Anodyne
Monday, August 19, 2013
 
Seminar One (2013-4)

Like L., I miss going back to school in the fall.  This year, I thought I might inaugurate a little reading group of my own.  Criteria: "liberal humanities," understood however you want to, and somehow relevant to my photographs (I originally wrote "art practice," then deleted it, 'cause as Phillips says, "I'm not practicing any more, I'm doing it.").  So there is a through line, however obscure.  Seminar One will run from August to April, just like the school year, and each week's reading list, plus occasional writing and thinking about it, will appear here from time to time.

Some questions I am trying to answer:

• How are repetition and reproduction distinct from one another?

• How should a person be?  By which I mean, how should individuals act in a way that is congruent with their own beliefs and with some broader concept of the "public good"?  When individual beliefs and the "public good" clash, what should take precedence?  Why?

• Why are public institutions so dysfunctional in this particular historical moment?  (See Zadie Smith on libraries, or The Mainlander on the VAG, and public art galleries in general.  Or ask L. & my friend Don Mega about legal aid, an exemplary public institution).

Seminar One, Week One: 19 August - 26 August 2013

Martha Nussbaum, The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge UP, revised edition, 2001).  Chapter 1, "Luck and Ethics," pp. 1-23, & Chapter 2, "Aeschylus and Practical Conflict," pp. 25-47.

Aeschylus, Aeschylus 1.  Oresteia: Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers, The Eumenides.  Ed. & trans Richard Lattimore (Chicago UP, 1953).

Sophocles, The Three Theban Plays: Antigone, Oedipus the King, Oedipus at Colonus.  Trans. Robert Fagles (Penguin, revised edition, 1984).
- posted by cjb @ 1:17 PM


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