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ispartof: American Novelists’ Autobiographical Acts: Nonfictional Disruptions location:Aix-Marseille Université date:6 Jul - 7 Jul 2023 status: published

Phoebe Apperson Hearst měla velmi úspěšného vlastního syna Williama, který byl ale více jako jeho otec: tvrdý obchodník. Našla však jemnou, uměleckou duši v malíři Orrinu Peckovi (1860–1921), který byl údajně gay a který ji, ještě za života své vlastní matky, začal oslovovat „má druhá mámo.“ Na základě podrobného výzkumu jejich vzájemné korespondence v Peckově pozůstalosti se můžeme ptát, jak moc si byla progresivní, bohatá žena 19. století, jakou byla Phoebe Hearst, vědoma Peckovy sexuality a pokud ano, jestli s tím neměla problém, nebo šlo o nevyřčené tajemství mezi nimi? Jejich příběh představí historik umění Ladislav Zikmund-Lender. Phoebe Apperson Hearst had a very successful son of William, but he was more like his father: a tough businessman. However, she found a delicate, artistic soul in the painter Orrin Peck (1860–1921), who was allegedly gay and who, while still his own mother's life, began to address her as “my second mother.” Based on a detailed study of their correspondence in Peck's estate, we may ask how much a progressive, rich 19th-century woman like Phoebe Hearst was aware of Peck's sexuality, and if so, if she had no problem with it, or was it an unspoken secret between them? Their story will be presented by art historian Ladislav Zikmund-Lender.

ispartof: BILETA Annual Conference location:online date:14 Apr - 16 Apr 2021 status: published

In 1939, due to WWII and the Nuremberg Laws, the revolutionary Czech structural engineer Jaroslav J. Polívka arrived in the United States. After his arrival, he started a research job at UC Berkeley, renewed his engineering practice, and offered his services to the US military as many businesspersons did during this era. Polívka worked for Henry Kaiser who turned Richmond, CA, into a vibrant, fast developing workers city. New residential districts, hospitals, hangars, docks, and warehouses were built there. Henry Kaiser approached the structural development of the city in the same way he revolutionized the construction of battleships: from prefabricated, standardized parts. He supported research and development of new technologies. Mobile, round-shaped hospitals from prefabricated aluminum frames were one of the results of that research. In 1946, Jaroslav J. Polívka introduced himself to the “starchitect” Frank Lloyd Wright. A productive mutual co-operation that lasted 13 years and resulted in eight spectacular projects had started and Polívka, who had been working on extensive research both at UC Berkeley and Stanford University, came up with many technological, structural, and material innovations over the period. In 1957, Henry Kaiser funded the construction of one of the two geodesic domes designed by Richard Buckminster Fuller in Hawaii and in the process he invited Frank Lloyd Wright to consult the project. Jaroslav J. Polívka was probably in direct contact with Fuller, since he wanted to include him in his unfinished project of an encyclopedia of the world-famous structural engineers. On this particular story and a social matrix evolving around Henry Kaiser and Frank Lloyd Wright, the lecture seeks to rethink architectural global modernism as a cooperative project rather than a series of individual innovations manifested by isolated genius figures.

Im März 1926 hat Siegfried Kracauer einen in der Frankfurter Zeitung veröffentlichten Artikel under dem Titel “Kult der Zerstreuung: Über die Berliner Lichtspielhäuser”. Dieser Text ist keine Verteidigung der derzeitigen Unterhaltungsindustrie, sondern ein Versuch, den Begriff der Zerstreuung von seinem üblichen pejorativen Sinne zu retten, um zu verstehen, wie die Massen ihre Emanzipation durch den Film erleben können. Wir werden untersuchen, wie diese kritische Stellungnahme auch eine Antwort auf die Steigerung der Propaganda in Europa durch die Staatsapparate ist, die im Gegensatz zu Kracauers Zerstreuung die Massen unausweichlich entfremden. Wir werden deshalb auch diesen Artikel von 1926 mit dem 1942 von Kracauer geschriebenen Text über die Nazipropaganda (“Propaganda und der nazistische Kriegsfilm”) verknüpfen. Letztendlich möchten wir zeigen, wie der “Kult der Zerstreuung” ein politisches Werkzeug für unsere Zeiten ist, in denen Politiker wie etwa Donald Trump oft durch Zerstreuung regieren, in dem sie die Massen von ihren wirklichen Alltagsproblemen entfernen.

ispartof: Languages and the First World War: Third conference - 13 September 2022 location:London / Online status: published

Invited lecture, invited by: The University of Texas at Austin, Department of English (Hannah C. Wojciehowski and Anna Schwartz) ispartof: location:The University of Texas at Austin (Austin, Texas, United States) status: published

Historian Denis Scuto, vice-director of Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History discusses the frontal attack by Trump and his supporters against democratic institutions and historical traditions.

The Romantic sublime, which has influentially shaped the Western relationship with nature, is no longer viable in the Anthropocene because it views nature as separated from humans and does not fully represent the intricacy of human/non-human relationship (Caracciolo 2021). This paper assesses the limits and affordances of the notion of the “haptic sublime” (McNee 2016) for challenging the Eurocentrism, androcentrism, and ocularcentrism of the Romantic sublime in a way that would also lead to heightened self- and/or environmental awareness. To that end, it analyzes extracts from American ecobiographical memoirs that build on American Romanticism’s, and more specifically Henry D. Thoreau’s multisensorial approach to nature (Lombard 2019), which suitably integrates the subjective and embodied dimensions of the haptic sublime. Inspired by insights from affective ecocriticism and rhetorical (eco)narratology, these analyses show that the haptic sublime involves bodily and multisensorial contact with material environments which induce affects such as guilt, satisfaction, and joy, that move beyond the confines of the romantic experiences of awe and horror. Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air and Silvia Vásquez-Lavado's In the Shadow of the Mountain are considered so as to argue that recent mutations in the rhetoric of the sublime retrospectively unearths haptic dimensions to the experience of the sublime. ispartof: The American Comparative Literature Association's 2023 Annual Meeting location:Chicago, IL, United States date:16 Mar - 19 Mar 2023 status: published