CofC Aesthetics Work Group

Roundtable discussion with Jonathan Neufeld (Philosophy), Simon Lewis (English), and Ornaith O’Dowd (Philosophy)

In 1997, J. M. Coetzee’s delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values that would become his novella The Lives of Animals. Typically, the Tanner lectures are philosophical essays presenting arguments on specific ethical or political problems or concepts. Instead of presenting the usual set of arguments, Coetzee delivered two lectures that were two chapters from a novella. The novella’s central character, Elizabeth Costello, herself delivers two lectures on humans’ mistreatment animals (to put it mildly). While she presents arguments and counterarguments, as do other characters in the story, these arguments do not simply stand as arguments—they are also, of course, literary devices that constitute the book as the work of art that it is. Is Coetzee really just making an argument, and just adding color to it with the story? Or does the fact that it is a piece of literature change the status of the arguments in it? Why might we make certain kinds of ethical claims in artistic form rather than in some other form (the form of philosophical argument typically found in the Tanner Lectures, for example)? Is there something about talking about the lives of animals, in particular, that calls for a literary, rather than a philosophical response?

February 14, 12:15-1:30PM Alumni Center in the School of EHHP

Narrative Ethics & The Lives of Animals(pdf flier)

This is nicely appropriate to our discussion of performance and the relationship between the arts (and just interesting on its own):

The Halsey Institute will be hosting a series of poetry readings during the January to March 2013 exhibition, Lesley Dill’s Poetic Visions: From Shimmer to Sister Gertrude Morgan. The Tongues Aflame poetry series is design to be a response to Dill’s fusion of language and image. All readings are free and open to the public. They will begin at 7:00pm and take place in the Halsey Institute galleries. A reception will follow each reading.

Co-sponsored by the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art, the College of Charleston’s Department of English, Poetry Society of South Carolina and Crazyhorse.

We will discuss Chapter 1 (“The Nature of Artistic Performance”) and Chapter 2 (“The Classical Paradigm I: The Nature of the Performable Work”) from David Davies’s Philosophy of the Performing Arts. If you need a copy of the reading, contact Jonathan Neufeld in the Philosophy Department.

This coming Monday (February 4), Thomas S. Grey of Stanford University will give a lecture on Wagner’s Ring cycle that examines the themes of “environmental catastrophe” and “ecological consciousness” as they emerge from the reception history of the work. The lecture is sponsored by the Departments of Music and German and Slavic Studies. For more information, please see below or the attached flyer.

The lecture is free and open to the public and will be held in Towell Library (in The Cicstern Yard) from 5pm to 6pm, February 4.

Paper Abstract:

Modern stagings of Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung since Chéreau’s celebrated Bayreuth centennial production (1976-1980) have repeatedly suggested the relation of the natural environment to the agency of mankind (including gods and dwarves) as an interpretive key to the whole cycle. Specifically, Alberich’s theft of the symbolic “Rhine Gold” at the beginning of the cycle and his forging from it the magical talisman of world-domination, the Ring, is presented as an allegory of the human exploitation of natural resources in the modern era for industrial, military, or other economic and political ends. In such readings, the gesture of apocalypse that concludes the cycle, Brünnhilde’s valedictory “immolation scene,” resonates with various historical and potential forms of environmental catastrophe.

This paper interrogates the conceptual foundations of this reading of the Ring cycle in the work’s text and music, and in the reception history especially since George Bernard Shaw’s The Perfect Wagnerite (1898). Wagner’s Ring, while obviously grounded in pre-environmentalist attitudes toward nature, actively participates in the construction of an ecological consciousness in Romantic-era artistic discourse contemporaneous with that of the American transcendentalists and other key figures in this history.

Thomas S. Grey is Professor of Musicology at Stanford University. He is the author of Wagner’s Musical Prose: Texts and Contexts (Cambridge, 1995) and editor and co-author of Richard Wagner: The Flying Dutchman (Cambridge, 2000), The Cambridge Companion to Wagner (Cambridge, 2008), and Richard Wagner and His World (Princeton, 2009). Other current interests include music and visual culture, music and the “Gothic,” and American musical theater.

Link to PDF flyer: Thomas S. Grey, Musicology Lecture[1]

Welcome to the AWG blog. The Aesthetics Work Group is an interdisciplinary group of professors and students who meet periodically to discuss theoretical works about and in the arts. The work is often (usually) works in progress by members of AWG, but we also read current articles and books that are relevant to the interests of the group. AWG has also co-sponsored visits by distinguished scholars from other institutions. Topics in the past have included participatory art (visiting faculty), aesthetic disobedience (faculty), the politics of form in Tibetan poetry (student), cover records as social commentary (visiting faculty), metaphor and metaphysics in Zhuangzi (student), ethical and emotional expression in music (faculty), environmental aesthetics (visiting faculty), and the transgender gaze in film (faculty). It is led by Jonathan Neufeld in the philosophy department and is regularly attended by students and faculty from German, English, Religious Studies, Music, Art, Art History, Political Science, and Psychology.

I will post meetings and events of potential group interest here. I have proposed that we have our first meeting of Spring 2013 on either Tuesday 2/5 at 3:15PM or Wednesday, 2/6 at 5PM. Please let me know which works better for you.

I wish I could edit the font in the blog header. Alas, we are stuck with serifs, for now.