Seminars 1949 to the Present

2023-24

Silvia Federici: Rethinking, Remaking a Feminist Agenda
Feminism, Social Reproduction, and the Reconstruction of the Commons (Public lecture), The Body as a Site of Resistance (Lunch seminar)

Denise Ferreira da Silva: On Sensibility
Annotations on Black Art: On Authority at the Threshold of Representation (Public lecture), On Interiority (Lunch seminar)

2022-23

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: The Practice of Learning Du Bois
My Brother Burghardt (Public lecture), The Long Shadow of Du Bois (Lunch seminar)

Hortense J. Spillers: Criticism in Times of Stress
Ethics and the Everyday – (Public lecture), Women and the Laws (Lunch seminar)

2021-22

Alenka Zupančič: Back to the Future of the End
Dead Ends – (Public lecture), The Apocalypse is Disappointing? – (Lunch seminar)

---

2010s

2019-20

Naomi Klein: A Call to Action: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal.
Read the story on the University homepage.

Michael Hardt: Globalization and Resistance
Empire, 20 years on (Public lecture), What is a movement? (Lunch seminar)

2018-19

Wendy Brown: Society Must be Dismantled – Markets, Morals and Freedom (Public lecture), Speaking Cakes and Whispering Crisis Pregnancy Centers: Undoing Democracy with Religious Liberty and Free Speech – (Lunch seminar)

Fred Moten: Poetics of Violence, Transubstantiation and Cosubstantiality (Public lecture), Apposition and Deposition – (Lunch Seminar)
Watch the video of his lecture here.

2017-18

Hegel and the Humanities: A Symposium

Kristin Gjesdal: “Why the Humanities Matter to Hegel (and Hegel to the Humanities)”
Chad Wellmon: “Hegel, Helmholtz, and the Compensatory Work of the Humanities”
Molly Farneth: “Why Religion Still Matters: Provocations after Hegel”Katrin Pahl — “Figures of Transformation: Queer-Feminist Hegel”
Robyn Marasco: “Hegel and the Passions”
Jeremy M. Glick: “Hegelian resonances/Afro-American Literary Studies: Some Preparatory Notes”Anjuli Raza Kolb — “Infinite Science: Hegel in the Weeds”
Andrew Cole:  “Figures as Concepts; or, Math Problems”
Russell Sbriglia: “Hegel after the Objectal Turn: Neo-materialism, Neo-realism, and the Specter of Subjectivity”

Catherine Malabou: Floating Signifiers Revisited – Post-Struturalism Meets Neurolinguistics (Public Lecture)

Seminar discussion on reading from Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality, by Catherine Malabou

2015-16

Michael Lesy: The Photography of History, North America, Europe and Asia 1900-10

1. Case Study: The Life and Times of Angelo Rizzuto, ‘the Little Angel’
2. Looking Backwards: 3D Images of the World at the Beginning of the 20th Century 2016-2017

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro: Misanthropology – varieties and variations

2014-15

Maurizio Bettini: Between Vertere and Interpretari: Texts and Gods in Roman Culture
1. From Market to Metamorphosis: Cultural Inages of “Translation” in Rome
2. Translating the Gods of Others?
3. Vertumnus, God of Vertere

Michel Feher: Did Something Unexpected Happen on the Way to the Market?

1. My Life is My Business: Neoliberalizm and the Entrepreneurial Self
2. Appreciable Projects: Financialization and the Invested Self

2013-14

Stephen Owen: Alternative Poetics – Chinese Poetry Against Itself

1. The Poetry Machine: LI He (791-817)
2. The Poetry that is Something Else and the Legally Aesthetic (11th-12th Century)
3. Brocade Leviathan: Wu Wenying (ll.c.mid-13th century)

Susan Howe and Daniel Grubbs: Woodslipper Counterclatter (full day symposium)

2012-13

Victor I. Stoichita: The Don Quixote Effect

1. Don Quixote and the “Aesthetic Border”
2. Murillo’s Frames
3. Minimal Zurbarán

Bernhard Böschenstein: Hölderlin and Sophocles

The Meridian Materials: Five Papers on Paul Celan:

Rainer Nägele: The Sense of Poetry
Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb: Two Meridiens: Celan and Auden Around 1960
Pierre Joris: Meridien into Meridien – On Translating Paul Celan
Anna Glazova: The Toil of Translation- Paul Celan’s Second Encounter with Ossip Mandelstam
Bernhard Böschenstein: The Meridian and Its Materials: Some Central Aspects of Celan’s Poetology

