Philosophy » Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature and The Arts Events, 2019/2020

11/03 5pm-6:30pm: CRPLA Seminar: Joshua Landy (Stanford) - 'Kafka's Double Bind: Freedom and Predestination in The Trial'

Donna McIntyre — Mon, 02 Mar 2026 11:58:46 GMT

When: 5pm - 6:30pm, Wed, 11 Mar '26

Where: OC1.08 and on Teams

"Kafka’s Double Bind: Freedom and Predestination in The Trial"

Abstract: The Trial is delightfully mysterious in a whole host of ways, but none more than this: the protagonist is both responsible for what happens to him and not responsible for what happens to him. While the Court is cruel and capricious, there’s plenty of evidence that Josef K. is not entirely innocent either. So what’s going on here? The solution, on my proposal, involves an innovative take on Christian theology, in which we’re responsible for making our souls ready for Grace, but in which no amount of preparation will guarantee its arrival. This is not a “message” sent by the novel; it is, instead, a shape for thought, a framework through which even secular readers can inspect a host of phenomena, from love to art, from inquiry to vocation. In more ways than one, we are all in Kafka’s world.

In person in OC1.08 and on TeamsLink opens in a new window

26/02 4:30pm-6pm: IAS/CRPLA Seminar: Mario Telò (Berkeley), ‘Apuleius and the Right to Maim'

Donna McIntyre — Mon, 16 Feb 2026 10:13:24 GMT

When: 4:30pm - 6pm, Thu, 26 Feb '26

Where: IAS Seminar Room (C0.02 on ground floor of Zeeman Building)

IAS Visiting Fellow Mario Telò will give a paper drawing on part of his book, currently in production, on Edward Said (The Late Animal: Edward Said, Classicism, and the Limits of Humanism, under contract with Oxford University Press). What does it mean to read Apuleius’s Metamorphoses in the current global crisis? How do images of Palestinian donkeys—moribund yet carrying the burden of transporting people and food in Gaza—change our view of this novel, in which a human turned into donkey is subjected to unceasing physical abuse? This paper answers these and other questions by reading for and with the donkey’s beaten corpus. It considers the necropolitics of form, proposing that we read against the novel’s plot (against its futurist teleology) and focus on the constantly self-renewing present of abuse, and that we interpretively embrace the linguistic difficulty of the text, its burdensome untranslatability (which is disavowed by classicists’ obsession with linguistic mastery) in order to push against our own desire for the abuse to continue. Apuleius’s novel is placed in dialogue with Edward Said’s idea of “bristling” lateness, with Adorno’s notion of musical late style, with recent theoretical work on necropolitics and, especially, with Afropessimism. These approaches help us understand why it matters to read and re-read Apuleius now.

Join: https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/31723194861559?p=LOKsgGg4AI9dtTL4xALink opens in a new window

02/02 5pm-6:30pm: CRPLA Seminar: Murray Smith (Kent)

Donna McIntyre — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 14:37:50 GMT

When: 5pm - 6:30pm, Mon, 02 Feb '26

Where: S0.18

Murder Ballads: Nick Cave in Song, Soundscape, and Image

With a career stretching back to the late 70s, Nick Cave stands as one of the most enduring - and perhaps unlikely - figures in the landscape of popular culture, with a continuously evolving profile as a songwriter and bandleader, poet and novelist, screenwriter, composer, and actor. At the heart of Cave’s artistic persona lies the drama of religious belief: the interplay between conviction and doubt, sin, retribution, and forgiveness, vividly staged in the struggles of the characters populating his ‘Gothic Blues.’ But how are we to understand the image of fraught devotion presented in Cave’s work: as a straightforward expression of religious commitment, or as something more indirect and complex - a kind of make-belief rather than belief? In tackling this question, I’ll also consider some more general theoretical issues prompted by Cave’s career and oeuvre, including the collaborative nature of songwriting and filmmaking, and the intrinsically social character of the appreciation of music, film, and art.

