GRADUATE COLLOQUIUM:
Culture, Gender, and Aesthetics
Mike Frangos (English, UCSB) and
Annalisa Zox-Weaver (English, USC)
Wednesday, May 16 / 2:00 PM / HSSB 6056
Download Flyer
Ph.D. Candidate Mike Frangos will present "Robin and the Machine: Djuna Barnes's Nightwood and the Scene of Fantasy." This paper argues that the trope of the machine body in Djuna Barnes's modernist novel charts a perverse space characterized by inverted or distorted relations between the body and the conditions of its representability. The talk locates the machine body at the scene of a fantasy in which the subject assumes the condition of an object in order to bear her own jouissance, which in modernist culture has been marked as that of both the female robot and the femme fatale.
Recent Ph.D. Annalisa Zox-Weaver will give a talk entitled "Berchtesgaden is Burning: Lee Miller, Iconicity, and the Demise of the Nazi Leaderî. The discussion will center around the notorious (and now iconic) photograph of Lee Miller bathing in Hitlerís bathtub, flanked by a photograph of Hitler and a kitsch Venus sculpture. The paper considers Millerís choice to engage the fascist--Hitler, his proxies, cohorts, and metonyms as a familiar figure of everyday life. What are the aesthetic, political, and ethical risks of voluntarily appropriating the perpetratorís identity of seeing with the eyes of evil in order to see through its brutal masquerade?
Sponsored by the IHC's Culture, Gender, and Aesthetics RFG, which is co-convened by Professors Maurizia Boscagli of English and Bhaskar Sarkar of Film and Media Studies.
