Archive for October, 2010

Dr. Russell Willerton

THIS FRIDAY, Oct. 8,  11:45-12:45, in Chambers 115, Dr. Russell Willerton of Boise State University will talk about careers and research in Technical Communication.

We will provide free pizza.

To learn about the speaker, see  http://www.boisestate.edu/english/ma/Russell_Willerton.html.

He was arrangements chair for the Council for Programs in Technical and Scientific Communication, which met at BSU this past weekend. He earned tenure this summer, and his publication list is much longer than his old man’s was at that age. His first job out of ACU (’94) was in public radio. After a year, he moved to Dallas and did tech writing for Ericsson and other companies, commuting to UNT for a master’s in English. His doctorate is in technical communication and rhetoric, and much of his research takes the form of case studies (web page usability, print media, white papers, and other formats).

He’s a runner and loves Idaho.

Interested in finding out more about Grad School?

Please join us next Tuesday, October 12th, immediately following Departmental Chapel in CBS Faculty Commons, room 249

We’ll eat pizza and talk grad school.

Hope to see you there!

Peruvian author Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded the 2010 Nobel prize in Literature.  Vargas Llosa is part of the so-called “Latin American Boom,” the literary movement in the 1960’s that propelled Latin American narrative, especially the novel, to the highest echelons of World Literature.

The “Boom,” as it is sometimes called, introduced such literary modes as “magic realism,” popularized by Gabriel García Márquez -who won the Nobel in 1967- and politically engaged works such as Vargas Llosa.  While García Márquez’s narrative is straightforward -at least on a superficial reading- Vargas Llosa’s is structurally much more complex; he frequently eschews linear plots and univocal narratives for complex timeframes and plurivocal exploration of a politically engaged theme, such as power structures and poverty.

Below is the announcement in Stockholm of the Nobel award, in Swedish, English and Spanish.

Vargas Llosa interviewed about his work.  In Spanish.

In 2007, he addressed the Letras Libres Forum held in Monterrey, Mexico, as one of the 8 intellectual “heavy weights” of the worlds.  His lecture was on the links between literature and reality.  In Spanish, with English subtitles.

Become famous reading Don Quixote!

The Real Academia Española wants to put the better part of Don Quixote up on YouTube.  To that end, it is enlisting the help of volunteers from around the world to sign up at their site to read pre-selected chunks and post them on the video site.  To find out more about it, read this article from the BBC.

** Bite-size Don Quixote on YouTube **
The Royal Spanish Academy invites the public to read a section from the 17th Century novel Don Quixote – and upload it to YouTube.
< http://www.bbc.co.uk/go/em/fr/-/news/world-europe-11449510 >