Humanities Without Boundaries 2008-09

    Franco Moretti
  • Franco Moretti
  • Danily C. and Laura Louise Bell Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University
    Brittingham Scholar in Residence

  • Style, inc. Reflections on 7,000 novelistic titles [Great Britain, 1740-1850]

  • October 22, 2008 @ 7:30 pm
  • Pyle Center
  • This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.
  • The talk describes some macroscopic changes in title structure between 1740 and 1850; suggests how they may have changed the way readers looked at novels; and makes a modest attempt at a stylistics of the genre system.
    In addition, please join Franco Moretti for a conversation with faculty and students at the Institute for Research in the Humanities on Monday, October 20, 12-1:30

  • Franco Moretti has written, most recently, Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 (1998), and Graphs, Maps, Trees (2005). Chief editor of The Novel (Princeton, 2006). He has given the Gauss seminars at Princeton, the Beckman lectures at Berkeley, and the Carpenter lectures at Chicago; he is a fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, and writes often for New Left Review. With support from the UW-Madison Division of International Studies, the International Institute, and Global Studies.

    • Download the Reading(s)
    The Novel: History and Theory

    Hent de Vries
  • Hent de Vries
  • Professor in the Humanities Center and the Department of Philosophy at the Johns Hopkins University

  • The Future of Immortality: Theodor W. Adorno and the Irreducible Permanence of the Theologico-Political

  • October 24, 2008 @ 7:30 pm
  • Pyle Center
  • This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.
  • In this lecture Hent de Vries offers a powerful lens for thinking about the endurance of immortality in modernity. Drawing upon Claude Lefort and Theodor Adorno, de Vries explains that although immortality no longer signifies the individual soul's existence beyond the body's demise, it nevertheless resists being fully secularized. Immortality thus emerges as a key instance where a theological trope continues to shape our social space and serves as a condition of justice, the rule of law, freedom, and democracy.

  • Hent de Vries is the Russ Family Professor in the Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University. Since January 2003, he has held a joint appointment as Professor in the Humanities Center and the Department of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins. Before joining Johns Hopkins, he held the Chair of Metaphysics and Its History in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam (1993-2002), where he continues to hold a research position as Professor Ordinarius of Systematic Philosophy and the Philosophy of Religion. He received his PhD in Philosophy of Religion from the University of Leiden in 1989. Hent De Vries's lecture is part of the conference The Weimar Moment: Liberalism, Political Theology, and Law October 24-26, 2008 at the Pyle Center, UW-Madison.

    Mary Louise Pratt
  • Mary Louise Pratt
  • Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures and the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University

  • Planetary Longings

  • November 6, 2008 @ 7:30 pm
  • Pyle Center
  • This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.
  • What desire resides in the idea of the “planetary”? A longing, perhaps, for inclusive affirmation in the face of collapsed modernity and depraved neoliberalism? For a sense of futurity, with or without history? For stories that decenter the human even as humans alone tell and hear them? Today, "we are awash in ambitious, worldmaking projects," says anthropologist Anna Tsing. The lecture will consider an array of planetary projections at work in the world today, and the ways they displace, relocate, or reassert, enlightenment humanist traditions.

  • Mary Louise Pratt is a Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Literatures and the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University, where she teaches Latin American literature and culture, cultural studies, postcolonial studies, and theory. Formerly the Olive H. Palmer Professor of Humanities at Stanford University, Dr. Pratt is now Silver Professor at NYU, where she is also affiliated with the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies, the Department of Comparative Literature, and the Hemispheric Institute for Performance and Politics. Her current research interests include language, linguistic agency and globalization. Dr. Pratt's books include Toward a Speech Act Theory of Literary Discourse; Women, Culture and Politics in Latin America (co-authored); Linguistics for Students of Literature; and Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. She has received Guggenheim, NEH and ACLS Fellowships and has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. She also recently completed a term as president of the Modern Language Association. Dr. Pratt earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from Stanford University (1975), an M.A. in Linguistics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1971), and a B.A. in Modern Languages and Literatures from the University of Toronto (1970). Mary Louise Pratt will also participate in an event for the UW-Madison Language Institute, “Land of the Free, Home of the Phraselator: The Weaponization of Language” Thursday, November 6th, 12PM room 254 Van Hise Hall This event is co-sponsored by the UW-Madison Language Institute

    K. Anthony Appiah
  • K. Anthony Appiah
  • Laurance S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy and the University Center for Human Values, Princeton University

  • Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers

  • April 6, 2009 @ 7:30 pm
  • Chazen Museum of Art, Room L160
  • This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.