Murray Smith is Professor of Philosophy, Art, and Film and Director of the Aesthetics Research CentreLink opens in a new window at the University of Kent. He was President of the Society for Cognitive Studies of the Moving ImageLink opens in a new window from 2014–17, and a Laurance S. Rockefeller Fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Human Values for 2017–18. He has published widely on film, art, and aesthetics. His publications include Film, Art, and the Third Culture: A Naturalized Aesthetics of FilmLink opens in a new window (Oxford University Press, 2017; revised paperback 2020), TrainspottingLink opens in a new window (BFI, revised edition 2021), and Engaging Characters: Fiction, Emotion, and the CinemaLink opens in a new window (Oxford University Press, revised edition 2022). Currently he is working on two Templeton-funded projects – ‘Art Opening Minds’ (2022-3) and ‘Character Engagement and Moral Understanding’ (2022-5) – as well as a new collection, Observing Film Art, devoted to the work of David Bordwell.

Here is the link to join online:

Microsoft Teams meeting:

https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/33464156556890?p=uTpCTFsNZQ1pZoCN2cLink opens in a new window

Meeting ID: 334 641 565 568 90

Passcode: SM2U2uU2

14/01 3:30pm-5pm: CRPLA Seminar: Michael Gardiner (Warwick) - ‘Why we embrace nuclear arsenals’

Donna McIntyre — Fri, 21 Nov 2025 16:05:49 GMT

When: 3:30pm - 5pm, Wed, 14 Jan '26

Where: S0.11 and on Teams

Teams access

28/10 5:30pm-7pm: CRPLA Seminar - Curie Virag (Warwick): 'Landscape and Longing: On the Perils of Gazing from a Height in Traditional China'

Donna McIntyre — Thu, 23 Oct 2025 08:39:34 GMT

When: 5:30pm - 7pm, Tue, 28 Oct '25

Where: S0.11 and on Teams

Abstract: A familiar trope in the Chinese literary tradition is that of climbing to a height, gazing out, and experiencing an outpouring of sadness, longing, and nostalgia. The earliest traces of this trope can be found in the Songs of Chu, a poetry anthology dating from around the 3rd century BCE, and it would remain a recurring theme in poetic writings thereafter. This theme of sadness evoked by gazing from a height has been explained psychologically, as a variation on the theme of unfulfilled yearning (sehnsucht) found in German Romanticism, or else as a symptom of the particularities of the traditional Chinese textual imagination. But it also bears examination as an aspect of the complex unfolding of other histories, including those of spatial organisation, cognition, and power. In my talk I will discuss how these histories were interwoven, drawing some conclusions about what the emotions bound up with seeing – and with failing to see – might reveal about the contentious domain of visual and epistemic authority in traditional China. Teams linkLink opens in a new window

11/11 4:30pm-6pm: CRPLA/Film & TV Seminar: Jason Mittell (Middlebury) - ‘Criticism and Self-Reflexivity in Video Essays’

Donna McIntyre — Fri, 17 Oct 2025 12:42:08 GMT

When: 4:30pm - 6pm, Tue, 11 Nov '25

Where: FAB0.21 (Cinema, Faculty of Arts Building)

14/10 5:30pm-7pm: CRPLA Seminar: Claire Anscomb (De Montfort) - 'Trust and Creativity in AI Art Practices'

Donna McIntyre — Mon, 06 Oct 2025 14:12:16 GMT

When: 5:30pm - 7pm, Tue, 14 Oct '25

Where: R2.41

Abstract: Rapid advances in visual forms of generative AI have prompted disagreement about the nature, ethics and integrity of the new practices arising from uses of the technology. Correspondingly, scepticism is routinely expressed towards their prospects as art. Addressing worries about the use of copyrighted materials as training data, I look to appropriation art to argue that the concern underpinning much of the scepticism is whether the creator has acted for what might be termed “artistic reasons”. I disentangle what it means to act for “artistic reasons” in these practices and propose that a lack of trust, compounded by social media platforms, in image-makers to act with a commitment to these threatens aesthetic discourse about these practices.

