Humanities Day

GERMANIC STUDIES / COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / SOCIAL THOUGHT

David Wellbery

Who is Faust?

Mandel Hall, 1135 East 57th Street

Johann Wolfgang Goethe's drama "Faust" was written over a period of sixty years (ca. 1772-1832) and is arguably the supreme achievement of one of the greatest writers of the Romantic era. But what does this drama about a scholar- magician who makes a wager with the devil have to say to us today? Is the Faust myth still compelling for us in the twenty-first century? In this lecture, Professor David Wellbery discusses why philosophers from Hegel to Santayana and writers from Thomas Mann to Paul Valéry have considered Goethe's play to be such a profound statement about the human condition. He also examines features of the play that still confound scholars today. The quest for a unified interpretation of Goethe's masterpiece continues and Professor Wellbery will offer here his thoughts on how we can best approach the Faust drama today.

Keywords: "who is Faust" vs. "who was Faust"

CLASSICS

Shadi Bartsch

The Stoic Path to Happiness (or, An Ancient Philosophy on How to Live)

Social Science Research Building, Room 122, 1126 East 59th Street

Not every culture has thought individual happiness should be the aim of life, but for the ancient Greeks and Romans, attaining this elusive goal was the main purpose of practicing philosophy. What might be surprising to us is the way one school in particular—the Roman Stoics—proposed going about it. Were they out of touch with reality? Or all too sane? We’ll discuss their unique perspective on getting to your “happy place” and its feasibility for ordinary human beings (like us).

Keywords: 7 steps to achieve happiness; seemingly pessimistic but true optimism; Why Classics?--See how the study of the ancient texts changed through history; that's fascinating.

CINEMA & MEDIA STUDIES

Jennifer Wild

Screening of Jour de Fête

Film Studies Center, Cobb Lecture Hall, Room 307, 5811 South Ellis Avenue

In Jour de Fête (Holiday, France, 1949), director Jacques Tati stars in his first feature that he shot simultaneously in an experimental, obsolete color process and, as a precaution, black and white. Restored to full color in 1995, the film is Tati’s exploration of provincial French cultural traditions against post-WWII modernity, mechanization, and American “progress.” But it is also a highly self-reflexive text about the filmmaking process, daily life, the history of comic style, and the role vision plays in laughter.

Keywords: Tati, Chaplin, how technology shapes our life, color vs. black&white--ironically technical~

from: http://humanitiesday.uchicago.edu/program

Weekend #4

Hunchback @ Rockerfeller Chapel

Redmoon Theater's Hunchback

October 22-25 at 8 p.m.

Redmoon Theater prides itself on producing unexpected theater in unexpected spaces. Rockefeller's Gothic environs serve as the stage for Redmoon's Hunchback, based on Victor Hugo's classic novel Notre Dame de Paris, with unique shadow puppetry, elaborate masks, and outrageous acrobatics. The dramatic set changes throughout the performance as life-size boxes transform to reveal carnival characters, and scenes unfold in a giant pop-up book with miniature puppets.

from: http://rockefeller.uchicago.edu/

i thought i love you

i thought i had an enthusiasm for academics, and that enthusiasm could never be diminished for whatever.

i was wrong.

Lucy--the mother-daughter relation

Please ignore this thread for now. It's really too long... I'll re-work on this later today! And add questions!

I was inspired by Mika's question in class, and thought about the mother-daughter relation as depicted in the novel. But I didn't exactly look at it in a feminism perspective. To me, how the protagonist Lucy treats this relation presents itself as the very process that she reconciles with her past.

In the narrative, Lucy's mother stands for a past that Lucy strives to depart from, but somehow fails. As she says explicitly "my past was my mother" (90). Lucy has an ambiguous feeling towards her mother: "The times that I loved Mariah it was because she reminded me of my mother. The times that I did not love Mariah it was because she reminded me of my mother" (58). Later on when she relates her memories of her mother to Mariah, she bursts into tears, the only time she cries in the story. As Lucy recounts, she started hating her mother when her mother gave birth to another boy, and thus Lucy felt that she could no longer get enough love from her mother, even though Lucy considered herself as her mother's "only identical offspring" (130). In other words, she feels "betrayed" (127).

