Updated info: U. Chicago conference on “Stanley Cavell’s Aesthetics” (Mar. 2-4)

We’ve just received updated information about the upcoming conference on “Stanley Cavell’s Aesthetics” at the University of Chicago (see, in particular, the link to the conference website):

Stanley Cavell’s Aesthetics, March 2-4 at The University of Chicago

Conference Organizers: Prof. James Conant and Prof. David Wellbery

Primary Participants: Sarah Beckwith (Duke), Michael Fried (Johns Hopkins), Arata Hamawaki (Auburn), Andrew Klevan (Oxford), Toril Moi (Duke University), Richard Moran (Harvard), Yi-Ping Ong (Johns Hopkins), Robert Pippin (Chicago)

The conference is jointly sponsored by The Alexander von Humboldt Stiftung, The Franke Institute for the Humanities, The Center for Interdisciplinary Research on German Literature and Culture, and The Department of Philosophy.

Website: https://cavell.sites.uchicago.edu/

Rebecca Schuman: “Kafka’s Verwandlung, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and the Limits of Metaphorical Language”

We wanted to let our readers know of a new essay on Wittgenstein and Kafka, written by Rebecca Schuman (ACLS New Faculty Fellow in the Department of German, Ohio State University). Prof. Schuman’s essay is entitled “Kafka’s Verwandlung, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and the Limits of Metaphorical Language.” It was recently published in Modern Austrian Literature, Vol. 44 Issue 3/4. For access to the full text, you are invited (by Prof. Schuman) to contact her at: schuman.23@OSU.edu.

Here is a preview of its first page (click on it to enlarge):

Nat Hansen: “J.L. Austin and Literal Meaning”

The European Journal of Philosophy has just published an essay by Nat Hansen (Postdoctoral Fellow, Institut Jean-Nicod, École Normale Supérieure), entitled “J.L. Austin and Literal Meaning.” To access it online, please click here.

Here is a preview of its first page, which includes an abstract (click on it to enlarge):

nonsite.org: Response Essays by Charles Altieri and Robert Pippin

[Updated 1/11/12: nonsite.org has just published responses by Charles Altieri and Robert Pippin to the essays announced in an earlier post of ours (copied below). Altieri's essay responds to the essays by Jami Bartlett, Jennifer Ashton, and John Gibson. Pippin's essay responds to the essays by Oren Izenberg and Paul Grimstad.]

nonsite.org has just published Part 2 of their special issue on the “No Quarrel: Literature and Philosophy Today” conference held at Boston University in April 2011. It includes responses, written by Jonathan Kramnick and Garry Hagberg, to the essays published in Part 1, as well as new essays by Jennifer Ashton, Jami Bartlett, John Gibson, Paul Grimstad and Oren Izenberg (see the table of contents below). Responses to these newly published essays, to be written by Kristin Gjesdal, Charles Altieri, and Robert Pippin, should be available sometime in January. We’ll let you know when those are out.

To access this new issue of nonsite.org, please click here.

ARTICLES

• The Question of Poetic Meaning, by John Gibson, University of Louisville
• The Motive for Metonymy (A Parochial Theme in Two Parts), by Jennifer Ashton, UIC
• On Going On: Rules, Inferences and Literary Conditions, by Paul Grimstad, Yale University
• Confiance au Monde; or, The Poetry of Ease, by Oren Izenberg, UIC
• Overlooking in Stendhal, by Jami Bartlett, University of California, Irvine

FEATURES

• Quarrelsome: Response to Camp, Harold, and Chodat, by Jonathan Kramnick, Rutgers University
• Wittgenstein, the Human Face, and the Expressive Content of Poetry: On Bernard Rhie and Magdalena Ostas, by Garry L Hagberg, Bard College

Upcoming at Duke: “Literature, Aesthetics, Politics: The Function of the Literary Magazine in the Current Moment” (January 20, 2012)

For more information about this event, please click here.

