Video, Past Event, Arts & Culture
Book Launch: Alberto Toscano & Clint Burnham
Authors and critics Alberto Toscano (London) and Clint Burnham (Vancouver) spoke about their books, "A Test of Powers: Writings on Criticism and Literary Institutions" (by Franco Fortini, translated by Toscano: Seagull Books) and "Fredric Jameson and The Wolf of Wall Street" (Burnham: Bloomsbury Books).
Toscano's translation brought us the work of a crucial figure in the Italian cultural and political scenes of the 1960s and 1970s, Fortini, a communist poet and critic who advocated for a "modular culture and language" that combined activism with an ecology of languague. Toscano's translation marks the first appearance in English of much of Fortini's critical work, and joins his earlier translation of Dogs of the Sinai, Fortini's book on the Palestine-Israel conflict. Burnham's book, which drew on Toscano's work in cultural studies (the book he co-wrote with Jeff Kinkle, "Cartographies of the Absolute"), uses the Marxist theories of Fredric Jameson to understand Martin Scorsese's 2013 film "The Wolf of Wall Street". In that film, Burnham argued, we have a critique of finance capitalism masquerading as a gangster film (or is it the other way around?).
Speaker Bios
Alberto Toscano has edited and translated Franco Fortini's "The Dogs of the Sinai" , and translated Fortini's "A Test of Powers: Essays 1948-1968", for the Italian List at Seagull Books, which he edits. He is the author of "Fanaticism" (2010) and "Cartographies of the Absolute" (2015, with Jeff Kinkle). He is an editor of the journal "Historical Materialism", and teaches at Goldsmiths, University of London.
Clint Burnham's recent books include "Pound @ Guantánamo" (poetry, 2016) and "Fredric Jameson and the Wolf of Wall Street" (criticism, 2016). His essays on contemporary art have appeared in The Globe and Mail, Artforum, Canadian Art, and Espace Art Actuel. He teaches in the department of English at Simon Fraser University.
Co-Presented by
SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement, SFU Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, the SFU Department of English, the SFU Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology, SFU Galleries, SFU Library, and the SFU Centre for Global Political Economy.
