The Persistence of Existentialism
Virtual Session
Description
Existentialism never had much influence on Anglo-American philosophy. Peaking perhaps with Thomas Nagel’s 1971 article “The Absurd,” it has more often been sneeringly dismissed, or simply ignored. Arriving in translation during the worst decades of the analytic/continental divide (the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy was founded in 1962 because of analytic hegemony at the American Philosophical Association), it was frequently approached by scholars in other disciplines (French, comparative literature, religion) instead. And yet, almost every philosophy department now still regularly offers a popular class on existentialism, and it is the topic of a disproportionate amount of public-facing philosophy.
Why and how, when and where, does interest in existentialism persist beyond its apogee in mid-twentieth-century France, and well after Camus distanced himself from the label and Sartre turned to socialism? Following Beauvoir and Fanon, is existentialism still useful in analyzing patriarchy, racism, and colonialism, given Beauvoir’s seeming assumption of a gender binary, the orientalism of texts in the tradition like Andre Gide’s The Immoralist and Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky, and how poorly Sartre’s conception of radical freedom seems equipped to explain societal constraints? Why and how did existentialism get taken up by Richard Wright and Walker Percy in America, and Kobo Abe in Japan? How do other, more recent novels, like Tom McCarthy’s Remainder or Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation, rewrite and critique this tradition? Are there unappreciated places where existentialism can contribute to current philosophical and theoretical debates?
This seminar welcomes papers on recurrences of interest in existentialism in different historical eras; on how it has been taken up and adapted by more recent writers, filmmakers, and other artists; on its spread to literatures beyond France; and timely reconsiderations of the continued relevance of Camus, Sartre, and Beauvoir or forerunners like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, Dostoevsky, Ivan Ilyich, and Bartleby, and others who should be understood as existentialists.
Email Ben Roth ([email protected]) with any questions.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Speaker Bio
Ben Roth is an assistant professor of philosophy in the Marlboro Institute for Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies at Emerson College. His articles have been published or are forthcoming in the European Journal of Philosophy, Philosophy and Literature, the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, and Philosophy and Rhetoric, among numerous other places. He is also published more than two dozen short stories, one of which was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
Speaker Bio
Michael LeMahieu is Professor of English and Associate Dean in the College of Arts & Humanities at Clemson University. He is the author of Fictions of Fact and Value: The Erasure of Logical Positivism in American Literature, 1945-1975 (Oxford, 2013) and co-editor, with Karen Zumhagen Yekplé, of Wittgenstein and Modernism (Chicago, 2017). He has received fellowships from the NEH and ACLS. LeMahieu is an editor of the journal Contemporary Literature.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Adelheid Rundholz is a native of Cologne, Germany, and currently teaches foreign languages and literature at Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte, NC, USA. She has a Ph.D. in Comparative Literature and in Romance Languages and Literatures (French). Her research interests are literature of migration, novel, literary theory, world literature, aesthetics and language, comparative literature, and translation, intersections of literature and philosophy.
Speaker Bio
George Cai is currently a third-year doctoral student in the program of Comparative Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. He graduated in 2019 from Davidson College with a major in philosophy and a minor in French. He obtained his M.A. degree at Duke University in 2022, where he wrote a thesis on Yu Hua and Can Xue’s early writings as rhizomatic works that resist interpretive clarity. He is interested in modern Chinese and Japanese literature that use Western ideas and spirituality as prosthesis or alternative for self-expression when native options are denied them.
Speaker Bio
Lior Levy is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Haifa and the Chair of the Ofakim Honors Program. She specializes in feminist philosophy, phenomenology, and aesthetics. Her essays on the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir, Luce Irigaray, and Adriana Cavarero appeared in Hypatia, American Imago, and Ibsen Studies, among other journals.
Speaker Bio
Dr. Evren Akaltun Akan received her BA in Western Languages and Literatures from Boğaziçi University and she completed her MA and Ph.D in Comparative Literature at SUNY Stony Brook. Currently, she is working as an Assistant Professor in the department of English Language and Literature at Yaşar University located in İzmir. Her area of interest are World Literature studies, Crisis and Critique, Memory studies, posthumanism and early 20th Century Turkish and English Literature.