Podcast: High Theory

Alienation

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In this episode Kim talks with Mustafa Yavas about Alienation.

Mustafa quotes Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. He also references Albert Camus’ books The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus, and Charlie Chaplin’s film Modern Times. Towards the end of the episode, he mentions Bertrand Russell’s 1930 article “In Praise of Idleness.”

For listeners interested in reading more on alienation, he recommends Herbert Marcuse’s Eros and Civilization; David Graeber’s Bullshit Jobs, and Rahel Jaeggi’s Alienation. He also suggests three great movies that dwell on the subject: Maren Ade’s Toni Erdmann; Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa, and Tolga Karacelik’s Toll Booth.

Mustafa is a postdoctoral scholar in sociology at NYU Abu Dhabi, where he works on work! He is writing a book called White Collar Blues about the transnational Turkish middle class, for which he has recently completed a brilliant book proposal (editors take note!). His previous research focused on boundary processes in social, economic, and political settings, including status homophily in social networks, residential segregation by income, and collective identity formation in social movements.

This week’s image is a 1920 painting of Sisyphus at his futile labor by Franz Stuck. Available on Wikimedia Commons.

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Love as Critique

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In this episode Saronik talks to Manasvin Rajagopalan about critical possibilities in varied literary ideations of love.

Manasvin mentions Hannah Arendt’s concept of love as destruction, the concepts of Puram and Akam in classical Tamil poetics, Moliere’s comedies, Plato’s Symposium, the Hebrew Bible, Sappho’s poetry, the story of Shakuntala, and The Aeneid.

Manasvin is a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at UC Davis , where he writes about questions of identity and world building in Early Modern French and Tamil literature.

Image: An eighteenth century representation of the Dhanasri Ragini held by The Art Institute of Chicago. Public domain artwork.

Music used in promotional material: “The Flute in a Barrel” by Sandro Marinoni and Stefano Roncarolo.

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Witnessing

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Ulrich Baer talks to Kim about the process and phenomenon of witnessing, which creates collective acknowledgement, understanding, and responsibility for trauma. Among other works, he talks about Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub’s book Testimony. In his discussion of witnessing with respect to our present political moment, he talks about the murder of George Floyd and the following global reckoning.

Ulrich Baer is University Professor at New York University where he teaches literature and photography, and writes frequently about photography, art, literature, and other subjects. A graduate of Harvard and Yale, he has been awarded Guggenheim, Getty, and Humboldt fellowship.

Image: Detail from ‘Girl with a Yellow Bird’ by Hale Woodruff.

Music used in promotional material: “Leaving for Chicago” by Rest You Sleeping Giant.

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Heterotopia

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Kim speaks with Amanda Caleb about Michel Foucault’s concept of heterotopia.

Amanda says that the classic definition of “heterotopia” is found in Foucault’s article “Of Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias” (Architecture /Mouvement/Continuité, October, 1984). She also mentions The Birth of the Clinic.

In comparison to Foucault’s heterotopia, we talk a bit about Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of the carnivalesque and the chronotope.

If you’re interested in reading more about heterotopias, check out Amanda’s article: “Contested Spaces: The Heterotopias of the Victorian Sickroom” in Humanities vol. 8 no. 2 (April 2019).

Amanda is a professor of English and Medical and Health Humanities at Misericordia University. She also runs a super cool podcast called the Health Humanist. She was kind enough to interview me about a crazy 1978 medical satire called House of God back in November 2020.

This week’s image is Gustave Caillebotte’s Les jardiners (1875). Below is a map of the “Gardens and Pleasure Grounds Baltimore Argyleshire” from The Art & Craft of Garden Making by Thomas Hayton Mawson (London : B.T. Batsford, 1900). We’re feeling gardens this week.

Music used in promotional material: ‘Floating Panther’ by Outrun

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9/11 Family Novel

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Saronik chats with Jay Shelat about the 9/11 family novel. They discuss how the attacks (re)dynamized constructions and perceptions of family.

Jay refers to a few 9/11 family novels, including Burnt Shadows by Kamila Shamsie, The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid, Netherland by Joseph O’Neill, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer. If you want a list of more 9/11 family novels, feel free to ask. A special shoutout to Sarah Wasserman’s The Death of Things: Ephemera and the American Novel for ideas about the state of print culture.

Jay is a PhD candidate at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, where he is writing his dissertation about 9/11 and the family. His work can be found or is forthcoming in Texas Studies in Literature and Language, Critic, ASAP/J, and elsewhere. You can follow him on Twitter @jshelat1.

Image: photo taken by Ben Hider at the 9/11 Memorial Museum.

Music used in promotional material: Adagio (mother nature’s sleep) by Dee Yan-Kay

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Dissensus

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Kim talks with Gina about Jacques Rancière’s concept of dissensus.

Gina refers to several major works of philosophy including:
Jacques Rancière’s Dissensus
Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement
Jacques Derrida’s The Truth In Painting
Plato’s Republic
She also takes a small dig at Althusser, in the spirit of Rancière

Gina is a PhD candidate at NYU and an amazing teacher. She studies medieval literature and critical theory. She loves Theodor Adorno and really really hates the dialectic.

