center tonight at 8 p.m. His book "1948: The First Arab-Israeli War", is a comprehensive and controversial look at the beginning of a conflict that shows no signs of abating.

One of the longest running programs on the Wesleyan campus is the Center for the Humanities Lecture series. Every Monday during the Fall and Spring semesters, scholars from around the country and world come to The Russell House, 350 High Street, and deliver talks that are challenging, thought-provoking and, often, quite impressive.

The title of the Spring 09 series is "Figuring 'The Human'" and begins tonight at 8 p.m. Steven Greenhouse, Labor & Workplace Reporter for The New York Times, will deliver a talk titled "Human Labor: Toward Dignity or Degradation, How America Has Fallen Short of the Ideal." His new book, "The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker", was issued last year and is a tough but clear-eyed look at how workers at all levels of the economy have suffered. In the words of Random House, the book's publisher, Greenhouse "explains how economic, business, political, and social trends—among them globalization, the influx of immigrants, and the Wal-Mart effect—have fueled the squeeze. We see how the social contract between employers and employees, guaranteeing steady work and good pensions, has eroded over the last three decades, damaged by massive layoffs of factory and office workers and Wall Street’s demands for ever-higher profits."

The talk (and the entire series) is free and open to the public. For more information, call the Center at 685-3044.