Session 2

Bob Dylan’s musical appetites are famously omnivorous. Over the course of his career, he has metabolized a vast range of musical genres, from folk to rock ’n’ roll, country to gospel, Tin Pan Alley to Western swing. This talk will focus on one genre that has saturated Dylan’s music from the early 60s until today: the blues.

The answer to the title question probably seems laughably obvious.  But what if we ask how we know this, how we are so sure of it?  Let’s stipulate that Shakespeare is great.  But what about the comparatives? How do we know that his plays are better than those of his contemporaries in the great period of early modern English theater?  This lecture will try to address these questions in a serious way.

Li Zhi’s career gives us many perspectives on the Ming Dynasty in the years of its decline. Li veered from scholar-official to Buddhist lay brother to critic of his times—or more broadly of the whole course of Chinese civilization since Confucius. In each of these roles, he stirred up controversy and made enemies. He occasionally made friends and allies, too, but these were unable to prevent his arrest and death in custody.  The talk, based on a new translation, focuses on the scandals (actual and imagined) surrounding Li Zhi’s writing. 

For many years in the United States, Primo Levi's first book was known by the title Survival in Auschwitz, rather than the Italian original If This Is a Man. This talk will interrogate the meaning behind this unfaithful, but also symptomatic mistranslation. How did this new title contribute to the extraordinary success of the work and in what way did the word "survival" condition its reception? What does it mean to survive not only in Auschwitz but also after Auschwitz?

Why do Indian films have so many songs? The function of the song, I will demonstrate, is deeply tied with the ebb and flow of time in these films. Through a close reading of select song sequences from Bollywood and Indian art cinema I show how Indian cinema combines realist and utopian dimensions of time.

Recently, I uncovered evidence of a close philosophical friendship between Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976), one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, and Margaret MacDonald (1907-1956), whose promising philosophical career was cut short by her untimely death. I will tell a minor detective story explaining this discovery, and discuss its significance for understanding the work of both Ryle and MacDonald, and the neglected place of women in the history of twentieth-century analytic philosophy.