2011-12

Jan Zwicky: Resonant Form

1. What is Ineffable?
2. Imagination and the Good Life
3. Auden as Philosopher: How Poets Think

2010-11

Laurence Horn, Paola Mieli, Jordan Finkin, and Rebecca Comay: One Hundred Years of Primal Words – Five Explorations of Symposium Freud’s “On the Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words” (1910)

Werner Hamacher: Justice in Language

1. Right is a Form (Kant) and Authentic Interpretation (Hobbes)
2. Conversation by Divorce (Milton)
3. Right in the Mirror (Legendre) and Justice in Language (Celan)

---

2000s

2009-10

Jacques Rancière: “Modernity” Revisited: Scenes from Aesthetic Regime of Art

1. Hegel and the Little Gods of the Street
2. How Emerson invented Modernism
3. Why Charlie Chaplin Became the Hero of the Artistic Avant-Garde

Abdelfattah Kilito: On the Lost Manuscript

1. The Second Madness of Shahriyar
2. Is Harîrî the Author of His Assemblies?
3. An Unpublished Tale from The Arabian Nights?

2008-09

Rachel Bowlby: Likely Stories: Realism in the Real Life and Literature

1. Out of Love: Phaedra and Hippolytus (Euripides, Racine)
2. Untold Stories in Mrs. Dalloway
3. Derrida’s Dying Oedipus (Sophocles’, Oedipus at Colonus)

Eleanor Kaufman: The Incorporeal in French Phenomenology

1. The Minerology of Being
2. The Botany of Inertiade
3. The Leaping of Objects

2007-08

Raymond Bellour: The Body of Cinema: Hypnoses, Emotions, Animalities

1. Cinema as Hyposis
2. Unfolding the Emotions
3. The Animal between Symbol & Intensities (The Case of Alfred Hitchcock)

2006-07

Hubert Damisch: Remarks on Abstraction

1. The Tree, The Grid, The Hypo-Icon
2. The Visible, The Screen, The Crisis
3. The Last Post

Peter Fenves: No One’s Thing: The Idea of ‘Res Nullius’ and the Search for a Critique of Violence

1. The Idea of “Res Nullius’ (Kant)
2. In Search of a Critique of Violence (Benjamin)
3. Workforce Without Possession (Kafka)

2005-06

Patricia J. Williams: Race, Biology, Judicial Fundamentalism

1. The Ghost of Christmas Past
2. The Shadows of the Present
3. Manifestations of the World to Be

2004-05

Joan Scott: French Universalism in Crisis

1. Parité: Women and the Abstract Individual
2. Alliance: Kinship, Family and the rights of Homosexual Couples
3. Laïcité: The controversy over headscarves in public schools

Mary Ann Doane: Modernity and the Cinema: Time, Movement and Scale

1. Real Time: Instantaneity and the Photographic Imaginary
2. Movement and Scale: From the Flip-book to the Cinema
3. Desire, Absorption, and the Close-up

2003-04

Jacqueline Rose: The Question of Zion

1. The Apocalyptic Sting: Zionism as Messianvism (Vision)
2. Imponderables in Thin Air: Zionism as Psychoanalysis (Critique)
3. Breaking Bones: Zionism as Politics (Violence)

Samuel Weber: Targets of Opportunity: Violence, Representation, Self- Fulfillment

1. Taking Aim: Homecoming
2. The “Principle of Representation”: Carl Schmitt
3. Getting Rid of the Traces: Freud’s “Man Moses…”

Single Lecture
Tariq Ali: Imperial Headaches and World Order

2002-2003

Svetlana Boym: The Other Freedom

1. The Other Freedom
2. From Estrangement to the Banality of Evil
3. Freedom of Expression and Russian-American Art

Peter L. Galison: Thinking Through Things

1. Poincaré’s Maps: Modernities of Physics
2. Einstein’s Clocks: The Place of Time
3. Rorschach’s Plates: Image of Self

2001-02

Martin Jay: Songs of Experience

1. The Appeal of Religious Experience
2. The Politics of Experience
3. History and Experience

Stefan Collini: Paradoxes of Denial: Intellectuals in Twentieth-Century Britain

1. Foreign Bodies
2. Other People
3. Cretan Liar

Single Seminar
Princeton Faculty Terrorism and War, the Arts and the Humanities; A Conversation in the Aftermath of September 11

2000-01 No Lectures/Events

---

1990s

1999-2000

Georges Didi-Huberman: Aby Warburtg and Nachleben: The History of Art as Ghost Story

1. Survivals and the Anthropology of Time: Aby Warburg with Edward B. Tylor
2. Renaissance and the Impurity of Time: Aby Warburg with Jacob Burckhardt
3. Killing the Ghosts: Edwin Panofsky, Exorcist of Nachleben

