to read our newsletter. - The School of Criticism and Theory - Cornell ...

IN THeory 2 Fall 20132014 Summer SessionJune 15 - July 25Reflections on SCT 20132014 Faculty6-Week SeminarsSimon CritchleyHans Jonas Professor in Philosophy,New School for Social Research“Tragedy As Philosophy”Mark B. N. HansenProfessor, Program in Literature, Program inMedia Arts and Sciences, Department of Art,Art History and Visual Studies,Duke University“Media Between Data and Experience”Sianne NgaiProfessor of English, Stanford University“The Contemporary”Annelise RilesJack G. Clarke ’52 Professor of Law in Far EastLegal Studies, Professor of Anthropology, andDirector, Clarke Program in East Asian Law andCulture, Cornell University“Theorizing the Gift: Law, Markets, Love”Mini-SeminarsLeela GandhiProfessor of English, University of Chicago“Moral Imperfection: An Ethics for Democracy”Ursula K. HeiseProfessor, Department of English/Institute ofthe Environment and Sustainability,University of California, Los Angeles“BioCities: Urban Ecology and the CulturalImagination”Christopher NewfieldProfessor of Literature and American Studies,English Department, University of California,Santa Barbara“Critical Theory and the Post-CapitalistUniversity”Tricia RoseDirector, Center for the Study of Race andEthnicity in America, and Professor ofAfricana Studies, Brown University“Black Popular Culture in the Age ofColor-Blindness and Mass CulturalCommodification”Applications from faculty membersand advanced graduate students atuniversities worldwide will bereviewed beginning February 1, 2014.For online application and programinformation:http://sct.cornell.edu/Perhaps the two most famousvisual representations ofscholarly inquiry—the eerilysimilar paintings titled TheGeographer and The Astronomer(both. c. 1668) by Johannes Vermeer—portray a solitary male figure immersedin intellectual activity. Confined in aclosed room with a singular source oflight, the scholar turns his eyes not onthe phenomena he is analyzing, but ontheir visual representations—a nauticalmap and a celestial globe. In this model—which Jonathan Crary identifies as theepistemological model of the cameraobscura—academic work results fromthe separation of bodily sensations andexperiences from the ever-changingphenomena of the studied field. In orderto understand the world, the geographerand astronomer have to withdrawfrom it.Although Ithaca (as well as the elevatedlocation of Cornell University’s campus)may seem like a site of withdrawal, aftera few days it became obvious that thestyle of conducting academic work atSCT had nothing to do with a solitarypursuit of knowledge. It was refreshingto see the different ways you couldperform academic work and its variousmanifestations. I was fascinated by thevariety of styles of asking questions—ranging from the short, innocent, andyet incisive, through the slightly messybut all the more brilliant, to the long,fully developed and ending with sharpwittedpunch lines. Different manners ofnote taking revealed the variety of waysin which one could absorb and registerknowledge—while some of us speedtypedthrough lectures, others wrotedown the main arguments in capitalizedletters, yet others used complicated notetakingprograms that allowed them toillustrate their notes with doodles. Sometook no notes at all, placing perhaps toomuch trust in the plasticity of their brains,to invoke the concept of one of the guestfaculty members at this year’s SCT—Catherine Malabou. It quickly becameobvious that every faculty member andparticipant brought with her a deeplydistinctive way of thinking, a uniquearchive of academic texts and culturalreferences as well as a particular way ofpresenting it. I took pleasure sharing myarchive with others, adding new indexcards to my own, was fascinated by themultiplicity of the forms of academicperformance, and enjoyed reflecting onnew rhetorical styles.Faculty and participants at the SCT registration picnic, A.D. White House garden