At 11am on November 11, 1918, the armistice that effectively ended the First World War was signed. What came to be known as “The Great War” had a profound and lasting impact on the cultural fabric of the nations involved: as Paul Fussell wrote, “its dynamics and iconography proved crucial to the political, rhetorical, and artistic life of the years that followed; while relying on inherited myth, war was generating new myth.” Over the course of the 20th century, the concept of war evolved beyond historically traceable moments and events to include the consideration of war as site and influence shaping every aspect of lived experience. This conference seeks to examine ways in which literature and the arts have taken up and taken apart war and the myths surrounding it -- grappling with it both as subject and context while also considering the ways in which the experience of war molded, mutilated, and morphed artistic forms. Though the word “centennial” often rings of monolithic celebration, it is equally an opportunity to highlight the attempts of writers and artists to contain, contend, or survive war and to question and problematize preconceptions and existing views of war by investigating their inherently bipolar nature.

November 10, 2018 (Day 2)
SCHEDULE:

• 9 – 11am - 2nd PANEL
  Chair: Jennifer Scappettone (University of Chicago, Associate Professor)
   
• Aubrey Knox (CUNY, PhD Student)
  "The Regulated Body: The Grand Palais as Military Hospital in World War I"
• Joanna Fiduccia (Reed College, Assistant Professor)
  "A Destructive Character: Alberto Giacometti’s Crisis of the Monument"
• Hadrien Laroche (INHA, France, Philosopher and Researcher)
  "Duchamp's waste: Trauma, Violence and Aesthetics"
   
• 11 - 11.30am – COFFEE BREAK
   
• 11.30am - 12.45pm – KEYNOTE ADDRESS

Jay Winter (Yale University, Emeritus Professor)
"All the Things We Cannot Hear: Silences of the Great War"

• 12.45am – 2pm – LUNCH BREAK
   
• 2 - 4.30pm - 3rd PANEL
  Chair: Peter Stansky (Stanford University, Emeritus Professor)
   
• Martin Löschnigg (University of Graz, Austria, Professor)
  "‘The extreme fury of war self-multiplies’: First World War Literature and the Aesthetics of Loss"
• Ron Ben-Tovim (Ben Gurion University, Israel, Post-Doc), Boris Shoshitaishvili (Stanford University, PhD Student)
  "Re-Enchanting the World after War: J. R. R. Tolkien, David Jones, and the Revision of Epic"
• Anna Abramson (MIT, Post-Doc)
  "Atmospheric Myths of The Great War"
• Isaac Blacksin (UC Santa Cruz, PhD Student)
  Senseless Encounter, Immutable Sense: The Contradictions of Reporting War

• 4.30 – 4.45pm – COFFEE BREAK
   
• 4.45 – 6pm – KEYNOTE ADDRESS

Alexander Nemerov (Stanford University, Professor)
"A Soldier Killed in the First World War"

For more info,  please email: massucco@stanford.edu

Sponsored by:  the Division of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures;  Stanford Department of Art and Art History; Theater and Performance Studies; Stanford Humanities Center; The Europe Center; Dept. of French and Italian; Dept. of History; Dept. of German Studies; and the Dean's Office of Humanities and Sciences.

At 11am on November 11, 1918, the armistice that effectively ended the First World War was signed. What came to be known as “The Great War” had a profound and lasting impact on the cultural fabric of the nations involved: as Paul Fussell wrote, “its dynamics and iconography proved crucial to the political, rhetorical, and artistic life of the years that followed; while relying on inherited myth, war was generating new myth.” Over the course of the 20th century, the concept of war evolved beyond historically traceable moments and events to include the consideration of war as site and influence shaping every aspect of lived experience. This conference seeks to examine ways in which literature and the arts have taken up and taken apart war and the myths surrounding it -- grappling with it both as subject and context while also considering the ways in which the experience of war molded, mutilated, and morphed artistic forms. Though the word “centennial” often rings of monolithic celebration, it is equally an opportunity to highlight the attempts of writers and artists to contain, contend, or survive war and to question and problematize preconceptions and existing views of war by investigating their inherently bipolar nature.

November 9, 2018 (Day 1)
SCHEDULE:

• 4 – 4.30pm – OPENING REMARKS
• 4.30 - 7pm - 1st PANEL

Chair: Russell Berman (Stanford University, Professor)

• Greg Chase (College of the Holy Cross, Lecturer)
• ‘Death is not an event of life’: How Wittgenstein’s War Experience Re-Shaped His Philosophy
• Victoria Zurita (Stanford University, PhD Student)
• Ironic prospects: hope in Jean Giono’s To the Slaughterhouse
• André Fischer (Auburn University, Assistant Professor)
• Politics by other means: War photography in the work of Ernst Jünger
• Nicholas Jenkins (Stanford University, Associate Professor)

For more info,  please email: massucco@stanford.edu

Sponsored by:  the Division of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures;  Stanford Department of Art and Art History; Theater and Performance Studies; Stanford Humanities Center; The Europe Center; Dept. of French and Italian; Dept. of History; Dept. of German Studies; and the Dean's Office of Humanities and Sciences.
 

Olzak examines how different components of globalization affect the death toll from internal armed conflict. Conventional wisdom once held that the severity of internal conflict would gradually decline with the spread of globalization, but fatalities have remained high. Moreover, leading theories of civil war sharply disagree about how different aspects of globalization might affect the severity of ethnic and non-ethnic armed conflicts. Using arguments from a variety of social science perspectives on globalization, civil war, and ethnic conflict to guide the analysis. Olzak will discuss how economic globalization and cultural globalization significantly increase fatalities from ethnic conflicts, and the sociotechnical aspects of globalization which result in an increase of deaths from ethnic conflict but decrease deaths from non-ethnic conflict, and finally, regime corruption that increases fatalities from non-ethnic conflict, which supports explanations suggesting that the severity of armed conflict is greater in weak and corrupt state. Susan Olzak is Professor of Sociology at Stanford University, where she does research on armed conflict, ethnic violence, collective action, and social movement organizations.

REGISTRATION LINK:

http://web.stanford.edu/~lapli/suzanolzak.fb

Four member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) have made territorial claims in the South China Sea that conflict with China’s professed entitlement to all of the “islands and the adjacent waters.” Because the “ASEAN Way” is to make decisions by consensus, each member state can, in effect, veto what the group might otherwise decide. Prof. O’Neill will explore how China has used its financial power to divide ASEAN’s members in order to prevent them from acting collectively to resolve their territorial disputes with China in the South China Sea. He will compare China’s relations with Cambodia, the Philippines, and Myanmar in order to highlight the key role that a recipient country’s type of regime plays in enhancing or constraining Beijing’s ability to use aid, loans, and investments to influence the policies and politics of developing states. He will argue that authoritarian institutions facilitate Chinese influence while democratic institutions inhibit it.

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