1998-99

Judith Butler: Antigone’s Claim

1. Kinship, Psychoanalysis, Politics
2. Unwritten Laws, Aberrant Transmissions
3. Promiscuous Obedience

Wendy Doniger: Rings of Rejection and Recollection

1. Tales of Clever Wives in Ancient India: Muladeva’s Wife and Shakuntala
2. Forgetful Husbands in Celtic Romances, Boccaccio, English Renaissance Dramas, and Shakespeare
3. Norse and Wagnerian Rings

1997-98

Paul Coates: Structuring Absences: Film, Modernity and the Afterlives of Transcendence

1. Naming Others
2. Modernist Adaptations and Structuring Absence
3. The Look Into the Sky: Film, Sublimity and Gender

1996-97

Antoine Compagnon: Anti-Semitism that Dare Not Speak Its Name: Ferdinand Brunetiere and the Dreyfus Affair

1. The Assyrian Defense
2. Judeophobia as Trope
3. Scapegoating Renan

Leonard Barkan: Mute Poetry Speaking Pictures

1. The Painting of the Chair: Poetics and Imagistics at Cross Purposes
2. Visible Speech
3. Shakespeare and the Theater as a Visual Art

Philip Fisher: Aesthetics and the Vehement Passions: Anger, Fear, Grief, Shame

1. Why Passions and not Feelings, Moods or Emotions?
2. The Spiritualization of Fear
3. Rashness and the Vehement Self

1995-96

Julia Kristeva: Proust: Questions of Identity

1. Special Qualities of Character in Proust
2. Commitment and the Writer: Proust During and After the Dreyfus Affair
3. Text as Experience: Proustian Temporality

Elizabeth Cropper: Beautiful Manners

1. The Problem of Beauty
2. Pontormo: A Question of Identity
3. Pontormo: Identity and Beauty

Lawrence Stone: Leisure and the Culture of Politeness in Eighteenth Century England

1. Gentlemen and Middling Sorts in 1660
2. Killing Vacant Time 1660-1800
3. Travel at Home and Abroad 1660-1800

1994-95

Sheldon Wolin: The Career of Theory

1. Inventing Theory: Reappearance and Reality
2. Theory and Revolution: Disappearance and Reality
3. The Disappearance of Theory and Reality

David Bromwich: The Radicalism of Edmund Burke

I. How Not to Read Burke’s Sublime and Beautiful
2. What Did Burke Think of the American Colonists?
3. King Lear, Burke, and the French Revolution

Judith Walkowitz: London and Modernity

1. Narrating London’s Modernity
2. Going Public: Shopping, Streetwalking, and Sexual Harassment in Late-Victorian London
3. The Indian, the Cockney, and the Jew: Imperial Self- Fashioning in the Edwardian Metropolis

1993-94

Marc Fumaroli: Rhetoric in the History of Forms

1. Rhetoric and Institutions
2. Rhetoric and Literary Art
3. Rhetoric and the Plastic Arts

Richard Taruskin: Hermeneutics of Russian Music

1. Tchaikovsky and the Human
2. Scriabin and the Superhuman, Stravinsky and the Subhuman
3. Shostakovich and the Inhuman

Sabine MacCormack: The Scent of a Rose: How Augustine Read Vergil

1. Words as Signs: Language and Grammar Between Pagans and Christians
2. The Tears Roll Down in Vain: Emotions and the Soul
3. Songs of the City: Rome and the City of God

Owen Fiss: Free Speech and the Modern Democratic State

1. The Silencing Effect of Speech: Regulating Pornography, Hate Speech, and Campaign Finance
2. Art and the Activist State: Constitutional Prescriptions for Public Funding Decisions
3. The Democratic Mission of the Press: Defining the Proper Role of the State and the Market

1992-93

Michael Riffaterre: The Discourse of Criticism

1. The Heresy of Paraphrase
2. Margins
3. The Poetics of Interpretation

T. M. Scanlon: Relativism

1. Fear of Relativism
2. Relativity and Reason
3. Possibilities for Benign Moral Relativism

Rosalind Krauss: The Optical Unconscious
1. The Picasso Pulse
2. The Sublimated Jackson Pollock
3. The Desublimated Jackson Pollock

David Bordwell: Toward a Theory of Style in the Cinema

1. Film Style as Technique: The Constraints of Craft Practice
2. Film Style as System: Pattern and Perception
3. Film Style as Function: Representation, Expression, and Ornamentation

1991-92

Franco Moretti: The Modern Epic

1. Nonsynchronism, Polyphony, Totality
2. Some Irreverent Thoughts on the Divided Subject
3. The Liberation of the Device

