Para-Academia & Theory Fiction | Session 3: Steve Aubrey on Nabokov, Coincidence and Otherwordliness (Audio is part one of two)
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Observatory at Proteus Gowanus, 543 Union Street, Brooklyn
Presented by the Hollow Earth Society and The Public School New York
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov (1899-1977) is perhaps most famous for Lolita and Pale Fire, novels of startling linguistic and literary playfulness. But as his wife, Vera, wrote in a foreword to a collection of his poetry in 1979, the true watermark of Nabokov’s work is the concept of “potustoronnost” or otherwordliness. Though much of Nabokov’s work may seem straight-forward and realist, lurking underneath his fiction is an entire pantheon of ghosts, shades, demons and devils that comprise the true world of Nabokov’s writings.
Stephen Aubrey descends from hardy New England stock. He is a Brooklyn-based writer, editor, dramaturg, lecturer, storyteller and recovering medievalist. His writing has appeared in Publishing Genius, Commonweal, The Brooklyn Review, Pomp & Circumstance, Forté and The Outlet. He inexplicably holds the rank of Lieutenant Colonel in the Hollow Earth Society and is an instructor of English at Brooklyn College.
He is also a co-founder and the resident dramaturg and playwright of The Assembly Theater Company. His plays have been produced at The Ontological-Hysteric Theater, The Flea Theater, The Collapsable Hole, The Brick Theater, Symphony Space, the Abingdon Theater Complex, UNDER St Marks, The Philly Fringe and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival where his original play, We Can’t Reach You, Hartford, was nominated for a 2006 Fringe First Award.
He has an MFA from Brooklyn College where he received the Himan Brown Prize and the Ross Feld Writing Award and a BA with Honors from the College of Letters at Wesleyan University.
He is—for the record—not a Christian singer-songwriter. He does, however, hold the dubious distinction of having coined the word “playlistism” in 2003.
For more information, including the related readings and writing assignment, go to: http://nyc.thepublicschool.org/class/3562
Audio part two of this session can be found here.
Audio recordings of the entire series can be found here.
Para-Academia & Theory Fiction | Session 1: Nicola Masciandaro on Commentary
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Observatory at Proteus Gowanus, 543 Union Street, Brooklyn
Presented by the Hollow Earth Society and The Public School New York
Blogs, Speculative Medievalisms, Collapse, Cyclonopedia, Lovecraft, print-on-demand: the idea of “para-academia” has arisen in recent years as an addendum and an ultimatum to established disciplines and practices.
The Public School New York will explore these emerging ideas and modes of expression through a series of discussions and writing workshops.
Questioning the concept of the ‘marginal’, this session will consider commentary as a para-academic and theory-fictional mode of thinking and writing. Specific topics to be discussed include geometrics of commentarial thought, contemplation vs. speculation, hidden writing and acontextual scholarship, philological eros, and destructive reading. A theoretical introduction will be followed by open discussion of the texts and the futures of commentary.
Nicola Masciandaro is Associate Professor of English at Brooklyn College and a specialist in medieval literature. He is founding editor of Glossator: Practice and Theory of the Commentary and co-director of the open-access press Punctum Books. For more information, see The Whim.
For related texts and more information, go to http://nyc.thepublicschool.org/class/3268
Audio from the second session in the series featuring Wythe Marschall on Gnostic Vertigo in Bataille and Lovecraft can be found here.