announcements
Autumn Lecture: Literacy as a Labyrinthine and Protean Concept
JERRY ZASLOVE, Simon Fraser University
What Can Walter Benjamin's "Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility" Teach Us about Literacy as a Labyrinthine and Protean Concept?
According to Zaslove, Benjamin views language as duplicitous: a medium of instrumentality or force that invades the integrity of the person through writing, reading and language as such. Benjamin's essay, "Critique of Violence," while not on literacy as such, basically argues that religion was about sacred violence; that is, making violence sacred in order to release religion from myth. This gets him to the myth of law-preserving violence, and then the state as a continuation of law preserving violence.
For this talk, Zaslove will view Walter Benjamin's work through his metaphor of the labyrinth-an emerging literacy of performance where the loss of the object through mechanical reproduction creates a different road to understanding how language is a sphere of "human agreement that is non-violent" and "wholly inaccessible to violence".
On October 16th Literacy Studies will host Jerry Zaslove of the Institute for the Humanities at Simon Fraser University. Zaslove will present the lecture: "What Can Walter Benjamin's "Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproducibility" Teach Us about Literacy as a Labyrinthine and Protean Concept?"
In anticipation of this event Jerry Zaslove has prepared materials available for download here
[PDF] or for reproduction in Denney Hall, room 421.
Photographing Memory Statement and
Additional Materials for Zaslove's talk. Dr. Zaslove has also worked closely with the Institute for the Humanities Research Project on Participatory Communities and Popular Education [
DOC |
HTML].
JERRY ZASLOVE is a founding faculty member of Simon Fraser University. He has taught European literature, humanities, and the social history of art at Simon Fraser University since it opened in 1965, and was active in the literacy "revolution" and counterrevolution He was Chair of the English Department and the founding Director of the Institute for the Humanities, and involved in developing the Humanities Department and Prague Field School. Zaslove is the co-editor of West Coast Line, a Canada journal of arts, letters, and cultural criticism. He teaches and publishes happily on utopian controversies, the city in history, photography, cultural memory, art movements in relation to
revolution, and cross-cultural understanding, or understanding what is outside of us.
His most recent published writing includes essays on the German-speaking exiles, Siegfried Kracauer, the Images of Community, W.G. Sebald and exile, Kafka's Josephine the Mouse Singer, Herbert Read and T. Walter Benjamin, memory and photography in Jeff Wall's photographs and, in a volume of essays with the University of Toronto Press, an essay on the lost utopia of a radical pedagogy.
