All welcome. No advance registration required.

 

Presentations:

 

Novelty and Nostalgia in American Modernist Literature
Alexander Eastwood (English)

Over the past decade, queer theorists have been preoccupied with articulating theories of time, and the connection between time and affect. In this talk, I examine queer theories of temporality in relationship to American literature from the early twentieth-century in order to explicate the prominence of nostalgia in Modernist texts. Focusing briefly on a few key Modernist authors, I argue that sexuality is key to their representation of how time passes, and how they approach and understand history.

The City as a Process, Not a Thing: Space and Time in Capitalist Urbanization
Martin Danyluk (Geography)

How to make sense of the tangled and turbulent landscape of the modern city? Conventional theories of urban form erroneously read the city as a fixed object, one that can be designed to reflect some “optimal” arrangement or that tends to converge on a state of spatial “equilibrium.” These approaches fall short, however, insofar as they neglect the violent upheavals wrought upon Space by its trusty counterpart: Time. Drawing on the contributions of Marxist geographers since the 1970s, I argue that our understanding of urbanization is enriched by conceiving of the city as a process, not a thing. I outline some of the key political and economic dynamics at work in shaping the urban environment, paying particular attention to the productive tensions generated by economic crises, infrastructure, and the restless form of the city itself.

Fatal Beating and Bad Breath: Music and Embodied Time
Alex McLeod (Music)

The experience of time is embodied in two significant ways, in the heartbeat and in the breath. This talk will use musical examples to show how these physical experiences give birth to the fundamental rhythmic units in music, pulse and phrase. Musical examples will be used to illustrate how rhythmic pulse and phrase structures create different relationships with time in the listener. Extreme examples of both types of music will show how the listener’s experience of time can be undermined or destroyed when either of these elements is absent. Finally, a discussion of musical metre will show one of the ways in which the two expressions of musical time can be used together to create a rich, multi-layered relationship with time.

Directions: To get to Grad Room in Graduate House, enter through the coffee shop on the northeast corner of Spadina and Harbord and then go down the stairs at the back. An elevator to the room is accessible through the main entrance of the Graduate House residence.