Graham Liddell and Prof. Christopher Hill will present.
Graham Liddell, "Reflections on Translating Habiby’s Sextet of the Six Days"
Palestinian author Emile Habiby’s short story collection Sextet of the Six Days is set in the aftermath of the 1967 war, in which Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights. It is written from the perspective of Palestinians who were able to remain on their land in what became Israel in 1948. Habiby highlights a number of reunions that take place in this period, when some Palestinian refugees are able to visit relatives from whom they have been separated for nearly 20 years, and cities and towns from which were expelled. While these brief and incomplete reunions take place in the shadow of catastrophic circumstances, they nonetheless provide an occasion to take stock of physical, psychological, and spiritual damage, and to assess any hopes of repair. In this short presentation, I will discuss my translation of Habiby’s collection (a work in progress) and propose a theoretical framework for understanding the impact of national displacement on modes of storytelling. Habiby’s style offers readers a close look at the ways his characters experience the sensations of everyday life amid national trauma. The striking dialogism at play within the text is not only indicative of rifts in individual psyches, but also of the utterance’s inherent inclination toward others.
Prof. Christopher Hill, "Toward a Chronogeography of the Naturalist Novel"
In the decades after the variety of literary realism known as naturalism emerged in France in the 1860s, in the work of Emile Zola and the Goncourt brothers, it was widely adopted by writers around the world. By the turn of the twentieth century self-described naturalists were working from the Americas to East Asia. As it traveled, the topics, themes, and techniques of naturalist fiction changed in ways that could not have been predicted from its origins. Current paradigms for explaining literary history on a large scale rely on categories derived from the literary history of a handful of European countries and are unable to treat works that differ from the categorical norms as anything but deviations. My talk uses examples from the history of the naturalist novel to propose alternative approaches to large-scale literary history.
Graham Liddell, "Reflections on Translating Habiby’s Sextet of the Six Days"
Palestinian author Emile Habiby’s short story collection Sextet of the Six Days is set in the aftermath of the 1967 war, in which Israel captured the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights. It is written from the perspective of Palestinians who were able to remain on their land in what became Israel in 1948. Habiby highlights a number of reunions that take place in this period, when some Palestinian refugees are able to visit relatives from whom they have been separated for nearly 20 years, and cities and towns from which were expelled. While these brief and incomplete reunions take place in the shadow of catastrophic circumstances, they nonetheless provide an occasion to take stock of physical, psychological, and spiritual damage, and to assess any hopes of repair. In this short presentation, I will discuss my translation of Habiby’s collection (a work in progress) and propose a theoretical framework for understanding the impact of national displacement on modes of storytelling. Habiby’s style offers readers a close look at the ways his characters experience the sensations of everyday life amid national trauma. The striking dialogism at play within the text is not only indicative of rifts in individual psyches, but also of the utterance’s inherent inclination toward others.
Prof. Christopher Hill, "Toward a Chronogeography of the Naturalist Novel"
In the decades after the variety of literary realism known as naturalism emerged in France in the 1860s, in the work of Emile Zola and the Goncourt brothers, it was widely adopted by writers around the world. By the turn of the twentieth century self-described naturalists were working from the Americas to East Asia. As it traveled, the topics, themes, and techniques of naturalist fiction changed in ways that could not have been predicted from its origins. Current paradigms for explaining literary history on a large scale rely on categories derived from the literary history of a handful of European countries and are unable to treat works that differ from the categorical norms as anything but deviations. My talk uses examples from the history of the naturalist novel to propose alternative approaches to large-scale literary history.
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