CCA SYMPOSIUM
March 20, 2024
Formalism and Its Discontents, An Interdisciplinary Conference |
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Recent turns in the humanities, including affect theory, the digital humanities, and surface reading, have often been understood as moving past a “hermeneutics of suspicion.” If affect theory examines immediate, automatic, or emotional reactions to a text, it puts less stock in the analytic decoding of that text. Much of the digital humanities depends on that reading which computers can execute, and computers (the argument goes) compute rather than interpret. Surface reading seeks not to disclose hidden meaning, but to attend to evident meaning, examining that which is perceptible and apprehensible in the surface of the text. In music studies and art history, hermeneutical criticism and iconology have also given way to approaches that explore the various modes in which we visualize objects and experience performances. In rejecting the hermeneutic notion that meaning must be excavated, all of these methodologies assert that meaning in art and other cultural objects can manifest itself immediately. In other words, content lies on the outside, and form is no ideal abstraction but something easily within reach.
Keynote SpeakersCaroline Levine, Professor of English and David and Kathleen Ryan Professor of Humanities, Cornell UniversityCaroline Levine has spent her career asking how and why the humanities and the arts matter, especially in democratic societies. She argues for the understanding of forms and structures as crucial to understanding links between art and society. She is the author of three books, The Serious Pleasures of Suspense: Victorian Realism and Narrative Doubt (2003, winner of the Perkins Prize for the best book in narrative studies), Provoking Democracy: Why We Need the Arts (2007), and Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015, named one of Flavorwire’s “10 Must-Read Academic Books of 2015”). She is currently the nineteenth-century editor for the Norton Anthology of World Literature and has written on topics ranging from formalist theory to Victorian poetry and from television serials to academic freedom.
Seth Brodsky, Assistant Professor of Music and the Humanities, University of ChicagoA musicologist by training, Seth's research focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century music and the intersection of music and philosophy, critical theory, and psychoanalysis. He is the author of From 1989, or European Music and the Modernist Unconscious (University of California Press, 2017).
Roundtable Participants
Conference LocationAlexander Library Teleconference Lecture Hall
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Events sponsored by the Center for Cultural Analysis are free and open to the public, unless specifically noted | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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