Center & Clark Core Program, 2003-2004
The
Age of Projects:
Changing
and Improving the Arts, Literature, and Life
during the Long Eighteenth Century, 1660–1820
Directed
by Maximillian E. Novak, English, UCLA
In his
Essay upon Projects, published in 1697, Daniel Defoe pronounced his
age "the Projecting Age." The words project and projector
had distinctly negative connotations, being associated with various
schemes and their often disreputable, desperate creators. Defoe tried
to give these concepts a new spin. While acknowledging the nefarious
impulses behind many projects, he also saw that projecting could lead
to improvements in human life through new inventions or new methods
of organizing society. His way of viewing the world was typical of
the European Enlightenment, which in itself may be conceived as a
massive project for changing and improving the world through innovation
in the arts, sciences, education, and politics. In this sense, Locke,
Swift, Rousseau, Diderot, and Godwin all had elements of the projector
in their makeup.
The yearlong
program of 2003-04 conceives of projects during the Enlightenment
in this very broad way. Interdisciplinary in nature, the series will
explore "projects" both literally and as a metaphor for a certain
type of inventive and creative thinking during the long eighteenth
century. Some of these projects involved rediscovering the achievements
of the past, and the first series of lectures will examine the impressive
antiquarian researches of the era. The great Enlightenment projects,
however, sought to improve human conditions in the eighteenth-century
present, and the second series will examine this contemporary experience.
Toward the end of the eighteenth century, utopia was in the air and
the impulse to peer into the future, hard to resist. The last section
of this series will concentrate on the projects of the era that looked
toward the future and on their creators, who tried to imagine what
an enlightened world might be.
The program will be divided
into three sessions:
Return to Year at a Glance
or scroll below through the schedule of programs
and their descriptions
Academic and Public Programs, 2003-2004
Unless otherwise noted, all programs will be held at the
Clark Library, 2520 Cimarron Street, in the West Adams district of
Los Angeles.
Limited seating at the Clark makes advance
registration necessary for all programs.
Registration fees cover the cost of lunches and refreshments and,
where applicable, the distribution of advance copies of papers.
Inquiries should be addressed to the Center
office at 310 Royce Hall, UCLA
Phone: 310-206-8552; E-mail:)
October 12 (Sunday), 2:00 p.m.
— Chamber Music at the Clark
—
David
Finckel, cello
Wu Han, piano
Cellist David Finckel and
pianist Wu Han bring remarkable insight and outstanding artistry
to the repertoire for cello and piano. Of their recent Wigmore
Hall debut, the reviewer for London’s Musical Opinion said: “They
enthralled both myself and the audience with performances whose
idiomatic command, technical mastery and unsullied integrity of
vision made me think right back to the days of Schnabel and Fournier,
Solomon and Piatigorsky.” Such praise, from presenters, the public,
and the press, has placed Mr. Finckel and Ms. Han in the top rank
of international musicians. Their Clark Library performance will
feature their artistry applied to the repertoire of the Romantic
period.
—
P R O G R A M
—
Franz Schubert, Sonata
in A Minor, D 821, Arpeggione
Richard Strauss, Sonata in F Major, Op. 6
—
I N T E R M I S
S I O N —
Sergei Rachmaninov, Vocalise
Frédéric Chopin, Sonata in G Minor, Op. 65
—
R E C E P T I O
N —
Reservations lottery submission
deadline: September 12
Admission: $20 per person
For an explanation of the
reservations lottery system, to access printable reservation-by-lottery
forms for upcoming concerts, and for direct links to the ensembles'
home pages, please see Music
Programs, 2003–04.
— October 17–18 (Friday
& Saturday) —
The
Radical Enlightenment
arranged
by
Margaret C. Jacob, UCLA, and
Wijnand W. Mijnhardt, Universiteit Utrecht
In the last decades two major
changes have affected the historiography of the European Enlightenment.
Firstly, the French and cosmopolitan vision has been replaced by a
series of national interpretations. As a result the Enlightenment
has come to be associated no longer simply with a cosmopolitan elite
discussing the improbabilities of revealed religion or the impossibilities
of absolutism but with the efforts of provincial literati to identify
the problems of the various nations and to contribute to their solutions.