06/05 5:30pm-7pm: CRPLA Seminar: Professor Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad (Lancaster), 'All the Stage Is the World: Finding Emotion in the Sanskrit Aesthetics of Abhinavagupta'

Donna McIntyre — Mon, 07 Apr 2025 17:03:43 GMT

When: 5:30pm - 7pm, Tue, 06 May '25

Where: S0.18

25/02 5:30pm-7pm: Cancelled - CRPLA Seminar: Murray Smith (Kent)

Donna McIntyre — Wed, 19 Feb 2025 14:04:26 GMT

When: 5:30pm - 7pm, Tue, 25 Feb '25

Where: S0.20

We will re-schedule Professor Smith's talk at a later date.

22/01 4:30pm-5:45pm: Film & TV/ CRPLA Research Seminar: Catherine Constable (Warwick), 'Deceitful Mazes and Demonic Grounds: Gendered and Raced Sublimities in Under the Skin'

Donna McIntyre — Fri, 17 Jan 2025 15:21:23 GMT

When: 4:30pm - 5:45pm, Wed, 22 Jan '25

Where: FAB0.21 - Cinema

05/12 5:30pm-7pm: PKEP & CRPLA Collaborative Seminar - Paul Kottman (New School), 'Ethics and Contemporary Aesthetic Culture'

Donna McIntyre — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 09:05:15 GMT

When: 5:30pm - 7pm, Thu, 05 Dec '24

Where: S0.19

19/11 5:30pm-7pm: CRPLA Seminar: Miguel Beistegui (ICREA/UPF), 'Tragedy, Crisis, and the State of Exception: On Carl Schmitt’s Hamlet or Hecuba'

Donna McIntyre — Wed, 13 Nov 2024 07:46:23 GMT

When: 5:30pm - 7pm, Tue, 19 Nov '24

Where: S0.20

This talk responds to our historical moment, one defined by a state of chronic crisis and the rise or return of constitutional dictatorships and authoritarian, if not fascistic regimes, for which the state of exception is becoming an increasingly normalised technique of government. This situation calls for a philosophy, and specifically a critique, of crisis. One of my claims will be that when philosophy tries to think its own present, it does so through the schema (if not always the concept) of crisis, which it inherits from ancient medicine and/or tragedy. I will turn to Hamlet as a case study, and to Carl Schmitt’s “modern” and “sovereigntist” reading of Shakespeare’s play. For Schmitt, Hamlet reveals the essence of the political understood as the decision regarding the state of exception. Drawing on the thoughts of W. Benjamin, E. Levinas, and J. Derrida, I will end my talk by trying to rescue an altogether different conception of the exception, rooted not in sovereignty, or the excess of the iustitium in relation to the ius commune, but in justice as the haunting presence of the oppressed.

08/10 5:30pm-7pm: CRPLA Seminar: Emma Mason (Warwick), ‘Edith Stein's phenomenological mysticism’

Donna McIntyre — Mon, 30 Sep 2024 08:57:59 GMT

When: 5:30pm - 7pm, Tue, 08 Oct '24

Where: S0.20

Teams link here

30/04 5pm-7pm: CRPLA Seminar with Antal Bokay - 'Sophocles, Freud and Robert Wilson: A Spectacle of Our Inner Abyss'

Donna McIntyre — Fri, 26 Apr 2024 10:08:18 GMT

When: 5pm - 7pm, Tue, 30 Apr '24

Where: S0.18

27/02 5:30pm-7pm: CRPLA Online Seminar: Eleonore Stump (St Louis), 'Revelation and the Veridicality of Narratives'

Donna McIntyre — Mon, 19 Feb 2024 13:41:32 GMT

When: 5:30pm - 7pm, Tue, 27 Feb '24

This is an online event. Professor Stump will speak remotely. Follow this link to join the seminar:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88410605504Link opens in a new window

30/01 5:30pm-7pm: CRPLA Talk 'Narrative afterlife: translating lived experience into literary texts'

Donna McIntyre — Mon, 29 Jan 2024 11:35:42 GMT

When: 5:30pm - 7pm, Tue, 30 Jan '24

Where: R3.41

Caroline Summers (Warwick SMLC)

5:30pm - 7pm, Tue, 30 Jan '24 Location: Ramphal R3.41

Narrative afterlife: translating lived experience into literary texts

Literary studies is fond of the metaphor of an ‘afterlife’ to describe the enduring resonance and visibility of an author’s work long after they have died. Meanwhile, in Translation Studies, the term has a more specific meaning, rooted in Walter Benjamin’s exploration of the concept in his 1923 essay ‘The Task of the Translator’. Benjamin tells us that true translation is the point at which ‘a work, in its continuing life, has reached the age of its fame. […] In [translation], the original’s life achieves its constantly renewed, latest and most comprehensive development’. Thus, for Benjamin, translation is a form that embodies something not otherwise captured in the original text. The possibility of translation is something that both is inherent in the essence of an original and contributes to its transformational fulfilment of self: it is at once a remainder of the past and a projection of the future.

