Save the Date: Annual Hoffman Lecture Fall 2025

Save the Date:

Hoffman lecturer, *November, 11, 2025, TBD, Carson L01, will be Ranjana Khanna from Duke University, who directs the Franklin Humanities Institute and was the president of the ACLA in 2024/25.  She is best known for her work on melancholia and psychoanalysis, but has also published on postcolonial agency, film, Algeria, autobiography, Marxism, and visual and feminist theory. Her current work in progress is called Asylum: The Concept and the Practice.

Jameson, Style, and Comparative Literature

In his 1984 afterword to his first book, Sartre: The Origins of a Style, Jameson writes of what style meant for him.  The book in its form as a dissertation was supervised by Henri Peyre, and Jameson notes that early formation as well as the importance of his teacher, Erich Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, Jean-Pierre Richard, as well as a reading technique shaped by Sartre himself.  But very soon, after, Jameson's attention to style shifts. The talk will address his use of the term style, its relation to literary terms like narrative and form, but also his tracing of style as symptom of something else, and his development of style in relation to sensation, the signature, singularity, and species-being.  Through a reading of the changing nature of attention to style, we can see how he brings together semiotics and dialectics to understand the seeds of time.  The talk will address the implications of Jameson's work for comparative literature as a field and as a project.

(date, time, location subject to change)