Lectures in Language and Linguistics

Writing Color

As part of an interdisciplinary improvisation, Matthew Rich had his art students collaborate with Matthew Woodman's creative writing students to work on the interplay between visual and verbal arts.  Woodman's students wrote poems for Rich's art students to illustrate as blocks of color, and then they reversed the process and had Woodman's students respond to colors Rich's students generated.  The whole endeavour was a worthwhile exercise in inspiration, connotation, and collaboration.  At the end, thanks again to Matthew Rich, a gallery space on campus exhibited the results.

Theatrefest

Congratulations to Jacob Brown, Susannah Vera, Mateo Lara, English minors Chyna Parker and Greg Bolanos, and English major Anthony Jauregui for having their plays chosen as part of Theatrefest!

CSUB Theatrefest Presents The Theatre of New Voices written and directed by CSUB students.

This is a biennial festival of student-written, student-directed one-acts. Seven short plays were selected through a competition held last spring.

Thursday-Saturday, February 25, 26, 27 at 8PM
Saturday-Sunday, February 27 & 28 at  2PM
Doré Arena Theatre

Limited seating; reservations strongly recommended as this production normally sells out: (661) 654-3150. Reservations taken starting February 15th.

Note: latecomers cannot be seated

$10 General Admission
$8 Seniors (60+)/CSUB Faculty & Staff
$5 Students with Identification

Box Office opens one hour prior to each performance and takes cash and checks only. We do not take credit cards. For a reservation, call (661) 654-3150.

Polish Poetry after Tadeusz Różewicz

In the latest issue of the literary journal Jacket2, Professor Marit MacArthur introduces a series of new translations of Polish poetry inspired by Tadeusz Różewicz, a Polish poet who lived from 1921-2014 and whose deadpan, pragmatist perspective has influenced poets across Europe as well as here in America.

MacArthur's introduction is titled "(Polish) Poetry after Różewicz," which you can read here.

To read three of MacArthur's co-translations, of the poet Jerzy Jarniewicz, click here.

Matthew Zapruder Reading

On Wednesday, November 18, The California Writers Series hosted the poet Matthew Zapruder, who read from his poetry collections Come on All You Ghosts and Sun Bear and from a nonfiction manuscript-in-progress about how to approach and engage poetry.  The reading was a resounding success, with Zapruder following his poems by engaging in a question-and-answer session with the audience and signing copies of his books.

Many thanks to Matthew Zapruder for sharing his work with us, and thanks to Marit MacArthur for arranging the reading; Curt Asher and the Walter Stiern Library for hosting; Poets & Writers, Sigma Tau Delta, and the CSUB English Department for sponsoring; and Eileen Montoya and Milissa Ackerley for managing arrangements and publicity.

California Writers Series

On Wednesday, November 18 at 7:00 p.m., the California Writers Series and Walter Stiern Library will host a reading by the poet Matthew Zapruder.  Zapruder earned a BA in Russian literature at Amherst College, an MA in Slavic languages and literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and an MFA in poetry at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.  His honors include a Lannan Literary Fellowship and a 2008 May Sarton Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has taught at the New School; the University of California Riverside, Palm Desert; and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst’s Juniper Summer Writing Institute. He lives in San Francisco, where he teaches in the St. Mary's MFA program, works as Editor-at-Large for Wave Books, and rocks out as a guitarist in the band The Figments.

For more on Zapruder's work, vist his page at The Poetry Foundation, and visit Divedapper to read a great interview.

Lectures in Language and Linguistics

On Wednesday, November 4 at 7:30pm, Kristen Greer, Ph.D (Lecturer in Linguistics, University of California, Los Angeles) will present her talk "How Many Is Many?: Quantities in Semantic Theory" in Science III Room 108.

Semantics is a notoriously tricky field within linguistics. Not only is it difficult to state exactly what words mean, but even more fundamentally, it’s hard to know what meanings even are. It is tempting to say that meanings are mental concepts--the ideas that are generated in our minds when we hear words like dogs, swim, happy, or frustration. But what are the mental concepts associated with words like every? some? two? many? hella? We might say that these mental concepts are quantities...but exactly what quantities? How many is many, after all? This talk explores these questions, arguing that in order to answer them, we need a theory of semantics that treats the meaning of a word not as the mental concept it evokes but as the way it points to objects in the world around us.

Kristen Greer received her Ph.D. in Linguistics from UC Davis in 2014. Before that, she completed a B.A. in Spanish and an M.A. in Spanish Linguistics, also at UC Davis. She is currently a lecturer in the Department of Linguistics at UCLA. Her research focuses on the meaning of quantity-denoting expressions (every, some, many, few, two/three and the like) in context. Her work has been published in the semantics journal Linguistics and Philosophy, and she has spoken at conferences at UC Davis, UC Berkeley, and UCLA, as well as to smaller audiences at UC Berkeley and UC Santa Cruz.