LUC READING GROUPS
Based on the conviction that LUC is a community of research and scholarship that incorporates students at all levels as well as teaching staff, and building on the basis that innovative ideas and provocations can be generated and nurtured in an environment that brings this community together in small groups that share common interests, the LUC Research Centre supports a number of reading groups. In each case, the groups are comprised of a mixture of students and staff; they meet regularly to read, discuss, and create together.
Current Reading Groups
MOVERS'N'SHAKERS
We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams.
World-losers and world-forsakers,
Upon whom the pale moon gleams;
Yet we are the movers and shakers,
Of the world forever, it seems.
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams.
World-losers and world-forsakers,
Upon whom the pale moon gleams;
Yet we are the movers and shakers,
Of the world forever, it seems.
Movers'n'Shakers brings together like-minds and diverse-bodies of The Hague (from LUC The Hague, Haagse Hogeschool, Royal Academy of Art, Royal Conservatoire...the more, the merrier!) for a monthly discussion of texts, widely construed, which fuel Political Arts.
Calling all revolutionaries: Arts meet Politics in 2012 on the theme of MANIFESTOS!
February 2012: The Surrealist Manifesto
March 2012: The Hackers Manifesto
April 2012: A Cyborg Manifesto
May 2012: First Things First Manifesto
June 2012: Dogme 95 + film screening
September 2012: The Communist Manifesto
October 2012: The October Manifesto
November 2012: The Futurist Manifesto
December 2012: The Art of Noises
A MISSING PEOPLE
...A MISSING PEOPLE: FROM BANNED BOOKS TO MURDERED WRITERS
Health as literature… consists in inventing a people who are missing. It is the task of the fabulating function to invent a people. We do not write with memories, unless it is to make them the origin and collective destination of a people to come, still ensconced in its betrayals and repudiations. (Gilles Deleuze)
If you speak you die. If you remain silent you die. So speak and die…
(Tahar Djaout)
The Parliament of Writers, whose first two presidents were Salman Rushdie and Wole Soyinka, was created in 1993, after more than a thousand writers had been persecuted, imprisoned or murdered in the first half of that year. Their initial joint statement says: “We have gone from the censorship of works to the persecution of authors, from censored texts to beheadings”; censorship “no longer targets political, religious or ideological opinions but instead the whole area of representation. A new crime haunts the night of orthodoxies: the crime of creating, of writing, of imagining. The crime of literature.”
In this reading group we will attempt to map the territories of “missing people” that Deleuze and Djaout allude to, from the banned characters in books, born from the imagination of writers and found scandalous, to the writers condemned on political or religious grounds.
Health as literature… consists in inventing a people who are missing. It is the task of the fabulating function to invent a people. We do not write with memories, unless it is to make them the origin and collective destination of a people to come, still ensconced in its betrayals and repudiations. (Gilles Deleuze)
If you speak you die. If you remain silent you die. So speak and die…
(Tahar Djaout)
The Parliament of Writers, whose first two presidents were Salman Rushdie and Wole Soyinka, was created in 1993, after more than a thousand writers had been persecuted, imprisoned or murdered in the first half of that year. Their initial joint statement says: “We have gone from the censorship of works to the persecution of authors, from censored texts to beheadings”; censorship “no longer targets political, religious or ideological opinions but instead the whole area of representation. A new crime haunts the night of orthodoxies: the crime of creating, of writing, of imagining. The crime of literature.”
In this reading group we will attempt to map the territories of “missing people” that Deleuze and Djaout allude to, from the banned characters in books, born from the imagination of writers and found scandalous, to the writers condemned on political or religious grounds.
Schedule Spring 2012
This spring we will meet every other Wednesday, beginning on week 3 of block 3, from 17:00 to 18:30h.
Reading list
22.02 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)
7.03 Bei Dao, The Waves (1979)
21.03 Film screening (participants’ choice: Madame Bovary, Lolita, A Clockwork Orange, or other adaptation of a banned book)
Spring break
11.04 Mircea Eliade, Youth Without Youth (1979)
25.04 Ken Saro-Wiwa, Sozaboy (1985)
9.05 Tahar Djaout, The Last Summer of Reason (1993)
23.05 Riverbend, Baghdad Burning blog, (2003-2007)
This spring we will meet every other Wednesday, beginning on week 3 of block 3, from 17:00 to 18:30h.
Reading list
22.02 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962)
7.03 Bei Dao, The Waves (1979)
21.03 Film screening (participants’ choice: Madame Bovary, Lolita, A Clockwork Orange, or other adaptation of a banned book)
Spring break
11.04 Mircea Eliade, Youth Without Youth (1979)
25.04 Ken Saro-Wiwa, Sozaboy (1985)
9.05 Tahar Djaout, The Last Summer of Reason (1993)
23.05 Riverbend, Baghdad Burning blog, (2003-2007)
Screenshot from Stanley Kubrick's 1962 film 'Lolita',
based on the controversial novel by Vladimir Nabokov,
published in 1955
based on the controversial novel by Vladimir Nabokov,
published in 1955
Please email Dr. Corina Stan if you are interested in participating.
