Events: February 2008 Archives

Renowned novelist, journalist, and short story writer, Jennifer Egan, will visit Temple as part of the Poets & Writers Series.

Egan's most recent novel, The Keep, was a national bestseller and a New York Times Notable Book for 2006.  Other works include Look at Me, which was a finalist for the National Book Award in 2001, The Invisible Circus, which became a movie starring Cameron Diaz, and Emerald City and Other Stories. She has published short fiction in The New Yorker, Harper's, Zoetrope and Ploughshares, among others, and her journalism appears frequently in The New York Times Magazine.

The event is free, open to the public, and will take place on Thursday, March 6th, 8:00pm, Temple University Center City Campus (TUCC), 1515 Market Street, room 222.

As part of the English Department's Spring Lecture Series, Edlie Wong will be presenting "Freedom with a Vengeance: Slavery, Kinship, and the Legal Culture of Travel" this Wednesday, February 27th at 4:00 pm in 1123 Anderson Hall.

Wong's talk charts the legal controversies over slaves brought to the states north of Mason Dixon after Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw's landmark ruling in the case of the slave girl Med in 1836.  Drawing upon a largely unexplored archive of freedom suits and reading them against the literature of abolitionism, this talk offers a more critically and historically embedded understanding of the freedom celebrated in the fugitive slave narrative.  It explores material that had been largely left out of the anti-slavery story: the cases brought by abolitionists to free slaves who had traveled with their masters into free jurisdictions.  Freedom suits reveal the contradictory logic by which abolitionists disregarded the slaves' express desires to remain with their masters, and in many cases argued for the very sorts of separations from kin that usually figured so large on abolitionist attacks on slavery.  These readings in law and literature thus present a critical alternative to the abolitionist plotting of freedom and the criminal agency of fugitive flight as they give expression to a politics and poetics of theft.

Edlie Wong is Assistant Professor of English at Rutgers University and recent Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Penn Humanities Forum.  This talk is drawn from her current book project, Fugitive and Foreigner: Cultures of Travel in the Black Atlantic, 1820-1861.

Samuel Delany and Adrian Khactu will appear at the first annual Cheryl J. Family Fiction Program at the Kelly Writers House (3805 Locust Walk) on Tuesday, February 26th, 6:00pm.

SAMUEL R. DELANY is a critic and novelist, with essays and interviews collected in seven volumes, the most recent three of which are "Silent Interviews" (1994), "Longer Views" (1996) and "Shorter Views" (1999).

His award winning autobiography "The Motion of Light in Water" (1988) and his novel "Hogg" (1995) were returned to print in 2004. His novel "Phallos" was reviewed in the Village Voice as "a lapidary, digital-age Pale Fire, tonally redolent of Valery's Epilinos." His other fictions include "The Mad Man" (1995), and "Atlantis: Three Tales" (1993). A multiple winner of both Hugo and Nebula Awards, Mr. Delany is also a recipient of the Pilgrim Award for outstanding scholarship in science fiction studies, and a winner of the William Whitehead Memorial Award for a lifetime's contribution to Lesbian and Gay Literature. His scholarly interests include Walter Pater and the Oxford aesthetic movement and its influence on high modernism, as well as questions of race, gender, queer studies, and literary theory. After eleven years as a comparative literature professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and a year and a half as an English professor at the State University of New York at Buffalo, Mr. Delany began as a professor of English and creative writing at Temple University in January 2001.

ADRIAN KHACTU's work has been published or is forthcoming in the Atlantic Monthly, Carve, Heritage, and In/Vision (or HOOT! as those in the know pronounce it). He has won the Richard Moyer Prize in Fiction and the Ezra Pound Prize in Literary Translation, as well as fellowships from Clarion West and Vermont Studio Center. Adrian currently lives, studies, and works in Philadelphia, and he holds shiny, though not entirely profitable, creative writing degrees from Stanford and Temple Universities (where he was a student of Samuel Delany).

Award-winning novelist and critic Samuel R. Delany will discuss his most recent novel, Dark Reflections, as part of TU Libraries’ Continuing Education program series.
 
Among the winners of the 2008 Stonewall Book Awards and currently nominated for a 2008 Lambda Literary Award, Dark Reflections follows the troubled career of Arnold Hawley, a gay, African American poet wrestling with obscurity while eking out a meager living in New York's East Village.
 
Delany, writer of epic science fiction and postmodern theory to autobiography, is Professor of English and Creative Writing at Temple University.

The program is open to the community and will take place on Tuesday, February 12th at 2:00pm in the Paley Library Lecture Hall.  Refreshments will be provided.

We hope to see you there!