“Living with Inexactitude” by Professor David Palumbo-Liu

3 Dec 2014 - 16:00 / 3 Dec 2014 - 18:00

Victoria College, Room 101
91 Charles Street West
Toronto

Today the humanities are often forced to translate themselves in terms of quantitative measures; this allows them to be “valued.”  This is what is called “commensuration.”  This lecture covers two aspects of this phenomenon.  First, how does comparative literature deal with the fact that acts of comparison need commensurate units of analysis?  Second, how does literature complicate any idea of “exchange value”?  I will examine Emile Habiby’s The Life of Saeed, the Pessoptimist, and Kazoo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go to get at these questions.

 

DAVID PALUMBO-LIU is the Louise Hewlett Nixon Professor of Comparative Literature at Stanford University. His fields of interest include social and cultural criticism, literary theory and criticism, East Asian and Asia Pacific American studies. He has published in each of these areas, including six books and numerous articles that have been translated into Chinese, German, French and Portuguese. His most recent book (The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age, Duke UP) addresses the role of contemporary humanistic literature with regard to the instruments and discourses of globalization, seeking to discover modes of affiliation and transnational ethical thinking. He is most interested in issues regarding social theory, community, justice, globalization, and the specific role that literature and the humanities play in helping us address each of these areas. He is the founding editor of the e-journal Occasion: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Humanities.