Please join us for the annual PAMLA 2025 Presidential Address, to be delivered by PAMLA President, Peter Schulman on Friday, November 21, 4:50 PM – 6:00 PM Grand Ballroom B/C! In Peter Schulman’s Presidential Address, “Palimpsests of Melancholy: Paris, New York, Istanbul, and the Resistance to Speed,” he reads cities as palimpsests that can reveal clues to past lives and past cityscapes through the prism of melancholy. Analyzing artist Sophie Calle, novelists Oran Pamuk and Paul Auster, and sociologist Marc Augé, Schulman explores notions of disappearance in contemporary urban settings. In Paris, a city with layers of architectural history at every step, lesser-known historical markers point to those who have disappeared, from plaques to children deported to concentration camps during the Occupation hanging outside of school entrances, to markers to relatively obscure resistance fighters ignored in most history books.
In New York, the indices of past lives are hidden in plain sight: the “Yiddish Theater Walk of Fame” in front of the former Second Ave Deli, now a Chase Bank, today largely goes unnoticed by the pedestrians rushing over the Jewish stars beneath their feet. Similarly, Turkish novelist Oran Pamuk treasures the sadness or huzun he sees in the Ottoman ruins that pepper Istanbul over the dominant, amnesiac, contemporary city portraying itself as a bastion of economic development.
When one scratches the walls, streets, or edifices of these cities, one can find a defining melancholia that acts as a sort of resistance to the speed characteristic of our times, an unmoored era of change and oblivion Paul Virilio labeled the “age of inertia.” As Marc Auge wrote, we must re-learn how to look at a city replete with hidden texts and messages for those who know how to find them.
Peter Schulman, Professor of French and International Studies at Old Dominion University, Officier de l’Ordre des Palmes Académiques, and author of The Sunday of Fiction: The Modern French Eccentric, edited a critical edition of Jules Verne’s The Begum’s Millions, co-edited a number of scholarly books, and translated Verne’s last novel, The Secret of Wilhelm Storitz, and a collection of Verne’s plays, A Thousand and Second Night and Other Plays. He translated Georges Simenon’s The Thirteen Culprits, Marie Darrieussecq’s On Waves, Jacques Reda’s Suburban Beauty, Celine Zins’ Adamah, Ying Chen’s Impressions of Summer, and Silvia Baron Supervielle’s Pages of Travel. Co-editor in chief of Green Humanities, a journal of eco-criticism, Schulman translated Marie Nimier’s play Another Year, Another Christmas, performed in Columbus, Ohio and New York City. He also directed two radio plays and associate produced the documentary I Found It at the Video Store.
Do join us for the Presidential Address. There will be an exciting announcement immediately before Peter Schulman’s Presidential Address you won’t want to miss (especially if you are interested in French literature and culture). And then, after the address we will all celebrate at the PAMLA Grand Reception with snacks, a cash bar, camaraderie, and music by the Uli Geissendoerfer Trio.