What Graduate Students Are Reading

Anna Lechintan is reading "A Report for an Academy" by Franz Kafka (1917).

This short story rekindled her "long-standing obsession" of Kafka while attending Professor Kittler's lecture course last quarter, providing a little mid-quarter philosophical enrichment. Red Peter, a human ape, speaks at an academic conference of his assimilation from animality into human culture. Much to think on in regards to the culture of academia as students!

"Tender, funny, and devastating"  -Anna

Qirui He is reading Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (1999) by John Durham Peters.
 
Peters highlights that media and communication's key traits---their dissemination and fated misconnumication---is rooted in deep cultural conceptions of religion, faith, and connection. His unique approach is beautiful and almost mystic, placing communication into the realm of angels, spirits, and aliens. He welcomes incommunicatibility as a deeply human blessing. 
 
"Opened a completely new world to me" -Qirui
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Surojit Kayal is reading The Marvelous Clouds by John Durham Peters.

In The Marvelous Clouds, the author argues that though we often think of media as environments, the reverse is just as true—environments are media. Drawing from ideas implicit in media philosophy, Peters argues that media are more than carriers of messages: they are the very infrastructures combining nature and culture that allow human life to thrive.  

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James Nichols is reading Exorcismos de la memoria: Políticas y poéticas de la melancolía en la España de la transición by Alberto Medina Dominguez. 

Through an interdisciplinary approach in which the analysis of philosophical, filmic, literary and political texts coexist, the book deals with a reading hypothesis of the period in which the lines of demarcation between the aesthetic and the political are blurred.

Nicole Smirnoff just finished Notes from the Underground, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Dostoyevsky's first-person, confessional novella from the perspective of a isolated, obsessive, contradictorily proud and insecure, man. Both a horribly reassuring and terrifyingly familiar read while trying to complete an exam. Nicole offers you the following quote:

“Gentlemen, do you know, perhaps I consider myself an intelligent man, only because all my life I have been able neither to begin nor to finish anything. Granted I am a babbler, a vexatious babbler, like all of us. But what is to be done if the direct and sole vocation of every intelligent man is babble [...] the intentional pouring of water through a sieve?” -Dostoyevsky

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GCLR Event Proposal 

As we begin working to fill our calendar for the upcoming academic year, students and faculty, please submit your event suggestions for the GCLR by completing this form. All submissions will be reviewed by the GCLR board.