Professor of English Literature Philip Weinstein's new book, Becoming Faulkner, explores the relationship between Faulkner's troubled life and the kinds of trouble he learned to convey so powerfully in his novels. "The process of his 'becoming Faulkner' was fraught with untimely decisions and unmastered experiences," Weinstein says. "If he had led the life he wanted, he would not have written the books he wrote."

Weinstein's talk draws on the third chapter of the book, "Dark Twins," and charts Faulkner's immersion, as a man and as a writer, in a sea of racially unmanageable waters. "His testimony is all the more telling," Weinstein adds, "for the fissures it reveals."

by Alexander Griswold Cummins Professor of English Literature Philip Weinstein

"When and why does western fiction become difficult to read? My lecture takes on this question," Weinstein says. "Modernist writers of unknowing refuse to tell the West's favorite story: that of a hero or heroine moving through trouble and eventually coming to know. I explore how we in the West came to tell that favorite story, why we have cycled and recycled it for over two centuries. Then, around the turn of the last century, a group of thinkers and writers-Proust, Kafka, Faulkner, and Freud among them-worked to reshape our very sense of the human drama. They revised our most commonsensical ways of understanding ourselves in space and time and among others. The aim of the lecture is to explain why they are so difficult to read. No less important, I'll try to persuade my audience that their difficulty is invaluable."

by Associate Professor of English Literature Nora Johnson

"Shakespeare's plays were famously ubiquitous in 19th-century America: as burlesques, as minstrel shows, as circus performances, as variety theater, and as high culture, sometimes all at once," Johnson says. "This paper examines the role of Edwin Booth, the great late-century tragedian whose brother shot Lincoln, in the formation of a distinctly elite Shakespeare, as narrated by a supporting actress named Kitty who had a terrible crush on him."

by Assistant Professor of English Literature Bakirathi Mani

"What does it mean to be South Asian today? How has immigration, transnational adoption, and 9/11 changed the ways in which South Asians identify as Americans?" Mani asks. "This talk uses contemporary digital videos and documentary films in order to explore how South Asians create new definitions of Asian American identity and community.

"I discuss three films in this lecture that focus on three distinct South Asian immigrant groups: first-generation professionals who migrated in the 1960s and 1970s; Indian adoptees who were adopted by white American families in Minnesota the 1980s; and working-class Bangladeshi immigrants who arrived in New York in the 1990s. Whereas many professional immigrants (particularly women) feel that they must choose between being Indian or being American, I demonstrate how transnational adoptees begin to create a sense of solidarity with each other as Indians and as Americans. These films document the ways in which first and second-generation immigrants create imaginative relationships with their countries of 'origin' at the same time that they embody and produce racialized subjectivities as South Asians in the United States."

Peter Schmidt teaches U.S. literature and history and is also Chair of the Department of English Literature. The talk is drawn from his current book project, scheduled for publication in 2007: Brier-Patch: Fictions of Race and Nation in the New South, 1865-1920. Mark Twain criticized American expansionism in the Caribbean and the Pacific in the 1890s and after, which justified itself as racial uplift and the liberation of oppressed peoples into democratic modernity. He pointed out how hypocritical and contradictory such projects were, given immense racial inequality and violence at home. Twain also raged against how democratizing projects abroad were often covers for the expansionof corporate power, not democratic values. Needless, to say, Twain's comments have a disturbing relevance to current events, as is discussed at the end of the talk. Twain's opinions are also juxtaposed against a representative sampling of other writers of his time, so that you can get a sense of the wide range of opinions regarding "regime change" in the name of democracy that existed during this period.