English and Humanities News and Events

Humanities Lecture Series Spring 2013

Innovation: Inventing the Future In and Through the Arts

Literature, film, music, architecture and the visual and performing arts can be crucial sources of creative ideas and structures for technology, industry, science, and politics. The theme is especially relevant to York College, a school which traditionally emphasizes professionalism in the context of a general education that values humanistic inquiry and the arts. Thus the cultural series can assist administration, faculty and students as we think about the course of vocation and professionalization in a manner that prepares students for the emergent economy of the future, rather than for a languishing economy of the past. This preparation must entail helping our students to approach their fields creatively, learning from the traditions and inventions that fuel literature, theater, painting, sculpture, film, design and music, treating those fields not only as peripheral to professionalization, fields for enjoyment in their leisure hours, but as central to their vocations and indispensable to the future of employable citizens.

Spring 2013 Lectures

Austin Kleon
"How To Steal Like an Artist"
Thursday, February 21, 2013, 7 p.m.
Humanities Center Room 218

Austin Kleon is a writer, artist, speaker and best-selling author. He has written two books: Steal Like An Artist, an illustrated manifesto for creativity in the digital age, and the poetry collection Newspaper Blackout. His art has been called “brilliant” by New York Magazine, and The New Yorker said his poems “resurrect the newspaper when everyone else is declaring it
dead.” His work has been featured on 20×200.com, NPR’s Morning Edition, and PBS NewsHour, and in Time, The Atlantic, Forbes, and The Wall Street Journal. He has spoken about creativity, visual thinking, and being an artist online for organizations such as Pixar, Google, SXSW, TEDx and The Economist. Kleon’s latest book, Steal Like An Artist, is an illustrated manifesto of 10 things he wishes he had heard about being creative when he was first starting out. A New York Times best-seller, the book has gathered praise from all sorts of artists and creative folks, including Rosanne Cash, who called it “brilliant and real and true.” His book, Newspaper Blackout, is a collection of poetry made by redacting words from newspaper articles with a permanent marker. Named a best seller in 2010 by the Poetry Foundation, Time called the poems “redacted masterpieces” and praised the book’s companion site as one of 30 must-see Tumblr blogs.

Barry Katz, Ph.D.
"Design and Its Limits: Lessons from Silicon Valley"
Thursday, March 14, 2013, 7 p.m.
Humanities Center Room 218

Dr. Katz was educated at McGill University in Montréal, the London School of Economics, and the University of California. He is Professor of Design at California College of the Arts and Consulting Professor in the Design Group, Department of Mechanical Engineering, at Stanford University. He is a Fellow at IDEO, Silicon Valley’s leading design and innovation consultancy, and also at the i.school, University of Tokyo. Katz specializes in cultural theory and the history of technology, exploring a range of
themes in the history and theory of design in his numerous scholarly and popular books. His lecture will examine Silicon Valley as the birthplace not only of new technologies and innovative products, but also of wholly new practices of design itself. Katz explores the manner in which the region’s designers learned to integrate art and technology, European aesthetics, and American engineering, and then — notwithstanding the admonitions of W. H. Auden — to “commit social science.” Despite the ongoing technological insurgency for which Silicon Valley is famous, Katz argues that design is a thoroughly human and humanistic affair.

Panel Discussion
The Cultural Life of Zombies
Thursday, April 4, 2013, 7 p.m.
Humanities Center Room 218

This panel event kicks off the English & Humanities Department’s three-day “Zombie Symposium” (Thursday, April 4, Friday, April 5, and Saturday, April 6), and will feature a multimedia exploration of the cultural life of zombies. The living, the dead, and the living dead are all invited to participate in this exploration of the coming zombie apocalypse! Does it suddenly seem like the living dead are everywhere? Lumbering past cyborgs, mutants, werewolves, and, yes, even vampires, zombies are the monsters du jour. From the pages of literary hits such as Colson Whitehead’s Zone One, The Walking Dead comic books, and pulp zombie apocalypse narratives such as World War Z, to television shows (AMC’s Walking Dead), movies (from the 1968 Night of the Living Dead to the more recent 28 Days Later, I Am Legend, and Shaun of the Dead), and even music (remember Thriller?), we’re surrounded by the walking dead. We’ve seen Nazi zombies, brain-eating zombies, comic zombies, and viral zombies. They’ve come from space, from nature, from biotech labs, and the dark recesses of the globe. They even have their own CDC website and inhabit a growing area of scholarly debate over the status of philosophical zombies. What are zombies and why are they now so prevalent in pop culture?

