Conference Program

**Please click the paper title to view the abstract**

8:30 AM-9:30 AM Breakfast & Registration (Room 5409)

 

9:30 AM-11:00 AM First Session

Institution and Interpretation (Room 8301)

Moderator:  Professor Charity Scribner

• “Clarifying the Meaning of Religious Beliefs: An Examination of D.Z. Phillips’s Critique of Modern Philosophy of Religion”

              Jennifer Guyver (McGill University)

• “Still Life with Damage in the Language of Adorno’s Minima Moralia“

               Nina Gerschack (McGill University)

• “EMERGENCE OF THE DIALECTIC: An Inquiry of Herbert Marcuse’s ‘One Dimensional Man: The Triumph of Positive Thinking and One-Dimensional Philosophy’”

              Kai Kaululaau (University of Bristol)

• “The Normative Dimension in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right”

               Elvira Basevich (CUNY Graduate Center)

Knowledge, Perception, and Power (Room 8304)

Moderator: Professor Monica Calabritto

• “Vico’s Critique of Certainty as Criterion of Science”

Christopher Nixon (Yale University)

• “Rupture/Feedback as Discursive-Effects: A Re-Interpretive Assessment of Machiavelli in Althusser and Foucault“

Asif Ali Akhtar (New School for Social Research)

• “‘Imagination, thus elevated by wonder and painful curiosity’ in Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian”

Michelle Germinario (Fordham University)

Identity, Imperialism and the Internet (Room 8400)

Moderator: Professor Jerry W. Carlson

• “Subject/Object Oriented Identity: Considerations on the Multi-Ethnic Individual”

              Andrew Hernann (CUNY Graduate Center)

• “Imperial Uncertainties: Reconsidering Différance in Postcolonial Re-writings of Empire”

               Daniel Silva (Brown University)

• “Subversive (post) colonial discourse”

               Victoria Browne (Marquette University)

• “Uncertain Figure of Modernity: Theorizing beyond the Author, from Death & Resurrection to Obsolescence”

                   David Hayden (Johns Hopkins University)

Art and Aesthetics(Room 8402)

Moderator: Professor Nico Israel

• “Beyond Interpretation?”

              Geoffrey Derven (California Institute of the Arts)

• “The Uncertain Architecture of Democracy”

              Manuel Shvartzberg (California Institute of the Arts)

• “The Descent into Obscurity: The Politics of ‘Decadent’ Aesthetics”

             Alex Wermer-Colan (CUNY Graduate Center)

15 Minute Break

11:15 AM-12:45 PM Second Session

Theory’s the Thing (Room 8301)

Moderator: Professor Richard McCoy

• “‘The Readiness is All’: Sacrifice and Act V of Hamlet“
  

               Jennifer McKim (Temple University)

• “’If it be nothing, I shall not need spectacles’: Ascertaining nihil in Meditations on First Philosophy and King Lear”
  

               Élan Reisner (Reed College)

• “Historicizing Allusion: Interpretive Play in The Merry Wives of Windsor“

              William W. Weber (Yale University)

Contexts, Contradictions and Cultural Criticism (Room 8304)

Moderator: Professor Morris Dickstein

• “Cognitivism, New Criticism, and the Epistemic Persona of Nabokov’s Lolita”

                   Stephen Spencer (CUNY Brooklyn College)

• “The Uncertainty of Wit in Baltasar Gracián y Moralles”

               Basil Lvov (CUNY Graduate Center)

• “Citing History: a genealogy of uncertainty from Cicero through Cervantes to Menard”

              Jeffrey M. Barnes (CUNY Graduate Center)

Shifty Subjectivities: Race, Gender, & Contingent Imagery in Popular Culture (Room 8400)

Moderator: Professor Paula J. Massood

• “Contingent Imagery in Black Cover Art”

               Dr. James Braxton Peterson (Lehigh University)

               Samina Ali (Duquesne University)

• “Cultural Miscegenation in Mansbach’s Angry Black White Boy”

              Cynthia Estremera (Villanova University)

• “Are You in that Mood Yet: The Gender Demons of Joe Budden”

              Wilfredo Gomez (University of Pennsylvania)

Contracts, Convictions, and Capitalism (Room 8402)

Moderator: Professor Stanley Aronowitz

• “Kafka Dead Certain: Injurious Certitudes of Subjectivity in Subjection”

              Joshua Winchester (New York University)

• “The Boilerplate of Everything in The Crying of Lot 49”

              Tal Kastner (Princeton University)

• “On the Education of Modern Reason: Antonio Gramsci”

               Patrick Bova (New School for Social Research)

12:45 PM-1:45 PM Lunch (On Your Own)

1:45 PM-3:15 PM Third Session

Uncertain Sights: Theories of Seeing Across Visual Media (Room 8301)

Moderator: Professor Mary Ann Caws

• “Figuring Bodies: Seeing and Relation in Wilfredo Lam”

              Laila Pedro (CUNY Graduate Center)

