Humanities Day 2012

As part of UChicago's 34th annual Humanities Day on October 20, 2012, David Wray, Associate Professor in Classics and Director of the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities (MAPH), and Hilary Strang, Deputy Director of MAPH, gave a reading of Dante's complex, self-referential book of poetry and prose, La Vita Nuova. This text is taught as part of the MAPH Core course Foundations of Interpretive Theory and is a fascinating meditation on what it means to write, read, and desire. Learn more about the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities at ➡ Subscribe: About #UChicago: Since its founding in 1890, the University of Chicago has been a destination for rigorous inquiry and field-defining research.This transformative academic experience empowers students and scholarsto challenge conventional thinking in pursuit of original ideas. #UChicago on the Web: Home: News: Facebook: Twitter: Instagram: University of Chicago on YouTube: /uchicago *** ACCESSIBILITY: If you experience any technical d

Jessica Stockholder, Professor and Chair of the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Chicago, shares images of her work and discusses its relationship to context. Her presentation focuses particularly on the "Color Jam" installation that was on view on the corner of State and Adams this past summer, describing the process of its construction and how its meaning is in part derived from its location. She shares images of other works that relate to this one and gives an overview on how she arrived at this way of working. Jessica Stockholder works at the intersection of painting with sculpture. Her work sometimes incorporates the architecture in which it has been conceived, blanketing the floor, scaling walls and ceiling, even spilling out of windows, through doors, and into the surrounding landscape. Her work is energetic, cacophonous, idiosyncratic, and formal - tempering chaos with control. She orchestrates an intersection of pictorial and physical experience, probing how mean

How is the digital changing the way that humanities scholars look at the past? This forum showcases several ongoing projects by faculty that utilize network visualization, text-mining, geo-spatial mapping, and other digital techniques to augment and/or reframe more traditional lines of humanistic inquiry. How have these techniques changed the kinds of questions that scholars are asking? How should they be integrated with established methods of interpretation? Presenters consider these issues as they exhibit their work on network analysis and the sociology of literary modernism and on the sonic landscapes of Renaissance Florence. Hoyt Long is Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations and the College at the University of Chicago. He is currently working on a project that considers postal technologies of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Japan as forms of "new media." He is focusing on the ways these technologies impacted practices of writing—

One feature of human language that is crucial to its role in communication is the systematic relation between linguistic symbols (words, phrases, sentences) and the information they express in different contexts. For example, the sentence, "The Quad Club is currently serving tripe for lunch" conveys the same information about the world at the time of utterance no matter who utters it. As a result, if Anna says "The Quad Club is currently serving tripe for lunch," and Beatrice says "No, the Quad Club is not currently serving tripe for lunch," then clearly one must be wrong, and we can simply look at the menu to discover the facts. However, the information content of many kinds of linguistic expressions appears to vary according to the perspective, attitudes, or subjective viewpoint of the individual who utters them. If Anna says "The Quad Club tripe is delicious," and Beatrice responds, "No, the Quad Club tripe is not delicious," we can no longer say with confidence that one must be rig

Bob Dylan's voice is at once one of the most recognizable and most polarizing sounds in Western music, simultaneously iconic and inscrutable. More even than his words, Dylan's voice is the most potent material signifier of his mercurial persona. As an early Columbia Records advertising campaign put it, "Nobody sings Dylan like Dylan." But does he even sing like himself? Over the last five decades Dylan has adopted a bewildering range of voices, from laconic dust-bowl drawl to smooth country croon, from gospel shout to guttural Delta-blues bark. What is Bob Dylan's "real voice"? And why does this problematic question seem to have such urgency in his case? This talk considers these questions by surveying Dylan's diverse voices, illustrating some of their differences through spectrographic imaging and speculating on their stylistic and physiological origins. The talk also considers the ways in which his voices act as agents of meaning and identity, bringing his celebrated words—and equall

According to Aristotle and Aquinas, human beings are essentially rational animals. According to psychoanalysis, much of our mental lives are taken up with unconscious mental activity. The usual way of understanding unconscious mental activity has it that the unconscious is either a sea of irrationality or an aspect of mental life so distant from the operations of reason as to be a-rational—a view that tends to treat manifestations of unconscious activity as significantly pathological. This talk explores a strong sense in which reason and the unconscious are not contraries, even though unconscious mental activity does not bear the hallmarks of self-conscious thought or feeling. Candace Vogler is the David B. and Clara E. Stern Professor and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Chicago. She is the author of John Stuart Mill's Deliberative Landscape: An Essay in Moral Psychology (Routledge, 2001) and Reasonably Vicious (Harvard, 2002). She has also published numerous

The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice are two of Shakespeare's most controversial and least loved (though very often performed) plays. While both of them are, by genre and intention, comedies, they often do not strike modern and contemporary audiences as such. The aim of this talk is not to dismiss concerns with misogyny and anti-Semitism as historically inappropriate or anachronistic, but to see what difference to our judgments some historical contextualizing and close reading can make. The plays will look rather different after these operations are performed on them, though they may still remain—as they probably should—potentially disturbing. Richard Strier is the Frank L. Sulzberger Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English and the College and an associate member of the Divinity School at the University of Chicago. He edits the journal, Modern Philology. His life-long project is to bring together two modes of literary study that have traditionally bee