As part of UCLA’s Centennial Celebration, the Department of Comparative Literature is celebrating its 50th birthday on June 1 & 2, 2019.  We will have two events. The first is a reception on June 1st from 4-6pm at Ross Shideler and Kathy Komar’s home. The second will be a series of panels in Royce Hall with some of the Department’s former chairs scheduled for the morning and an afternoon panel with a few of our former Ph.Ds.  SCHEDULE *** Saturday, June…

Paul A. Bové (Distinguished Professor, University of Pittsburgh) is the Editor of boundary 2, an international journal of literature and culture, published by Duke University Press. The journal has published recent special issues on major topics in the academy, including Antinomies of the Post-Secular, Second Hand Europe, as well as a Dossier: Orientalism and the Invention of World Literatures. Forthcoming special issues include studies of Stuart Hall as an exemplary intellectual, “Marxism, Communism, and Translation,” and “New Perspectives on Gender,…

‘It was not only their own misfortunes that the refugees carried with them from land to land, from continent to continent,’ Hannah Arendt wrote, ‘but the great misfortune of the whole world.’ Shortly before her death, Arendt said that the real story of her generation of Jewish refugees from Nazism had yet to be fully understood. This lecture will return to Arendt’s refugee years to show how her influential theories about rights, the human condition, and political life were forged…

  This talk explores the Watts Writers Workshop, founded in the heart of Watts by Jewish American writer Budd Schulberg immediately after the Watts Rebellion of 1965, and argues that the success and final demise of the project tracks Schulberg’s shift from prose to property. Drawing on Schulberg’s archives, including lease contracts, letters, and personal notes, I argue that Schulberg’s personal and financial investment in Watts re-located his political standing as the “neighbor” to the Watts writers with whom he…

The lecture will explore representations of “chameleon” or hybrid Jewish figures in cinema: Jewish characters that change their appearance, transform their identity, infiltrate other cultures and express their Jewishness by becoming “other-than-Jewish.”  The hybrid Jew will be discussed from the theoretical perspective of postcolonial studies, feminism and queer studies, post-structural French philosophy and traditional Jewish sources. The films that will be discussed are mixtures of Jewish characters and themes with genres that usually do not include Jews (for example the…