35th Southern Comparative Literature Association Conference
Keynote Speakers
Andrei Codrescu
"Sheherezade's Bodies: Notes on Narrative and Extinction"
Andrei Codrescu is MacCurdy Distinguished Professor of English at Louisiana State University, author, most recently, of The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess (Princeton University Press).
Romanian writer and NPR-Commentator Andrei Codrescu shares a unique history of the Dada movement as told through a fictitious game of chess and offers a survival guide for all of us posthumans living our 21st-century lives
THE POSTHUMAN DADA GUIDE
Andrei Codrescu
“This Zagat-sized handbook, a Dadaist chop suey showcasing the astonishing intellectual range of English professor and NPR commentator Codrescu, is arranged alphabetically and topically, which permits one to dip in or to read it all. The occasionally outrageous encyclopedic juxtapositions of entries give a firsthand experience similar to the effect of Dada cutups and collages.”
—Publishers Weekly
THE POSTHUMAN DADA GUIDE: tzara and lenin play chess (Original paperback, $16.95, Pub date: April 1, 2009) is Andrei Codrescu’s impractical guide to living a practical life.
Codrescu begins his manifesto-like guide with an imagined chess game between Tristan Tzara (“the daddy of Dada”) and V. I. Lenin (“the daddy of communism”). The poet and future mass murderer face off over the chessboard, neither realizing that they are playing for the world, but with Codrescu’s signature irreverent style, this epic battle between two poles of 20th- and 21st-century thought, politics, and life is molded into a brilliantly funny and Dadaesque guide to Dada.
Andrei Codrescu was born in Sibiu, Romania, in 1946. He emigrated to the U.S. in 1966 and became a U.S. citizen in 1981. He is a poet, novelist, essayist, teacher, and lecturer. Codrescu is MacCurdy Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where he edits Exquisite Corpse: a Journal of Letters & Life. He is also a regular commentator on National Public Radio and winner of the Peabody Award for the film “Road Scholar.” He received National Endowment for the Arts fellowships for poetry, and editing, the Romanian Literature Prize, the ACLU Freedom of Speech Award, and the Ovidius Prize.
"One of our most prodigiously talented and magical writers."
—Bruce Shlain, New York Times Book Review
Gabriele Schwab
Roundtable discussion featuring Gabriele Schwab, Chancellor's Professor of English and Comparative Literature, and former Director of the Critical Theory Institute at the University of California at Irvine.
“Epistemologies of Evil, Deceit and Trauma”