For the last 2,500 years literature has been attacked, booed, and condemned, often for the wrong reasons and occasionally for very good ones. The Hatred of Literature, by William Marx, examines the evolving idea of literature as seen through the eyes of its adversaries:  philosophers, theologians, scientists, pedagogues, and even leaders of modern liberal democracies. From Plato to C. P. Snow to Nicolas Sarkozy, literature’s haters have questioned the value of literature—its truthfulness, virtue, and usefulness—and have attempted to demonstrate its harmfulness.

Literature does not start with Homer or Gilgamesh, William Marx says, but with Plato driving the poets out of the city, like God casting Adam and Eve out of Paradise. That is its genesis. From Plato the poets learned for the first time that they served not truth but merely the Muses. It is no mere coincidence that the love of wisdom (philosophia) coincided with the hatred of poetry. Literature was born of scandal, and scandal has defined it ever since.

In the long rhetorical war against literature, Marx identifies four indictments—in the name of authority, truth, morality, and society. This typology allows him to move in an associative way through the centuries. In describing the misplaced ambitions, corruptible powers, and abysmal failures of literature, anti-literary discourses make explicit what a given society came to expect from literature. In this way, anti-literature paradoxically asserts the validity of what it wishes to deny. The only threat to literature’s continued existence, Marx writes, is not hatred but indifference.

After an initial presentation by William Marx, American writer Ben Lerner, who has engaged similar themes in his book The Hatred of Poetry (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2016), will respond and join Marx in discussion of their underlying convictions. 

William Marx
Writer, critic, professor of Comparative Literature, Université Paris Nanterre; author of La Haine de la littérature (The Hatred of Literature, Harvard University Press, 2018)

Ben Lerner, respondent
Poet, novelist, critic; MacArthur Fellow; author of No Art; Leaving the Atocha Station; 10:04; The Hatred of Poetry

Eric Banks, moderator
Director, New York Institute for the Humanities

In English

Sponsored by La Maison Française and the New York Institute for the Humanities

In conjunction with the exhibition The Beautiful Brain: The Drawings of Santiago Ramón y Cajal
January 9–March 31, 2018

Lawrence Weschler, writer; Carl Schoonover, Postdoctoral Fellow, Axel Lab, Columbia University; and Beth Campbell, artist, will ponder the way branching patterns keep appearing at different scales and in different guises, from the dendrites of Cajal’s neurons to the decision trees in Campbell’s work.

Co-sponsored by NYU’s New York Institute for the Humanities and Grey Art Gallery.

Free of charge, capacity limited, and subject to change. Photo ID required for entrance to NYU buildings.

On Friday, December 8th please join us for “Svetlana Boym: Exile and Imagination”: A film by Judith Wechsler. The screening will be followed by a discussion between Wechsler and Anne Lounsbery, Associate Professor of Russian Literature and Chair of the Department of Russian & Slavic Studies at New York University. This event is co-sponsored by the New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU and the NYU Jordan Center for the Advanced Study of Russia.

This one hour documentary film is about the life and work of Svetlana Boym, literary and cultural critic. In 1980, age 21, Svetlana left the USSR for the US. After graduate studies at Boston University and Harvard, she became the Carl Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Harvard University.

A brilliant writer of ambitious scope and great imagination, combining personal memoir with philosophical essay and historical analysis, she explored motifs of exile, nostalgia, the diasporic imagination and different forms of freedom in Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Mandelstahm, Akhmatova, Nabokov, Brodsky, and many others, in a total of six books, with two more about to appear.

Through videos of her lectures and interviews, together with photographs since her childhood, and her own photographs, and photomontages, we convey this remarkable person and her scholarly, critical, and artistic contributions. Interviews with family, teachers, colleagues, students and friends provide different perspectives. Much of the text of the film is drawn from Svetlana Boym’s writings and lectures.

Exuberant, ironic and witty, Boym was a charismatic critic and teacher until her untimely death from cancer, at age of 56.

The film is distributed by the Circulating Film Library of the Museum of Modern Art, NY

Judith Wechsler is an art historian and filmmaker.   She has written and directed 28 films, predominantly on art, for the Louvre, with the Comèdie francaise, for the Metropolitan Museum and others. Her most recent films include “The Passages of Walter Benjamin” and “Aby Warburg: Exile and Imagination”. Wechsler is the National Endowment for the Humanities Professor in art history Emerita at Tufts University, taught for many years at MIT and was visiting professor at Harvard, The Ecole normale supèrieure in Paris and The Hebrew University, Jerusalem. She is the author of A Human Comedy, Physiognomy and Caricature in 19th Century Paris, and books on Cézanne and Daumier as well as numerous articles and essays on 19th and 20th century art. Wechsler was a fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, at Bogliasco, and at the van Leer Foundation in Jerusalem. The French government named her a Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres.

In his new book The Politics of Opera, Mitchell Cohen takes readers on a fascinating journey into the entwined development of opera and politics, from the Renaissance through the turn of the nineteenth century. What political backdrops have shaped opera? How has opera conveyed the political ideas of its times? Delving into European history and thought and an array of music by such greats as Lully, Rameau, and Mozart, Mitchell Cohen reveals how politics—through story lines, symbols, harmonies, and musical motifs—has played an operatic role both robust and sotto voce.

Join Cohen and respondents Katha Pollitt and Mark Anderson for a conversation about the intersections of music, the state, and politics.