Secondly, but no less importantly, the chronology of the intellectual
development of the Enlightenment has been turned upside down. Central
to this novel approach has been Margaret Jacob's The Radical Enlightenment
(1981), in which she identified a republican, materialist, and
even pantheist, Enlightenment as a part of the influential exile culture
that flourished on Dutch soil in the early 1700s. The intellectual
sources for this radical Enlightenment were not Newtonian but distinctly
Cartesian and Spinozist. Jacob's book has solicited a very influential
debate and elicited a tremendous amount of new research, especially
in the Netherlands, in England, and in Italy. Its recent climax is
Jonathan Israel's major book Radical Enlightenment, which appeared
in 2001. As did Jacob, Israel identified the Dutch Republic as the
center of Enlightenment radicalism, but he concentrated especially
on indigenous Dutch intellectual culture and its influence throughout
Europe. The conference will be truly
international and will end on a contemporary note as the neuroscientist
Antonio Damasio and the political scientist James Miller comment on
the relevance of the radical Enlightenment to neuro-scientific research
and to the discontents voiced by postmodernism.
Conference papers will be accessible
from this page two weeks before and two weeks after the conference.
They will be mailed to registrants by request.
Registration
deadline—October 3
Registration
fees—UC faculty and staff:
$15; students with ID: no charge; others: $25.
Registration fees include the cost of lunches
and refreshments, as well as the mailing, by request, of conference
papers. The fees are not refundable.
Click here to view the program schedule.
Click here for a printable registration
form.
— November 14–15 (Friday & Saturday) —
The
Age of Projects:
Changing and Improving the Arts, Literature, and Life during the Long
Eighteenth Century, 1660–1820
arranged
by Maximillian E. Novak, UCLA
— Part
I —
Retrieving
the Past
The first seminar of our yearlong
series, an investigation of the projecting spirit during the long
eighteenth century, will focus on efforts at looking backward, to
discover in past knowledge-of science, literature, or the arts-matters
thought to be of value to the present. Despite his emphasis upon the
progress of scientific discovery, even Thomas Sprat, in his History
of the Royal Society (1667), argued that English literature would
benefit greatly by an understanding of the "Antients," and maintained
that the Royal Society might aid in retrieving lost knowledge from
the past. "Nay, even many of the lost rarities of Antiquity
will be hereby restored," he wrote, foreseeing a new form of archaeology
that would recover matters "overwhelm'd in the ruines of Time."
Sprat drew a sharp line between impartial, disinterested, gentlemanly
scientists and scheming, impecunious, "vain Projectors"; but,
in championing the writing of a history of the civil wars and of a
kind of academy to rule over the English language (which he viewed
as corrupted by language usage during those very wars), Sprat was
not only trying to retrieve the past but also assuming the air of
a projector. Thirty years later, in his Essay upon Projects (1697),
Daniel Defoe, an unabashed admirer of the projecting spirit, in addition
to proposals for a women's academy, new banks, and ways of financing
pensions, argued for a revival of the system of Roman roads that had
once spanned Britain. Before that date, a new breed of antiquarians
had searched in England's past for solutions to problems in contemporary
politics. During this period, when "ancients" battled "moderns," even
those who believed that the civilization created by the long eighteenth
century had eclipsed the past, usually acknowledged that they could
write better, think more clearly and see further because, as the saying
went, they stood on the shoulders of giants.
Registration
deadline—November 7
Registration
fees—UC faculty and staff:
$15; students with ID: no charge; others: $25.
Registration fees include the cost of lunches
and refreshments. The fees are not refundable.
January 9 (Friday), 1:30 p.m.
Celebrating
Richard Popkin's
New History of Scepticism: From Savonarola to Bayle
and His Eightieth Birthday
Program
—
David Myers, UCLA
Between False Messiahs and Free Thinkers: Dick Popkin and
the Rethinking of Jewish History
Harry Bracken, Arizona State University
Popkin's Discovery of Berkeley's Anti-Pyrrhonism
Avrum Stroll, University of California, San Diego
Collaborating and Disagreeing with Genius
Allison Coudert, Arizona State University
Memories of a Grateful Popkinite
—
A Reception follows the program —
Admission:
comlimentary. Seating is limited.
R.S.V.P. (310-206-8552) no later than Monday, January 5.
January 11 (Sunday), 2:00 p.m.
— Chamber Music at the Clark
—
A
Special Fund-Raising Event to Support
the Clark Library Chamber Music Endowment Fund
Shanghai
Quartet
Within four years of its
formation at the Shanghai Conservatory in 1983, the Shanghai Quartet
won two international competitions and embarked on an extensive
touring career. Today, this unusually refined and musically distinct
group is recognized as one of the leading quartets of its generation.
