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2007-08 Faculty Center Fellows
Stanley Corkin - Department of English and Comparative Literature
Project: Starring New York, as Itself: Film, Globalization, and Cultural Narratives of Decline and Rebirth, 1969-1981Abstract:
This study discusses a significant group of films released between 1969 and 1981 that employ New York City as a location and central motif. It focuses, ultimately, on the cultural history of this period and draws its interdisciplinary method from film studies, cultural geography, and history. This project further advances the methodology for cultural analysis that I have developed in two previous books and numerous published essays. I approach a vital moment of historical transition through the prism of cultural productions, asking how these objects complexly participated in this shift in belief and practice, while showing how an understanding of a period may be altered through this approach.This era in U.S. film history is marked by the many successful works by a prominent group of directors that came of age in this decade: Francis Coppola’s Godfather (1971 and 1973) films, Martin Scorcese’s Mean Streets (1973) and Taxi Driver (1976), William Friedkin’s The French Connection (1971), Sidney Lumet’s Serpico (1973) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979), Bob Fosse’s Lenny (1974) and All That Jazz (1979)., all of which I consider in detail. These productions provide us with a window through which to enter a period of significant historical change for cities in the U.S. and beyond. As films shot on location, they picture selected aspects of the built environment in their images. Further, their narratives, which include their visual rhetoric, locate New York City in a state of transition, providing viewers glimpses of a specific process of transition. These films represent processes of economic, demographic, and geographic change, as they show the ways in which this powerful aspect of popular culture participates in articulating, anticipating, and enabling change. As such, my analysis not only illuminates vital aspects of the period in a manner that provides distinctive insights into the ways in which materiality was altered; it also allows for a broad reconception of the connection between representational works of the imagination and the materiality of history.
Michael Griffith - Department of English and Comparative Literature
Project: Trophy: A NovelAbstract:
Trophy is the most ambitious novel I’ve undertaken. The book was inspired by two works of the Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis, Dom Casmurro (1900) and especially The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas (1880), a novel narrated by a corpse: a smug, self-justifying, rather combative person (or ex-person) who dedicates his tale to the first worm able to penetrate his casket and who explicitly addresses many of his remarks to the reader, for whom he cannot conceal his disdain and mistrust.The present-tense action of my novel spans less than one second, the instant in which the protagonist, a twenty-nine-year-old carwash “Hose Associate” and ex–veterinary student named Vada Prickett, dies. (He’s crushed to death by a stuffed grizzly he’s helping a wealthy neighbor move into his trophy room, on the eve of the neighbor’s wedding to the woman Vada adores.) The narrative consists of Vada’s dislocated reminiscences and valedictions/maledictions as he casts back over his life―or (and here there’s a further chronological complication) over the last twenty minutes of his life, which seems the only time period to which he has direct memorial access. As he complains early on:
Vada couldn’t tell you how many times, in his thirty years topside, he’s heard that old saw about your whole life flashing before your eyes when you die. It’s a loathsome movie cliché, like selective amnesia, multiple personalities, grizzled fatties with starlet wives, villains shot and shot and shot until they’re human colanders, but who always rise, undead, to pose one last threat with swelling music before being impaled on something weird, like a weathervane or a hood ornament. To have to find out in extremis, almost the last thing he’ll ever discover, that God doesn’t after all work in mysterious ways but rather with the paycheck-whoring laziness of a Hollywood hack . . . it’s a disappointment, especially for someone who has spent his life―oops, chuck that present perfect (O lost tense!) for the simple past―someone who spent his life waiting for the thing to get a proper start, and who would have thought . . .
Trophy poses several daunting technical and stylistic problems. One, as I’ve suggested, is the manipulation of time. There’s also the architectural intricacy of a book made up entirely of flashbacks nested like matryoshka dolls. There’s the difficulty of creating and maintaining tension in a book whose single major plot event occurs before the first sentence and is revealed immediately, so that traditional forms of suspense are out the window. There’s the task of creating an entertaining and accessible novel that takes up, often explicitly, involuted ideas about the nature and order of narrative―and that features a narrator self-consciously addressing his reader.