Once a professor from Trinidad told me that "everyone comes with burdens." (Well, actually she kind of illegally came.) I never really understood that remark till I read Lucy. Maybe for her, her mother's love and what's represented by that love constitute her burden. "I had come to see her love as a burden" (36). It is a burden not only because her mother would naturally remind her of the islands she left behind, but more importantly, Lucy has always been exprienced a forced identification with her mother. The force came from people like Maude, but more directly from Lucy's mother, as Lucy described her mother's love as "designed solely to make me into an echo of her" (36). The only way of fully become independent and find herself is to get rid of this burden. Lucy actually achieves that. When Maude visited and passed on the sad news from home, she told Lucy that she resembled her mother. " It is this very remark that has "the only thing that could keep [Lucy] alive, because in her response that she was not like her mother at all, Lucy finally rid herself of that forced identification, and meanwhile, her past.

This burden goes off, however, at a price. When she wrote that "I wish I could love someone so much that I would die from it," it's likely that this inability to love could be attributed to her twisted relation with her mother. In her early decision to rid herself of her mother, Lucy lost the chance to come to terms with that traumatic past.

Commodity Fetishism的要点究竟是什么呢？

只是社会关系的物质化还是和商品价值有联系呢？晕～～～

Marx

从12岁开始系统学习马克思主义哲学思想以及政治经济学理论：初中、高中、大学。学了3遍了都。然则却在美国开始第一次读马克思的原著，听正经的哲学家将马克思主义哲学。

很震撼。

先说感性认识：因为从小学习马克思主义。Marxism，对于我来说，除了cliche还是cliche。Marxism不仅仅象征了那些“共产主义必将取代资本主义”的bullshit，更与那些浪费在死记硬背考政治的宝贵青春死死相连，于是，我恨马克思主义。

可是M大师说了，Marx提出的不是政治理论，而是哲学理论。因此人们不能用the application of Marxism来衡量这个哲学理论的价值。于是我想：Ok, 我不能把CCP的没脑子怪罪到马克思大人生上。

再说理性认识：在论证人的本质是社会属性时，马克思特别论证了一下人和动物的区别。你觉得是什么呢？语言、智慧、思想？No, no, no~Consciousness对于马克思来讲，完全没什么大用。而对待这个词，也完全是把它看作一种社会的collective consciousness，而完全去除了individual consciousness的作用。

我觉得这个很有意思。不知道能不能作为从小受到马克思主义教育的我们比起个人主义为先的西方小孩儿，比较缺少个人意识的一种解释。

讲到工作使人异化这一部分，我觉得比较有意思的地方在于，马克思认为，worker在资本主义里，已经不是一个人了，而是一个slot，一个可以由任何人（甚至机器人）来占据的slot。而个体的差别也丝毫不会对这个角色的扮演产生任何影响。我好像以前从来没这么想过。嗯。

话说马克思比拉康读起来好很多。说话很有逻辑，头头是道。不过批判起Hegel以及Young Hegelian时也是很不留情面的呀。有趣有趣。

New formalism

Neoformalism

Keywords: David Bordwell, Russian Formalists, defamiliarization, story/= form of the story (narration?)

Bordwell has also been associated with a methodological approach known as neoformalism, although this approach has been more extensively written about by Kristin Thompson.^[2] Neoformalism is an approach to film analysis based on an observation first made by the literary theorists known as the Russian Formalists: that there is a distinction between a story and the form that conveys the story. For example, in a detective story, the murder comes at the beginning of the chain of events, but we find out the details about the murder at the end of the film, not the beginning. Much of neoformalism deals with the idea of 'defamiliarization' which is the general neoformalist term for the basic purpose of art in our lives: to show us familiar objects or concepts in a manner that encourages us to look at them in a new way.

Neoformalists reject many assumptions and methodologies made by other schools of film study, particularly hermeneutic (interpretive) approaches, among which he counts Lacanian psychoanalysis and certain variations of post-structuralism. In Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, Bordwell and co-editor Noël Carroll argue against these types of approaches, which they claim act as "Grand Theories" that use films to confirm pre-determined theoretical frameworks, rather than attempting to do middle-level research that can actually illuminate how films work. Bordwell and Carroll coined the term "SLAB theory" to refer to theories that use the ideas of Saussure, Lacan, Althusser, and/or Barthes. Many film scholars have criticized neoformalism, notably Slavoj Žižek, of whom Bordwell has himself been a long-time critic.^[3] Their criticism is generally not based on any internal incosistencies in neoformalism; rather, they argue that neoformalism is an overly limited approach that does not incorporate cultural approaches.