The Ethics of Reading
May 3rd - 4th, 2024
Terrace Room of Margaret Jacks Hall
The Philosophy & Literature Workshop at Stanford and the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins welcome submissions for the 5th annual Philosophy & Literature Graduate Conference to be held in person on May 3rd - 4th, 2024 in the Terrace Room of Margaret Jacks Hall, Stanford University.
Conference Topic
This year’s conference topic, “The Ethics of Reading” brings together doctoral students and scholars that work at the intersection of philosophy, literature, the arts, and media studies to reflect on the role of ethics in creating and engaging with literature and, more broadly, art of all forms.
Description
In 1987, J. Hillis Miller published The Ethics of Reading, in which he asks us: “In what sense can or should the act of reading be itself ethical or have an ethical import?” In wrestling with Miller’s question, we hope this conference can serve as a space to better understand the ethical obligations that we – as scholars, thinkers, and humans – owe to artworks. Indeed, we should inquire, as Candace Vogler does, as to how reading might respond to the question of how one should live. Is it necessary that life, as Miller puts it, “make a detour through the mirroring of art in order to become visible and hence lovable”? What does reading do for us? Need it to do anything? What do we owe to a text? To the beauty it gives life to? Is fictional empathy practical? Does it even exist?
Some contributions might explore the following lines of investigation:
1. The moral/immoral/amoral dimensions of reading
2. Different modes of reading of narratives, artworks, and virtual experiences
3. Narrative conceptions of self
4. Expressing the inexpressible, responding to the limits of representation
5. Ethics of art and artifice
6. Literary and interpretive communities
7. Care for and responsibility to artworks
8. The ethics of historical narration
Keynote Speakers
Professors Elaine Scarry (Harvard University) and Yi Ping Ong (Johns Hopkins University) will each deliver a keynote address during the conference, and Professor Mark Greif (Stanford University) will lead a workshop entitled “Who’s Reading in Your Head?”.
Conference Program
FRIDAY, May 3
8:30 – 9:30 a.m. Breakfast
9:30 a.m. Institutional Remarks (Prof. Lanier Anderson, Philosophy, Stanford University)
10:00 – 11:30 a.m. Panel: Frames of Reading
Chair: Marta Cerreti (Johns Hopkins University)
Aidan Watson-Morris (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) “The Indifferent Time of Reading”
Tucker Kuman (University of Virginia) “A Mirror for Magistrates and the Scandal of Topicality: Reading and Writing Against Aesthetics”
Grant Bartolomé Dowling (Stanford University) Difficult Texts and Precocious Readers
11:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. Panel: The (A)morality of Empathy
Chair: Konstantinos Konstantinou (Stanford University)
Ryan Lackey (UC Berkeley) Twisted Complicity: (Anti)Ethical Form in Teju Cole and Viet Thahn Nguyen
Aili Pettersson Peeker (University of California, Santa Barbara) One-Dimensional Empathy
Semilore Sobande (Brown University) “In My Own Way”: Melodrama and Reading the Unspeakable in Fantasia: An Algerian Cavalcade
1:00 – 2:30 p.m Lunch
2:30 – 4:00 p.m. Panel: Reading as Praxis
Chair: PM Irvin (Stanford University)
Alicia Badea (Yale University) Between Challenge and Claim: An Alternative Reading of the Book of Job
Michael Henderson (Washington University) The Affirmative Practice of Resistance: Resistance as the Space for Ethics in Arendt, Honneth, and Camus
Angela Xaiojaun Yin (Rutgers University) Judging Justice in Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale
4:00 – 4:30 p.m. Coffee Break
4:30-6:00 p.m. Keynote Lecture
Prof. Yi Ping Ong (Comparative Thought and Literature, Johns Hopkins University) The Moral Imaginary of the Novel: Freedom, Bad Faith, and Moral Ambiguity in George Eliot.
SATURDAY, May 4
8:00 – 9:00 a.m. Breakfast
9:00 – 10:30 a.m. Workshop
Prof. Mark Greif (English, Stanford University) "Who is Reading in Your Head?"
11:00 am – 1:00 p.m. Panel: Language and Meaning
Chair: Korinne Eleni Hensley (Stanford University)
Gerald Jia Ding (Stanford University) An Ethics of Lyricization?
Claudia Grigg Edo (Columbia University) The Politics of Re-Reading
Samara Michaelson (Duke University) Tuning ‘Attunement’ and Turning Affect: The Cavellian and Kantian Experience of the Aesthetic Experience
Molly Young (University of Pennsylvenia) Scenes of Acknowledgment: Realism, Reading, and Eliot’s Everyday
1:00 – 2:30 p.m. Lunch
2:30 – 4:30 p.m. Panel: Books that Bind
Chair: Chloe Van Steertegem (Stanford University)
Amy Wells (Oxford University) Disinterested Reader: The Responsibilities and Rewards of Free Play
Xinyue Zhang (University of Chicago) “Behold what we have made”: On the problem of genre and reading in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves
Noushin Ahdoot (Johns Hopkins University) My Antigone: Kierkegaard’s Novelization of Antigone and the Morality of Mineness (Jemeinigkeit)
Jiawen Wang (University of Chicago) Reading/writing and the ethics of amusement in the Dream of the Red Chamber
4:30 – 5:00 p.m. Coffee Break
5:00 – 6:30 p.m. Keynote Lecture
Prof. Elaine Scarry (English, Harvard University) "The Counterfactual Imagination"
6:30 – 7:00 p.m. Closing Remarks
7:00 p.m. Reception
For those interested in attending Professor Mark Greif's workshop on Saturday, please RSVP to receive any pre-circulated materials.
RSVP: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1wSglMGXOGJQXnAwcXo-fVxaZi2C32WezCjLn5HZAMG4/edit
Sponsors
This conference is sponsored by Johns Hopkins University (Center for Philosophy, Art and Literature), Stanford University's Phil+Lit (The Initiative in Philosophy and Literature), and Stanford's Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages.
