“Aesthetics of Madness: the Fugitive Art of Marie Lieb”

Howard Caygill (Kingston University)

The tradition of modern aesthetics since Baumgarten and Kant has understood art in terms of an analogy or harmony between imagination and reason. But where does this leave the work of artists whose reason itself is in question? Can madness produce works? The aesthetics of madness explores this question through the emergence of artwork from mental hospitals between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. The talk will focus on the work of Marie Lieb, a late nineteenth century patient in the Heidelberg psychiatric clinic. Through this art it will explore the possibility of a reorientation of aesthetics away from its enlightenment legacy.

Guided Reading

Text: James A. Evans and Jacob G. Foster, “Algorithmic Abduction: Robots for Alien Reading”. Session led by Simon Swift (UNIGE) and Patrick Jones (UNIGE).

“Simulating Social Worlds: How ‘The Dead’ Speaks Across Historical Distance”

Paul Armstrong (Brown University)

Literary works make it possible for us to simulate the actions and interactions that constituted past social worlds by engaging in acts of imaginative participatory sense-making through which we interact with meanings held ready by the text. James Joyce’s story ‘The Dead’ (1914) is a rendering of a Christmas party in early twentieth-century Dublin that invites us to participate in animating the interactions through which a social gathering is constituted. This story provides a small-scale model of a paradox that characterizes all social worlds–namely, that the actions of individual agents engaged in coordinated, collaborative activity set in motion interactions that create a we-subject that goes beyond and is not reducible to those acts. (Cross-listed with the Doctoral Workshop in Medieval and Early Modern English Studies).

Work-in-progress papers

Aïcha Bouchelaghem (UNIGE), “Reading Animals and Animality in Antebellum U.S. Slave Narratives”.

Marianna Riishojgaard (UNIGE), “Language of Emotion, Music of Thought: Articulating Lyric in British Romanticism”.

Keats and Fading 

Mina Gorji (Cambridge University)
Lily Dessau (UNIGE)

Romantic poets were the last generation who wrote before the possibility of listening to recorded sound.  According to Judith Pascoe,  “those  who listened in advance of sound recording technology experienced a tragic  sense of the ephemerality of the voice”. I argue that in Ode to a Nightingale, Keats explores the experience and aesthetic of fading by drawing on and transforming a mode of elegiac 'evening listening'. I trace the development of 'evening listening'  through eighteenth-century poetry of Sensibility and argue that listening darkling, Keats drew on the language and melancholy mode of 'evening listening' to describe the experience of fading out. Darkling listening describes listening at a particular time, as darkness falls, but it also becomes a metaphor for his own experience as a listener, his fading out.

Please note that this session will be held online. A Zoom link will be communicated via the mailing list.

Welcome to the Club: DJ Paulette in Conversation with Nora Zufferey

In this event, which will take place at the Maison Rousseau et Littérature, Nora Zufferey (UNIGE) and DJ Paulette will discuss DJ Paulette’s new book Welcome to the Club: The Life and Lessons of a Black Woman DJ (Manchester University Press, 2024).

In Welcome to the Club, Manchester legend DJ Paulette shares the highs, lows and lessons of a thirty-year music career, with help from some famous friends. One of the Haçienda's first female DJs, Paulette has scaled the heights of the music industry, playing to crowds of thousands all around the world, and descended to the lows of being unceremoniously benched by COVID-19, with no chance of furlough and little support from the government. Here she tells her story, offering a remarkable view of the music industry from a Black woman's perspective. Behind the core values of peace, love, unity and respect, dance music is a world of exclusion, misogyny, racism and classism. But, as Paulette reveals, it is also a space bursting at the seams with powerful women. Part personal account, part call to arms, Welcome to the club exposes the exclusivity of the music industry while seeking to do justice to the often invisible women who keep the beat going.

Switzerland and Modernism

Roundtable discussion on Switzerland and Modernism featuring Nell Wasserstrom (UNIL/UNIFR), Julia Straub (UNIFR), Patrick Vincent (UNINE), Martin Mühlheim (UNIZH), and Sangam MacDuff (UNIL).

Please note that this session will take place at the later hour of 17h15 in a room other than Phil 204. Details of the alternative room will be communicated via the mailing list.

Time Management During the PhD

One difficulty PhD students face is time management. How to balance the demands of teaching and research? Should I participate in a conference even though it is not directly related to my PhD? Should I be writing every day? These are just some of the questions we might explore in this practical, group-led session. 

Although the session will be of special relevance to PhD students, researchers of all levels are welcome!

Please note that this session will also take place in a location other than Phil 204. Details of the alternative room will be communicated via the mailing list.