New essay collection: “Iris Murdoch, Philosopher” (ed. Justin Broackes)

Oxford University Press has just published a new essay collection entitled Iris Murdoch, Philosopher, edited by Justin Broackes (Philosophy, Brown University). Below is the publisher’s description of the book, followed by its table of contents. To visit the publisher’s webpage for the book, please click here.

Book description:

Iris Murdoch was a notable philosopher before she was a notable novelist and her work was brave, brilliant, and independent. She made her name first for her challenges to Gilbert Ryle and behaviourism, and later for her book on Sartre (1953), but she had the greatest impact with her work in moral philosophy–and especially her book The Sovereignty of Good (1970). She turned expectantly from British linguistic philosophy to continental existentialism, but was dissatisfied there too; she devised a philosophy and a style of philosophy that were distinctively her own. Murdoch aimed to draw out the implications, for metaphysics and the conception of the world, of rejecting the standard dichotomy of language into the ‘descriptive’ and the ‘emotive’. She aimed, in Wittgensteinian spirit, to describe the phenomena of moral thinking more accurately than the ‘linguistic behaviourists’ like R. M. Hare. This ‘empiricist’ task could be acheived, Murdoch thought, only with help from the idealist tradition of Kant, Hegel, and Bradley. And she combined with this a moral psychology, or theory of motivation, that went back to Plato, but was influenced by Freud and Simone Weil. Murdoch’s impact can be seen in the moral philosophy of John McDowell and, in different ways, in Richard Rorty and Charles Taylor, as well as in the recent movements under the headings of moral realism, particularism, moral perception, and virtue theory.

This volume brings together essays by critics and admirers of Murdoch’s work, and includes a longer Introduction on Murdoch’s career, reception, and achievement. It also contains a previously unpublished chapter from the book on Heidegger that Murdoch had been working on shortly before her death, and a Memoir by her husband John Bayley. It gives not only an introduction to Murdoch’s important philosophical life and work, but also a picture of British philosophy in one of its heydays and at an important moment of transition.

Table of contents:

• Justin Broackes: Introduction
• Iris Murdoch: Heidegger: Sein und Zeit
• John Bayley: Iris on Safari
• Peter Conradi: Holy Fool and Magus
• Martha Nussbaum: ‘Faint with secret knowledge’
• Maria Antonaccio: The Virtues of Metaphysics
• Richard Moran: Iris Murdoch and Existentialism
• Carla Bagnoli: The Exploration of Moral Life
• Bridget Clarke: Iris Murdoch and the Prospects for Critical Moral Perception
• Margaret Holland: Social Convention and Neurosis as Obstacles to Moral Freedom
• Roger Crisp: Iris Murdoch on Nobility and Moral Value
• Julia Driver: For every Foot its own Shoe
• Lawrence Blum: Visual Metaphors in Iris Murdoch’s Moral Philosophy
• Alison Denham: Psychopathy, Empathy, & Moral Motivation

MLA Panel: “Narrative and/in Wittgenstein”

If you’re attending the MLA, please consider coming to the following panel — on “Narrative and/in Wittgenstein” — organized by Robert Chodat. And if you do come, please say hello! The panel will take place 7pm tonight (Thursday, January 5th) in the Virginia room at the Sheraton.

Presiding: Bernard Rhie, Williams Coll.

1. “Is Narrative a Something or a Nothing? ,” Robert Chodat, Boston Univ.

2. “Wittgenstein and the Literary Conception of Selfhood,” John Gibson, Univ. of Louisville

3. “Running against the Boundaries of Language: Lectures on Ethics by Kafka and Wittgenstein,” Yi-Ping Ong, Johns Hopkins Univ., MD

To search for other panels and events at the 2012 MLA convention, please click here. If you find other sessions that you think would interest readers of this blog, please note them in the comments to this post.

