Please join us for a roundtable discussion of Svobodny’s "Nijinsky’s Feeling Mind. The Dancer Writes, The Writer Dances" (2023)
Panelists:
Nicole Svobodny, Senior Lecturer in Global Studies and Russian Literature and Culture
Tili Boon Cuillé, Professor of French and Comparative Literature
Elinor Harrison, Lecturer in Dance
Anca Parvulescu, Professor of English; Liselotte Dieckmann Professor of Comparative Literature
Moderator: Tabea Linhard, Director of Global Studies and Professor of Spanish
Nijinsky’s Feeling Mind: The Dancer Writes, The Writer Dances is the first in-depth literary study of Vaslav
Nijinsky’s life-writing. Drawing on extensive archival research, Nicole Svobodny illuminates the
modernist contexts from which the dancer-writer emerged at the end of World War I.
Through close textual analysis combined with intellectual biography, Svobodny puts the spotlight on
Nijinsky as reader. She elucidates Nijinsky’s riffs on Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche, equating
these intertextual connections to “marking” a dance, whereby the dancer uses a reduction strategy
situated between thinking and doing. By exploring the intersections of bodily movement and verbal
language, this book addresses broader questions of how we sense and make sense of our worlds.
Kimerer LaMothe writes about Nijinsky’s Feeling Mind: “In Svobodny’s thorough account, Nijinsky’s
notebooks appear as one face of a multimodal art project—involving dancing, writing, and
drawing—whose interlocking pieces break down easy dichotomies between interiority and
exteriority, thought and feeling, writing and dancing, and in so doing, enact (both performing and
representing) the creative process as a key to healing a world ravaged by war.”
The roundtable discussion will take place on November 17, 3:00pm, DUC 234. A reception will
follow.