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Contents Introduction..........................................................................................6 PAL/FHI Mellon Seminar: The Other.......................................10 PAL for Graduate Students..........................................................14 Co-Sponsored Events.....................................................................16 Young Scholars Workshop............................................................18 Writing is Thinking 2017-18........................................................20 Other Events......................................................................................22 Duke-Stanford Annual Graduate Student Conference ...24 PAL Graduate Students Certificate..........................................26 PAL Visiting Scholars......................................................................28 PAL Steering Committee..............................................................30 PAL People..........................................................................................31
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In Memoriam
Stanley Cavell (1926-2018)
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Toril Moi Director of PAL
As I sat down to write this overview of last year’s activities at PAL, the message about Stanley Cavell’s death arrived. Stanley Cavell was one of the greatest American philosophers of the twentieth century. Without his pioneering work on the boundaries between literature, theater, film and philosophy PAL would not exist. In the fall of 2009, he came to Duke to give PAL’s inaugural lecture. His spirit has been with us ever since, not just in the many events we have devoted to ordinary language philosophy, and to Wittgenstein, but in all our events and workshops exploring the way different art forms think. And Stanley Cavell’s spirit also inspired our long-standing commitment to the initiatives and events that we gather under the rubric Writing Is Thinking. In the coming academic year, PAL will organize a number of event to honor Stanley Cavell’s memory. 2017-2018 saw both continuation and change at PAL. First the new: We inaugurated a new annual graduate student conference collaboration with the Philosophy and Literature Initiative at Stanford University. The conference is co-organized by graduate students from Duke and Stanford. In May 2018, Duke students went to Stanford. In Spring 2019, Stanford students will come to Duke. The collaboration was the brainchild of my colleagues Joshua Landy and R. Lanier Anderson at Stanford. We think graduate students in both places will benefit hugely from being exposed to our congenial, yet different intellectual styles. This initiative is in keeping with PAL’s
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Introduction
efforts to be a community-building resource for graduate students in relevant fields at Duke, and to connect them with their peers elsewhere. But we also continued two traditions that have been with us since the start. The 5th biannual Young Scholars Workshop focused on the question of character in literature, and featured two of the leading literary scholars in the US today, Rita Felski (UVa) and Amanda Anderson (Brown), and three specially invited graduate students: Hannah Haejin Kim (Stanford), Greg Chase (Boston U.) and Jon Najarian (Boston U.). As usual the workshop filled up with students and faculty from across the disciplines. We also continued our explorations of writing, this time in collaboration with a Working Group sponsored by the English department. Our question for the year was: What can academics learn from non-fiction writers? The group’s inquiries culminated in a wonderful workshop with James Wood, head literary critic for The New Yorker, and Claire Messud, one of the US’s leading novelists today. We will continue work on writing in the coming years. Finally, some excellent news. Thanks to the generosity of the Provost’s Office, PAL has been funded for another three years, until the Summer of 2021! As usual, we invite you to check PAL’s website dukepal.org and subscribe to our listserv philartslit@duke.edu to find out what we are up to.
Toril Moi Director of PAL
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Annual Report 2017-2018
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2017-18
The Other: Interdisciplinary Explorations David Palumbo-Liu Stanford University Friday | September 8 | 2017 | 10 a.m. - 3 p.m. How useful is the concept of the Other in the humanities today? “Where do we stand when we name the other?” A lecture by David Palumbo-Liu
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Duke Faculty Panel: miriam cooke (AMES) Ranjana Khanna (English & Literature) Priscilla Wald (English & Women’s Studies) David Wong (Philosophy)
Duke Graduate Student Reponses: Nora Nunn (English) Renée Ragin (Literature) Taylor Ross (Religion) Heather Wallace (Philosophy)
PAL/FHI Mellon Seminar: The Other
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Embodiment, Embeddness, Kindness: Conditions of Reading and Living Together in Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello Yi-Ping Ong Johns Hopkins University Thursday | Sept 21 | 2017 | 4:30-6:30pm How do we come to share an ethical outlook with others? Is it possible to teach ethics? What does it mean to live with others, when we do not (always) inhabit the same world? Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello engages these profound ethical questions in and through its very form.
