Program

NO QUARRELS: LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY TODAY

Boston University, CAS 200 (725 Commonwealth Ave.)

The conference is free and open to the public

FRIDAY, APRIL 1

4:00 Introduction

James Winn (English, BU; Director of the BU Humanities Foundation) 

4:15-6:30 Narrative and Philosophy (Chair: Charles Griswold, BU Philosophy)

Allen Speight (Philosophy, BU), “Narrative and Agency in Contemporary Philosophy”

Elisabeth Camp (Philosophy, U Penn), “Wordsworth’s Prelude, Poetic Autobiography, and the Narrative Construction of the Self”

Jami Bartlett (English, UC-Irvine), “Circumstances Under Which”

Reception to follow

SATURDAY, APRIL 2

9:30-11:00      Literature and Pragmatism (Chair: Maurice Lee, BU English)

Robert Chodat (English, BU), “The American Evasion of Pragmatism: Minds, Souls, and the Case of Walker Percy”

Paul Grimstad (English, Yale), “On Going On: Wittgenstein’s ‘Beetle in the box,’ Analytic Pragmatism, and the Literary Conditions of Philosophy”

11:30-1:00      Methods and Standards of Criticism (Chair: Michael Prince, BU English)

Oren Izenberg (English, UIC), “Confiance au Monde; or The Poetry of Ease”

James Harold (Philosophy, Mt. Holyoke), “Literature, Genre Fiction, and Standards of Criticism”

2:30-4:00        Wittgenstein and Aesthetics (Chair: Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, BU Philosophy)

Bernard Rhie (English, Williams), “Wittgenstein on the Face of a Work of Art”

Magdalena Ostas (English, BU), “Wordsworth, Wittgenstein, and the Reconstruction of the Everyday”

4:30-6:00        Poetic Meaning (Chair: Juliet Floyd, BU Philosophy)

Jennifer Ashton (English, UIC), “Metaphor, Meaning, Affect, and the Literal Subject of Poetry”

John Gibson (Philosophy, Louisville), “The Question of Poetic Meaning”