Building chiefly on the work of Bella Brodzki (2007), who frames the text as a ‘literary invigoration’ of memory, this paper reads the literary narrative as a ‘translation’ of experience and asks what Benjamin’s reading of afterlife might teach literary studies more broadly about the relationship between the stories we live and those that we read or write. Exploiting the intersection between literary narratology and a sociological understanding of experience as narrative, the paper draws on literary accounts of German Reunification (1989/90) to explore how these texts create a space in which the spectres of experience can enjoy a long afterlife.

In collaboration with the Warwick Workshop for Interdisciplinary German Studies

16/01 5:30pm-7pm: CRPLA Seminar: Michael Thomas (Amsterdam), 'Towards a Social Aesthetics of Race'

Donna McIntyre — Tue, 09 Jan 2024 15:09:10 GMT

When: 5:30pm - 7pm, Tue, 16 Jan '24

Where: R0.03 (Ramphal Building)

The works of W.E.B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, and Audre Lorde have been canonized as sources for anti-racist education in higher education. In this context, their works are commonly interpreted through the lens of an essentialist understanding of racialized experience and analyses of racism that bifurcate between racism as a psychological problem of ignorance or biases and as a structural problem generated by institutional powers that organize the actions of individuals. This lecture addresses this phenomenon by offering an interpretation of the works of Du Bois, Baldwin, and Lorde as models for Black thought built by translating their experiences into literary forms that reflect their own processes of shaping their mentality to intervene in racial modernity. It views these forms as grounded in an understanding of an aesthetic philosophy of race that theorizes how the racial fictions used to justify racist institutionalized habits draw upon and reinforce forms of racial sensibility that naturalize racist domination. I argue that attention to the forms of their work allow us to map their models of thought to develop forms of analyzing racism that resist the bifurcation into its psychological and structural dimensions through a focus on how these two levels interact in felt experience. In addition, their respective work on racial feeling provides a foundation for an aesthetic philosophy of race that synthesizes work in Black Aesthetics, Black Existentialist Phenomenology, Black Political Philosophy, and the Critical Philosophy of race through a theory of racial sensibility that offers epistemic and political alternatives beyond integrationist paradigms.

03/05 5pm-7pm: CANCELLED: German Studies/CRPLA Research Seminar with Lydia Goehr

Donna McIntyre — Tue, 02 May 2023 13:46:43 GMT

When: 5pm - 7pm, Wed, 03 May '23

Organisers: Antonia Hofstätter and Christine Achinger (German Studies/Modern Languages)

14/03 5:30pm-7pm: CRPLA Seminar: Michael Gardiner (Warwick ECLS) - 'Tanizaki Jun'ichirō, Kyoto, and the Transparency Society'

Donna McIntyre — Sun, 05 Feb 2023 07:48:51 GMT

When: 5:30pm - 7pm, Tue, 14 Mar '23

Where: A0.23 (Soc Sci)

31/01 5:30pm-7pm: CRPLA Seminar: Catherine Wheatley (KCL), 'Green means go. A brief cultural history of the green light'

Donna McIntyre — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 15:01:35 GMT

When: 5:30pm - 7pm, Tue, 31 Jan '23

Where: A0.23 (Soc Sci)

Abstract: Every small child knows that green means go. Green lights stand at crossings, intersections, and entrances, signaling permission to move forward, to continue our journey or embark upon a new one. So potent is their symbolism that the object has become a verb. To greenlight is to give the go-ahead, at least to certain persons and activities. Greenlighting a project ushers it into existence.

