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SUMMARY:Writing War - Jay Winter (Yale)
DTSTART:20120229T170000Z
DTEND:20120229T183000Z
UID:TALK36547@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Ruth Rushworth
DESCRIPTION:Humanitas Visiting Professor in War Studies 2012: Jay Winter\n
 \nProfessor Jay Winter (Charles J Stille Professor of History\, Yale Unive
 rsity) will give a series of three public lectures and a concluding sympos
 ium on Imagining War in the 20th Century and After. \n\nAbstract\n\nThe le
 ctures explore mediating languages and symbolic forms which writers\, arti
 sts\, and filmmakers have used to represent war since 1900. This attention
  to language in cultural history is at the core of this interpretation. Wh
 at we know of war is always mediated knowledge and feeling. The event itse
 lf\, what Walt Whitman called the red thing\, the actual killing\, is beyo
 nd us. We need lenses to filter out some of its blinding\, terrifying ligh
 t in order to see it at all. The lectures want to draw attention to these 
 lenses as the elements which make understanding war possible at the same t
 ime as they limit what we see.\n\nOne such element is linguistic in a stra
 ightforward sense. The first lecture will make the claim that in whatever 
 language we utter\, we speak differently of war. English and French will b
 e taken as points of reference\, but those learned in other languages can 
 test this hypothesis easily enough. The claim is that we have as many lang
 uages of war as we have languages through which we speak to each other. Th
 ey are neither interchangeable nor are they transparently equivalent. Each
  brings its history\, its music\, its memory of the past with it. We have 
 many languages of war\, and once we realize that\, we can register the unc
 omfortable fact that the mountain of literature we have about war is the r
 eal tower of Babel of our time.\n\nFor more information on this series\, p
 lease see the following link: http://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/1716/.
LOCATION:Room 3\, Mill Lane Lecture Rooms\, 8 Mill Lane\, Cambridge
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