The Foundation for Contemporary Arts is a New York-based organization founded in 1963 by Jasper Johns, John Cage, and others in a spirit of community, hoping to assist and encourage innovation, experimentation, and potential in the arts. Since then, exhibitions and sales of works donated by more than 600 visual artists have made possible non-restrictive grants to individuals working in dance,
music, performance art/theater, poetry, and the visual arts.
 

Five Sisters Productions (includes Jennifer Burton, Lecturer F99) has just completed THE HAPPIEST DAY OF HIS LIFE. The film was invited to preview at the Wexner Center in Ohio, plans are underway for a festival tour, and a distribution company is interested in releasing it on Canadian television. And (perhaps as a sequel?) Jennifer Burton has started filming a documentary on modern-day parenting.

The Andy Warhol Foundation’s three-year, three-million-dollar initiative is designed to encourage intellectually rigorous and creatively generative writing about art and to insure that critical writing remains a valued mode of engaging in the visual arts.

In this first year of the Arts Writing Grants, a panel of six esteemed judges awarded $100,000 each to six journals and allocated from $8,500 - $50,000 each for eighteen individuals. Myles joins a group of distinguished writers working on projects as diverse as art in Vietnam, politics and race in museums, and alternative media. All are committed to the craft of writing and advancement of critical discourse on contemporary visual art.

Max Parra has been appointed to the Board of Directors for the California Council for the Humanities.

Lynn Ta will be presenting at the Crossing Borders Conference March 2-4. The title of her talk is "Denationality, Gender Violence, and Senorita Extraviada."

Edwige Tamalet Talbayev presented a paper entitled "Mediterranean Journeys: Transgressing Segregation in French Colonial Algeria in the 1930s" at the "Literary Odysseys: The Journeys in and of literature"graduate student conference organized by the University of Colorado at Boulder, Department of Comparative Literature and Humanities, February 23-24.

Alexa Weik presented two papers last month:
- a paper entitled “Prejudice and Emotion: The Irrational Ends of Cosmopolitan Conversations” at the 32nd Annual FSU Conference “Cosmopolitanism: Thinking Beyond the Nation,” Florida State University, Tallahassee, February 1-4, 2007.
- a paper entitled “The Dialectic of Cosmopolitanism and Commitment in William Gardner Smith’s The Stone Face and  Return to Black America” at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900, University of Louisville, Feb 22-24, 2007.

IN MEMORIAM

Claudio Guillén
(Paris, September, 1924-Madrid, January 27, 2007)

Some 20 years ago, the principal speaker at a symposium on Pérez Galdós held at Harvard was a then famous British comparatist of German origin who, to everyone’s dismay, began his talk by declaring that, until receiving the invitation to participate in our gathering, he had never read Galdós. But, he continued, curious about the unexpected invitation, he had taken the trouble to read Fortunata and Jacinta in translation, and he could now confirm to us that Benito Pérez Galdós was undoubtedly one of the very best of all XIX Century novelists. It was nice of him to let us know, and I am sure some in the audience wished that he would go back to Oxford (or was it Cambridge?) and, please, spread the news.

But it was a good thing Claudio Guillén was not there that afternoon. To be sure, Claudio was too well bred, too polite to have attacked that pompous ass directly, but I don’t doubt that he would have been obliged to meditate, once more in his life, about what Comparative Literature means when you belong to the periphery of Western culture. For can anyone who has read Claudio Guillén’s works or has known him possibly imagine that, besides Spanish and Latin American authors, he had never read Stendhal, or Tolstoy, or Dickens, or Mark Twain (Dostoyevski is always a given, of course)?

But, of course, Claudio Guillén was culturally privileged. His mother was an intelligent and cultivated French woman, his father a great and famous Spanish poet; he was educated in Spanish and French, as a child he lived in Sevilla, and when his family went into exile after the Spanish Republic was defeated by Franco and his German Nazis and his Italian Fascists, and after he served with De Gaulle’s army during the Second World War, he was educated in English, at Williams College and at Harvard, where he studied not only with Harry Levin, locally well known, but with Amado Alonso, a great philologist who, after the Russian Formalists, spread the theory of Stylistics in the whole of Latin America in the 1950’s. And Claudio knew his German. And his Latin. And Portuguese, and Italian and…

So both by birth and because of the vicissitudes of exile, Claudio was an internationalist. To be sure, he was a Spaniard, but that, paradoxically, was also an advantage. Carlos Fuentes once wrote that the cultural advantage of belonging to a peripheral or marginal nation is that one has to know not only one’s own culture, but that of others too. So Claudio Guillén was, so to speak, born into comparatism, and exile strengthened what must have been an almost innate tendency. And, yes, he thought and wrote much about Spanish literature (after all, the picaresque and Cervantes, for example, are major European literary achievements: just ask Moll Flanders and Tristram Shandy), but he never saw it/read it in isolation: witness not only his major works, but his beautiful small book El sol de los desterrados (The sun of the exiles) where he writes of many exiles, but —subtle as he was— not about the exile of anti- Franco Spaniards.

