Below is information about the panel sessions at the upcoming MLA Convention in Seattle, Washington (9-12 January, 2020) sponsored by the MLA Executive Committees of the Russian and Eurasian Forum and the Slavic and East European Forum; plus a couple of additional panels of interest to our membership. We hope to see you there!
104 - Colonial Pacific NorthwestThursday, 9 January 2020
3:30 PM - 4:45 PM
WSCC - 213
Presider: Angelina Del Balzo
Bilkent U
Presentations:
‘Satisfied with Her Condition’: Russian Women’s Captivity Narratives in the Pacific Northwest
Jeffrey Glover, Loyola U, Chicago
‘We Showed Them the Burning Fuses’: Shelekhov’s Bomb and Performances of Cultural Contact in the Northern Pacific
Simon Huff, Indiana U of Pennsylvania
‘Split-Lipped Ladies’: Misreading Facial Texts of Haida Women in George Vancouver’s and Ella Rhoads Higginson’s Colonizing Pacific Northwest Narratives
Laura Laffrado, Western Washington U
The Photographic Imagination: Contextualizing Ella Higginson’s Portrayal of the Pacific Northwest
Karoline Schaufler, Western Washington U
Thursday, 9 January 2020
7:00 PM - 8:15 PM
WSCC - 213
Presentations
Sublime Anxiety: The Petersburg Text and Dostoevsky’s Gothic City
Katherine Bowers, U of British Columbia, Vancouver
Dostoevsky and Early Russian (Anti)Feminist Literary Journalism
Katya Jordan, Brigham Young U, UT
Dostoevsky’s The Idiot as a Critique of the Limits of Personhood
Brian Armstrong, Augusta U
Session Information
Allied Organization: International Dostoevsky Society
Program: Allied Organizations
Subject: Slavic and East European Literatures
241 - Central Asian Literature: Subjects and Worlds
Friday, 10 January 2020
10:15 AM - 11:30 AM
WSCC – 212
Presider: Naomi Caffee, Reed C
Presentations
The Radical of Representation: Persianate Epideictic Verse, Stalinist Mass Politics, Samuel G Hodgkin, U of Chicago
Deconstructing Soviet Literary Construction: The Making of Uzbek Socialist Realism’s First Classic, Hamza Hakimzoda Niyoziy’s The Rich Man and the Servant (1918–39), Christopher Fort, American U of Central Asia
Minor Literatures and Intra-Soviet Translations: The Case of Nisso, Emily Laskin, U of California, Berkeley
An Inheritance of Paper: The Art of Anuar Alimzhanov, Christopher Baker, American U of Central Asia
284 - Bad Art
Friday, 10 January 2020
12:00 PM - 1:15 PM
WSCC - Skagit 4
Description: Panelists deal with the borders of aesthetic judgment—the critical approach to and aesthetic standing of texts that are unsuccessful, obnoxious, unintended, and so on. Case studies include Stalinist prose, the Portsmouth Sinfonia (an orchestra whose members had no prior training with their instruments), terrorist literature, the discourse of judgment and intention around visual art, and nonaesthetic documents incorporated into aesthetic texts.
Presider: Jacob Emery, Indiana U, Bloomington
Speakers:
Christopher Chiasson, U of Pittsburgh
Karen Sullivan, U of Queensland
Benjamin Massey Sutcliffe, Miami U, Oxford
Chris Reeves, U of Illinois, Chicago
Irina Meier, U of New Mexico, Albuquerque
Respondent: Julia Vaingurt, U of Illinois, Chicago
423 - Deoccidentalizing Postcolonial Studies
Saturday, 11 January 2020
8:30 AM - 9:45 AM
WSCC – 618
Presider: Jonathan Stone, Franklin and Marshall C
Presentations:
Japan’s Triangulated Imperialism, Robert Tierney, U of Illinois, Urbana
Russia’s Empires and What They Bring to Postcolonial Studies, Edyta M. Bojanowska, Yale U
Reconsidering the Ottoman Decline: Melancholy and Mystification of Imperial Sovereignty
Arif Camoglu, Northwestern U
510 - “On Theme” / “V Teme”: Sex and Text on the Soviet Periphery
Saturday, 11 January 2020
12:00 PM - 1:15 PM
WSCC – 213
Presider: Leah Feldman, U of Chicago
Respondent: Vitaly Chernetsky, U of Kansas
Presentations:
Uncovering the Queer: An Exploration of Gender and Sexual Relations in the Early-Twentieth-Century Russian Novel, Devin McFadden, U of Kansas
Queer Approaches to Periodical Studies: Mitin zhurnal between the Soviet Underground and Transnational Queer Literature, Philip Gleissner, Ohio State U, Columbus
Everyday Life and the (Post-)Soviet Gay Experience in Klāvs Smilgzieds’s Erotic Stories, Karlis Verdins, Washington U in St. Louis
691 - Teaching Texts in Translation: Theoretical and Pedagogical ApproachesSunday, 12 January 2020
10:15 AM - 11:30 AM
WSCC - 211
**For related material, write to grecog@pdx.edu**
Presider: Gina L. Greco
Portland State U
Presentations
Rethinking Translation; or, The Problem of Foreign Words
Brian James Baer, Kent State U, Kent
Teaching the Translator: Constance Garnett and Milena Jesenská
Michelle Woods, State U of New York, New Paltz
Teaching Literary Works in the Context of General Education and Honors Courses
Cassio de Oliveira, Portland State U
Translation Theory in the Early French Literature Classroom
Gina L. Greco, Portland State U
733 - Representing the Camps: The Problem of Genre
Sunday, 12 January 2020
12:00 PM - 1:15 PM
WSCC – 616
Presider: Naomi Caffee, Reed C
Presentations:
The Present Demands of the Past: Genre and Exceptional Experience in Camp Literature, Benjamin Paloff, U of Michigan, Ann Arbor
The Home and the Camp: Curating Holocaust Memory in the Balkan Novel, Drago Momcilovic, U of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
Genre, Trauma, and the Ethics of Silence in Japanese American Internment Literature, Heather Hathaway, Marquette U
