Transculturation studies seminar, fall 2011
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upcoming talks
WEDNESDAY 2 NOVEMBER Seminar room 400 (HF Building)
12.15 – 14. 00
Lene M Johannessen (IF, UiB)
“Russia’s Calfornio Romance: The Other Shores of Whitman’s Pacific”
“Fresh come, to a new world indeed, yet long prepared, I see the genius of the modern, child of the real and ideal…”
The last lines of Walt Whitman’s “Song to the Redwood Tree,” sometimes referred to as his “California Song,” name the realization of the American movement westward that would overrun other cultural and historical presences, including the less described Russian one on the California coast. This work in progress takes as its starting point the meetings and conversations between Russian and Spanish plenipotentiaries during a few months in San Francisco the spring of 1806, and seeks to bring out perspectives on the Pacific shore that are quite different from the national significance it would come to have. This discussion also includes the rather tragic love story between Nikolai Rezanov and Concepción de Argüello, and the problems both Spanish and Russians experienced in relation to the “Bostonians.” Ultimately, the Spanish-Russian encounter in 1806 also speaks of various kinds of imaginaries, the “waxing and waning empires” (Clifford) which California at one time was host to, and whose various legacies still remain.
WEDNESDAY 30 NOVEMBER Seminar room 400 ((HF Building) 12.15 – 14. 00
Associate professor Timothy Saunders (Volda University College)
"Aesthetics across borders: modern evaluations of Hellenistic culture"
(Abstract to be announced later.)
The seminar series is affiliated with the Nordforsk funded project Nordic Network for Literary Transculturation Studies, 2009-2012: https://www.uib.no/rg/nnlts
