Thursday, April 21, 2016
2:00 PM
Grucci Room, 102 Burrowes Building

Co-sponsored by the Department of Philosophy

On Thursday, April 21, 2016, Tom Eyers (Duquesne University) delivered a lecture titled “Formalism in a Positivist Age.”

Event flyer

Description of presentation

Taking up certain aspects of my 2014 article “The Perils of the ‘Digital Humanities’: New Positivisms and the Fate of Literary Theory,” this talk will address the complex relationship between various, overlapping strands of contemporary literary theory, Continental philosophy, and the digital humanities. What is emerging, I will argue, is a contest for the meaning of one of the oldest and most inexact of critical terms — “form.” What might a “speculative” formalism look like, were it to contest the tacit positivism that underpins much that comes under the banner of both the “new formalism” and the digital humanities? How might historical and political questions be integrated into such an approach without neglecting the generative modulations of form at the level of the line? Finally, what are the general prospects for criticism today, formalist or otherwise, given the reinvigoration of positivist and anti-critical lines of thought?

Speaker bio

Tom Eyers is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Duquesne University and Assistant Editor of the journal boundary 2: international journal of literature and culture. He is the author of three books: Lacan and the Concept of the Real (Palgrave, 2012), Post-Rationalism: Psychoanalysis, Epistemology and Marxism in Postwar France (Bloomsbury, 2013/2015), and Speculative Formalism: Literature, Theory, and the Critical Present (Northwestern University Press, forthcoming in 2016).

Description, from publisher’s Web site

This is the first book in English to explore in detail the genesis and consequences of Lacan’s concept of the “Real,” providing readers with an invaluable key to one of the most influential ideas of modern times.

“The Lacanian concept of the Real is itself a case of the real — a frustrating deadlock, combining a series of opposite determinations: lack, without lack; impossible, unavoidable; outside the symbolic, the effect of a symbolic deadlock… Tom Eyers does the impossible: he provides a systematic outline of the concept of the Real in all its dimensions, from its genesis and transformations to its clinical and philosophical implications. His book is thus simply inescapable for anyone who wants to find a way in the labyrinth of Lacanian theory and of modern thought itself. It is simply something one will have to have at his side all the time while reading hundreds of other books.” —Slavoj Žižek

Description, from publisher’s Web site

Post-Rationalism takes the experimental journal of psychoanalysis and philosophy, Cahiers pour l’Analyse, as its main source. Established by students of Louis Althusser in 1966, the journal has rarely figured in the literature, although it contained the first published work of authors now famous in contemporary critical thought, including Alain Badiou, Jean-Claude Milner, Luce Irigaray, André Green and Jacques-Alain Miller. The Cahiers served as a testing ground for the combination of diverse intellectual sources indicative of the period, including the influential reinvention of Freud and Marx undertaken by Lacan and Althusser, and the earlier post-rationalist philosophy of science pioneered by Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem and Alexandre Koyré.

This book is a wide-ranging analysis of the intellectual foundations of structuralism, re-connecting the work of young post-Lacanian and post-Althusserian theorists with their predecessors in French philosophy of science. Tom Eyers provides an important corrective to standard histories of the period, focussing on the ways in which French epistemological writing of the 1930s and 1940s — especially that of Bachelard and Canguilhem — laid the ground for the emergence of structuralism in the 1950s and 1960s, thus questioning the standard historical narrative that posits structuralism as emerging chiefly in reaction to phenomenology and existentialism.

Other resources

Interview about Post-Rationalism: Psychoanalysis, Epistemology and Marxism in Postwar France at Bloomsbury Philosophy News

Interview about Lacan and the Concept of the Real in 3:AM Magazine

“Badiou among the Poets,” boundary 2 43.2 (2016)

“The Perils of the ‘Digital Humanities’: New Positivisms and the Fate of Literary Theory,” Postmodern Culture 23.2 (January 2013)

Thursday, March 31, 2016
3:30 PM
Grucci Room, 102 Burrowes Building

On Thursday, March 31, 2016, Matt Tierney (Penn State) delivered a lecture titled “Critical Cyberculture in the Large World House.”

Event flyer

Description of presentation

In our rejoinders to the advance of technology, we often assume that ours is an unprecedented historical conjuncture. This talk, however, will consider a prior conjuncture, in the late 1960s, when some poets and activists responded with mixed feelings toward automation, nuclear proliferation, and the apparent cohesion of an electronic “global village.” Setting these novelties in context, a range of writers — from Martin Luther King Jr. and Shulamith Firestone to W.S. Merwin and Thomas Merton to James Laughlin and Philip José Farmer — instead imagined how poetry and collective life might survive the sudden arrival of unfamiliar machines. This presentation is an excerpt from a book in progress titled “A World of Incomparables: Interruptions of Communicative Globalism.”