Richard Stites: Popular Culture, Politics, and Emotion in Totalitarian Europe

1. Stalin by Starlight
2. Springtime for Hitler
3. The Heart of War

Bernard Williams: Truth, Truthfulness and Power

1. Truth
2. Truthfulness
3. Power

Catharine MacKinnon: Only Words

1. Defamation and Discrimination
2. Racial and Sexual Harassment
3. Equality and Speech

1990-91

Manfred Frank: Style in Philosophy

1. Towards a Philosophy of Style
2. Style in Philosophy
3. An Illustration: Wittgenstein and Early Romanticism

Richard Poirier: Poetry and Pragmatism

1. Superfluous Emerson
2. The Transfiguration of Work
3. The Reinstatement of the Vague

Philip Gossett: Music History and Contemporary Performance: 19th- Century Italian Opera at the End of the 20th Century

1. Pre-Performance Decisions
2. Singing and Playing
3. Translation and Adaption

Simon Schama: Landscape and Redemption

1. The Living Cross
2. Sylvan States
3. The Flow of Life

---

1980s

Paul Coates: Structuring Absences: Film, Modernity and the Afterlives of Transcendence

1. Naming Others
2. Modernist Adaptations and Structuring Absence
3. The Look Into the Sky: Film, Sublimity and Gender

1988-89

Saul Friedlander: Catastrophe and Modern Memory: The’Final Solution’

1. The Emergence and Structure of the “Monumental” Narrative
2. The Paradoxes of the “Return to History”
3. History and Myth

Lynn Avery Hunt: The Family Romance of the French Revolution

1. The Revolution Without Lineage
2. The Many Bodies of Marie-Antoinette
3. Politics in the Boudoir

Michael Holquist: The Mirror of Dionysus: Anthropomorphism and Narrative

1. Biographical Structure in Non-Biographical Narrative
2. Allegories of Encounter: Biographies of Cultures
3. The Biography of a Nose: Literary Texts as Faces

1987-88

Jonathan D. Spence: China in Western Imagination

1. Playing with Reason: 1680-1840
2. Forking the Paths: 1910-1980
3. From Canton to Charenton: The Placement of Hu

James Nohrnberg: On the Narrative of the Bible

I. On Genesis: “The Keeping of Nahor”
2. On the Exodus: “The Constituting of an Interruption”
3. On the Former Prophets: “Kingship and Character”

Joseph Kerman: Concerto Studies

I. Identity and Relationship
2. Spontaneity and Form
3. Myths and Stories

John W. Burrow: Revolution, Reason, Tradition: Some Victorian Reflections

1. After Apocalypse
2. The Ironies of Progress
3. After Progress

1986-87

Nina Auerbach: Private Theatricals: The Lives of the Victorians

1. Little Actors
2. Performing Nature’s Bidding
3. Death Scene

Timothy Clark: Beliefs and Purposes in David’s Death of Marat

1. Problems
2. Politics
3. Reading

Patricia Parker: Rhetoric, Gender, Discourse

1. Motivated Rhetorics: Gender, Order, Rule
2. Rhetorics of Property: Exploration, Inventory, Blazon
3. Coming Second: Woman’s Place

Roberto Mangabeira Unger: Reinventing Democracy, Imagining Transformation, Living Without Foundations

1. Reinventing Democracy
2. Imagining Transformation
3. Living Without Foundations

1985-86

Leo Steinberg: Rethinking Michelangelo’s Sculptures

1. The Roman Pieta
2. The Medici Madonna
3. The late Pietas

Juliet Mitchell: Rethinking Psychoanalysis and Feminism

1. Thoughts on Twenty Years of Feminism: Why
Psychoanalysis?
2. From Fathers to Mothers: Jacques Lacan and
Melanie Klein
3. Sexuality and Sexual Difference: Some Clinical
Considerations

Dorrit Cohn: Fictional Versus Historical Lives

1. The Distinction of Person
2. Novel and Biography
3. Novel and Autobiography

Pierre Bourdieu: What is a Literary Field?