It appears regularly in the major music centers of North America,
Europe, and Asia, collaborating on occasion with pianists Lillian
Kallir, Joseph Kalichstein, Ruth Laredo, and Gerhard Oppitz; flutist
Eugenia Zuckerman; and cellist Yo-Yo Ma; among others. On the
occasion of its tenth anniversary as Quartet-in-Residence at the
University of Richmond, the Quartet premiered a new work by Bright
Sheng, commissioned especially for the event by the University
and the Freer Gallery in Washington D.C. Under the auspices of
Delos International, the Shanghai Quartet has built an extensive
discography offering traditional string quartet repertoire as
well as unconventional cross-cultural and best-selling “cross-over”
classical fare.
—
P R O G R A M
—
Hou Long, Song of
the Ch'in
Bedrich Smetana, String Quartet No. 1 in E Minor, From
My Life
—
I N T E R M I
S S I O N —
Ludwig van Beethoven,
First String Quartet Op. 130/133
—
R E C E P T
I O N —
Reservations deadline: December 8
Admission: $70 per ticket, $55 of which is tax-deductible
To access a printable
reservation form for this concert, and for direct links
to this and other ensembles' home pages, please see Music
Programs, 2003–04.
— January 23–24 (Friday &
Saturday) —
The
Culture of Enlightenment and Reform
in Eighteenth-Century Italy
a conference arranged
by
John Davis, University of Connecticut, Storrs
John Marino, University of California, San Diego
Geoffrey Symcox, UCLA
This conference will bring
together distinguished scholars from Europe and North America to
offer new perspectives on the history of the Italian Enlightenment
and to take stock of developments in its historiography since the
fundamental work of Franco Venturi. The aim of the conference is
to familiarize the English-speaking public with the current state
of scholarship on the Italian Enlightenment, and the expected publication
of the conference papers themselves as a special number of the Journal
of Modern Italian Studies will serve as a further way to bring
this new body of scholarship to the attention of the English-speaking
public.
January 25 (Sunday), 2:00 p.m.
— Chamber Music at the Clark
—
Ying
Quartet
The Ying Quartet is renowned
for its outstanding performances and for its expertise at designing
community outreach programs. The four siblings began their career
as an ensemble in 1992 in the farm town of Jesup, Iowa, as the
first recipients of a National Endowment for the Arts grant
to support chamber music in rural America. While still in Jesup,
the quartet earned the 1993 Naumburg Chamber Music Award, and
in the years since, it has established an international reputation
for excellence. The quartet performs to widespread acclaim throughout
north America, Europe, Australia, Japan, and Taiwan; yet the
express goal of reintegrating artistic and creative expression
into the fabric of everyday life continues to guide the group
in its choice of programs, audiences, and venues.
—
P R O G R A M
—
Wolfgang Amadeus
Mozart, Quartet in D Minor, K 421
Béla Bartók,
Quartet No. 2
—
I N T E R M I
S S I O N —
Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky,
Quartet No. 3 in E-flat Minor, Op. 30
—
R E C E P T
I O N —
Reservations lottery
submission deadline: December 8
Admission: $20 per person
For an explanation
of the reservations lottery system, to access printable
reservation-by-lottery forms for upcoming concerts, and
for direct links to the ensembles' home pages, please
see Music
Programs, 2003–04.
— January 30–31 (Friday & Saturday)
—
Theorizing
the Dynamics of Core-Periphery Relations
arranged by
Robert Brenner, UCLA
Peter H. Reill, UCLA
Balázs Szelényi, Library of Congress
The conference will focus
on the core-periphery debate and its contemporary significance.
In the 1960s and 1970s leading academics argued that in the seventeenth
century certain core countries in Western Europe broke away from
traditional socio-economic patterns and rose to world dominance,
while Eastern Europe stagnated under the imposition of second
serfdom. Since the collapse of communism, however, it has become
necessary to revisit the problems associated with the basic premise
of this theory. The core-periphery debate rose to importance in
the backdrop of the Cold War, when the obvious dichotomy in Europe
was between a democratic capitalist West and a dictatorial communist
East. Yet with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the declining significance
of the East-West divide, several questions emerge: Where does
the border of Eastern Europe begin? Will the absorption of Eastern
Europe into the European Union mean the end of the East-West divide?
