First-Year Research Seminar: Topics of Conversation

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What is conversation, and what is it good for? In this research seminar we will explore the role of conversation in Western philosophy and culture. How has the idea of dialogue shaped understandings of art and ethics, metaphysics and psychology, race and cosmopolitanism, and gender and sexuality from classical times to the present? More specifically: How does the art of conversation arrive at metaphysical truths? How does talking to another person help us to uncover psychic meaning, and why do we need another person to understand our psyches? What do the dialogues in our selected works tell us about the interpersonal construction of meaning and the nature of friendship and erotic experience? What do we bring to our encounters with people of different backgrounds, and what can we take away from conversations with those of disparate political views? Some of our foundational theoretical texts may include Plato’s exploration of metaphysics and love in The Symposium; Bakhtin’s The Dialogic Imagination and his interpretation of Dostoevsky’s vivid characters and philosophically rich dialogues in Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics; Freud’s writings on psychoanalytic technique, including “Remembering, repeating, working through” and “Analysis terminal and interminable”; Juliet Mitchell and Jacqueline Rose’s feminist revisions of psychoanalysis; and Montaigne and Alexander Nehamas on friendship. We will ourselves put these theoretical works in dialogue with films and novels that take conversation—as well as the silences and tacit subtexts, ambiguities and ironies embedded within—as their structuring principle and primary subject of concern. Texts may include Jane Austen’s Persuasion, excerpts from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov and Notes from Underground, Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle,” Teju Cole’s Open City, Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, Louis Malle’s…