But where did they come from, these green lights, which originally signalled “caution” – or even “stop”? And how have they shaped the ways we think about matters of freedom, control and consent? Following a road lined with green lights taken from film, literature, TV and pop music, leading from the 19th century Houses of Parliament to contemporary Los Angeles, this paper asks where the green light has led us so far, and what its future projections might be.

Catherine Wheatley is Reader in Film and Visual Culture at King’s College London. She has published widely on questions pertaining to film, ethics and aesthetics. Catherine is the author of four monographs, including Michael Haneke’s Cinema: The Ethic of the Image (Oxford: Berghahn, 2009); the BFI Classics book on Caché (London: BFI Publishing, 2013), and Stanley Cavell and Film: Scepticism and Self-Reliance at the Cinema (London: Bloomsbury, 2018) Catherine also writes regularly for Sight & Sound magazine, and is a convenor of the BFI’s Philosophical Screens series.

17/01 5:30pm-7pm: CRPLA & WMA Seminar: Paul Smith (Warwick History of Art) - Cezanne, perception, autism: (not) putting the pieces together; Comments by Naomi Eilan (Philosophy)

Donna McIntyre — Thu, 12 Jan 2023 09:31:37 GMT

When: 5:30pm - 7pm, Tue, 17 Jan '23

Where: A0.23 (Soc Sci)

Respondent: Naomi Eilan. See Paul Smith's work on Art and PerceptionLink opens in a new window with the Behaviour, Brain and Society GRP.

06/12 5:30pm-7pm: CRPLA Seminar: Antonia Hofstätter (Warwick) – 'Falling Stars, Dying Planets, and the Limits of Natural Beauty: Reflections on Adorno’s Aesthetics in the Age of the Anthropocene'

Donna McIntyre — Mon, 05 Dec 2022 11:24:54 GMT

When: 5:30pm - 7pm, Tue, 06 Dec '22

Where: A0.23 (Soc Sci) and on Teams

Abstract:

Adorno’s aesthetics are currently undergoing a renaissance. The reason, it seems, lies not in their potential contribution to the analyses of contemporary artworks, but in Adorno’s unorthodox rethinking of the notion of natural beauty. In their resemblance to natural beauty, ‘successful’ artworks, Adorno claims, promise the end of the domination of nature. In thus providing an intellectual resource for conceptualizing non-instrumental modes of comportment toward the natural world, the appeal of ‘natural beauty’ to contemporary scholarship is hardly surprising. Taking my cue from Adorno’s historically situated approach, however, I would like to problematize this current intellectual trend. In my paper, I will first lend substance to Adorno’s notion of natural beauty by unpacking his reading of a passage in Beethoven’s piano sonata in D minor, Op.31 No. 2, in which a falling star seems to appear on the firmament. I will then move to Adorno’s reflections on the closing bars of Mahler’s Lied von der Erde, which, I contend, register an inversion of the Beethovenian perspective. My tracing of these two distinct aesthetic and metaphysical constellations aims not only at elucidating the complex concept of natural beauty but, crucially, at drawing out the historically contingent and shifting aesthetic experiences which they presuppose. Ultimately, I will raise the question whether the aesthetic experiences that informed Adorno’s approach to art and aesthetics – and which are indebted to the experience of beauty in nature – still resonate with us today.

Teams access: Click here to join the meetingLink opens in a new window

11/10 5:30pm-7pm: CRPLA Book Symposium on Karen Zumhagen-Yekplé, A Different Order of Difficulty: Literature after Wittgenstein

Donna McIntyre — Tue, 04 Oct 2022 09:11:09 GMT

When: 5:30pm - 7pm, Tue, 11 Oct '22

Where: A0.23 (Soc Sci) and on Teams

Hybrid event:

Join MS Teams meeting on your computer or mobile app

Click here to join the meeting

25/10 5:30pm-7pm: CRPLA Seminar: Monique Roelofs (Amsterdam) - Decoloniality beyond Transculturation: Memory, Fluids, and Life in Claudia Llosa’s The Milk of Sorrow

Donna McIntyre — Fri, 23 Sep 2022 07:39:16 GMT

When: 5:30pm - 7pm, Tue, 25 Oct '22

Where: A0.23 (Soc Sci)

