Cathy Jean Maloney will discuss her book World's Fair Gardens: Shaping American Landscapes and Garden History (University of Virginia Press, 2012), which describes how nine World’s Fair landscapes forever changed America’s major urban green spaces and private backyards. From Frederick Law Olmsted’s work at Chicago’s 1893 World’s Fair to a “dream team” of landscape artists at the 1940 New York World’s Fair, Maloney will show how these trends filtered into home gardens and growers’ hothouses.

Taking the case of Arabic, English, and French from the late eighteenth through the early twentieth centuries, this lecture traces the rise of modern comparative literature to a new global regime in which a language acquired power in the world (empire) insofar as it held the power to capture the world “exactly” (empiricism). In the shadow of imperialism and empiricism, languages that once had styled themselves “incomparable”—larger than life—now were urged to simulate life: the really seen and heard. This turn from “artificial” to “natural” literary languages newly bound word to world, making “incomparable” languages comparable. Languages now had to […]