John Malkovich in Coetzee's "Disgrace"

J. M. Coetzee's 1999 novel about racial strife and a father-daughter relationship in South Africa was adapted as a 2008 movie starring John Malkovich as a troubled college professor who resigns his position after an affair with a student and moves to his daughter's remote farm house in the South African hinterlands to make sense of his life.

See the trailer here:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqvIssZT6cg

Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, visits UAlbany tomorrow, Friday, 10/12:  http://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/programpages/vws.html#jm

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Celebrating Walter Benjamin at UAlbany

The University at Albany will host an international conference Sept. 28-29 on the work of the beloved literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), a German Jew who attempted to flee the Nazi regime, but committed suicide on the French-Spanish border after being apprehended by the Vichy authorities.

Wildly popular in intellectual circles after his death, Benjamin is famously uncharacterizable as a thinker and writer.

Turkish novelist Elif Shafak makes an effort to describe him (and to describe his importance to her) in an article in The Guardian last April:

"One doesn't read him to feel better. One reads him to feel. In his universe nothing is as it appears to be and there is a vital need to go beyond surfaces and connect with humanity. To live is to walk upon a pile of rubble, listening to any signs of life coming from under the ruins."

More: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/apr/27/hero-walter-benjamin-elif-shafak

The opening event of the conference is free, open and designed for the general public:  a presentation by quirky novelist and electronic literary artist Paul La Farge, sponsored by the New York State Writers Institute.

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Best "School Book"

The New York Times asked its staffers to pick their favorite book ever about school settings.

Janet Maslin picked The War Between the Tates by the Writers Institute's newly-appointed New York State Author Alison Lurie.

“The War Between the Tates” is Alison Lurie’s funniest and most sharp-clawed novel. Published in 1974, and describing the step-by-step breakdown of a marriage between two academics, it is set at a place that’s called Corinth University but is instantly recognizable as Cornell. This book’s satirical bite is so sharp that when the Cornell Chronicle ran a piece about Lurie in 1998, the English department chair half-joked that “we professorial types worry that we might be satirized in a sequel” and expressed “gratitude” that her subsequent books had had other targets. Lurie concentrates on hostilities between Brian Tate, a self-satisfied political science professor, and Erica, his maddeningly stifled wife. At 40, Erica has a Radcliffe degree that has earned her the right to sit through faculty dinners and a husband who expects to be doted on. There are also two Tate teens, described tartly by Ms. Lurie as “nasty, brutish and tall.” The year is 1969. The Tates have hit the age of midlife crisis. It is almost inevitable for Brian to get involved with a student and for Erica to be galvanized by feminism as she fights back. Even with Vietnam War is its backdrop, artfully contrasted with the Tates’ form of combat, Lurie does her best strategic maneuvering on the home front. But it’s the depiction of all things Corinth that makes this tale of fraught academia so timeless and dead-on.

More picks in the NYT.

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Keenaghan on Emerson on Pacifica Radio

UAlbany English Prof Eric Keenaghan will discuss Ralph Waldo Emerson's politics today (3PM EST) on Pacifica Radio/NPR affiliate KPFA Berkeley, CA. He writes:

 

Dear Colleagues:

Recently I recorded an interview with C.S. Soong for "Against the Grain," a program on Pacifica Radio/NPR out of Berkeley that usually interviews activists and intellectuals. My interview's topic is on Emerson [pictured here] and reading and politics. The interview will be broadcast on Monday afternoon, on air and online. (Details below.) This all came about because the host read my non-specialist essay in the The Other Emerson (U of Minnesota P, 2010), co-edited by two (now former) members of our department, Branka Arsic and Cary Wolfe.

It is heartening because it has reminded me that non-academics can, and sometimes do, read our work. And some of them are better poised for helping us disseminate our ideas and voices than the usual academic routes.

--Eric

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