Fall 2010 Events

"'A spirt of my own seminal wet': Spermatoid Design in Walt Whitman's 1860 Leaves of Grass"

Date: Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Time: 3:30-5:00 p.m.
Location: Iowa City Public Library, Meeting Room A
Presenters: Ed Folsom, Roy J. Carver professor of American Literature, University of Iowa; Sid Huttner, UI Libraries; Sara Sauers, UI Center for the Book

Folsom will discuss typographical design for the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass and how design enhanced Whitman’s idea of the sexual relationship between a book and its reader. Following the presentation, two formal responses will be offered: one from Sid Huttner of the UI Libraries Special Collections and one from Sara Sauers of the Center for the Book.

Co-sponsored by International Programs and ENCIC

“Richard Wagner: Self-Promotion and the Making of a Brand?”

Presenter: Nicholas Vazsonyi (University of South Carolina, German)

When: Thursday, Sept. 16, 2010 at 4:30 p.m.
Where: Gerber Lounge in the English Philosophy Building (EPB)

Topic: The lecture discusses various aspects of Professor Vazsonyi's recent book Richard Wagner: Self-Promotion and the Making of a Brand (Cambridge University Press, 2010). He will address the assumptions that form the basis of the book, the meaning of self-promotion, the extent to which the techniques Wagner used to attract an audience were special, and the ways in which we might reconcile the thesis that Wagner created a brand with the composer's claim that his aesthetic agenda emphasized the sanctity and purity of art, eschewing all interest in money.

NICHOLAS VAZSONYI is Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the University of South Carolina. His first book Lukács Reads Goethe (1997) was followed by two edited volumes, Searching for Common Ground: Diskurse zur deutschen Identität 1750-1871 (2000) and Wagner’s "Meistersinger": Performance, History, Representation (2003). His book Richard Wagner: Self-Promotion and the Making of a Brand was just published by Cambridge University Press, and he was recently commissioned as the editor of the Cambridge Wagner Encyclopedia, which is scheduled to appear in 2013.

This event is sponsored by OSF and ENCIC.