Benjamin Percy
Writer-in-Residence
Thursday, April 18, 2013, 7 p.m.
DeMeester Recital Hall, Wolf Hall

“Benjamin Percy moves instinctively toward the molten center of contemporary writing, the place where genre fiction, in this case horror, overflows its boundaries and becomes something dark and grand and percipient.” –Peter Straub. Percy is the author of three novels, The Dead Lands (forthcoming in 2014), Red Moon, The Wilding, and two books of stories, Refresh, and The Language of Elk. His fiction and nonfiction have been read on NPR, performed at Symphony Space, and published by Esquire, Time, Men's Journal, Outside, The Paris Review, Tin House, Chicago Tribune, Orion, GQ, Men’s Health, The Wall Street Journal, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, Poets & Writers, and many other magazines and journals. His honors include a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, a Whiting Award, the Plimpton Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and inclusion in Best American Short Stories. His story "Refresh" was adapted into a screenplay by filmmaker James Ponsoldt and a graphic novel by Eisner-nominated artist Danica Novgorodoff. He is Writer-in-Residence at St. Olaf College, a faculty member at the low-residency MFA program at Pacific University, and regularly lectures at conferences and universities around the country. He is adapting his novel The Wilding into a screenplay for filmmaker Guillermo Arriaga (Babel, 21 Grams).

Spring 2013 Film Series

Mad Men
With Professor Justin Harlacher
Thursday, February 28, 2013, 7 p.m.
Humanities Center Room 218

Mad Men is one of the most popular and critically praised dramatic series currently on television. Since its premiere in 2007, it has generated considerable buzz and has steadily built a viewership that tunes into the AMC Network each week to check in with the charming and mysterious Donald Draper. The show is part of what some critics have described as a new golden age of television, one in which television programming, once seen as inferior to film, has now become the destination for audiences looking for the kind of complex characters and innovative storytelling previously associated only with cinema. As part of this year’s Humanities Film Series, two episodes from Mad Men’s first season, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and “Red in the Face,” will be introduced by York College Professor of Film Studies Justin Harlacher, who will discuss the ways in which the show reflects television’s adoption of film’s visual style and narrative techniques, and consider what these changes mean to the ways audiences relate to television programming.

The Artist
With Weinstein Company Executive Jodi Murphy ’89
Thursday, March 21, 2013, 7 p.m.
Humanities Center Room 218

One of the most celebrated films of 2011 was The Artist, a heartfelt homage to Hollywood movies of the 1920s. Although it was shot in black and white by a French director with French actors in the lead roles, and is, for all practical purposes, a silent film, it was embraced by viewers and won most of the top prizes at the 2012 Academy Awards, including the Oscars for Best Actor, Best Director and Best Picture. The enormous success of The Artist can largely be attributed to the efforts of the Weinstein Company, the multimedia production and distribution company that handled the movie’s release in the U.S. following its premiere at the 2011 Cannes Film Festival. Launched in 2005 by Bob and Harvey Weinstein after their departure from Miramax, the legendary movie company they co-founded in 1979, the Weinstein Company has produced and distributed some of the most popular and critically acclaimed films of the last several years, including The Reader, The King’s Speech, My Week with Marilyn and The Iron Lady. Its enthusiastic and intensive campaign on behalf of The Artist ensured that the film captured the audience and the attention it deserved. No one knows this better than Jodi Murphy ’89, who is Senior Vice President of Worldwide Delivery for the Weinstein Company and an alumna of York College. In her introduction of The Artist, she will offer a unique, behind-the-scenes account of the Weinstein Company’s distribution and promotion of the film. She will also answer questions about her role at the company and her long history working with the Weinsteins after the screening.

Coriolanus
Noel Sloboda, Ph.D.
Thursday, April 25, 2013, 7 p.m.
Humanities Center Room 218

Coriolanus might be Shakespeare’s least sympathetic hero: the Roman general is a dynamo of violence who sneers at the plebeians and betrays them to invaders. As embodied by Ralph Fiennes in Coriolanus (2011), however, the character has undeniable appeal. For critic Slavoj Žižek, Fiennes’s winning portrayal evokes “a saint in an Orthodox icon . . . offering us the figure of the radical freedom fighter.” Yet for Dr. Noel Sloboda, Professor of English at Penn State York and dramaturg for the Harrisburg Shakespeare Company, what really makes this version of the tragic figure resonant is the way Fiennes (who cowrote and directed) humanizes him – without blunting his sharp edges. Instead, Fiennes helps us understand what has whetted his sharp edges, evoking the acute anxiety that comes from living in a complex and unstable world. His Coriolanus tries to play a variety of often contradictory parts, lurching from husband to son, from leader to follower, from man-of war to man-of-peace, until finally he loses his balance and falls in classic Shakespearean fashion. Adding a contemporary twist to his characterization, Fiennes also comments on the ways in which film and television frame – and sometimes skew – our perceptions not only of heroes, but also of ourselves.