How will future generations view the core-periphery debate? Is
it possible that in the twenty-first century historians will view
the core-periphery debate as little more than ideological struggles
born out of the Cold War? Or, will the next generation of historians,
political scientists, and sociologists continue to regard the
seventeenth century as the critical period for distinguishing
the West from the East? Alternatively, will a third option arise,
as parts of the core-periphery debate are salvaged and other discarded?
The program will be in honor
of Iván Berend as he approaches his seventy-fifth birthday. Papers
read at this conference will be brought together in a Festschrift
to honor Professor Berend's contribution to comparative European
political-economic history, and the study of core-periphery relations.
Registration
deadline— January 23
Registration
fees—UC faculty and staff:
$15; students with ID: no charge; others: $25.
Registration fees include the cost of
lunches and refreshments. The fees are not refundable.
Click here to view the program schedule.
Click here for a printable registration
form.
— February 6–7 (Friday & Saturday)
—
Communication
and Dissimulation
in Seventeenth-Century Europe
[Originally titled the "Republic
of Letters"]
a conference cosponsored with
Centro Interdipartimentale
di Studi su Descartes e il Seicento, Lecce
Università degli
Studi di Bari
École Pratique des Hautes
Études, Paris
arranged by
Jean-Robert Armogathe, École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris
Giulia Belgioioso, Centro Interdipartimentale di Studi su Descartes
e
il Seicento, Lecce
Massimo Ciavolella, UCLA
Peter H. Reill, UCLA
Mercury, the god of merchants
and thieves, is the patron of trade (commercium) in the republic
of letters. The dissemination of knowledge goes hand in hand
with dissimulation. Information comes from honest correspondents
as well as from informers and spies. Letters circulate openly
or hidden under ciphers, more difficult to break because the
text presents an obvious meaning of its own. This duplicity
of the modern age is not limited to the diplomats: it touches
upon the enunciation of mathematical challenges, and at the
same time upon the subversion of libertine discourses. The Baroque
age, both in literature and in the arts, hides and deceives
as much as it shows openly. The eye is surprised and deceived
by trompe-l'oeil in anamorphosis, while rhetorical devices signify
more than they declare.
Only a multidisciplinary
approach will allow us to embrace the complexity of an age in
which the first periodicals compete with erudite correspondence,
and in which new techniques multiply the diffusion of ideologies.
Propaganda and information cohabit in a Europe in which the
categories of the possible and the probable tend to blur the
contours of the "clarity and distinction" attributed to the
seventeenth century.
Registration
deadline— January 30
Registration
fees—UC faculty and
staff: $15; students with ID: no charge; others: $25.
Registration fees include the cost
of lunches and refreshments. The fees are not refundable.
— February 17 (Tuesday), 7:30 p.m. —
Merlin
Holland
Irish
Peacock and Scarlet Marquess:
The Real Trial of Oscar Wilde
—
A reception will follow the lecture —
Admission:
Free of charge.
Reservations: R.S.V.P.
to 310-206-8552 no later than February 11. Seating
is limited.
February 28 (Saturday), 2:00
p.m.
The
Seventh Annual Stephen A. Kanter Lecture
on California Fine Printing
—
Woman of Letters
—
a
lecture by Kitty
Maryatt, Scripps College Press
—
A reception will follow the lecture —
Admission:
Free of charge.
Reservations: R.S.V.P.
to 323-735-7605. Seating is limited.
—This
program is made possible by the generous support of Dr. Stephen
A. Kanter —
March
6 (Saturday), 2:00
p.m.
LAtino
Poets:
Hispanic Poets in Los Angeles
Who Write in English
—
A program in the series Poetry Afternoons
at the Clark —
The
Los Angeles writing scene is a diverse as the
city itself. This year's poetry program will bring
together
a group of young Latino poets who write mainly
in English, and whose voices contribute to the
multicultural, multilinguistic mix that is L.A.
Poetry.
The
Participating Poets:
Rocio Carlos
Juan Delgado
Marisela Norte
Armando Zuniga
Poetry
Afternoons at the Clark is a series
of poetry readings, presented annually, with programs
dedicated to the work of poets associated with
Los Angeles. The series is arranged and directed
by Bruce Whiteman, UCLA, and Estelle Gershgoren
Novak, UCLA.
Reservations
deadline: February 27
Admission: $5.00 (fee is not refundable);
free of charge to students with I.D.
Click
here for a printable registration form.
