Friday, March 7

Imperial Dreams:

HERMAN Melville & JAMES Joyce

Two of the nation’s foremost literary scholars, Dr. Denis Donoghue and Dr. Vincent Cheng, will visit Buffalo for the first time ever this Friday to discuss the work of two outwardly disparate authors. Though literary giants Herman Melville and James Joyce lived in and wrote about different times and places, they can be connected by their literary reactions to their political circumstances. According to Patrick Martin, Riverrun Inc. director and the man who dreamed up the event, “We’ll hear two very different perspectives on two writers who are both very concerned with politics and who share a particular concern with/proximity to imperial adventures.” Dr. Cheng will present “Amnesia, Forgetting and the Nation in Joyce’s Ulysses” at 7pm, and Dr. Donoghue will present “The Ambiguities of Herman Melville” at 8pm. The event is the first in the Writers and Politics Series, presented by Riverrun, Inc. and the UB Humanities Institute. Riverrun was founded “to connect the intellectual and artistic resources of UB with Buffalo proper,” according to its director, Patrick Martin. “Much of Buffalo’s tradition of avant garde arts, especially in the 1960s and 70s, came out of that connection,” a connection that was damaged when UB moved the majority of its operations to the Amherst campus. The series—which will continue later this month with a program at UB entitled “New Paths in Political Philosophy” is an attempt to produce more cultural programs in that tradition. For a complete schedule of events for Friday evening, visit albrightknox.org/gusto/mar08.html.

—peter koch

6:30pm. Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 1285 Elmwood Ave. (882-8700) Free