youtor.org
Orientalism Literature and Intellectuals
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Video Source: www.youtube.com/watch?v=oDDgDQ3wAno
March 28, 2024 • An afternoon panel featuring recent work by Julia Hartley (Edward W. Said Research Fellow, 2018), Marieke Mueller, and Robert Jackson (Edward W. Said Research Fellow, 2024). • Presentations • Julia Hartley Iran and French Orientalism • New translations of Persian literature into French, the invention of the Aryan myth, increased travel between France and Iran, and the unveiling of artifacts from ancient Susa at the Louvre Museum are among the factors that radically altered France's perception of Iran during the long nineteenth century. And this is reflected in the literary culture of the period. In an ambitious book spanning poetry, historiography, fiction, travel-writing, ballet, opera, and marionette theatre, former visiting Edward Said Fellow Julia Hartley reveals the unique place that Iran held in the French literary imagination between 1829 and 1912. In this talk, she will be reflecting on how her recent book both builds on the paradigms first articulated by Edward Said in Orientalism, but also significantly nuances them by making a case for the cultural specificity of Iran. • Marieke Mueller Literature, Society, and Violence: from Jean-Paul Sartre to Edouard Louis • In 1947, after the dramatic years in which the German occupation of France had for many presented an unequivocal ethical choice between collaboration or Resistance, Sartre proclaimed (now in-) famously the responsibility of the author. Literature, too, had a moral role to play since “to show is to change.” Without stipulating any specific political point of view that authors should embrace, Sartre argued that writing needed to address the reader in their freedom. More recently, texts by Annie Ernaux, Didier Eribon, Edouard Louis, and others have mobilized an auto-socio-graphic framework that again interrogates the relationship between authorship and society, while Geoffroy de Lagasnerie’s revendication of a “literature of confrontation” is reminiscent of Sartre’s quest for writing as an appeal to freedom. This presentation traces the Sartrean heritage in contemporary auto-sociographical writing, focusing in particular on Edouard Louis’s widely read and translated work which traces the author’s experience of homophobia in working class communities in Northern France and the social violence that shapes the lives of the members of these communities. • Robert P. Jackson Rethinking Trajectories of the Intellectual: Edward Said and Antonio Gramsci • A generation has passed since Edward Said’s BBC Reith Lectures, in which he re-examined the role of the intellectual in modern society. Is an intellectual someone inclined to ask the right questions? Does that make them special? Does it set them apart from the rest of society? Said’s lectures discuss different answers to these questions by thinkers such as Antonio Gramsci and Julien Benda. For Gramsci, we are all, in a sense, intellectuals. Benda, on the other hand, saw ‘real’ intellectuals as rare, heroic individuals in pursuit of truth and justice. Said finds value in both. Placing intellectuals in a global context, he considers the tension between their cosmopolitan, universal aspirations and their roots in particular national traditions. For Said, these ‘worldly’ connections mean intellectuals always face a choice between siding with authority or advocating for the marginalized and the oppressed. In this talk, I employ Gramsci’s concept of an intellectual-‘commando’ [ardito] to consider Said’s dramatic staging of Gramsci with Benda in the context of the obstruction of forms of critical intellectuality associated with subaltern groups. • https://sofheyman.org/events/oriental...
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