Conferences Archive (1994-1995)

National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for School Teachers

Jane Austen: Self and Society

June 27-July 29, 1994

Directed by Gene W. Ruoff, Department of English, and Director, Institute for the Humanities at the University of Illinois at Chicago

Sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, this seminar will explore three novels of Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (1811) and Pride and Prejudice (1913) and Emma (1815), using the first as a focus-text to crystallize aesthetic and social issues in Austen’s fiction. We will explore such topics as language, characterization, narrative method, and the thematization of personal and social ethics, with an eye toward assessing the magnitude of Austen’s contribution to the development of the novel in English. Special attention will be paid to Austen’s parodic use of narrative form, the problems she faced in representing women’s experience fictionally, and the relationship of her fiction to contemporaneous social and political controversy.

1994 National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar for College Teachers

American Indian Written Literatures

June 20-August 12, 1994

Directed by A. LaVonne Brown Ruoff, Professor of English, University of Illinois at Chicago

Sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, this seminar will focus on the evolution of written autobiographies and fiction published from 1829 to the present. It will examine how authors used multiple literary voices and how the writers were influenced by both their tribal oral traditions and non-Indian literature. Writers to be studied include William Apess, George Copway, Sarah Winnemucca, Mourning Dove, John Joseph Matthews, D’Arcy McNickle, N. Scott Momaday, Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch, Gerald Vizenor, and Louise Erdrich. The audience is college teachers in such fields as literature, history, philosophy, anthropology and folklore.

Guest speakers:
Jim Northrup (Ojibwa)
James Welch (Blackfeet/GrosVentre)

The University of Illinois at Chicago and
Lyric Opera of Chicago present

Boris Godunov Symposium:
A program exploring the opera by Modest Musorgsky

Saturday September 24, 1994
Illinois Room Complex, Third Floor
750 South Halsted, University of Illinois at Chicago

10:00 am

Welcome
Jay A. Levine , Dean, Liberal Arts and Sciences, UIC

Lecture
Richard Taruskin , University of California , Berkeley
“Musorgsky vs. Musorgsky: The Two Distinct Authorial Versions of Boris Godunov”

Lecture
Caryl Emerson, Princeton University
“The Boris Plot on Stage: Karamzin, Pushkin, and Musorgsky as Historical Thinkers”

Round Table Discussion
Moderator: Robert Oldani, Arizona State University
Panelists: Richard Taruskin, Caryl Emerson, James Cracraft (UIC) and Lauren Leighton (UIC)
“Boris Godunov, Glasnost, and Beyond”

2:30 pm

Slide Lecture
Janet Kennedy, Indiana University
“Russia on Stage: Musorgsky’s Operas and the ‘National Style’ in Russian Theater Design and History Painting”

Round Table Discussion
Moderator: Ardis Krainik, Lyric Opera’s General Director
Panelists: Conductor Bruno Bartoletti and artists participating in the production