Humanities Day 2019 - Session 2

Keats's Odes at 200

sspatterson — Mon, 29 Jul 2019 18:32:10 +0000

Presenter:

Two hundred years ago, between April and September of 1819, a young John Keats managed to compose all of his so-called Great Odes, a half-dozen poems that rank among the finest lyrics in English. What entitles these poems to their claims of greatness? How did an ex-pharmacology student without advanced education, not yet 24 years of age, manage to compose them? In what sense do they add up to something that coheres as a series or as a narrative? In pursuit of these questions, this session looks at four of these poems in chronological order: “Ode to Psyche,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” and “To Autumn.”

**This presentation is full.**

Syntactic Movement in Language

sspatterson — Thu, 18 Jul 2019 21:45:08 +0000

Presenter:

Erik Zyman

Session 2

A crucial task for linguistics is to determine what syntactic operations are made possible by the human capacity for language. What are their properties, and why? One pervasive operation is movement: a phrase can move from one position in a sentence to another (“I wouldn’t invite those people” → “Those people, I wouldn’t invite”). The presenter argues that movement is subject to a previously undiscovered restriction: if a phrase X is buried within the edge of a Major Domain (roughly, a grammatically important chunk of structure), X can move only if it crosses a certain minimum distance. The session concludes by considering what this restriction reveals about the underlying architecture of syntax in human language.

The Tangled Web of Deceit in Two Italian Novels

sspatterson — Thu, 18 Jul 2019 21:43:38 +0000

Presenter:

Rebecca West

Session 2

In today’s world of post truth and alternative facts, it is illuminating to read and ponder fiction that takes as its main theme duplicity, lies, and deception. Two recent Italian novels, Roman Ghosts by Luigi Malerba and The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco, are tied up with deceit in both their form and their content. In very different—yet always highly entertaining and engaging ways—these intricate novels give us the opportunity to consider the pernicious effects of falsehood, not only on individual lives but also on the fabric of collective social and political life.

Thoughts on Thomas Mann's "Magic Mountain"

sspatterson — Thu, 18 Jul 2019 21:42:05 +0000

Presenter:

David Wellbery

Session 2

On December 28, 1949, a precocious 16-year-old University of Chicago student, along with two companions, visited Thomas Mann in his Pacific Palisades home. Mann later noted in his diary: “Afternoon, an interview with three Chicago students about The Magic Mountain.” The student, Susan Sontag, wrote that same evening in her diary: “I interrogated God this evening at six.” To be sure, Sontag later shed her adolescent idolatry, but Thomas Mann’s great novel of 1924 nonetheless remained a source of inspiration for her, as her book Illness as Metaphor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1978) richly illustrates. But what can Mann’s encyclopedic account of European culture, fictionalized as his hero’s seven-year sojourn in a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, tell us today? This lecture offers an answer to that question by exploring three leading themes of the novel: morbidity, paternity, and eros.

**This presentation is full.**

Imagining Conservation and Deforestation

sspatterson — Thu, 18 Jul 2019 21:39:43 +0000

Presenter:

Victoria Saramago

Session 2

This talk investigates the growing rift between environments preserved in fictional works, and the changes these same environments face in real life. How do fictional works and other cultural objects dramatize, resist, and interfere with deforestation processes and conservation initiatives? How can the perception of pristine forests in Latin American be changed into the reality of deep ecological change? This session shows how novels have inspired the development of conservationist initiatives; how they have offered counterpoints to and dialogues with modernization projects and their environmental consequences; and how environmental aspects have composed the agendas of novelists as activists, politicians, and public intellectuals.

From Divine Scrutiny to Corporate Surveillance

sspatterson — Thu, 18 Jul 2019 21:33:37 +0000

Presenter:

Benjamin Saltzman

Session 2

Much as the idea of God as an all-knowing force shaped behavior in the early medieval period, we are now entering an era when a new form of mysterious omniscience—the global data economy collecting and harnessing human information in pervasive ways most of us are incapable of comprehending—could have a profoundly similar effect on human social behavior. By looking back to the early Middle Ages, this session discusses how we might be in a better position to understand the cultural and legal implications for the future of privacy.

**This presentation is full.**

Greece in Space and Time

sspatterson — Thu, 18 Jul 2019 21:27:00 +0000

Presenter:

Anastasia Giannakidou

The study of Greek has always been integral to the instructional and research mission of the University of Chicago. This presentation seeks to convey a vision on Greece as a multidimensional intellectual space which can inform, engage, and inspire contributions from a multitude of research areas, methodologies, and audiences. The panelists introduce the newly founded University of Chicago Center for Hellenic Studies, which aspires to become a forum for highly interdisciplinary and diverse works on Greece, and to offer innovative ways to cross-fertilize research across paradigms, fields, and frameworks.

Recovering Black Love in Film

sspatterson — Thu, 18 Jul 2019 21:25:20 +0000

Presenter:

Allyson Nadia Field

Session 2

In 2017, a hitherto lost film from 1898 was discovered. The film showed an African American couple laughing and embracing repeatedly in a naturalistic and joyful manner, a radical departure from the racist caricatures otherwise prevalent in early cinema. After some detective work, this presenter identified it as “Something Good—Negro Kiss,” directed by William Selig and starring well-known vaudeville performers Saint Suttle and Gertie Brown. Since then, the film has been named to the National Film Registry and received widespread attention from African American media celebrities, who were drawn to its moving depiction of Black love. This talk describes this process of rediscovery, and details its significance. “Something Good—Negro Kiss,” along with other rediscoveries of early films featuring African Americans, forces a systemic rethinking of the relationships between race, performance, and the emergence of American cinema. These films provide new insights about the cinematic expression of African American affection, and how it can serve as a powerful testament to Black humanity at a time of rampant misrepresentation. This forgotten archive speaks to problems of politics and cinematic representation that are relevant today.

Migration Across Genres

sspatterson — Thu, 18 Jul 2019 21:23:12 +0000

Presenter:

Migration is a human experience that is at the forefront of both the news and literature at the moment. How do writers take up ideas and experiences of migration, home, and displacement in different genres? What combinations of documentation and imagination grow into novels, reportage, memoirs, poetry? Join writers of fiction and nonfiction, who are also contributors to the University of Chicago’s Migration Stories Project, for this discussion of reading, writing, and teaching around migration.

Three Paradoxes of Pleasure

sspatterson — Thu, 18 Jul 2019 21:21:18 +0000

Presenter:

Benjamin Callard

Session 2

Pleasure is taken to be central to human life, both as a motive and as a justification. Indeed, some thinkers (psychological hedonists) have gone so far as to claim that pleasure is the only reason we ever do anything (Epicurus: “from pleasure we begin every act of choice and avoidance”); others (ethical hedonists) hold that pleasure is the only good, and that we ought to spend our days maximizing our own pleasure. This presenter discusses three contradictions in our everyday conception of pleasure, with a view to better understanding the role pleasure can and should occupy in our lives.