The project involved writing and translation course by writer Shushan Avagyan. Participants practiced reading texts of contemporary American artists in English and translating them into Armenian. The thematic focus was literary descriptions and rituals of mourning in literature. The study was organised around the following questions: What is the relationship between literature and mourning? Is mourning a political act, or does politics impede the process of mourning? How is the literary response to death different from scientific or juridical responses to death? What literary techniques do authors employ in their narratives to re-enact or represent human responses to death? Participants of the workshop were 10 young women, with excellent knowledge of written English and Armenian languages. Some of translations has been published in Feminist magazine V.3, 2010.

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Shushan Avagyan is the translator of a book of poems by Shushanik Kurghinain, I Want to Live (AIWA, 2005) and Viktor Shklovsky's Energy of Delusion: A Book on Plot (Dalkey Archive, 2007) and Bowstring: On the Dissimilarity of the Similar (Dalkey Archive, 2011). She is a doctoral student in English at Illinois State University.
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Philosophers began using the word «archive» around thirty years ago. Then it began to be used in other disciplines as well, suddenly and strikingly and also invasively, although we never quite understood how and why that happened. Were there no archives on the face of the earth before 1970? Did the human, all too human tendency to archive legal and state documents not exist? If yes, what, then, is new about the concept of the archive, or in its structure?,/p>

The lectures were attended by about 25 people, writers, philosophers, and art theorists.

The lectures have been recorded by Utopiana and are available at our media lab.

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Marc Nichanian is currently Visiting Professor of Cultural Studies at Sabanci University, Turkey. A graduate of the University of Strasbourg and the École Nationale des Langues Orientales Vivantes, he is a philosopher and literary critic, who has taught at Columbia University among other institutions. He has published in French, English and Armenian: six volumes of Gam: A Journal of Literary analysis; and an extensive bibliography of Hagop Oshagan. In French: Ages et usages de la langue arménienne (Paris, 1989) a history of the Armenian language; La Perversion historiographique (Paris, 2006), a book on the perversion of history, the English version of which is forthcoming as The Historiographic Perversion from Columbia University Press, as well as three volumes of a series on modern Armenian literature entitled, Entre l'art et le témoignage, as well as French translations from Armenian (Khrakhouni) and English (Vahakn Dadrian). In English: Charents, Poet of the Revolution (Mazda Press, 2003), Writers of Disaster: Armenian Literature in the Twentieth Century (Gomidas Institute, 2002).
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