Mitchell Cohen is professor of political science at Baruch College and the CUNY Graduate Center and editor emeritus of Dissent.

Katha Pollitt is a columnist for The Nation

Mark Anderson is Professor of German at Columbia University

Cosponsored with La Maison Française & the NYU Department of French Literature, Thought, and Culture

Join us for a panel discussion marking the appearance of new translations of the work of Michel Leiris: Phantom Africa, translated by Brent Hayes Edwards and Fibrils, Vol. 3 of The Rules of the Game, translated by Lydia Davis.

Books will be available for purchase at a discount.

Panelists:

Brent Hayes Edwards (Columbia University)

Lydia Davis (writer, translator)

Richard Sieburth (NYU)

Vincent Debaene (Université de Genève)

Moderated by Denis Hollier (NYU)

The New York Institute for the Humanities at NYU

n+1 Magazine

and

the Institute for Public Knowledge present:

Canon/Archive:

Franco Moretti in Conversation

with Leah Price

and Nicholas Dames

moderated by Virginia Heffernan

On Computer-Aided Criticism

& the Stanford Literary Lab

and Beyond

Franco Moretti is Permanent Fellow, Wissenschaftskolleg Zu Berlin

Leah Price is Francis Lee Higginson Professor of English Literature at Harvard

Nicholas Dames is Theodore Kahan Professor of Humanities at Columbia

Virginia Heffernan is a Contributing Editor at Politico and the author of Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art

NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge and the NYIH at NYU invite you to join us for a launch event for Rachel Sherman’s new book Uneasy Street: The Anxieties of Affluence (Princeton University Press, 2017). Sherman will be present in conversation with Ron Lieber.

From TV’s “real housewives” to The Wolf of Wall Street, our popular culture portrays the wealthy as materialistic and entitled. But what do we really know about those who live on “easy street”? In this penetrating book, Rachel Sherman draws on rare in-depth interviews that she conducted with fifty affluent New Yorkers—including hedge fund financiers and corporate lawyers, professors and artists, and stay-at-home mothers—to examine their lifestyle choices and their understanding of privilege. Sherman upends images of wealthy people as invested only in accruing and displaying social advantages for themselves and their children. Instead, these liberal elites, who believe in diversity and meritocracy, feel conflicted about their position in a highly unequal society. They wish to be “normal,” describing their consumption as reasonable and basic and comparing themselves to those who have more than they do rather than those with less. These New Yorkers also want to see themselves as hard workers who give back and raise children with good values, and they avoid talking about money.

Although their experiences differ depending on a range of factors, including whether their wealth was earned or inherited, these elites generally depict themselves as productive and prudent, and therefore morally worthy, while the undeserving rich are lazy, ostentatious, and snobbish. Sherman argues that this ethical distinction between “good” and “bad” wealthy people characterizes American culture more broadly, and that it perpetuates rather than challenges economic inequality.

As the distance between rich and poor widens, Uneasy Street not only explores the real lives of those at the top but also sheds light on how extreme inequality comes to seem ordinary and acceptable to the rest of us.

Rachel Sherman is associate professor of sociology at the New School for Social Research and Eugene Lang College. Her first book, Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels (University of California Press, 2007), analyzes how workers, guests, and managers in luxury hotels make sense of and negotiate class inequalities that marked their relationships.

Ron Lieber is a journalist and author of the “Your Money” column for The New York Times, which addresses a variety of personal finance issues, from investing to paying for college to mortgages and homes. He is also the author of The Opposite of Spoiled, a guide to teaching kids about money and values.

Princeton University Press and the New York Institute for the Humanities at New York University are pleased to announce the second the Second Annual PUP/NYIH Lecture in the Humanities. With the aim of highlighting both the value and the relevance of the humanities, this new lecture will be given annually in New York by notable figures from a wide range of fields and will explore humanistic topics and themes.

This year's lecture will be given by Annette Gordon-Reed, who is the Charles Warren Professor of American Legal History at Harvard Law School and a professor of history in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. Gordon-Reed won the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2009 for The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family (W.W. Norton, 2009). Her most recently published book (with Peter S. Onuf) is “Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (Liveright Publishing, 2016). Gordon-Reed's lecture, "Thomas Jefferson’s Imagined Black Nation," draws on her research from this book. Thomas Jefferson had a vision of enslaved African Americans as a "captive nation," a nation that could not coexist peacefully with the American nation. How did Jefferson come to this view? What are we to make of him in light of his pessimism about the possibility of a multiracial, multicultural society?

Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus is Laura Kipnis's provocative argument for how the “recent upheavals in sexual culture on American campuses” are symptomatic of “officially sanctioned” sexual paranoia and hysteria. She will be joined in conversation by the cultural critical Shamus Khan, of Columbia University.

Laura Kipnis is a cultural critic/essayist whose work focuses on sexual politics, emotion, acting out, bad behavior, and various other crevices of the American psyche. She is the author of MEN: Notes from an Ongoing Investigation (November 2014/ Metropolitan), and her latest book is Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus; her previous books, which include How To Become a Scandal and Against Love, have been translated into over fifteen languages. She teaches in the filmmaking program at Northwestern University.

Shamus Khan is associate professor of sociology at Columbia University, where he is the director of the graduate program. He is also an editor at Public Culture and writes on culture, inequality, and elites.

This event was co-sponsored by the Institute for Public Knowledge and Public Books.

**for an audio recording of this event, please go to our Audio Archives in the main navigation bar of the NYIH home page.