Speaker bio

Matt Tierney is Assistant Professor of English at Penn State, University Park. He holds the Ph.D. in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University and is the author of What Lies Between: Void Aesthetics and Postwar Post-Politics (Rowman & Littlefield International, 2015), along with articles in the journals Cultural Critique, Camera Obscura, and Image and Narrative. He recently co-edited a special issue of the journal Postmodern Culture titled “Medium and Mediation” and is at work on a book to be titled “A World of Incomparables: Interruptions of Communicative Globalism.”

Description, from publisher’s Web site

This book explores the emergence of void aesthetics in fiction, film, and theory in the postwar period in order to assert the disruptive opportunity this aesthetic offers to the post-political present.

By what aesthetic practice might post-politics be disrupted? Now is a moment that many believe has become post-racial, post-national, post-queer, and post-feminist. This belief is reaffirmed by recent events in the politics of diminished expectations, especially in the United States. What Lies Between illustrates how today’s discourse repeats the post-politics of an earlier time. In the aftermath of World War II, both Communism and Fascism were no longer considered acceptable, political extremes appeared exhausted, and consensus appeared dominant. Then, unlike today, this consensus met a formal challenge, a disruption in the shape of a generative and negativist aesthetic figure — the void. What Lies Between explores fiction, film, and theory from this period that disrupted consensual and technocratic rhetorics with formal experimentation. It seeks to develop an aesthetic rebellion that is still relevant, and indeed vital, in the positivist present.

Other resources

Publisher’s Web site for What Lies Between: Void Aesthetics and Postwar Post-Politics

“Introduction: Medium and Mediation,” Postmodern Culture 25.2 (January 2015)

Update: this event has been canceled (2015-12-01)

Thursday, December 3, 2015
4:00 PM
127 Moore Building

Co-sponsored by the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

On December 3, 2015, Dr. Anna Everett (University of California, Santa Barbara) will join us to deliver a lecture titled “Gaming Matters: Playing with Black Womyn MPCs.”

Event flyer

Description of presentation

Many humanities disciplines are finally taking critical games studies seriously at the same time that the gaming industrial complex (GIC), as I call it, reaches new heights of cultural influence and power, even supplanting films’ dominance of people’s increasingly precious leisure time in the 21st century global economy. This multimedia talk takes up the fact that a paradigm shift of sorts has occurred in the procedural rhetorics and gameplay structures of videogames over the last two decades where race and gender in games intersect, though the changes are not nearly enough. At issue here is understanding how gamers now negotiate and amplify the joy and pain of their videogame fandom quite publicly and enthusiastically as game characters of color are gaining some new visibility as optional play (OP) and must play characters (MPC). As powerful narrative agents in action-adventure, open-world and first- and third-person-shooter genres in mainstream, casual and online gaming spaces (including networked games on Xbox Live), black women as MPCs in successful mainstream gaming franchises and action-adventure game brands are redefining the gaming experience in terms of 21st-century multicultural, multiracial heroic character ideals. This illustrated talk explores an emergent benefit/threat dialectic in gaming’s tepid embrace of black women and girls as sheroes of play in popular game titles. Online fora, video games journalism, and recent scholarship on intersectionalities in gaming industry theory and praxis will be at the center of this presentation. This analysis is not meant to tamp down the excitement of black girl gamers and fangirls, and others savoring this overdue moment, but to interject a bit of critical caution: “be careful what you wish for!”

Speaker bio

Dr. Anna Everett is Professor of Film, Television and New Media Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). She was Interim/Acting Associate Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity and Academic Policy; former Chair of the UCSB Department of Film and Media Studies; and former Director of the UCSB Center for Black Studies. Dr. Everett is a two-time recipient of the Fulbright Senior Scholar Award (2005, 2007), among other honors and awards. Her many publications include the books Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909-1949; Learning Race and Ethnicity: Youth and Digital Media (for the MacArthur Foundation’s series on Digital Media, Youth, and Learning), New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality, AfroGeeks: Beyond the Digital Divide, Digital Diaspora: A Race for Cyberspace, and Pretty People: Movie Stars of the 1990s. She is finishing a new book on President Obama, social media culture and the Where U @ Generation.

Other resources

• Returning the Gaze: A Genealogy of Black Film Criticism, 1909-1949
• Learning Race and Ethnicity: Youth and Digital Media
• New Media: Theories and Practices of Digitextuality
• AfroGeeks: Beyond the Digital Divide
• Digital Diaspora: A Race for Cyberspace
• Pretty People: Movie Stars of the 1990s