Dinner & Lecture with Prof Rodriguez: A Question of You and Me

We invite you to join us for a special evening with Brown University Prof Ralph E. Rodriguez for dinner and lecture featuring a “lyrical criticism on the relationship between culture and identities”. The evening is our first event this academic year in an ongoing series bringing Brown faculty to you, sponsored by the Brown Club of Oregon with support from the Brown Alumni Association.

Guests will enjoy drinks, appetizers and northwest cuisine while engaging in a conversation about the nature of our identity and the influence of race, gender, culture and sex. See below for menu details.

Friday, Dec 9 2011
Noble Rot / 1111 E. Burnside / Fourth Floor / Portland (map)
6:00 pm drinks & appetizers
7:00 dinner & lecture
$35 all inclu
sive

rodriguez event

REGISTER by Sunday Dec 4:
https://alumni.brown.edu/alumni/BRAVO/Events/Registration.aspx?Event=794*
>> Attendance is strictly limited to 30 people, so reserve your space soon!
Dinner Menu
Appetizer: Goat cheese mousse with caramelized squash & escarole
First Course:Endive salad with hazelnuts, blue cheese & beets
Second Course(choose one):
Beef short rib with whipped potatoes;
Market selection fish with roasted white roots & shrimp sauce; or
Leek & chanterelle tart, roasted carrots & parsnips
Third Course: Chocolate torte with dulche du leche
Wine and non-alcoholic drinks

Lecture:Life in Fragments: Reflections on Culture, Society and the Self

A Question of You and Meis a manuscript of lyrical criticism that examines how we inhabit, enact, and represent our racialized, gendered, and sexualized identities. I analyze how culture not only represents our multi-form identities but also helps produce the very identities we inhabit or might be interested in inhabiting. Culture, that is, is as richly productive of our heterogeneous, protean selves as it is reflective of them. Since the project is historically interested in the postmodern notion that our lives have become increasingly fragmented, I pursue my argument in a series of associatively related fragments rather than in a traditional linear argument. Fragment as form is a style that has long interested writers and readers. Thus antecedents for my project can be found as far back as Pascal’sPensees, Nietzsche’sBeyond Good and Evil, and more recently in works such as Roland Barthes’sPleasure of the Text, Kathleen Stewart’sOrdinary Affects, and Jed Perl’sAntoine’s Alphabet, to name but a very few of the rich books written in fragment form. The topics engaged in my argument range from literature, to critical theory, to music, to film, and I have also written a few as micro-fiction.