PROJECTS
Literature, Arts, and Humanities Curriculum
Do poems take up truths? Can a novel be a way of thinking about something? Can you learn—about yourself, about others, about the world—from a photograph or film? In what way is literature a part of our imaginative lives, and in what way is it an entry into what is worldbound? The courses I am developing explore such conversations and connections between literature, art, film, and worlds of ideas. They include Arts of Thinking, The Literature of Identity, Art and Ideas, Writers of the Ordinary, and Writing and Everyday Life.
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 well beyond the confines of one course.
What We Are in Literature and Art
What We Are in Literature and Art begins from a simple observation: literature and art hand 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 like poems, novels, plays, paintings, and photographs give us evidence of the lives of persons. They ask: What are we?
My book considers how aesthetic works pose this longest-standing question and become entangled in our philosophical conversations about personhood. It is written for a broad audience interested in the relationship between literature and philosophy. Through sequences of reflective fragments, the book weaves through a diverse constellation of works in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The reflections zigzag through poetry (William Wordsworth to Gwendolyn Brooks), novels (Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf), drama (Henrik Ibsen to Samuel Beckett), visual art (J. M. W. Turner to Jeff Wall), and philosophy (Immanuel Kant to Ludwig Wittgenstein). What We are in Literature and Art is an experiment in philosophical reading.
Women and the Struggle to Think
This essay 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 conceptual history of women’s exclusion from worlds of ideas.
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?