EAST LANSING, Mich. – Mary Louise Pratt, Silver Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures at New York University, will deliver a lecture titled “Planetary Longings” at 5 p.m. Friday, Oct. 7, in the Kellogg Hotel and Conference Center, Big Ten Room C, on the Michigan State University campus.
The lecture, which is free and open to the public, is the part of a series of talks titled “Questioning the Global” sponsored by MSU’s Global Literary and Cultural Studies Research Cluster (GLCS).
“Professor Pratt’s work epitomizes the cutting edge scholarship that the GLCS seeks to foster,” said Sandra Logan, GLCS director. “Her creative consideration of conjunctions among literary/cultural studies, language, pedagogy and sociopolitical issues situates her as one of the most important interdisciplinary scholars of our time.”
Pratt’s lecture will explore the implications of global and planetary perspectives for the humanistic disciplines born out of the West’s self-making. She will consider what it would mean to genuinely supersede this originary mission, who may be in a position to answer such questions, what scholarly practices humanistic disciplines have developed that genuinely take them in this direction, and what drives their desire take up such a direction.
Pratt, who served on the faculty of the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Stanford University from 1976 to 2003, is perhaps best known as a scholar of Latin American literature since 1800. Her research and teaching areas have included postcolonial criticism and theory, cultural studies, women and print culture, literary discourse and ideology, travel literature, and modern prose fiction. Her published work includes “Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse,” “Linguistics for Students of Literature” and “Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation.”
The MSU Global Literary and Cultural Studies Research Cluster fosters interdepartmental research collaborations that focus on literature, film and other forms of cultural production in light of various critical approaches that have emerged out of the literary disciplines. Participants examine the pluralities of cultural experience, the pressures of homogenization and the dislocations of national, ethnic and linguistic identities that can be produced through globalization.
The Kellogg Center is located at 55 S. Harrison Avenue on the MSU campus, at the corner of Michigan Avenue.