This week’s image is an illuminated miniature from a 15th C manuscript held by the British Museum, depicting the “Debate for the Soul.”

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Deterritorialization

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Saronik talks to Shweta Krishnan, doctoral candidate in Anthropology at George Washington University.

She speaks about how she uses Giles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of deterritorialization in her work on the emergent religious discourse of Donyipolo in the Indian states of Arunachal Pradesh and Assam.

Shweta thinks with the geological metaphors and mythological stories of the Mising and Adi tribes, and brings them into conversation with Deleuze and others. Donyipolo (sometimes referred to as Donyipoloism) is an emergent discursive formation shaped by the efforts of the Adi, the Mising and other Tani tribes to revive, reform and improvise their ancestral ethical practices since the 1980s. Donyipolo is the name given to an omniscient and omnipotent force that catalyzes the formation of the material world in Tani cosmologies. Shweta examines how the revivalists reimagine religiosity in and through their efforts to rebuild their relationship with Donyipolo.

Image: photo taken by Shweta on the way to Majuli from Jorhat by boat.

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Eugenics

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Kim talks with Mercedes Trigos about eugenics.

Mercedes references Francis Galton, who coined the term, preimplantation genetic profiling, and the failures of our ordinary progress narratives.

If you are interested in reading more about the subject check out:
Alexandra Minna Stern, Eugenic Nation: Faults and Frontiers of Better Breeding in Modern America, University of California Press, 2015
Daniel Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics: Genetics and the Uses of Human Heredity, Harvard UP, 1998
Nancy Leys Stepan, “The Hour of Eugenics” Race, Gender, and Nation in Latin America, Cornell UP, 1991

Kim and Mercedes organized an panel on “Eugenics and the Body” at the Modern Language Association Convention in January 2021. If you attended the conference and held onto your registration ID, you can watch a video of the panel on the MLA website, and learn more about the history and legacy of eugenic thought.

Mercedes is a sixth-year PhD candidate at New York University’s English Department. Her work focuses on racialization, sex, and sexuality in Chicanx and Latinx studies. 

This week’s image is the root system of the Dicotyledoneae Asteraceae herb. For the Deleuze scholars and botanists in the room, it is an example of root phenotypic plasticity: a primary root which becomes tap root and lateral roots. This image is in the public domain.

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Computational Creativity

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Saronik talks to Tuhin Chakrabarty about the creative processes of Artificial Intelligence, what we can expect from it, and how to keep the results fair.

(Saronik messes up the word GPT-3 twice!)

Reading List:

GPT3 Creativity

When AI Falls in Love, GPT-3 Creative Fiction, Are You Ready for NaNoWriMo?

Papers/Posts on Computational Creativity

Generating Similes Like a Pro, Content Planning for Neural Story Generation, Reverse, Retrieve, and Rank for Sarcasm Generation , The Comedian is in the Machine

Music and Art

Google Magenta

Creating Image from Text

Dall-E, Creative Text Generation

Bias in Language Models

Stereoset measures Racism, Sexism, and other Forms of Bias in AI Language Models, Towards Controllable Biases in Language Generation, The Woman worked as a Babysitter, Timnit Gebru’s thread about Google firing her, RealToxicityPrompts, Measuring and Reducing Gendered Correlations in Pre-trained Models

Bias in Poetry

Investigating Societal Biases in a Poetry Composition System

AI Poetry

Google’s New AI Helps You Write Poetry like Poe, Generating Topical Poetry

Academic Venues

Computational Creativity, Machine Learning for Creativity and Design

Image: created using Dall-E

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Institutions

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Kim talks with Chad Hegelmeyer about the institutional turn in literary studies.

Chad references Jeremy Rosen’s article “The Institutional Turn” from the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature.

We also talk about: Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (Harper Collins, 1963), D.A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police (U California Press, 1989), Nancy Armstrong’s How Novels Think (Columbia UP, 2006), Mark McGurl’s The Program Era (Harvard UP, 2011), and Janice Radway’s books, Reading the Romance (UNC Press, 1984) and A Feeling for Books (UNC Press, 1997).

Chad quotes several texts referenced by Rosen:
Franco Moretti’s Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms (Verso, 2005)
Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Cornell UP, 1982)
Mark McGurl. “Ordinary Doom: Literary Studies in the Waste Land of the Present.” New Literary History 41, no. 2 (Spring 2010): 329–349.

In the longer version of our conversation, Chad gave several other examples of the “institutional turn” including: James F. English, The Economy of Prestige: Prizes, Awards, and the Circulation of Cultural Value (Harvard UP, 2005); Claire Squires, Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain (Palgrave, 2007); John B. Thompson, Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century (Polity, 2010); Laura J. Miller, Reluctant Capitalists: Bookselling and the Culture of Consumption (U Chicago Press, 2008); Jim Collins Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture (Duke UP, 2010).

Chad is a friend of the pod! He writes about fact checking and literature, and he’s a postdoc in the English Department at NYU.

Today’s image is a photograph of the “Staircase of the National Museum of Slovenia” taken by Petar Milošević, posted under a creative commons attribution share-alike license on Wikimedia Commons.

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