March 12–13 (Friday & Saturday)
The
Age of Projects:
Changing and Improving the Arts, Literature, and Life during
the Long Eighteenth Century, 1660–1820
arranged
by Maximillian E. Novak, UCLA
— Part
II —
Improving
the Present
In his Essay upon Projects,
published in 1697, Daniel Defoe pronounced his age “the
Projecting Age.” The words project and projector had
distinctly negative connotations, being associated with various
schemes and their often disreputable, desperate creators.
Defoe tried to give these concepts a new spin. While acknowledging
the nefarious impulses behind many projects, he also saw that
projecting could lead to improvements in human life through
new inventions or new methods of organizing society. His way
of viewing the world was typical of the European Enlightenment,
which in itself may be conceived as a massive project for
changing and improving the world through innovation in the
arts, sciences, education, and politics. In this sense, Locke,
Swift, Rousseau, Diderot, and Godwin all had elements of the
projector in their makeup.
The yearlong program of 2003–04 conceives of projects
during the Enlightenment in this very broad way. Interdisciplinary
in nature, the series explores “projects” both
literally and as a metaphor for a certain type of inventive
and creative thinking during the long eighteenth century.
The second part of the series focuses on the great Enlightenment
projects which sought to improve human conditions in the eighteenth-century
present.
Registration
deadline—March
5
Registration
fees—UC faculty and
staff: $15; students with ID: no charge; others: $25.
Registration fees include the cost
of lunches and refreshments. The fees are not refundable.
March 28 (Sunday), 2:00
p.m.
— Chamber Music at the
Clark —
Jerusalem
Trio
The Jerusalem
Trio, founded in Israel in 1989, and shepherded
to fame under the auspices of the late Isaac Stern's
Jerusalem Music Centre, enjoys a stellar reputation
as Israel's leading piano trio. Its performances are
especially notable for the manner in which they unite
thoughtful insight with passion. Whether in Japan,
Australia, and New Zealand, or in Europe and Israel,
or in North and South America, this combination of
artistic traits thrills audiences as well as critics.
The Trio maintains a steady schedule of recitals in
venues such as Avery Fisher Hall in New York, the
Philharmonie Kammermusiksaal in Berlin, the Alte Oper
in Frankfurt, and the Melbourne Symphony Hall in Australia;
it also appears at summer music festivals such as
the Banff in Canada, the Dubrovnik in Croatia, the
Insel Hombroich in Germany, and the Kfar Blum in Israel.
Recordings may be found on the JMC and DOREMI labels.
Trio members, Roi Shiloah (violin), Ariel Tushinsky
(cello), and Yaron Rosenthal (piano), teach at the
Rubin Music Academy and the Jerusalem Hebrew University.
—
P R O G R A M
—
Josef Haydn,
Trio in A Major Hob: XV, No. 18
Johannes
Brahms, Piano Trio No. 3 in C Minor, Op. 101
—
I N T E R M I
S S I O N —
Dmitri
Shostakovich, Piano Trio No. 2, Op. 67
—
R E C E P T
I O N —
Reservations
lottery submission deadline: February 23
Admission: $20 per person
Reservation-by-Lottery
Form
For an explanation
of the reservations lottery system, to access printable
reservation-by-lottery forms for upcoming concerts,
and for direct links to the ensembles' home pages,
please see Music
Programs, 2003–04.
April 4 (Sunday), 2:00
p.m.
— Chamber Music at the Clark
—
Petersen
Quartet
With
the palpable excitement of their performances, Conrad Muck
(violin), Daniel Bell (violin), Friedemann Weigle (viola),
and Henry-David Varema (cello) of the Petersen Quartet
have earned critical acclaim and a loyal following around
the world. Founded in 1979 at the Hochschule für Musik Hanns
Eisler in Berlin, the Quartet was guided in its development
as an ensemble by mentors such as the Amadeus Quartet, Sándor
Végh, and Thomas Brandis. During its five years as the quartet-in-residence
at Radio Berlin, the group recorded CDs with Capriccio Records,
covering repertoire from the eighteenth century to the twentieth.
International competition awards include, most notably, Prague
(1984), Evian (1985), Florence (1986), and the ARD Competition
in Munich (1987). The Quartet today performs regularly in
illustrious venues such as Berlin's Philharmonie, Amsterdam's
Concertgebouw, London's Wigmore Hall, and Paris's Louvre.
