Multilingual aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education
🗓️ Thursday, 25 June — 4:30pm
- 5:30pm
(60 mins)
Presenters
Abstract
Pre-Texts is a pedagogy that plays at the borders of national languages to enjoy multilingual slips and generally to revive the classical meaning of school as leisure. The simple but rigorous protocol begins when everyone asks a question of a shared text, which displays a variety of viewpoints. It continues with creative interpretations of the text, using old and new arts. The result is self-efficacy and admiration for others in a broad and sustainable civic culture.
Biography
Doris Sommer is Ira and Jewell Williams Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures and of African and African American Studies. She is founder of "Cultural Agents," an Initiative at harvard and an NGO dedicated to reviving the civic mission of the Humanities. Her academic and outreach work promotes development through arts and humanities, specifically through “Pre-Texts” in Boston Public Schools, throughout Latin America and beyond. Pre-Texts is an arts-based training program for teachers of literacy, critical thinking, and citizenship. Among her books are Foundational Fictions: The National Romances of Latin America (1991) about novels that helped to consolidate new republics; Proceed with Caution when Engaged by Minority Literature (1999) on a rhetoric of particularism; Bilingual Aesthetics: A New Sentimental Education (2004) for our times of contested immigration; and The Work of Art in the World: Civic Agency and Public Humanities (2014). Sommer has enjoyed and is dedicated to developing good public school education. She has a B.A. from New Jersey's Douglass College for Women, and Ph.D. from Rutgers University.