Date: 03/22/2016
Time: 1:00 pm - 2:30 pm
Location
Charles B. Wang Center Theatre
Description
Celia Marshik will discuss “An Epidemic of Fancy Dress: Representations of Costume in Modernist and Popular Literature”
Costumes were incredibly popular in the early twentieth century: period commentators even diagnosed an “epidemic” of fancy dress. This talk traces the range of options party-goers might wear and looks at the surprising responses of writers to a category of clothing that purported to transform a wearer’s identity, if only for a night. I will provide examples of popular writers who routinely punished characters wearing aspirational costumes and others who played with the idea that identity might be no more than costume. Fancy dress, I will argue, became a site for working out the relationship between persons and what they wore.
Celia Marshik is professor and chair of the English Department. She is the author of British Modernism and Censorship and the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Modernist Culture. Her talk is taken from her forthcoming book, Thinking Clothing: Modernism, Middlebrow and the Strange Life of British Garments, which will be published in summer 2016.
Ruth (Sue) Bottigheimer will discuss “The Europeanness of the Arabian Nights“
The Arabian Nights have undergone remarkable transformations over the centuries, most notably the amazing way that the collection has incorporated European stories from the early 1700s. Always bearing the same title, Alf Lyla wa-Layla, or Thousand and One Nights, the collection began as Aesopic moral tales. Subsequently, they added romances and complex and mind-bending fictions. Over time, motifs or entire plots from European fairy tales joined the eastern stories.
Ruth (Sue) Bottigheimer, Research Professor in the Department of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at Stony Brook University, is a leading historian of European fairy tales. She completed her doctorate in German Literature and Language at Stony Brook University. Her most recent book is titled Magic Tales and Fairy Tale Magic from Ancient Egypt to the Italian Renaissance, and she is presently researching the European components of the Arabian Nights.
Registration
This event is fully booked.
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