Its North American tours have taken it coast to coast. The
2004 season will see the Quartet inaugurating a series of
concerts at the Philharmonie in Essen, featuring specially
commissioned new music
—
P R O G R A M
—
Franz Schubert, Quartet
in E-flat Major, D. 87
Dmitri Shostakovich,
Quartet No. 4
—
I N T E R M I
S S I O N —
Edvard Grieg, Quartet
in G Minor, Op. 27
—
R E C E P T I
O N —
Reservations lottery
submission deadline: March 1
Admission: $20 per person
Reservation-by-Lottery Form
For an explanation of
the reservations lottery system, to access printable reservation-by-lottery
forms for upcoming concerts, and for direct links to the ensembles'
home pages, please see Music
Programs, 2003–04.
April 18 (Sunday), 2:00 p.m.
— Chamber Music at the Clark
—
Triple
Helix
A critic of the Los
Angeles Times not long ago described the piano trio Triple
Helix as "clearly something special," musicians whose performance
display "splendid musical chemistry[,] virtually perfect dynamic
balance, a firm collective sense of rhythm, and a fervor and
authority when needed." The Boston Globe described the
group more succinctly, as simply "the livest live music in town."
Such accolades and the performances that have called them forth
have placed Triple Helix among the best of the piano
trios to be heard today. The group was formed in 1995 when internationally
acclaimed musicians Lois Shapiro (piano), Bayla Keyes (violin),
and Rhonda Rider (cello) decided to join forces. Together these
musicians serve as artists-in-residence at Wellesley College,
where their lectures and concerts are enthusiastically received.
Individually, they also serve on the faculties of other Boston-area
universities. They have elected to dedicate Triple Helix
to the exploration of new music and have already premiered
seven works especially commissioned for them.
—
P R O G R A M
—
Bright
Sheng, Four Movements for Piano Trio
Ludwig van Beethoven, Piano Trio in D Major, Op. 70, No.1
—
I N T E R M I
S S I O N —
Maurice Ravel, Piano Trio in A Minor
—
R E C E P T
I O N —
Reservations lottery
submission deadline: March 15
Admission: $20 per person
Reservation-by-Lottery
Form
For an explanation
of the reservations lottery system, to access printable
reservation-by-lottery forms for upcoming concerts, and
for direct links to the ensembles' home pages, please
see Music
Programs, 2003–04.
May 2 (Sunday), 2:30 p.m.
—
An Afternoon of Acquisitions, 2004 —
This annual fund-raising
program provides individual donors with the opportunity to sponsor
books or manuscripts recently acquired by the Clark
Library. Celebrity readers perform from
a script derived from the books available for sponsorship. This
performance is followed by an elegant garden party held on the
beautiful
grounds of the Library.
Admission:
$75.00 per person ($55.00 is tax-deductible). Reservations
deadline: April 23.
To receive an invitation,
please contact the Center:
310-206-8552 or.
May 7–8 (Friday & Saturday)
The
Age of Projects:
Changing and Improving the Arts, Literature, and Life during
the Long Eighteenth Century, 1660–1820
arranged
by Maximillian E. Novak, UCLA
— Part
III —
Envisioning
the Future
In his Essay upon
Projects, published in 1697, Daniel Defoe pronounced his
age "the Projecting Age." The words project and projector
had distinctly negative connotations, being associated with
various schemes and their often disreputable, desperate creators.
Defoe tried to give these concepts a new spin. While acknowledging
the nefarious impulses behind many projects, he also saw that
projecting could lead to improvements in human life through
new inventions or new methods of organizing society. His way
of viewing the world was typical of the European Enlightenment,
which in itself may be conceived as a massive project for
changing and improving the world through innovation in the
arts, sciences, education, and politics. In this sense, Locke,
Swift, Rousseau, Diderot, and Godwin all had elements of the
projector in their makeup. The yearlong program of 2003-04
conceives of projects during the Enlightenment in this very
broad way. Interdisciplinary in nature, the series explores
"projects" both literally and as a metaphor for a certain
type of inventive and creative thinking during the long eighteenth
century.
This series began
with an examination of projects that attempted to rediscover
the achievements of the past; it continued with a consideration
of the great Enlightenment projects that sought to improve
human conditions in the eighteenth-century present. Toward
the end of the eighteenth century, the strong consensus against
all forms of religious and political "enthusiasm" had almost
evaporated as the ideal of sensibility had begun producing
a literature filled with ghosts, mystery, and heightened emotion.