Elaborating decolonial and intersectional methods, aesthetics has developed rich tools for tackling power differences. How to comprehend the cultural field if it is at once a site of heinous expropriation and violence and one of vital social and political possibility? This essay explores this question through Claudia Llosa’s film The Milk of Sorrow (La teta asustada) (2009). The film, I indicate, reworks racial, gendered, and colonial logics and supplants a model of transculturation, magical realism, and syncretism by a cultural vision of a web of multivalent, pluri-directional aesthetic promises and threats. Thus it presents a young indigenous woman as a contemporary decolonial actor who renders memory livable and opens up unforeseen futures for her shantytown and country. I signal the implications for the positioning of the decolonial feminist spectator or culture maker and for the notion of a decolonial aesthetics. Aesthetic existence at the intersection of oppression and liberation, although tremendously impure and troubled, functions as a bountiful font of feminist energy and sustenance and a site of communal caring and imagination.

24/05 5:30pm-7pm: CRPLA Symposium: Celebrating Beistegui and Poellner

Donna McIntyre — Wed, 04 May 2022 17:04:27 GMT

When: 5:30pm - 7pm, Tue, 24 May '22

Where: S0.20 / Teams

CRPLA will celebrate the Warwick careers of our long-time Philosophy colleagues, Professor Miguel Beistegui and Professor Peter Poellner, by enjoying talks from them, followed by discussion and a reception. There will be Teams access to the talks: Click here to join the meeting

Professor Beistegui will follow up on the CRPLA reading group that he led in Autumn 2020:

“On the Manifold Meaning of Crisis: Deviation, Exception, Contradiction, Extinction”

Professor Poellner will introduce us to his new book from Oxford UP:

'Précis of Value in Modernity'

15/03 5:30pm-7pm: CRPLA Seminar: Lorenzo Serini (Warwick), "Friedrich Nietzsche: Cheerful Thinker and Writer. A Reflection on Cheerfulness and the Style(s) of Philosophy"

Donna McIntyre — Sun, 13 Mar 2022 15:25:14 GMT

When: 5:30pm - 7pm, Tue, 15 Mar '22

Where: R0.14 (and on Teams)

The theme of cheerfulness in Nietzsche's philosophy has recently been at the centre of an important debate in the literature between Robert Pippin (2010) and Lanier Anderson and Rachel Cristy (2017). Engaging with these scholars, I will consider three major questions: (1) What is cheerfulness? (2) What is its value for philosophy? (3) Is Nietzsche a cheerful thinker and writer? If yes, in what sense? As insinuated by the title of this presentation, I propose that it is possible to argue that starting from his middle writings Nietzsche thinks and writes cheerfully in some of his works, including a number of significant ones.

In person and on Teams:

Click here to join the meetingLink opens in a new window

01/03 5:30pm-7pm: CRPLA Seminar: Victoria Rimell (Warwick), 'Philosophers' stone: enduring Niobe' (Note change to hybrid event!)

Donna McIntyre — Fri, 11 Feb 2022 18:27:22 GMT

When: 5:30pm - 7pm, Tue, 01 Mar '22

Where: S0.20

Niobe, daughter of Tantalus and wife of Amphion king of Thebes, the lesser-known point of comparison for Antigone in Sophocles’ tragedy, was the hyper-fertile mother of either 12 or 14 children. When she boasted of her maternal superiority to Leto, mother only of the twins Apollo and Diana/Artemis, Leto punished her by ordering Apollo and Artemis to murder all her offspring, before Niobe was whisked back to her homeland and transformed into a weeping rock on Mt Sipylus. As her story is told in its longest surviving narrative form, in book 6 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Niobe the weeping rock seems to epitomise the limit of the human where metamorphosis is located, Lacan’s ‘zone between two deaths’. In A. Benjamin’s response to Hegel’s Niobe in Towards a Relational Ontology, she is ‘that other who, in standing in stone on the outside, complicates assimilation insofar as she is positioned outside any structure of recognition’. In opposition to the Virgin Mary, who stands in Hegel for, as Benjamin puts it, ‘that specific logic of love’ in which ‘love is positioned by the necessity of its accession to universality in which reconciliation, completion, and self-sacrifice occur’ (131), Niobe is ‘impossible to love’, or renders impossible an ethics or politics based on love, defined as a being-at-one-with-the-other. In this paper, I take up the challenge that Benjamin seems both to acknowledge and elide, that of being alongside Niobe not (only) in her hubris, her rage and in the initial impact of her children’s murder, but in her final state of perpetual suffering. My reading will move between Homer, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, Ovid, and contemporary artworks, and between philosophy, psychoanalysis and trauma theory.