Bernard Williams’s Antiquity: A Conference at the University of North Carolina (April 13-15)

We’re very pleased to announce the following event, organized by Brendan Boyle (Classics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill):

Bernard Williams’s Antiquity: A Conference at the University of North Carolina

13-15 April, 2012

Bernard Williams’s interest in the ancients was intense and abiding, and there is scarcely as aspect of his work the ancients did not touch.  Agamemnon’s dilemma figures prominently in his early accounts of “ethical consistency,” while Thucydides’ radical understanding of the past shapes much of Truth and Truthfulness.  And this is not even to mention Shame and Necessity, the most astonishing study of the ancients in many, many decades.

Williams’s work on the ancients is all extremely challenging in its own right, and has not, I think, been sufficiently well-understood.   That alone is good reason to convene a study of “Williams’s Antiquity,” but it is complemented by the fact that it has proved extremely fertile – its influence can be seen in work as varied as Robert Pippin’s accounts of fate and agency in modernity, Raymond Geuss’s critique of certain strands of Anglophone moral theory, and Richard Eldridge’s studies of Hegel and tragedy.  The aim of this conference, then, is to gather participants to examine Williams’s provocative body of work on antiquity and the challenge it poses to contemporary philosophical practice.

Speakers: Robert Pippin, Raymond Geuss, Richard Kraut, Richard Eldridge, Paul Woodruff

Contact Brendan Boyle (bpboyle AT gmail DOT com) with any questions, or visit bpboyle.wordpress.com.

New blog design: request for feedback

Dear readers,

As you can see, I’ve changed OLP & Literary Studies Online’s blog design “theme.” I think the way this theme displays text, in particular, is more appealing and readable than the old theme, and there are other minor differences I like about it. But what really matters is what you think. So, please send me feedback about the new look, either in the comments section to this post, or by email. I appreciate it very much. And if it turns out that most of you don’t like it, I will change it back, or look for something different.

I’ll be heading out of town with my family (my son is playing in a baseball tournament in Florida) for the next week, so I won’t be able to respond to your notes till I return. Thanks in advance for your patience.

Wishing you all a happy new year! And as ever, thank you for reading,

Bernie

Sianne Ngai: “Passionate Utterances: Learning from Stanley Cavell”

The LA Review of Books Blog has published a piece by Sianne Ngai (Stanford University) entitled “Passionate Utterances: Learning from Stanley Cavell.” Ngai’s piece is the seventh installment of LARB’s Writers On Teachers series. To read the whole thing, please click here.

Here is how it begins:

I was a grad student in English at Harvard in the mid-90s, but physically there for just three years, anxious to move to Brooklyn for a relationship as soon as I became ABD. In that brief but intense period of time, I tried to take as many courses offered by Stanley Cavell as possible. In my last year, I asked him to be a member of my dissertation committee. Looking back I’m still flooded with gratitude (and astonishment) by the fact that he said yes.

At the time I couldn’t have said why I felt so attuned to Cavell’s writing. I just knew, after reading his essay on moods in Emerson and Nietzsche (“Aversive Thinking”) and then his books on Thoreau and remarriage comedy (The Sense of Walden, Pursuits of Happiness), that I wanted to read more, and to think and talk with him as much as possible about the things he thought were interesting. All the more so when I realized that, in person, Stanley Cavell was exactly like the voice his writing projected. That voice, no matter what it happened to be speaking about — Shakespeare and the avoidance of love, Jacques Derrida and J. L. Austin, the Hollywood women’s film of the 1930s and 40s — was unfailingly generous and infectiously interesting. It was a meta-philosophical voice, preoccupied less with thewrongness of skepticism (that is, with skepticism understood as intellectual error, thereby capable of intellectual correction) than with its status as a basic condition of human life and also as a kind of madness, a denial of our shared reality with other minds. Cavell’s voice was a kind of therapy against that madness. It was also an utterly and profoundly non-snobby voice: the voice of a philosopher concerned with philosophy’s aversion to the ordinary, and with the nondiscursive aspects of ordinary language — its affect and force, its ontology as action — that seemed to interest so few other philosophers of language at the time. It was, finally and significantly, the voice of someone deeply interested in how gender inflects both of these problems.