The third speaker in this year’s Patten Lecture Series is Americanist Werner Sollors, professor of English and African and African American Studies from Harvard University. He’ll give two FREE lectures that will be from 7:30-8:30 p.m. in Chemistry 122. Sollors will speak on:
African American Intellectuals and Europe between the Two World Wars
Jan. 20, 7:30-8:30 p.m., Chemistry 122, Bloomington ---Americanist Werner Sollors, professor of English and African and African American Studies from Harvard University, will discuss in his first Patten Foundation lecture the period that witnessed the rise of communism and its transformation into Stalinism, the emergence of fascism, and two momentous "interwar wars," and numerous African American intellectuals that met their counterparts in Europe. Encounters include: Countee Cullen and Claire Goll (Paris), Claude McKay, Alain Locke, and George Grosz (Paris, Berlin, Moscow), McKay, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Leon Trotsky (Soviet Union), Horace Cayton and Nancy Cunard (Paris and Hamburg), Alain Locke and the "Black Watch on the Rhine" (French-occupied Rhineland), Langston Hughes, James Yates, and the Spanish Civil War, and W.E.B. Du Bois in Nazi Germany. Common human misunderstandings create a comedy of intellectuals against the climate of political violence in interwar Europe.
’Heil, Johnny’: Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair: or, The Denazification of Erika von Schlütow
Jan. 22, 7:30-8:30 p.m., Chemistry 122, Bloomington --- Americanist Werner Sollors, professor of English and African and African American Studies from Harvard University, will discuss in his second Patten Foundation lecture how on August 16, 1945 film director Billy Wilder proposed "Propaganda through Entertainment" to the Information Control Division of the American Military Government in Germany, offering to make an "entertainment film," "a very special love story, cleverly devised to help us sell a few ideological items." Working with a comedy that was a Paramount Studios property, Wilder transformed it into the film A Foreign Affair (1948), starring Jean Arthur and Marlene Dietrich. Set against the background of ruined Berlin, the film deals with denazification and fraternization. Sollors will discuss how the Production Code Administration intervened and how reviewers responded to a movie that poked fun at what were undoubtedly serious issues.
For more information, visit http://www.patten.indiana.edu or see IU News Room article at http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/9565.html.
