PROJECTS

What We Are in Literature and Art

My book What We Are in Literature and Art is an experiment in philosophical reading. It begins from a simple observation: literature and art give us complex material evidence of the experience of people. This is not a mystical, naive, or hopelessly old-fashioned claim about aesthetic works. The experience that literature and art let us touch, to be sure, is wildly and irreducibly complex. But it is an important idea that creative works—poems, novels, plays, paintings, photographs—give us evidence of the lives of persons. What are we? This book considers how aesthetic works pose this longest-standing question and become entangled in our philosophical conversations about personhood.

The book takes a nontraditional form, one that exemplifies its commitment to reading as philosophical questioning and continual philosophical curiosity. Through sequences of reflective fragments or segments, What We Are in Literature and Art weaves through a diverse constellation of works in poetry, fiction, drama, painting, and photography in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Each fragment or segment pursues the philosophical pull and import of works of literature and art on the topic of personhood. Jane Austen, for example, probes ethics and the shape of what we are; J. M. W. Turner interrogates the perspectives of persons; Emily Dickinson becomes a key thinker of metaphysics and subjectivity; Langston Hughes a central theorist of expression in the arts; Elizabeth Bishop a natural ontologist; and Thomas Struth a philosopher of aesthetic experience. The array of figures with which the book engages—from William Wordsworth to Gwendolyn Brooks, Henrik Ibsen to Samuel Beckett, Henri Matisse to Jeff Wall, Immanuel Kant to Ludwig Wittgenstein—welcomes a wide range of readers into its critical terrain.

What We Are in Literature and Art deliberately engages a neglected corner of aesthetics. It practices what might be called aesthetics inside out, that is, thinking with literature and art—rather than about them. The book makes space for art and literature—emphatically—to do the thinking. What do they have to say? How do we elicit that saying? The readings in the book underscore how literature and art engage with ideas without positing propositions and entangle themselves in worlds of thought.

Humanities Curriculum and Pedagogy

Humanities pedagogy and innovation in humanities curriculum are at the heart of all of my perennial interests—with an increasing urgency. I have a special interest in courses in the tradition of the liberal arts for students in the early stages of their college careers—that is, courses in writing, critical thinking, and thoughtful interpretation that lay the foundation for reflective engagement with the world beyond the confines of the classroom. I am also especially interested in working with diverse student populations, especially first-generation students, students from historically marginalized or disenfranchised groups, and nontraditional students.

Women and the Struggle to Think

This research project is about the history of women’s lives as improbable homes and unlikely hosts of thinking. It is about the history of why being a woman or being perceived to be what is called a woman makes it difficult to be someone who is understood to think—that is, someone who is understood to reflect broadly and with vital energy on important topics. This project explores the everyday history and the conceptual history of women’s exclusion from worlds of ideas. It also asks why women’s lives, undeniably, have functioned as piercing threats to theories, philosophies, and abstract ideas about existence.

In this project I explore portrayals of women in literature, art, film, photography, and philosophy as either incapacitated or disinclined thinkers—that is, persons who might have or could have thought but in the end do not think. These persons—women—do other things instead and are susceptible to being seduced away from thought. They engage in activities that are apparently, and importantly, exclusive of the ability to think: they fall into reverie, observe others, attend to others, labor, toil, worry, wonder, laugh, cry, cook, read things, make things, see things, and in general get caught up—wholly, irreversibly, defenselessly—in something other than thinking. I am interested in how this unsupportable history of intellectual engagement with life inflects what we think “thinking” is anyway.

Why do the activities associated with womanhood seem to discourage this activity—suddenly strange—of thinking? What do we demand of figures who think that we much less readily grant or afford women? Why is women’s often more intimate or entangled knowledge of the infrastructure of daily life an affront to the philosopher’s desire to know life? What have been the costs of bracketing her forms of knowing as actual knowledge?