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PAL/FHI Mellon Seminar: The Other
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2015-16
Fall Kickoff: Graduate Student Happy Hour Tuesday | Sep 12 | 2017 | 5pm We began the year with drinks and hors d’oeuvres to announce PAL’s 2017-2018 offerings for graduate students, including our PAL Certificate Courses and the 2018 Young Scholars Workshop
PAL Papers Two PAL Certificate Papers by Duke Graduate Students Thursday | Oct 19 | 2017 | 5pm
In Search of an Übersicht: Wittgenstein, Western Marxism, and the Future of Criticism Justin Mitchell English PAL Certificate Candidate
Skepticism and Knowledge in Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener” Myles Oldershaw English PAL Certificate Candidate .
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PAL for Graduate Students
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2015-16
The Natural Method: Ethics, Mind, and Self Themes from the work of Owen Flanagan Sep 28-29 | 2017 This two-day conference celebrated the work of Owen Flanagan, James B. Duke Professor of Philosophy and member of the PAL Steering Committee Proudly Co-Sponsored by PAL Also sponsored by the Duke Department of Philosophy; Trinity College of Arts and Sciences; Center for Cognitive Neuroscince; Center for Comparative Philosophy; Kenan Institute for Ethics; and MIT Press
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Co-Sponsored Events
THE NATURAL METHOD ETHICS, MIND & SELF THEMES FROM THE WORK OF OWEN FLANAGAN PATRICIA CHURCHLAND PEGGY DESAUTELS GILLIAN EINSTEIN GEORGE GRAHAM P. J. IVANHOE ROBERT N. MCCAULEY ROBERT VAN GULICK DAVID WONG
SEPTEMBER 28-29, 2017
ORGANIZED BY EDDY NAHMIAS THOMAS POLGER WENQING ZHAO SPONSORED BY THE DEPARTMENT OF PHILOSOPHY, TRINITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES, CENTER FOR COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE, CENTER FOR PHILOSOPHY, ARTS AND LITERATURE, CENTER FOR COMPARATIVE PHILOSOPHY, KENAN INSTITUTE FOR ETHICS, and THE MIT PRESS
philosophy.duke.edu Cortical Sunburst, ©2013 Greg A. Dunn, used by permission
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2017-18
Young Scholars Workshop 2018
Character: Identification, Ethics, Ontology
with Amanda Anderson (Brown) and Rita Felski (University of Virginia) March 22, 2018: Public Keynote Lectures
Thinking with Characters
A lecture by Amanda Anderson
Identifying with Characters A lecture by Rita Felski
March 23, 2019: Closed Workshop for Participants
Afternoon workshops with Amanda Anderson and Rita Felski Is There Any Point in Warning Literary Critics Against Treating Characters as if They Were Real People? A paper presentation by Toril Moi Responses from invited Young Scholars: Jon Najarian, Boston University Greg Chase, Boston University Hannah Haejiin Kim, Stanford University
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The workshop gathered 14 local scholars (faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students).
Young Scholars Workshop
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2017-18
Working Group The English Department generously sponsored a working group on “Writing and Academic Work” for 2017/18, which met every 2-3 weeks. The working group spent the year reading and discussing non-academic texts in fields close to our own (literary criticism, philosophy, etc.), workshopping their own writing, and sponsoring a number of talks and workshops. PAL co-sponsored the working group’s final event, with the leading critic James Wood of The New Yorker and Claire Messud, one of America’s foremost novelists.
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Writing is Thinking 2017-18 Write Now! On Fiction and Criticism Claire Messud and James Wood April 3-4 | 2018 April 3, 2018, 4:30pm Reception and Public Readings April 4, 2018, 12:00pm Conversation with the Authors Hosted by the Duke English Department, and co-sponsored by Humantities Futures Initiative @FHI, PAL, and So and So Books
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Macchia versus Memory? Outlining Inner Images Nicola Suthor Yale University Monday | April 16 2018 | 6pm Introduced by
Neil McWilliam Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Art and Art History
Professor Suthor examined the generative processes of drawing practice in seventeenth-century Europe through reference to Renaissance art theory and contemporary conceptions of the role of volition and the suspension of memory in the act of sketching. The lecture centered on a close reading of a sketch by Rembrandt of Christ carrying the Cross (c. 1630) from the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin.
