Saturday, March 31, 2007

What's in common between Odes(s)a, Staples, and Architecture?

Poster: Odes(s)a + Staples + Architecture
Credit: wikipedia, MS Word
2007 @ artjunction.blogspot.com

Munk Centre for International Studies!

My Events List for next week:

Tuesday April 10, 2007
Identities in Odes(s)a
12:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Location: 108N

Wednesday April 11, 2007
Staples and Beyond
4:30 PM - 7:00 PM
Location: 156S

Thursday April 12, 2007
Philosophy, Architecture, History
4:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Location: 108N


Munk Centre for International Studies
University of Toronto
1 Devonshire Place
Toronto ON M5S 3K7
Tel: (416) 946-8900
www.utoronto.ca/mcis/


Details:

Identities in Odes(s)a

Date: Tuesday April 10
Time: 12:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Room: 108N, North House

Speakers:
Tanya Richardson
Assistant Professor, Wilfrid Laurier University

Abel Polese
Jacyk Visiting Scholar, Research Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Institute in Dresden

Olga Andriewsky
Trent University

Contact Info:
Larysa Iarovenko

Description:

Tanya Richardson (Assistant Professor, Wilfrid Laurier University), "Between Cosmopolitan and Provincial: Spaces of History and the Place of Odesa in Post-Soviet Ukraine"
Abel Polese (Jacyk Visiting Scholar, Research Fellow at the Hannah Arendt Institute in Dresden), "Weird Mathematics in Odesa: Why One Odessan is a Ukrainian but ten Odessans are Russian?"

Main Sponsor:
Petro Jacyk Program for the Study of Ukraine
Trent University

Professor Olga Andriewsky
Chair of History Department, Trent University
e-mail: oandriewsky@trentu.ca

Research interests: Russia as empire; national identity and imperial discourse, Russian-Ukrainian relations.
Research interests: Russia as empire; national identity and imperial discourse, Russian-Ukrainian relations.

Teaching interests: Modern Russia and Eastern Europe; Russian Revolution; Stalin and Stalinism; and Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union.

* "The Russian-Ukrainian Discourse And The Failure Of The 'Little Russian Solution', 1782-1917" in Peoples, Nations, Identities: The Russian-Ukrainian Encounter, project jointly sponsored by the Harriman Institute, Columbia University; the Seminar on East European Studies, University of Koln (Germany); and the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies, University of Alberta (forthcoming 2003);
* "The Paradoxes of Reform: Higher Education in Post-Soviet Ukraine" in Problems of Development of Ukraine since Independence (forthcoming, Canadian Scholars' Press, 2003)


Abel Polese
Abel Polese, from Italy, has been learning languages most of his life, to the extent where he is now fluent in seven, including English and Russian. He has various languages qualifications and has spent time studying at Coventry University.



Philosophy, Architecture, History

The Eighth Hermann Levin Goldschmidt Memorial Lecture

Date: Thursday April 12
Time: 12 4:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Room: 108N, North House

Speaker:
Claudia Brodsky-La Cour
Princeton University

Contact Info:
Edith Klein

Main Sponsor:

Joint Initiative in German and European Studies
Co-sponsored by
Foundation Dialogik
Centre for Comparative Literature
Department of Philosophy
Jewish Studies Program

Claudia J. Brodsky Lacour
Claudia Brodsky Lacour is Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University and ancien directeur de programme at the Collège International de Philosophie, Paris. She is the author of The Imposition of Form: Studies in Narrative Representation and Knowledge (1987), Lines of Thought: Discourse, Architectonics, and the Origin of Modern Philosophy (1996), and several articles on German, French, and English literature and philosophy from the Enlightenment through the present.

Lines of Thought: Discourse, Architectonics, and the Origin of Modern Philosophy (Paperback)
by Claudia Brodsky Lacour (Author)

Editorial Reviews
Book Description
It is considerably easier to say that modern philosophy began with Descartes than it is to define the modernity and philosophy to which Descartes gave rise. In Lines of Thought, Claudia Brodsky Lacour describes the double origin of modern philosophy in Descartes’s Discours de la méthode and Géométrie, works whose interrelation, she argues, reveals the specific nature of the modern in his thought. Her study examines the roles of discourse and writing in Cartesian method and intuition, and the significance of graphic architectonic form in the genealogy of modern philosophy.
While Cartesianism has long served as a synonym for rationalism, the contents of Descartes’s method and cogito have remained infamously resistant to rational analysis. Similarly, although modern phenomenological analyses descend from Descartes’s notion of intuition, the “things” Cartesian intuitions represent bear no resemblance to phenomena. By returning to what Descartes calls the construction of his “foundation” in the Discours, Brodsky Lacour identifies the conceptual problems at the root of Descartes’s literary and aesthetic theory as well as epistemology. If, for Descartes, linear extension and “I” are the only “things” we can know exist, the Cartesian subject of thought, she shows, derives first from the intersection of discourse and drawing, representation and matter. The crux of that intersection, Brodsky Lacour concludes, is and must be the cogito, Descartes’s theoretical extension of thinking into material being. Describable in accordance with the Géométrie as a freely constructed line of thought, the cogito, she argues, extends historically to link philosophy with theories of discursive representation and graphic delineation after Descartes. In conclusion, Brodsky Lacour analyzes such a link in the writings of Claude Perrault, the architectural theorist whose reflections on beauty helped shape the seventeenth-century dispute between “the ancients and the moderns.”
Part of a growing body of literary and interdisciplinary considerations of philosophical texts, Lines of Thought will appeal to theorists and historians of literature, architecture, art, and philosophy, and those concerned with the origin and identity of the modern.


From the Back Cover

“An engaging and original piece of work—a very good book. Lines of Thought will take a respected place amongst interdisciplinary studies of philosophy.”—Jonathan Ree, Middlesex University

“An excellent, highly disciplined reading; a truly interdisciplinary achievement. One of the most striking qualities of this book is the way in which Brodsky Lacour opens up broader historical, philosophical, and literary perspectives, pertaining particularly to present discussions of Modernity and deconstruction, by strictly pursuing her rigorous reading of Descartes’s and Perrault’s texts. The basis for such a mediation is the author’s excellent literary analyses and her impressive understanding of philosophical and mathematical issues. In thinking through the figures of line and architecture in and as thought and discourse, she unfolds a certain construction of modern subjectivity and contemporary theoretical problems in a highly illuminating way.”—Rainer Nagele, The Johns Hopkins University

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