You are cordially invited to this talk hosted by the Department of English Language and Literature. The event will be held on Zoom.<\/p>\n
Title: \u201cThe Ideal of Conversation in Fiction, Philosophy and Interdisciplinary Criticism\u201d
\nDr. Erin Greer (University of Texas, Dallas)<\/p>\n
Date and time: Thursday, Oct 10, 2024, 06:00 PM<\/p>\n
This is an online seminar. To obtain event details please send a message to department.<\/p>\n
ABSTRACT: The ideal of \u2018conversation\u2019 recurs in modern thought as a symbol and practice deemed central to ethics, democratic politics and thinking itself. This talk\u2014which articulates core claims of my first book, Fiction, Philosophy and the Ideal of Conversation (Edinburgh UP, 2023)\u2014surveys the promiscuous, alluring career of \u2018conversation\u2019, then spotlights its invocation in responses to skeptical doubt about the reliability of our understandings of \u2018reality.\u2019 I argue that there are striking correspondences in the uses of \u2018conversation\u2019 made in exemplary works of fiction, as well as in the ethical thought of Stanley Cavell and the democratic theory of Hannah Arendt. According to this outlook, conversation is an aesthetic performance. It does not merely take place between speakers in a world, but instead generates their shared world through an iterative relay between constraint and openness, normativity and improvisational freedom. These features of conversation are key to its suitability for addressing ethical and political concerns provoked by skepticism, from uncertainty about how to respond to \u2018other minds\u2019 we cannot know, to the demands of democratic politics unmoored from shared \u2018truths\u2019 and \u2018facts.\u2019 I further argue that a clarified understanding of this shared outlook on conversation yields a world-affirming model for interdisciplinary criticism. The talk concludes by proposing this account of interdisciplinary, conversational criticism as a route forward for contemporary literary studies and a timely resources for overlapping political, ethical, and disciplinary concerns.<\/p>\n
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE: Erin Elizabeth Greer is an associate professor of literature at the University of Texas at Dallas. Her writing and teaching bring together post-Romantic British and Anglophone fiction, ordinary language philosophy, ethical and political theory, feminist thought, and critical new media studies. Her first book, Fiction, Philosophy and the Ideal of Conversation, was published in 2023 by Edinburgh University Press. She\u2019s in early stages of a new project interweaving studies of works of fiction and philosophy that seek to reimagine \u2018justice\u2019 to meet challenges of the 21st century, in which the fates of human and nonhuman entities are entangled in conditions that strain inherited moral, political and legal frameworks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
You are cordially invited to this talk hosted by the Department of English Language and Literature. The event will be held on Zoom. Title: \u201cThe Ideal of Conversation in Fiction, Philosophy and Interdisciplinary Criticism\u201d Dr. Erin Greer (University of Texas, Dallas) Date and time: Thursday, Oct 10, 2024, 06:00 PM [\u2026] <\/p>\n