What I want to do in this novel is, then, in some ways a risk and a departure, but in other ways it’s of a piece with my earlier books. As always, I want to take off from a preposterous-seeming comic premise (in this case it involves, among other things, large-animal taxidermy, underwater-zombie lore, a Christian millennialist minor-league baseball franchise, racist spelling bees, a Fascist-themed car wash, and a career in one of what Vada calls the “wetting industries”) and yet manage, by means of a ceaseless empathetic attention to Vada, to locate the pathos and intellectual heft in what first appears to be mere goofiness or slapstick. I would like to start with what looks like farce and then wring tragedy out of it, as the reader comes to know Vada and to understand the grief (for his dead parents), envy (of his boyhood friend and rival, Wyatt), and love (for Darla, Wyatt’s fiancée) that have brought him to this pass, or this passing.
The book will, again after Machado’s model, comprise probably 150 brief chapters, and I project it to be roughly 350 pages in manuscript.
John McEvoy - Department of Philosophy
Project: The Historiography of Chemical Revolution: Patterns of Interpretation in the History of ScienceAbstract:
Since its inception in the eighteenth century, the discipline of the history of science has served a motley collection of extrinsic disciplinary interests, philosophical ideas, and cultural movements. My project at the Taft Center involves an exploration of the impact of the cultural movements of modernism and postmodernism on the historiography of science, and shows how they influenced positivist, post-positivist, and sociological interpretations of the Chemical Revolution, which occurred towards the eighteenth century and is generally regarded as the origins of modern chemistry. My project also shows how these interpretations of the Chemical Revolution furthered the disciplinary inroads made by science, philosophy, and sociology into the discipline of the history of science, and it outlines an alternative model of the Chemical Revolution, and the history of science in general, that emphasize the specificity and irreducibility of history.Maura O'Connor - Department of History
Project: “Risking the World: The London Stock Exchange and the British Empire, 1801-1902”Abstract:
This book project uses the vantage point of the nineteenth century’s most notorious ‘speculating stage’ – as the London Stock Exchange was often dubbed – as a place from which to view the complex relationships between capitalism, class, and culture at the moment of their historical formation and transformation. The story that it tells focuses on the world of international finance, the culture of risk capital, and the gendered politics of speculating and investing in the British Empire from the period of the French revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars to the Anglo-Boer War. These two wars were key, I argue, in shaping Britain’s imperial and global destinies in the nineteenth century.Thomas Polger - Department of Philosophy
Project: Realization and ExplanationAbstract:
My TCF project will culminate in a book with the working title, Realization and Explanation, to be co-authored with Lawrence Shapiro, of the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Colloquially speaking, for something to be realized is for it to be “made real.” In philosophy, the term "realization" refers to a special variety of making real whose paradigm cases are those in which one thing “plays the role of” or “functions as” another. For example, one might say that the human heart realizes a blood pump, that a rock realizes a door stop, or that my computer (or some part of it) realizes Microsoft Word. Moreover, it is widely held by philosophers of science and metaphysicians that realization provides the best way to understand the relation between the entities and processes studied by physics and those studied by economics, psychology, biology, and other so-called special (i.e., non-fundamental) sciences. The latter are, it is said, realized by the former. Despite the central role of realization in philosophical and philosophical-cum-scientific theorizing, until recently very little attention had been paid to the nature of the relation itself. Competing theories of realization generally aim to vindicate the explanatory value of realized entities for the non-fundamental “special” sciences. We generally agree that hearts are legitimate explanatory objects for biologists, for example. But are they realized entities? And it is even more controversial whether all special sciences entities are realized (or whether some stand in other relations to basic science entities), and what sort of explanatory achievement it is to discover that a functional type (e.g., a heart) is realized, and (iii) whether traditional philosophical models of scientific explanation can accommodate this variety of explanation by appeal to realization. So a full account of realization requires attention to particular cases as well as a complementary treatment of scientific explanation.Hilda Smith - Department of History
Project: Not the Less True: Women Intellectuals and Constraints of Intellectual HistoryAbstract:
This project is an effort to assess the nature of early modern intellectual history as seen through the analytical gaze of seventeenth-century women intellectuals, in particular Margaret Cavendish and Mary Astell. It seeks to
understand why intellectual history has failed to incorporate women into its framework, and how early modern women understood and confronted their exclusion in ways that offer current scholars guidance. It is built upon three decades of studying the philosophic and scientific writings of early modern women, analyzing the gendered nature of political theory, and assessing the trends in intellectual history, and will result in a synthetic work, which will include early modern authors, contemporary theory, and judgments offered by intellectual historians.
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