Claudio Guillén came to UCSD’s Department of Literature in the Fall of 1963 and founded here the Comparative Literature section. He was also instrumental in the founding of CILAS. And he was much admired and liked by his colleagues and students. It was sad to see him leave us for Harvard in 1978. But then, in 1982, he went back to the Spain of his childhood, where he taught at two prestigious universities, received two literary prizes for his work in Comparative Literature and, by an almost unanimous vote, was made a member of the Language Academy (Real Academia de la Lengua). Having lived a long, rich, complex and difficult life, he died while watching a movie on TV in the company of his second wife, Margarita. His first wife, Elfie, had died a month before. The movie he and Margarita were watching was The African Queen, and Claudio’s death was mercifully and brutally instantaneous. Some of us will never forget him. As long as we live, of course.

Carlos Blanco-Aguinaga

MARCH EVENTS

NEW WRITING SERIES Winter 2007

Thursday, March 15, 4:30 pm, Visual Arts Performance Space, New Writing Series: Justin Tussing  

George Varga, Music Critic
San Diego Union-Tribune

“The Advent of Rock Journalism” Monday, March 5, 2007
10:00 – 11:00 am, deCerteau Room, 155 Literature Building

1st Annual Diversity Symposium
Monday, March 5, 2007, 3:00-5:00pm, Price Center Theatre
A discussion on the crisis of ethnic diversity and equity at UC San Diego

Specific presentations include: Hiring of diverse faculty, Restructuring the Chief Diversity Office responsibilities, Student recruitment & retention Hiring & promotion of underrepresented staff, Support for academic minors

There will be presentations on issues and specific proposals to address under-representation among students, faculty, staff, and the curriculum.

The UCSD Science Studies Program Colloquium Series
presents Roddey Reid, Professor of French Studies and Cultural Studies, Department of Literature, UCSD"Globalizing Public Health: Singularities, Aggregates, and the Arts of Government in Tobacco Control"Monday, March 5, 2007 - 4:00 - 6:00 pm
Humanities & Social Sciences Bldg # 3027
Reception prior to talk at 3:30 in H&SS 3005

Dialogues in Sexuality Studies II

Featuring: David Serlin
Associate Professor of Communication and Science Studies at UCSD
"Womanhood in Black and White: Sexuality, Embodiment, and Medical Science in the 1950s" and Elyse Montague, MFA Candidate, Department of Visual Arts, UC San Diego

"Well Dressed: A Film About Bodies in Transition"
Thursday, March 8, 5-7 pm
LGBT Resource Center
Old Student Center

Eileen Myles
reads from her new collection
Sorry, Tree

Ali Liebegott
reads from her novel
The IHOP Papers

Friday, March 9, 7pm * D.G. Wills Books

Rae Armantrout
reads from her new book
Next Life

Friday, March 30, 7pm
D.G. Wills Books
  

CONFERENCES

Asian Studies Student Group

Some of Literature Dept grad students launched an Asian Studies Student Group earlier this quarter. One of our goals is to create a network among lit grads who work on (broadly defined) *Asian Studies* as their field and for whom the MLA joblist might not apply. We also plan to start a Brown Bag series in the near future. If you are interested in joining our group, please email this quarter's contact person, Su-yun.

2007-08 IICAS Research & Travel Grants

The Institute for International, Comparative, and Area Studies (IICAS) at UC San Diego is pleased to announce a competition for its 2007-08 Grant programs!

IICAS grants are directed primarily to faculty and students in the social sciences and humanities. Supported research should be about other societies rather than simply conducted in other societies. Applications from fields outside the social sciences and humanities may be eligible if they deal with global issues, cross-national comparisons, or research on particular societies and also have a substantial human or societal dimension. (Implications for public policy should be made explicit.)

* 2007-08 Research Conference Grantss
* 2007-08 Faculty Research Planning / Travel Grants
* 2007-08 Graduate Travel Grants