News and Events
News
Revealing the earliest origins of Italian Language
• Date: September 20, 2011
Olivier Morel Shares Veteran Stories in Class and on Film
By Sara Burnett
Olivier Morel was in his car one day when a story came on the radio about suicide among veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. According to the report, eight to 10 veterans were taking their own lives each day.
The news was like a punch in the stomach for Morel, a Notre Dame faculty member whose research focuses on fiction and trauma.
“I was trembling,” he recalls. “I was angry, and I felt helpless ... I was thinking, ‘This is unacceptable.’”
Facing Human Trauma
An assistant professional specialist in French and associate director of the Ph.D. in Literature Program in the College of Arts and Letters, Morel told the story to a friend a few months later during a visit to his native France. The friend suggested he share it with a producer—and within minutes of doing so, Morel had a signed contract to produce a documentary on the subject.
The result is On the Bridge, a feature-length film that will air this fall on the European public television channel ARTE. It is also among 12 documentaries selected for the prestigious Chicago International Film Festival, which begins later this month, and was an official selection at the recent Global Peace Film Festival in Orlando.
The film follows several veterans who return from war suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), a syndrome one veteran says “will follow you wherever you go.”
Some of the veterans turn to alcohol and drugs—“anything ... to get your mind off whatever it is you don’t want to face,” one young man says. Another has an armful of prescription drug bottles but still panics when he finds himself in a position that could be vulnerable to an ambush. Several seek help from the Veteran’s Administration or the military but cannot get it. One young man, whose parents were profiled in the film, kills himself. More
Events
"Between a Dialogue and a Dream Voice: Life in the Wake of Diderot."
Eyal Peretz, IU Bloomington
April 19 217 Debartolo, 5:00 PM
Lecture initiated by Erik Larsen (Ph.D. in lit. Prog.’s candidate)
Eyal Peretz works at the intersection of literary theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis and film studies. His work is an attempt to redraw the relations between philosophy and the arts by examining various ways in which works of art and philosophical texts enter into a new type of dialogue in the age that has been defined as post enlightenment. This age, from the point of view of these interests, is characterized by two main intellectual projects: the rise of Aesthetics, thus of the introduction of the question of the significance of art into the heart of philosophy, and what has been called the critique of metaphysics, thus the critique of the logic guiding classical philosophy from Plato to Kant. His first book, Literature, Disaster, and the Enigma of Power: a Reading of Moby-Dick (Stanford UP 2003) examined the relations between literature and philosophy within this context. His second book, Becoming Visionary: Brian De Palma’s Cinematic Education of the Senses (Stanford UP 2008), dealt with philosophy and film. In the mean time, he co-edited with E. Sun and U. Baer The Claims of Literature: The Shoshana Felman Reader (Fordham University press, 2007). His current project is a reading of various writings by the major enlightenment philosopher and writer, Denis Diderot, a transitional figure between enlightenment thinking and post-enlightenment. He proposes to examine the significance of dramatic theater for the rethinking of philosophy’s relation to the arts.
Rebecca Johnson, Northwestern University
April 25, 4:30 PM
116 DeBartolo
Lecture initiated by Tobias Boes and Olivier Morel.
Tentative title: "Robinson Crusoe in Arabic, or the Strange and Surprising Adventures of a Genre"
This talk looks at Qissat Rubinsun Karuzi, an Arabic translation of Robinson Crusoe published in 1835 and consequently the first novel to appear in Arabic. While many studies of the Arabic novel situate its emergence within the context of national independence movements, the formation of national educational programs, and canons of domestic realism, this talk situates the novel's incorporation into Arabic within the context of the ambivalent textual and translation practices of the Arab literary modernity. Reading Karuzi with Crusoe illuminates the particular transnational interactions that produced the text as well as the productive mistranslations that define the genre's ambivalent adoption and transformation into Arabic. Reintegrating problematic texts such as Karuzi into the foundations of Arabic literary modernity helps build new ground for understanding the history of the novel outside of Western Europe and raises important questions about the approaches to comparative studies of the genre outside of models of diffusion.
Rebecca Johnson teaches courses in Middle Eastern literary and cultural studies with a special focus on modern Arabic literature. Her research focuses on the history and theory of the novel in Arabic and English, the literature of the nineteenth-century period known as the Nahda, and literary orientalism and occidentalism, and her wider interests include pre-modern Arabic prose genres, cosmopolitanism, and the poetics and politics of translation. Her current book project studies the intertwined early histories of the Arabic and English novels, using translation as a lens through which to understand the form and function of the genre. Professor Johnson has been a fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, the Council for Library and Information Resources, and the Fulbright Foundation. She has also published translations of Arabic literature; her translation with the author of Sinan Antoon's I'jaam: An Iraqi Rhapsody is available from City Lights Books.
