PY READING GROUPS 2010/11
AUTUMN TERM
WEEKS 1 - 5
RG115 PY Reading Group: Objectivity in History
Ryan Plumley
Credits: 2,5
Objectivity has consistently been used by historians to differentiate scholarly History from the related discourses of myth, legend, and literature as well as from "subjective" discourses such as memory or proselytizing. Historians don't make up their stories about the past, and they don't let their own ethical, political, or social commitments inflect what they find in the historical record. As opposed to fiction or propaganda, historians produce "objective" knowledge about the past. Sometimes this knowledge has been equated with a kind of comprehensive truth about the past, sometimes with a partial but reliable account.
But even as objectivity remains central to understanding the past in a critical and useful way, there has been substantial debate about what it is or how it functions. If History involves narrativizing of the otherwise chaotic past, then what makes it decisively different from fictional narratives? Can't realist novels, for instance, also make a claim for objectively representing the past? And if History involves pointed interpretation of an otherwise unclear past, then how can it (or why would it) avoid being biased by its own historical time and place? Are not historians themselves caught in the flux of history even as they try to study it?
In this Reading Group we will focus our attention on the debate, from the late 80's and early 90's, within the community of historians over the concept of objectivity. Some historians lost faith in objectivity. Others rallied behind it. And still others tried to rescue it from naiveté by critically revising it. By investigating this debate within the historical discipline we will also have a chance to see how a community of academics carry on a conversation with each other over an important issue. Reviewing this process should help prepare you for your own work in the PY.
RG113 PY Reading Group: Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet (1912-1935)
Bruno Macaes
Credits: 2,5
"What is a spiral? A snake without a snake vertically curled around nothing." One has to see clearly in order to write well, but the truest landscapes are the landscapes of our dreams. Always on the fringe of what he belongs to, desiring nothing, a foreigner even to himself, the writer becomes a mirror reflecting the world. In this strange book, a masterpiece of twentieth century literature, Pessoa shows us the moment when the emptiness of a life becomes the highest virtue.
WEEKS 6 - 10
RG117 PY Reading Group: Velázquez, Las Meninas
Geoff Lehman
Credits: 2,5
In this reading group we will focus not on a book but on a picture: the painting Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez. We will consider the problem of objectivity in representation through a close reading of Las Meninas, in light of issues such as perspective and perception, naturalism, the subjects and objects of vision and/or visual attention, and the concept of representation as a system of knowledge. Weekly reading assignments will be drawn from a range of art historical, philosophical, and/or literary texts.
RG119 PY Reading Group: Ernst Cassirer, The Logic of the Cultural Sciences (1942)
Bruno Macaes
Credits: 2,5
Not just the realm of scientific knowledge, but even that of common experience is shot through with theoretical interpretations and meanings. Cassirer investigates the peculiar modes of intuiting and perceiving reality. With every attentive glance into the world we theorize, but we do so in many different and permanently changing ways. The center of gravity shifts from the philosophy of nature to the philosophy of culture: the immense project of a unified study of language, myth and religion, science, and art.
WINTER TERM
WEEKS 1-4
RG122 PY Reading Group: Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex
Catherine Toal (c.toal@ecla.de)
Credits: 2,5
Simone de Beauvoir s The Second Sex is an historical, anthropological and psychological dissection of how gender difference is culturally understood and enforced, and of the consequences of this for judgment and action.
RG124 PY Reading Group: Heinrich von Kleist, The Marquis of O and Other Stories (1810-1811)
Bartholomew Ryan (b.ryan@ecla.de)
Credits: 2,5
Enigmatic, uncanny, when reason reaches its limits, the tragic deceptiveness of appearance, the disaster of self-consciousness in man, and the cracks in objectivity… welcome to the peculiar vision of Heinrich von Kleist. Throughout his short, passionate life, having failed to find his Lebensplan, and thrown into metaphysical uncertainty and despair after reading "the recent so-called Kantian philosophy", Kleist transformed this crisis into becoming a brilliant, creative writer. We will read Kleist's eight stories (now in one book) unveiling our ordered existence as an allusion to where only chaos and uncertainty are real. Varying in length and content, these tales are united by the exhilarating, disturbing and masterly style of the troubled, Prussian poet.
WEEKS 6-10
RG126 PY Reading Group: Theodor Adorno: Minima Moralia (1951)
Bartholomew Ryan (b.ryan@ecla.de)
Credits: 2,5
"Das Ganze ist das Unwahre". Inverting Hegel's dictum that the whole is the true, the great 20th century literary critic and co-leader of the Frankfurt School bemoans the collapse of reason and objectivity as well as the end of culture in what he calls his melancholy science. Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life is one of the great masterpieces of 'philosophical writing'. Ironic, tragic, bittersweet and of supreme intellectual power, Adorno reflects on art, psychology, philosophy, politics and personal memories in a collections of dazzling aphorisms in a book that refuses to be pinned down to one discipline.
RG128 PY Reading Group: What Is a Photograph?
Katalin Makkai (k.makkai@ecla.de)
Credits: 2,5
This reading group studies two classic texts on photography, Susan Sontag's On Photography and Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida. What relation can a photograph have to reality? Have photographs come to serve to distort-or to distance us from-what they ostensibly "capture"? Barthes reflects on a childhood photograph of his deceased mother: what difference does the personal, individual significance of a photograph make to what one sees in it? These are a few of the questions upon which we'll reflect critically, grounded by the study of particular photographs.