Upcoming Events
Literature and Philosophy Workshop
Upcoming Events | 2024-2025 | University of Chicago
Download the Literature and Philosophy Workshop Fall Schedule
All are welcome to the workshop.
Please email Jessie Alperin (alperinj@uchicago.edu) if you have any questions or require accommodations to participate.
October 17 | Campus North 154 | 5:15 PM
“Violent Naïveté: Reading Adorno’s Homer Excursus with Schiller”
Rachel Wong, PhD Candidate, Social Thought & Germanic Studies
Respondent: Andrei Pop
Allan and Jean Frumkin Professor, Committee on Social Thought, Art History, and the College
Abstract
This article uncovers the overlooked influence of Friedrich Schiller’s On Naïve and Sentimentalist Poetry (1795-96) on Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947). Although the sentimentalizing ideals of Weimar classicism were explicitly and repeatedly rejected by Adorno, his conception of the utopian function of the artwork and his attention to the dialectic between myth and epic bear striking structural affinities with Schiller’s interpretation of Homer. Drawing on “On Epic Naïveté” (1943), “Is Art Lighthearted?” (1967) and Aesthetic Theory (1970), the article argues that Schiller’s concept of the naïve—an anticipated reconciliation of autonomous nature with human reason—is recuperated by Adorno in order to refigure Homer’s Odyssey as an epic of “second nature.” By projecting the attainment of naïveté onto the endpoint of history, and not its origin, Adorno reconfigures literary history as a domain of experience that is both autonomous and participates in social change.
Rachel Wong is a joint doctoral candidate in Social Thought and Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago. Originally trained in Classics and East Asian Media Studies, she brings a transdisciplinary approach to her current work on classical German aesthetics and its contemporary afterlives. Her dissertation, entitled “Aesthetic Reconciliation: Configuring Art and History from Schiller to the New Left,” retraces the reception of Friedrich Schiller’s aesthetic theory in thinkers of the Frankfurt School and the New Left, including Mann’s novel Doktor Faustus and Rancière’s film criticism in Fables cinématographiques. Beyond the dissertation, she is working on a project that explores the relevance of Siegfried Kracauer’s “Mass Ornament” essay for contemporary aesthetics, especially in the context of mass spectacles in post-socialist China.
Link to paper will be available a week before the workshop.
“Ludwig Hohl’s Elemental Poetics of Action”
Margareta Ingrid Christian, Associate Professor, Germanic Studies
Respondent: Nicholas Andes, PhD Student, Germanic Studies
Abstract
This talk is about Ludwig Hohl’s “philosophical novella,” Ascent (Die Bergfahrt). Ludwig Hohl (1904-1980) has been called the enfant terrible of Swiss literature. Considered “the cult author of Switzerland” and a “writer’s writer,” (if not, as Tess Lewis puts, “a writer’s writer’s writer”) his refractory work is not well known. Ascent was written primarily in the 1920s but it was reworked until it was published in 1975. The English translation came out in 2012. In my paper, I suggest that Hohl develops a poetics of elemental action. First, in the sense that the elements – like rock and water – figure different modes of being active (stillness / movement, inertia / vivacity, depression / hyperactivity). Hohl’s novella is interested in charting such encounters between different modalities of action and the text uses the elements to think through these encounters as it asks: What is an ideal form of animation in life? This means both: what is the right kind of physical movement but also what constitutes a proper vita activa? Second, an elemental poetics of action understands “elemental” in the sense of a “basic constituent” (Grundbestandteil). Hohl develops a decompositional poetics of action in which he takes action apart into its smallest constituents, its smallest action elements (e.g., the grand act of climbing a mountain consists, among other small actions, of wriggling your feet to stay awake on a perilous cliff).