#HumanitiesontheEdge

Daniel Clausen

Mar 31, 2015

Humanities on the Edge Event Review: Adam Kotsko

On March 18, Adam Kotsko lectured on “The Prince of this World: The Devil and Political Theology” as the first of this semester’s Humanities on the Edge guests. Kotsko, who teaches at Shimer College, was the 19th invited speaker in the series. Drawing on his current book project, his lecture argued that the Devil, as a theological character and symbol, arose out of the specific political history of Jewish and early Christian communities. Kotsko, also known for his philosophic

Humanities on the Edge Book Review: Siva Vaidhyanathan

Chandler Warren

Mar 17, 2015

Humanities on the Edge Book Review: Siva Vaidhyanathan

Vaidhyanathan, Siva. The Googlization of Everything (And Why We Should Worry). Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. I remember not too long ago when I was using a newly acquired iPad to find a recipe that I could glance at in the kitchen. Having found it on my desktop prior, I typed in the same list of ingredients in order to rediscover it and reap the benefits of my new mobile device. To my surprise, the search I made on my desktop instantly appeared on my iPad –

Humanities on the Edge Book Review: Adam Kotsko

watershedunl

Mar 10, 2015

Humanities on the Edge Book Review: Adam Kotsko

My favorite scene in HBO’s Enlightened occurs toward the end of the first season, in an episode that centers on the protagonist’s mother, Helen (Diane Ladd). At the grocery store, inspecting a melon, she is surprised by Carol (Barbara Barrie), an old friend whom she hasn’t seen for many years. The two have a brief conversation, mainly about their children, before Helen asks Carol about her husband. We gather that, at some point, Carol’s husband pulled out of a business deal t

watershedunl

Jan 20, 2015

Sociopaths and Game of Thrones

Game of Thrones is bristling with sociopaths. The most successful characters (measured in terms of episodes survived, or the power they achieve within the show) are both amoral and lacking in human emotional connections. As I detailed in my last post, sympathetic characters have a tendency to end up scattered across the scenery. While in the fourth season Prince Oberyn filled that ignoble role, in the first season it was Ned Stark—and the kindly, virtuous bodies hit the dirt

Humanities on the Edge Lecture Review: Gregg Lambert

watershedunl

Nov 11, 2014

Humanities on the Edge Lecture Review: Gregg Lambert

The crowd in the Sheldon Museum sat slightly perplexed last Thursday as this unsettling recording of Antonin Artuad’s To Have Done With the Judgement of God (1947) played while the lecturer - Gregg Lambert - remained seated: Lambert, current Dean’s Professor of Humanities at Syracuse University and co-founder of the Perpetual Peace Project, took the podium, explaining how Artaud's piece interrogates the American system of manufacturing its population into soldiers, segueing i

Humanities on the Edge Article Review: Gregg Lambert

watershedunl

Nov 4, 2014

Humanities on the Edge Article Review: Gregg Lambert

In The Blazing World, Siri Hustvedt’s dazzling new novel (released earlier this year), Harry Burden has a problem with the art world. A somewhat obscure artist as well as the widow of a renowned art collector, she feels herself slighted by the competitive, sexist New York art scene—in large part due to her gender. “All intellectual and artistic endeavors, even jokes, ironies, and parodies, fare better in the mind of the crowd when the crowd knows that somewhere behind the gre

watershedunl

Nov 4, 2014

Humanities on the Edge Article Review: Gregg Lambert

I was in my eighteenth year when the first gulf war started in 1990 (the one that Baudrillard said didn’t actually happen). Except for the odd excursion into the equatorial paradises like Panama and Granada, the United States was not at war from about the time I was born until I became an adult. Sure, there was the Cold War, but that was pretty much thawing by the time I was learning the alphabet. I have learned that I will, on occasion, have some trouble relating to my stude

Humanities on the Edge Lecture Review: Ursula Heise

watershedunl

Oct 7, 2014

Humanities on the Edge Lecture Review: Ursula Heise

On Oct. 2, 2014, Ursula Heise [http://www.uheise.net/] spoke on “Biocities: Urban Futures and the Reinvention of Nature” to an attentive audience at UNL’s Sheldon Museum of Art. Heise, a professor of English and a faculty member of UCLA’s Institute of the Environment of the Sustainability, was the 17th invited guest of the Humanities on the Edge speaker series. Her lecture previewed ideas from her manuscript-in-progress, Where the Wild Things Used to Be: Narrative, Database,

Humanities on the Edge Article Review: Ursula Heise

watershedunl

Sep 30, 2014

Humanities on the Edge Article Review: Ursula Heise

The plants at the center of Ruth Ozeki’s 2003 novel All Over Creation are agricultural crops, in particular, the Russet Burbank potato. Ursula Heise notices how Ozeki repeatedly uses the potato as a metaphor for humans, and suggests this narrative equation demonstrates the dangers of conflating social and biological diversity. Heise’s larger point is that environmental literature and ecocriticism need a more nuanced engagement with theories of transnationalism and globalizati

watershedunl

Sep 23, 2014

Humanities on the Edge Book Review: Ursula Heise

Heise, Ursula. Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global. New York: Oxford UP, 2008. In a world in which networks of transportation and communication operate globally, environmental thought needs to find more complex ways to engage a planetary scale. This is the core argument of Heise’s 2008 book, which helped further cement her position as a leading ecocritic. With measured contrarianism, Heise tries to find a concept that can balance th

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