End Date :
Female Orphan School, Parramatta South Campus, University of Western Sydney
A collaborative Writing/Thinking workshop
Presented by the ICLS (Columbia), Philosophy@UWS and the Writing and Society Research Centre (UWS)
Date: Monday, 8 December 2014
Location: Female Orphan School, Parramatta South Campus, University of Western Sydney
Symposium conveners: Alex Ling and Lorraine Sim, School of Humanities and Communication Arts, University of Western Sydney
In light of the recent interest across the Humanities in emotion, affect and associated topics such as sensation, this symposium turns our attention to the related but largely overlooked category of sentiment. On the one hand we seek to remember the complex history of this term: its centrality, for instance, to eighteenth-century moral philosophy and aesthetics (the moral philosophy of Adam Smith and David Hume; the novel of sensibility), and the mechanisms by which it becomes, in the nineteenth century, conflated with the largely derisory concept of sentimentalism as an overabundance or banality of feeling, triviality of character, or as a descriptor for bad art. Given the demotion of sentiment to sentimentalism – one from which it has never fully recovered – this symposium invites us to reflect on the status of sentiment as a concept at this particular theoretical and cultural moment; to consider what traction it might offer us as a concept in various disciplines across the Humanities; and the ways in which it informs contemporary genres and media. Furthermore, in spite of the significant critical interest in emotion and affect in recent years, feeling is something that we are still warned against as academics engaged in the apparently objective activity of critique.
Speakers:
· Professor James Chandler (Departments of English and Cinema and Media Studies, University of Chicago)
· Professor Gil Anidjar (Department of Religion and MESAAS, Columbia University) (ICLS)
· Assoc. Professor Patricia Dailey (Department of English and Comp. Lit., Columbia University) (ICLS)
· Dr. Sara Crangle (School of English and Co-Director of the Centre for Modernism Studies, University of Sussex)
· Dr. Magdalena Zolkos (Institute for Social Justice, Australian Catholic University
