Session 2

Faculty members from University of Chicago's Creative Writing program choose a piece of writing that has been important to them, read an excerpt, and talk about it from a writer's perspective. How does this differ from a scholar's perspective, or that of a recreational reader? Listen to Jennifer Scappettone, poet, scholar and award-winning translator; Vu Tran, novelist and short story writer; and Peter O'Leary, poet and scholar, discuss this question and whatever arises in a presentation chaired by John Wilkinson, chair of the Committee on Creative Writing.

For about a decade, scholars in the U.S. and elsewhere have been debating the issue of "world literature" with renewed vigor, often beginning with a reconsideration of Goethe's famous idea of a Weltliteratur. Building on this recent debate, this talk will engage two seemingly simple questions: What is world literature? And: Why should we care?

Just as there are dialect differences between Standard American English and African American Vernacular English, there are differences in the standard variety of American Sign Language (ASL) and the one used by the African American Deaf community. In this study, the patterns of movement and pausing during third person narratives reveal a difference in the storytelling register of these two varieties of ASL.

The Chinese writing system is usually regarded as one of four independently created writing systems in the world. In this presentation I will explore the earliest material evidence for writing in China, will describe the several principles used to create Chinese characters, and will consider the possible significance that the nature of the writing system may have had for the rise of literature in China.

"Oral literature" sounds like a paradox, since "literature" involves (etymologically and in principle) "letters." Although "literature without letters" has no doubt existed since the beginnings of human language, the concepts used to describe it are of much more recent vintage. Two periods saw the emergence of such concepts: the seventeenth and early twentieth centuries. Detaching "literature" from letters proves no easy task, as this historical investigation shows.

Orchestral conductors are responsible for a vast amount of musical information. A conductor must discern and understand the relationships between hundreds of thousands of notes, dynamics, articulations, and other instructions from the composer. From this information, a conductor must then find and internalize a logic from these data that can communicate on a sensory, psychological, and emotional level. In my presentation, I will discuss the process I created for internalizing and interpreting music, which shares many principals of heuristics used in data-intensive computing.

The traditional vision of the Islam's origins in the seventh century has been challenged fundamentally in recent years because, for the most part, that vision was based on Muslim sources of later date. Actual documents dating from the origins period are extremely rare. The talk will present an Arabic papyrus document that appears to date from the earliest phase of the Islamic community, and attempt to explain what its intriguing and sometimes puzzling features imply for our understanding of Islam's beginnings.