Utopia was in the air and the impulse to peer into the future
hard to resist. In a visionary moment, William Godwin pronounced
about the future, in his Political Justice, "There
will be no war, no crimes, no administration of justice, as
it is called, and no government. Beside this, there will be
neither disease, anguish, melancholy, nor resentment." The
final program of the series will concentrate on the projects
of the era that looked toward the future, and on their creators,
who tried to imagine what an enlightened world might be.
Registration
deadline—April 30.
Registration
fees—UC
faculty and staff: $15; students with ID: no charge; others:
$25.
Registration fees include the cost
of lunches and refreshments. The fees are not refundable.
May 14–15 (Friday & Saturday)
Aretino
and the Libertine Tradition
arranged
by
Massimo Ciavolella, UCLA
Peter H. Reill, UCLA
In December
of 2002, the UCLA Center for Seventeenth and Eighteenth
Century Studies acquired, for its William Andrews
Clark Memorial Library, a major private collection
of books by and relating to the Italian writer Pietro
Aretino (1492-1556). The collection, rich in early
editions of Aretino's writings, translations (especially
into French), and later editions, also includes works
by both supporters and detractors of the author, particularly
in Italy and France. It is the importance of this
acquisition that the conference "Aretino and the Libertine
Tradition" celebrates.
Pietro Aretino
was one of the most versatile, innovative, and original
writers of the Italian Renaissance. Throughout his
literary career he excelled in all the important genres
of his time, and when he died in 1556 he was undoubtedly
one of the most famous writers in Europe. He had friendships
with many powerful figures, but his reputation as
the "scourge of princes" and the "prophet of sexuality"—a
reputation he himself encouraged—over time contributed
to his undoing. In the last canto of his Orlando
furioso, Ludovico Ariosto praised him as a "divine"
writer; while his many enemies and detractors branded
him a blasphemer, a pornographer, an assiduous frequenter
of prostitutes, and a vile sodomite. Within three
years after his death, on the evidence of only two
of his works—Le sei giornate and the Sonetti
sopra i 'XVI modi,'—his entire literary production
was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books. The objective
had been to condemn him to an actual damnatio memoriae,
but in fact his fame grew ever brighter precisely
because of that condemnation.
By the end of the century Le sei giornate and
the Modi were among the best known underground
books in Europe, and "that notorious ribald of Arezzo,"—as
John Milton later describes him—is transformed
into one of those "libertines," condemned by Calvin
in 1544, "deprouveues des sens et de raison": men
free from dogmatic-religious constraints and from
moral obligations, and therefore able to: "se lascer
la bride, à une licence charnelle, et à memer vie
dissolue." Not surprisingly, in Casanova's Histoire
de ma vie, the privileged interlocutor—the
author hidden behind the description of many gallant
encounters—-is Pietro Aretino, and the voyeurism
of the Sei giornate constitutes the background
of the most renowned exploits of the Venetian libertine.
This international conference will explore the myth
of Aretino as a "prophet of libertine literature,"
as well as the relationship between culture and pornography
from the late sixteenth century to the eighteenth
century.
Registration
deadline—May
7.
Registration
fees—UC
faculty and staff: $15; students with ID: no charge;
others: $25.
Registration fees include
the cost of lunches and refreshments. The fees are
not refundable.
June 4–5 (Friday & Saturday)
Naturalized
Texts/Textes naturalisés
Translations, Adaptations, Influences
The texts to be discussed
in this colloquium appear in several languages and in various
important translations and adaptations. They have without
a doubt worked as influential texts in foreign cultures. The
object of our discussion, however, is to consider those seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century texts that shed their foreignness enough
to be "naturalized" in foreign cultures. Obvious examples
of such texts whose origins were no longer or only barely
recognizable in foreign cultures are Robinson Crusoe, William
Tell, or Don Quixote. Other naturalized texts may
never have shed their foreign accents in other languages—one
thinks of Shakespeare's plays, or Rousseau's La Nouvelle
Héloise, or Richardson's Clarissa, or the Arabian
Nights. But such texts also became so richly adapted and
pervasive in other cultures that they founded new theatrical
forms or new bodies of conventional allusions or new plots
or even new vocabularies in the cultures they were adapted
to. And what of texts that were once naturalized in Europe
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries but which
have now disappeared from literary canons and even historical
notice? Were texts differently or even more easily naturalized
in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than they are
today? Can we define the criteria for identifying a naturalized
text, or are the texts we have in mind only special cases
of adaptation and influence? Is there a difference between
a translated, influential text and one that seems to have
become an essential part of literary, political, or psychological
discourse of a foreign culture? These and other questions
raised in this colloquium we shall continue to discuss in
a second colloquium next year at the Université Paris Sorbonne–Paris
IV.