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Other Events
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2017-18
Interiorities: Reflecting Subjectivity and Sociality Apr 27-28 | 2018 | Stanford University Sponsored by the Philosophy and Literature Initiative at Stanford and by the Center for Philosophy, Arts, and Literature at Duke University; organized by graduate students from Duke University and Stanford University Keynote Speakers: Yi-Ping Ong (Johns Hopkins) Karla Oeler (Stanford) “Interiorities: Reflecting Subjectivity and Sociality� brought together doctoral students and scholars from both coasts to reflect on how social life conditions the formation, exposure, and expression of selfhood, while paying close attention to the irreducible features of subjective experience. Duke Graduate Student Organizers: Kevin Spencer, English Robert Tate, English Devin Buckley, English
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Duke-Stanford Annual Graduate Student Conference Duke Graduate Student Participants:
Feeling as Moral Life: Coleridge’s Phenomenology of Affect in Aids to Reflection Devin Buckley – English
J. M. Coetzee: Thinking Outside the Computational Model James Draney – English
’Learning to See’ the Image (Weltinnenraum): On Lyric Imagination and Phenomenology Interiority in Rilke’sThe Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge John Jolly – German
Endgames: Interiority and Communication Breakdown in Thomas Bernhard’s The Lime Works Christoph Schmitz – German
Disowning Action in Macbeth Kevin Spencer – English
Ovidian Reflections amid Westworld’s Bicameral Mind Robert Tate – English
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PAL Graduate Student Certificate The PAL Graduate Certificate seeks to connect the study of specific works of art and specific art forms (e.g., literature, music, theater, painting, film) to questions concerning creativity, the nature of specific art forms, the relationship between knowledge and art, and between ethics and aesthetics. The Certificate aims to make students conversant with philosophical reflections on literature and the arts. The Certificate seeks to foster an understanding of the historical nature of different art forms, and of aesthetics and philosophy, and to encourage exploration of philosophy, art and literature from different historical periods.
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PAL Graduate Student Certificate Certificate Courses 2017-18 Fall 2017
Spring 2018
Wittgenstein and Literary Theory Toril Moi
Opera: From Entertainment to Philosophy Jacqueline Waeber
Comparative Modernism across the Arts Corina Stan and Gabriel Richard
Shakespeare, Tragedy, Ethics Sarah Beckwith
Film-philosophers/Film-makers Markos Hadjioannou Stimmung and Film Aesthetics Inga Pollmann (UNC) Rilke and Phenomenology, 1900-1926 Thomas Pfau
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Ingeborg Löfgren Department of Literature Uppsala University, Sweden
Ingeborg Löfgren (Department of Literature, Uppsala University, Sweden) was a visiting scholar at Duke University’s Literature Program and PAL, September through November 2017. She earned her Ph.D. in Literature at Uppsala University in 2015, with a dissertation on skepticism and literary theory: Interpretive Skepticism: Stanley Cavell, New Criticism, and Literary Interpretation. Currently she is initiating a project on the literary philosophy of the Swedish activist and novelist Sara Lidman (1923-2004). In January 2018, she began a 3-year postdoc project at Uppsala University, entitled Con-Science and The Whole: Sara Lidman’s Literary Philosophy. Her research interests are modernism, ordinary language philosophy and criticism (OLP and OLC), interpretive theory, the intersection of philosophy and literature.
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PAL Visiting Scholars
Tobias Skiveren PhD-fellow at the Scandinavian Department Aarhus University, Denmark
Tobias Skiveren was a visiting scholar at PAL February through May 2018. He is a PhD-fellow at the Scandinavian Department, Aarhus University, Denmark. As a literary critic, he has written extensively on (contemporary) Danish literature and is part of a current wave of scholars trying to transfer new materialist philosophy, ecocriticism, and affect theory to the field of Danish literary criticism. His Ph.D.-project engages the methodological implications that arise when adopting new theoretical ideas of affect and materiality to the study of literature.
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PAL Steering Committee
PAL Steering Committee
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Sarah Beckwith
Owen Flanagan
Neil McWilliam
Professor of English and Theater Studies; Chair of Theater Studies
James B. Duke Professor of Philosophy; Professor of Neurobiology
Walter H. Annenberg Professor of Art History
Toril Moi
Thomas Pfau
Jacqueline Waeber
James B. Duke Professor of Literature and Romance Studies; Professor of Philosophy, English and Theater studies
Alice Mary Baldwin Professor and Eads Family Professor of English and German; DGS-German Studies
Associate Professor of Music
PAL People PAL Graduate Students Assistants
Heather Wallace Associate Director
Filippo Screpanti
Assistant & Graphic Design
Matia Guardabasco
PAL’s Staff Support in the English Department
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108 Friedl Building Box 90670 1316 Campus Drive Durham, NC 27708
palinfo@duke.edu www.dukepal.org