A Celebration of the Axinn Center
October 15-18, 2008
Named for College Professor of History Emeritus Nicholas R. Clifford, the annual Clifford Symposium presents a unique opportunity for members of the community to come together to reflect upon issues and problems that have an intellectual and cultural life beyond the boundaries of the College. This year’s Clifford Symposium, on Homecoming Weekend 2008, is organized by the Office of the Provost.
Wednesday, October 15
7:30 p.m.
Faculty Panel: “Sites of Memory”
Moderator: Jason Mittell; panelists: Rebecca Bennette, Dan Brayton, Rachael Joo, and Chris Keathley
Location: Axinn 229
A discussion about the relationship between memory and place in literature, art, and culture. This topic is inspired by the transformation of our old library—which was the College's centennial building in 1900—into a center for literary and cultural studies.
Thursday, October 16
4:15 p.m.
Student Poetry Reading
Location: Abernethy Room
7:30 p.m.
Lecture by Marsha Kinder, of USC’s Labyrinth Project
“Dramatizing the Archive: Contested Sites of Memory and Erasure”
Location: Axinn 232
The Labyrinth Project is an art collective and research initiative on interactive cinema and database narrative at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Communication. Under the direction of cultural theorist Marsha Kinder, this initiative works at the pressure point between theory and practice. Kinder produces interactive narratives and installations in collaboration with visual artists and writers known for their experimentation with nonlinear forms.
Friday, October 17
4:15 p.m.
Lecture by George Chauncey (Yale University)
“From Sodomy Laws to Marriage Amendments: A Century of Sexual Identity/Politics”
Location: Axinn 229
George Chauncey is a professor of history at Yale University. His work includes Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890-1940, Why Marriage? The History Shaping Today’s Debate over Gay Equality, as well as numerous articles on the history of gender and sexuality. Professor Chauncey is currently completing The Strange Career of the Closet: Gay Culture, Consciousness, and Politics from the Second World War to the Gay Liberation Era, which reconstructs the racially-segregated and class-stratified African American, Latino, and white gay male worlds and sexual cultures of postwar New York City, analyzes the generational shift from the culture of the double life to the culture of coming out, and reinterprets the sources of postwar antihomosexualism, the development of gay politics, and the transformation of urban liberalism.
7:30 p.m.
Poetry reading by Galway Kinnell
Location: Mead Chapel
Pulitzer Prize winning poet Galway Kinnell has worked for the Congress on Racial Equality and traveled widely in the Middle East and Europe. He has taught at several colleges and universities, including California, Pittsburgh, and New York. The poems of his first volume, What a Kingdom It Was (1960), were informed by a traditional Christian sensibility. However, while retaining a sacramental dimension, his later work burrows fiercely into the self away from traditional sources of religious authority or even conventional notions of personality. “If you could keep going deeper and deeper,” he has said, “you'd finally not be a person ... you'd be a blade of grass or ultimately perhaps a stone. And if a stone could read poetry would speak for it.” The poems issuing from this conviction may be found in such collections as Flower Herding on Mount Monadnock (1964), Body Rags (1968), The Book of Nightmares (1971), and Mortal Acts, Mortal Words (1980).
Saturday, October 18
9:30 a.m.
Faculty Panel: “Looking Backwards: Milestones in the Field”
Moderator: Jay Parini; panelists: Leger Grindon, Brett Millier, Paul Monod, and Michael Newbury
Location: Axinn 229
The "greatest hits" in their respective scholarly fields.
AXINN DEDICATION
Saturday, October 18
11 a.m.
Poetry reading by Donald E. Axinn '51, Litt.D. '89
Location: Axinn Abernethy Room Noon
Reception and Dedication
Location: Axinn Winter Garden
1:30 & 3 p.m.
Tour of building with discussion of building history by Professor Glenn Andres
2 p.m.
Screening of student films begins on continuous loop, until evening
Location: Axinn 232
8 p.m.
Reception for “Frostiana” and “Sound Investment”
Location: Axinn Winter Garden
8 p.m.
College Choir performs selections from “Frostiana”
Location: Abernethy Room
8:30 p.m. - 10:00 p.m.
Performance by Sound Investment
Location: Reading Room
10 p.m. - 1 a.m.
Black and White Ball
Bands: Project DCQ and campus band, Yuzimi
Axinn Lawn
Ongoing
Hemingway Exhibition
This exhibit features highlights of Middlebury’s Hemingway Collection, including the first two chapters of The Sun Also Rises (excised from the final published version at the suggestion of F. Scott Fitzgerald), letters to and from Ernest Hemingway, and snapshots of the Hemingway family.
Axinn Center