For Teams access: Click here to join the meetingLink opens in a new window

01/02 5:30pm-7pm: CRPLA Seminar: Daniel Abrahams (Glasgow), 'Taming the culture war: A theory of why people fight over humour'

Donna McIntyre — Tue, 25 Jan 2022 17:51:56 GMT

When: 5:30pm - 7pm, Tue, 01 Feb '22

Abstract: In one way or another, humour seems to frequently play a central role in culture war battles. Comedians like Hannah Gadsby and Dave Chappelle are presented as central figures. Commentators argue over which politicians are actually funny, and which comedies ‘belong’ to which parties. People at least seem to expect satire to have a meaningful political effect. Rather than engage culture war issues on their own terms, what I want to do is engage at a prior point and ask what is it about humour that makes humour and humourists contested in the first place.

My main contention will be that humour is seen as valuable and values can confer legitimacy. This leads to values becoming goods so that parties can hoard sources of legitimacy. When values confer legitimacy, values become goods.What I have to show, then, is what it is about humour that leads people to see it as conferring legitimacy. Legitimacy means right to rule, so I want to tease out the different ways that humour can be taken to confer that right to rule.

Microsoft Teams meeting

Click here to join the meeting

18/01 5:30pm-7pm: CRPLA Seminar: Amy De'Ath (KCL), 'Hidden Abodes and Inner Bonds: Literary Study and Marxist-Feminism'

Donna McIntyre — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 21:48:19 GMT

When: 5:30pm - 7pm, Tue, 18 Jan '22

This talk presents an argument that Marxism can provide much more capacious and flexible tools for feminist analysis than has previously been allowed for, and that the concepts and methods developed in value-theoretical readings of Marx that first emerged in Germany in the 1960s are particularly well suited to reading gendered literary texts. My approach draws in particular on the idea of “real abstraction,” a Marxian concept germane to thinking from the perspective of the whole. Far from helping us to diagnose a case of interpellation by capital’s narratives, value theory and Marxist-feminism can work in the service of a feminist literary criticism attuned to the highly ambivalent and dialectical ways in which capitalist subjects might “identify.” I offer a brief reading of a poem by Kay Gabriel to suggest that feminist poetry gives us ways to think capitalist abstraction not as sublime other, but as the social synthesis of an exchange in toto that gathers, institutes, and deploys difference wherever it goes.

Link to "You Say Wife" by Kay Gabriel:

https://verse.press/poem/you-say-wife-170396036961114241

23/11 5:30pm-7pm: CRPLA Seminar: James MacDowell (Warwick): 'YouTube Aesthetics and "YouTube Art"’ (on Zoom)

Donna McIntyre — Mon, 22 Nov 2021 23:27:03 GMT

When: 5:30pm - 7pm, Tue, 23 Nov '21

Today in film, TV and media studies, the first questions scholars ask about any new audiovisual technology or form are unlikely to focus on issues of aesthetics. For instance, among the many questions academics have thus far asked about YouTube, it is unsurprising that few have involved a concept that has become increasingly side-lined in media and cultural studies generally: arthood. Is YouTube facilitating new artistic genres? What expressive properties must, for example, a vlog possess in order to be profitably interpreted and evaluated as an audiovisual artwork? Yet on YouTube itself, such questions are increasingly being contemplated by creators themselves, giving rise to some lively meta-critical debates, addressing the question: “What does 'YouTube art’ look like?” Relating such discussions to art-definitional debates in philosophical aesthetics and film theory, this talk explores what might be involved in approaching (some) YouTube videos not simply aesthetically, but as artworks, and why doing so might matter.

Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89049676921?pwd=ZHlBNFVpczJJdmExcU83bHFDSngzUT09