Recent News
Department Events
- 2013-02-13:
A Reading by Richard Powers - 2013-02-20:
Watch video of "Careers in Teaching & Postdocs" - 2013-02-21:
Thomas Pfau (Duke University)
Sianne Ngai's "The zany, the cute, and the interesting"
In her new book, Our Aesthetic Categories: zany, cute, interesting, Prof. Ngai explores how the zany, the cute, and the interesting saturate postmodern culture. They dominate the look of its art and commodities as well as our discourse about the ambivalent feelings these objects often inspire. In this . . . study, Ngai offers a theory of the aesthetic categories that most people use to process the hyper-commodified, mass-mediated, performance-driven world of late capitalism, treating them with the same seriousness philosophers have reserved for analysis of the beautiful and the sublime.
(read more . . . )
"Living Through Conquest: The Politics of Early English, 1020-1220"
Prof. Elaine Treharne's latest publication, Living through Conquest, is the first ever investigation of the political clout of English from the reign of Cnut to the earliest decades of the thirteenth century. It focuses on why and how the English language was used by kings and their courts and by leading churchmen and monastic institutions at key moments from 1020 to 1220. English became the language of choice of a usurper king; the language of collective endeavour for preachers and prelates; and the language of resistance and negotiation in the post-Conquest period. . . . While many scholars to date have seen the period from 1060 to 1220 as a literary lacuna as far as English is concerned, this book demonstrates unequivocally that the hundreds of vernacular works surviving from this period attest to a lively and rich textual tradition.
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