• “The phototext and fascinated hantologie in Suzanne Doppelt’s Le pré est vénéneuxe”

              Phillip Griffith (CUNY Graduate Center)

• “The ‘With’ of Cinema: Valérie Massadian’s Nana“

              Tim Wilson (CUNY Graduate Center)

Indefinite Definitions (Room 8304)

Moderator: Professor Hermann W. Haller

• “Guarded Readings in Plato’s Phaedo”

              Katie Deutsch (Harvard University)

• “Uncertain Definitions of Grace in Baltasar Gracián”

              Anna Williams (CUNY Graduate Center)

• “Drug/Test: Two Moments of délire in Rousseau’s Reveries of a Solitary Walker”

              Jacob Denz (New York University)

• “Pushkin’s ‘The Queen of Spades:’ Generic Gambling with fantastic Ambiguity”

                 Jane Shmidt (CUNY Graduate Center)

Authenticity, Autobiography, and the Self (Room 8400)

Moderator: Professor Vincent Crapanzano

• “« L’instable équilibre » : The radical impossibility of Maurice Blanchot’s L’Instant de ma mort”

Diana Kole (McGill University)

• “A New Dimension of Authenticity: Finding the Self in Autobiographical Narration”

Laura T. DiSumma (CUNY Graduate Center)

• “The uncertainty principle in Vico’s sense of self”

 Rosemary Demos (CUNY Graduate Center)

• “Towards an Approach to Narrative Liminality”

Daniel Irving (SUNY at Stony Brook)

Psychoanalysis and Signification (Room 8402)

Moderator: Professor Joshua Wilner

• “Kripkenstein’s Return to Freud”

 James Curley-Egan (CUNY Graduate Center)

• “Lacan’s (K)not-Politics”

 Jennifer Wang (New School for Social Research)

• “Deconstructing ‘Ithaca,’ Or How Joyce Circles the Square in Ulysses”

Jesse Cersosimo (SUNY at New Paltz)

• “Melanie Klein and the Hermeneutics of Uncertainty”

   Michael Mayo (Exeter College at Oxford University)

15 Minute Break

3:30 PM-5:00 PM Fourth Session

Rhyme, Reason, and Reversability (Room 8301)

Moderator: Professor John Brenkman

• “Heidegger’s Critique of Certainty”

              Zohar Atkins (Balliol College at Oxford University)

• “Kierkegåard’s uncertain language”

              Frances Maughan-Brown (Boston College)

• “Poetry and uncertainty in Søren Kierkegåard’s Either/Or”

             Alice Christensen (Princeton University)

• “Uncertainties, Mysteries, Doubts: Modernist Aesthetics, Negative Capability, & the Problem of Logical Truth”

              Rebecca Ariel Porte (University of Michigan at Ann Arbor)

Theorizing Theory (Room 8304)

Moderator: Professor Martin Elsky

• “The Dream of Socrates, or Theory and Literature in the Strip Club (A Love Story)”

Tom Ribitzky (CUNY Graduate Center)

• “In Defense of Meaninglessness”

    Michael Lubing (CUNY Graduate Center)

• “Uncertainty, Of Course: The Error of Understanding Error”

              Mareike Stanitzke (Tufts University)

• “Uncertainty in the Post-Modern West: Finding Meaning On Broadway”

Stephanie Lim (California State University at Northridge)

Space, Place and the Modernist Imagination (Room 8400)

Moderator: Professor Evelyne Ender

• “Un-framing the feminine picturesque”

Marios Vasiliou (University of Cyprus)

• “Limitless Negativity: Feminine Space In/Between/Beyond Virginia Woolf’s Lily Briscoe and Mrs. Ramsay”

Veronica Cassidy (New School for Social Research)

• “Reading the ‘Fringe:’ Vague Thoughts and Dim Relations in James, Emerson, and Poe”

Ella Mershon (University of California at Berkeley)

• “Henry James, Bataille, and the Sublime”

Daniel Nutters (Temple University)

Ethics and Ambiguous Meanings (Room 8402)

Moderator: Professor Noam Scheindlin

• “Searching for Uncertainties: Deconstruction and Frankfurtian Negativization around the idea of justice in Jacques Derrida”

             Pedro A. Aguilera Mellado (University of Michigan at Ann Arbor)

• “Banishing Dissemination: Habermas and Gadamer Against Derrida”

              Mert Bahadir Reisoglu (New York University)

• “Lacan on Writing and the Unconscious: The Sliding Signifier”

              Timothy Collins (Buffalo State College)

• “The Uncertainty of the Other: Levinas and the Problem of Metaphor”

              David Maruzzella (New York University)

5:30 PM Keynote Talk by Dr. Martin Hägglund 

Opening Remarks: Claire Sommers (Conference Organizer)

Welcome: Dr. André Aciman (Chair, Comparative Literature Department)

“Dying for Time: T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets” Dr. Martin Hägglund (Harvard University)

Closing Remarks: Conference Organizing Committee

Reception to follow Keynote Talk (Room 5409)

 

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