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Week of 13 November 1998 Vol. II, No. 14 Feature Article November 20 and 21 at LAW Conversazione to pose question --What comes post postmodernism? by Michael B. Shavelson "In the beginning was the Word." T. S. Eliot gently jibed at the opening of the Gospel of St. John, but Claudio Véliz probably takes it quite seriously, at least in the context of the upcoming Conversazione on Post-Modernisms: Origins, Consequences, Reconsiderations. For Véliz, the word postmodern has gone out of control. "My colleagues and I felt that there is enough confusion surrounding the concept of postmodernism for it to be a worthwhile topic for exploration," says Véliz, director of The University Professors program. Claudio Véliz BU photo services "The inventor of the word is Charles Jencks, from the UCLA School of Architecture. When he wrote the book Post-Modern Architecture in 1977, it was quite a pioneering work and concept," explains Véliz. "Then in an almost imperceptible way the word traveled sideways and became attached to a certain disposition in historical studies, in literary studies, in science. How can you have a postmodernist book on history?" Véliz says that the idea behind this year's Conversazione -- an annual series sponsored jointly by BU, Oxford, and La Trobe University in Melbourne and organized by The University Professors -- was not to look at postmodernism in specific fields, but rather to have distinguished thinkers in different areas look at the idea of postmodernism itself. "We decided that instead of taking the concept discipline by discipline, we should get Charles Jencks to come to the first session and tell us what he had in mind," says Véliz. "Then we invited a distinguished historian, Felipe Fernández-Armesto from Oxford, and a distinguished scientist, Gerald Holton from Harvard, to pitch in from their end to consider the origins of postmodernism." Discussion of the first session will be launched by three reactors: Timothy Potts, director of the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, from the Emory University department of history, and Leonard Laster, chancellor emeritus of the University of Massachusetts Medical Center. Jon Westling will chair the first session. Does it help? The second session looks at the "consequences of the concept of postmodernism and its uses," says Véliz. "Is it clarifying? Is it illuminating? Has it made clear what was not clear before?" BU's Sir Hans Kornberg, University professor and CAS professor of biology, will chair the session. Geoffrey Hill, University professor and professor of literature and religion, will join Patrick McCaughey, director of the Yale Center for British Art, and Mark Lilla, of New York University, in presenting papers that address Véliz's question. Keith Morgan, chairman of the CAS department of art history, Philip Waller, a fellow and tutor in modern history at Oxford, and Richard Wendorf, director of the Boston Athenaeum, will be reactors. The final session, Reconsiderations of Postmodernism, will be chaired by John Silber and begins with a paper by the Australian philosopher Peter Steele, S.J. Hilton Kramer, art critic and editor and publisher of The New Criterion, and Edward O. Wilson from Harvard, who is probably best known for his work on insect societies and biodiversity, but is the author as well of Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, published earlier this year, will follow. The variety of the presenters looking at postmodernism is precisely the point, says Véliz, as is the variety of the reactors to the last session: novelist and University professor Saul Bellow, artist Neil Welliver, and Charles Griswold, chairman of the CAS department of philosophy. Paradigm found "An attempt is being made to restore to the heart of the university an unblinkered view of things," says Véliz. "We feel that specialists have been allowed to run riot and many universities disable some of the best students of each generation -- especially at the graduate level -- by clapping blinders on them and chanting, for example, chemistry, chemistry, chemistry or art history, art history, art history. We are trying to break away from that in a thousand different ways, and one of them is by example, with the Conversazione. "And if you say, but Hilton Kramer is an art historian and Edward Wilson is ants, I say, so what!" continues Véliz. "They are educated, cultivated people doing what all our students emerging from BU should be able to do: they are addressing a great theme of our time. "Certainly we ensure that the students in The University Professors program have this intellectual disposition, which goes beyond being interdisciplinary. Interdisciplinary is a fraudulent concept." The bottom line is intellectual curiosity, insists Véliz, and an understanding that all fields of knowledge are tightly intertwined. "That's what motivates each of the annual Conversazioni." This year's Conversazione, Post-Modernisms: Origins, Consequences, Reconsiderations, will be held November 21 and 22 at the Law School Auditorium. Call The University Professors at 353-4020 for more information.