  • In his acerbic lectures, Appiah explores some of the central ethical questions of our time. How is it possible to consider the world a moral community, for instance, when there is so much disagreement about the nature of morality? He offers answers that are grounded in a new ethics (Cosmopolitanism) which celebrates our common humanity, while at the same time offers a practical way to manage our differences. With wit, reason and humanity, he offers a new approach to living a moral life in the modern age -- where the competing claims of “a Clash of Civilizations” on one hand, and a groundless moral relativism on the other, can make such a project seem impossible.

  • Kwame Anthony Appiah is our postmodern Socrates. He asks what it means to be African and African-American, but his answers immediately raise issues that encompass us all. His principal and abiding concern is how we individually construct ourselves in dialogue with social circumstance, both private and public, past and present. He has taught philosophy and African and African-American studies at Cambridge, Duke, Cornell, Yale, Harvard, and Princeton Universities. He is currently Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton (with a cross-appointment at the University Center for Human Values). Appiah's latest book, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (Issues of Our Time), is a work of discourse on “clashing civilizations” that, according to Publisher's Weekly, “reclaims a tradition of creative exchange and imaginative engagement across lines of difference.” His early philosophical work dealt with probabilistic semantics and theories of meaning, but his more recent books have tackled philosophical problems of race and racism. The Ethics of Identity and In My Father's House are among his titles. This event is co-sponsored by the UW-Madison Distinguished Lecture Committee, the UW-Madison African Studies Program, the UW-Madison Human Rights Initiative, Global Studies, and with generous support from the Evjue Foundation.

    Leo Bersani
  • Leo Bersani
  • Professor Emeritus of French at the University of California, Berkeley

  • Ardent Masturbation (Descartes, Freud, et al.)

  • April 16, 2009 @ 7:30 pm
  • Pyle Center
  • This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.

  • Foucault identified the beginning of the modern age in his history of Western notions of subjectivity with "the Cartesian moment," by which he meant the prioritizing of knowledge over "care of the self" or spirituality. What are the procedures of Cartesian self-knowledge? In what sense does Descartes initiate a type of introspection characteristic of what we have come to understand as self-analysis?

  • Leo Bersani was for several years the Class of 1950 Professor of French at UC Berkeley. His books include The Freudian Body, The Culture of Redemption, Homos and, with Ulysse Dutoit, Caravaggio's Secrets and Forms of Being/Cinema, Aesthetics, Subjectivity. Chicago University Press has recently published Intimacies, a work co-authored with Adam Phillips.

    Leo Bersani will participate in a brown bag, "Thinking Intimacies: A Faculty Roundtable with Leo Bersani" on Friday, April 17th, 12-1:30 in HC White 6191. Including UW Professors Jill Casid (Art History), Michael Jay McClure (Art), and James Klausen (Political Science).

    Lorraine Daston
  • Lorraine Daston
  • Executive director of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG) in Berlin

  • The Passions of the Unnatural

  • April 24, 2009 @ 7:30 pm
  • Pyle Center
  • This event is one of the Humanities Without Boundaries events.

  • The unnatural comes in several forms: monsters that violate the order of natural species; catastrophes that capsize the order of ecological balance; marvels or miracles that break with the order of what happens always or most of the time. It is a striking fact that these versions of the unnatural also provoke distinctive emotional responses: horror, terror, and wonder, respectively. These are the emotions (or better, passions, in the original sense of the term as an extreme state that we suffer rather than merely feel) that register a breach of order -- and blur the boundary between the natural and the moral.

  • Lorraine Daston is Director at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, Germany and Visiting Professor in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. Her most recent book, co-authored with Peter Galison, is Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2008). Lorraine Daston will also participate in a History of Science brown bag discussion April 24th, 2009 at 12PM in the Memorial Union. Co-Sponsored by the UW-Madison History of Science Department and the Center for the Humanities 'What is Human?' Initiative