SMC
To get things started, however, we have selected the first book, to be read and discussed in Block 2 of the academic year 2011-2012:
Mismatch: The lifestyle diseases timebomb, by Peter Gluckman and Mark Hanson
2008, Oxford University Press,
Paperback edition:
ISBN-10: 0199228388
ISBN-13: 978-0199228386
Book description:
We have built a world that no longer fits our bodies. Our genes - selected through our evolution - and the many processes by which our development is tuned within the womb, limit our capacity to adapt to the modern urban lifestyle. There is a mismatch. We are seeing the impact of this mismatch in the explosion of diabetes, heart disease and obesity. But it also has consequences in earlier puberty and old age. Bringing together the latest scientific research in evolutionary biology, development, medicine, anthropology and ecology, Peter Gluckman and Mark Hanson, both leading medical scientists, argue that many of our problems as modern-day humans can be understood in terms of this fundamental and growing mismatch. It is an insight that we ignore at our peril.
The reading group will start in week 2 of Block 2. If you want to join you should send an email to Patsy Haccou (p.haccou@luc.leidenuniv.nl) before Tuesday November 1. Since at most 15 people will be admitted to the reading group, you should be quick: we work on a 'first come, first served' basis!
FEMINIST READING GROUP
The Feminist Reading Group was started as a student initiative at the end of the first academic year at LUC, after the realization that there are still so many gender-related issues to talk about.
Thus, a small group of students and Dr. Cissie Fu came together to discuss chapters of The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, a book often credited with starting the second feminist wave. Immediately, this sparked suggestions of movie nights, magazine raids, documentaries, TV show viewings and more books full of theory and practice.
Needless to say, the Feminist Reading Group intends to host interesting discussions about various materials, also looking at questions such as 'what is feminism nowadays?' and the much-asked 'is feminism necessary nowadays?' We wholeheartedly welcome all students and staff interested in these issues, but do ask for devotion to the group and the preparation our meetings require in return.
For further information, contact Dr. Cissie Fu or Ms Georgina Kuipers.
Betty Friedan (1921-2006), writer, activist, feminist
Thus, a small group of students and Dr. Cissie Fu came together to discuss chapters of The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan, a book often credited with starting the second feminist wave. Immediately, this sparked suggestions of movie nights, magazine raids, documentaries, TV show viewings and more books full of theory and practice.
Needless to say, the Feminist Reading Group intends to host interesting discussions about various materials, also looking at questions such as 'what is feminism nowadays?' and the much-asked 'is feminism necessary nowadays?' We wholeheartedly welcome all students and staff interested in these issues, but do ask for devotion to the group and the preparation our meetings require in return.
For further information, contact Dr. Cissie Fu or Ms Georgina Kuipers.
.
Past Reading Groups
- HOMO CYBERNETICUS
(Reading Group 2010-2011) [+]Where do you draw the line between human and non-human, beyond race, between species, when mechanic extensions and modifications are increasingly organic, when inter-connectivity is no longer fiction but faction, and our psychic forays into digital spaces spill over with the fantastic projections of the body electric?
And as you gleefully traverse the borders of bio-mechanic into arenas of the digital collective, how are you transformed through the cybernetic, hybrid, monstrous intrusions of the future/present imaginary, and still remain exactly the same?What stories do we tell to bridge the new expanses of communities, the new reaches of the body, through the inventive cartographies of the digital that explore, collapse, and create?
Cover image of Donna Haraway's 'Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature'
In response to a burgeoning student interest in Science Fiction/Fantasy at the LUC, we bring together discussions of the machine, the body, and postmodern space, alongside science fiction (novels and anime), to think creatively about our un/imaginable future. Our readings will include Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulations, selections from Frederic Jameson’s Postmodernism: or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Donna Haraway's Simians, Cyborgs, and Women, and Neal Stephenson cypberpunk novel Snowcrash. We will be showing Hideaki Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion (26 eps) as well as the alternate ending, End of Evangelion.
For further information, contact Mr. Danny Damen.
The group's blog is here: http:/homosapienscyberneticus.wordpress.com/.
- POST-INTERNATIONAL GROUP
(Reading Group 2010-2011) [+]LUC Post-lnternational Group is a research group led by LUC students and staff jointly. It is intended to provide a forum in which to explore poststructural and post-colonial approaches to international politics at Leiden University. It brings together those students and staffs who are interested and engaged in work inspired by a number of scholarly works of post-structuralism and post-colonialism, the former including philosophers such as Michel Foucault or Jean Baudrillard, and the latter referring to postcolonial theorists such as Edward Said or Franz Fanon. In summation, the main goals of this group are to support a broadly defined critical, alternative, and inter-disciplinary study and understanding of international politics.
In order to meet this goal, the LUC Post-International Group organises various intellectual and social activities. The group, on the one hand, acts as a reading and discussion group. Its members meet regularly to discuss the readings together, as well as exchange ideas associated with and inspired by the readings. On the other hand, it organises meetings at which the work of members of the LUC as well as other departments of Leiden University is discussed, and invites occasional speakers from outside Leiden University to present their work. The meetings of the group are open to all students and staff of the LUC.
For further information, contact Dr Jay Hwang.
