Named an “Outstanding Academic Title” of 2012 by Choice magazine!
“Fascinating, eloquent, and tightly argued, Standing by the Ruins offers a distinctive perspective on relations between cultural productions and politics in times of extreme duress.Across a range of fascinating examples, Seigneurie shows the ways in which novelists and filmmakers offer alternative visions in a collapsing world that can set the stage for new ways of imagining the future.”—David Damrosch, Harvard University
“An excellent study of the cultural production of Lebanese society resulting from the period of civil war.”——Roger Allen, University of Pennsylvania
“Discourses of Uprising.” Modern Language Association Annual Convention, Boston, January 2013.
“National and World Literatures: The Changing Roles of Cultural Production in the World Today.” Univesité Saint-Joseph, Centre d’Etudes pour le Monde Arabe Moderne (CEMAM). Beirut, Lebanon, December 2012.
“Literariness and World Literature.” The Orient Institute of Beirut. December 2012.
“Arabic Literature in World Literature: (Still) Pointing Incredulously at Death.” Keynote Address for the conference: At the Crossroads of Arabic Literature: Arabic Literary Heritage in the Context of World Literature. School of Modern Languages, University of St. Andrews, Scotland. September 2012.
World Literature 204 – Human Rights Literature at Simon Fraser University – Surrey
This course will examine the development of human rights as a moral concept and response to modern utopianism. From an historical and theoretical background drawn from the work of Vaclav Havel, Gayatri Spivak, Michael Ignatieff, Joseph Slaughter and Lynn Hunt, the course will explore a thematic diptych in the literature of human rights. The first panel concentrates on how the unimpeachable will to progress, often expressed in the terms of moral meliorism, often leads to tyranny. The second panel will focus on writing that thematizes responses to various social, economic and political utopianisms. Students successfully completing this course can expect to acquire a sharpened sense of human rights as a historically conditioned discourse in defense of the fullness of human life over against the excesses of modern rationality. Writers studied: Capek, Solzhenitsyn, Milosz, al-Daif, Emecheta. http://www.fass.surrey.sfu.ca/wl/courses/previous_outlines
Conference Committee Chair: American Comparative Literature Association Annual Meeting
Theme: “World Literature/Comparative Literature”
Vancouver, Canada
March 31-April 3, 2011
http://www.acla.org/acla2011/