Registration
deadline—May 28.
Registration
fees—UC
faculty and staff: $15; students with ID: no charge; others:
$25.
Registration fees include the cost
of lunches and refreshments. The fees are not refundable.
June 8 (Tuesday), 4:00 p.m.
—— at
306 Royce Hall, UCLA ——
Dorothy
and Lloyd Moote
The Great Plague: The Story of London's Most Deadly
Year
Lloyd and Dorothy
Moote will discuss their new book on the Great Plague
in London during the years 1664–65, which killed
nearly 100,00 people living in and around London. Hailed
by the Guardian for its ability to combine minute
detail with the larger picture in an "extraordinarily
accomplished book," The Great Plague has been
described as "a book of rare distinction, one that is
able to analyse a city in crises while never losing
sight of the individual lives contained within it. From
the tiniest microbe to the most blustery of regal proclamations,
there seems to be no aspect of Pestered London to which
the Mootes do not have access."
Lloyd Moote
is recognized as a major historian of early modern Europe.
He has taught at the University of Toronto, the University
of Minnesota, the University of Southern California,
and is now an Affiliated Professor at Rutgers University.
Dorothy Moote is a medical microbiologist, with a special
interest in epidemiology and immunology. She has worked
at Berkeley, UCLA, and the University of Southern California.
—— The
lecture will be followed by a reception and a book signing
——
Advance
registration is not required for this event.
Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis.
June 12 (Saturday)
Cohosted
with the
Department
of English, UCLA.
Arranged by Robert M. Maniquis, UCLA,
on behalf of colleagues and friends
of Frederick Burwick.
After
nearly four decades of teaching in the
UCLA English Department, Professor Frederick
Burwick will retire at the end of this
academic year. A scholar of Romanticism,
who has written upon many English, American,
and German writers, Fred Burwick has
been praised internationally. He continues
to influence the thinking of his readers
and the work of his students. His knowledgeable
and witty approach to Romanticism has
delighted students and colleagues not
only at UCLA but also in Germany, at
the Universities of Heidelberg, Köln,
Giessen, Leipzig, Jena; in England,
at Oxford and Cambridge; and every summer
at the Wordsworth Conference, where
generations of students have studied
English Romantic writers under Fred's
guidance in seminar rooms and during
long, unforgettable hikes in the English
Lake District. Fred has often been a
pioneer in English studies. He began
writing about Thomas De Quincey, the
"English Opium-Eater," long before the
current revival of interest in him.
His vast knowledge of that writer was
called upon in the editing of the monumental
edition of The Works of Thomas De
Quincey, recently published by Pickering
& Chatto. With critical and historical
works as diverse and as important as
Poetic Madness and the Romantic Imagination;
The Haunted Eye: Perception and the
Grotesque in English and German Romanticism;
and Thomas De Quincey: Knowledge
and Power, it is no wonder that
Fred has received several prestigious
career and book awards, including an
award as Distinguished Scholar of Romanticism
given by the Keats-Shelley Association
of America in 1998. In recognition of
Fred's brilliant career as scholar and
teacher, the UCLA English Department
and the Center for Seventeenth- and
Eighteenth-Century Studies have organized
a colloquium in his honor. Several of
his many students, now themselves distinguished
teachers and scholars, will present
brief papers drawn from their current
work.
A reception will be held in Fred's honor
at the Clark Library at 5 p.m., immediately
after the colloquium.
Registration
deadline—June
4.
Registration
fees—UC
faculty and staff: $5; students with ID: no
charge; others: $10.
The afternoon reception
is hosted by the Department of English.
The registration
fees go toward the cost of lunch and morning
refreshments; they are not refundable.
Unless otherwise noted,
all academic and public programs will be held
at the Clark Library, 2520 Cimarron Street,
in the West Adams district of Los Angeles.
Printed publicity and program registration
forms
will be mailed to subscribers at the beginning of fall, winter, and
spring terms.
Inquiries should be addressed to the
Center office at 310 Royce Hall, UCLA
Phone: 310-206-8552; E-mail:
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