1. A Sociological Reading of Flaubert’s L’Education Sentimentale
2. Field of Power, Literary Field, and Habitus
3. “Literary Field” and Principles of Field Analysis

1984-85

John Freccer: Irony and Mimesis in the Inferno

1. The Gates of Hell
2. The Absence of the Present
3. Death in Florence

Michael Rogin: American Counter-Subversion

1. The Birth of a Nation: The Movie as History
2. The Birth of a Nation: History as a Movie
3. Ronald Reagan, The Movie

Michael Harrington: The Crisis of Western Socialism

1. The Crisis of Keynesian “Socialism”
2. France and Sweden: Two Different Paths
3. The End of Socialism?

George Kateb: Human Extinction and Moral Philosophy

1. Nuclear Weapons and Individual Rights
2. Human Extinction and Non-Democratic Individualism: Nietzsche and Heidegger
3. Human Extinction and Democratic Individuality: Emerson and Whitman

1983-84

Jean Franco: A Haunted House: Feminist Readings of Contemporary Latin American Fiction

1. On Recognition and Forgetting
2. Patriarchy and Authorship
3. Matriarchy and the Traffic in Women

Marshall Sahlins: The Anthropology of History in the South Seas

1. Structure and History: Elementary Forms of the
Symbolic Life
2. The Polynesian War: I. Hierarchy and Victory
3. The Polynesian War: II. Systems and Strategies

Amos Funkenstein: Theology and the Scientific Imagination From the Later Middle Ages to the 17th Century

1. The omnipresence, the Body of God and Some Ideals of Science
2. Divine Omnipotence and the Laws of Nature
3. Divine Providence and the Course of History

Paul Ricoeur: History, Fiction and Time

1. The Specificity of Historical Time
2. History Making and History Writing
3. The Conjunction of History and Fiction in the Refiguration of Time

1982-83

Carol Gilligan: The Psychology of Love

1. The Conquistador and the Dark Continent
2. The Age of Innocence
3. Sins for the Sake of Loyalty

Angus Fletcher: Liminal Poetics

1. Thresholds
2. Maze-Thresholds
3. Hobson’s Choice

Neil Hertz: Authorial Surrogates in George Eliot’s Fiction

1. Some General Considerations
2. Adam Bede
3. Daniel Deronda

Michael Walzer: Exodus and Revolution

1. The House of Bondage
2. The Golden Calf
3. The Promised Land

Single Lecture
Pierre Ryckmans: Painting and Poetry: Aspects of Chinese Classical Aesthetics

1981-82

Charles Taylor: Persons and the Human Context

1. The Issue of Naturalism
2. The Human Context
3. Deconstruction and Humanism

Alasdair Macintyre: The Rise and Fall of the Scottish Philosophy in Scotland and America, 1690-1890

1. Scottish moral philosophy: the Professor as Hero
2. The Invention of Common Sense
3. From McCosh to William James –Morality and Irrationalism

Hayden White: The Politics of Historical Interpretation

1. The Politics of Historical Interpretation
2. The Domestication of History
3. The Limits of Discipline

Robert Herbert: Impressionism: the Iconography of Leisure

1. The Transformation of Paris
2. Cafe-Concert
3. Masters of the Ballet

Shirley Hazzard: The Lonely Word

1. Virgil and Montale
2. The Defence of Candour
3. Posterity: ‘The Bright Reversion

1980-81

Jaroslav Pelikan: One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic? Some Doctrinal Issues on the Eve of the Reformation

1. Unity and Schism
2. The Wicked Priest and the Wicked Ruler
3. The Crisis of Apostolic Authority

Robert Rosenblum: The Picasso Revival

Hans-Georg Gadamer: The Central Place of Hermeneutics in the Context of Philosophy

J.G.A. Pocock: The History of Political Thought: An Account of a Practice

1. Texts, Language and Contexts
2. The Reconstitution of Discourse
3. Eagles, Owls and Ravens

Ernst Tugendhat: Problems in Moral Philosophy

1. The Semantic Approach to Morality
2. Morality and Historical Experience
3. Morality and Communication

Harold Bloom: Revisionism and Gnosis in Criticism

1. Agon: Revisionism and Critical Personality
2. Transumption: Towards a Diachronic Rhetoric
3. Paradigms: Catastrophe Creation, Family, Romance, Transference

---

1970s

1979-80

E. Rodriguez Monegal: Literary Biography as a Form of Textual Criticism

1. Biography as Myth
2. Biography as Poetics
3. Biography as Text

Arnaldo Momigliano: The Origins of Universal History

1. Universal History in Greece and Rome to the Age of Augustus
2. Daniel and the Dangers of Apocalyptic
3. The Paradox of the Roman Empire and the Sybilline Books

Mary Douglas: Pollution Theory

1. Unnatural Vice
2. Natural Death
3. Perceiving Danger

Quentin Skinner: Machiavelli — The Making of the Prince

1. The Framework of Political Action
2. The Uses of Political Experience
3. The Transvaluation of Political Values

Ian Watt: The Myths of Modern Individualism — Faust, Don Juan and Others

1. Who Damned Faust?
2. A Counter-Reformation Mythology
3. The Romantic Apotheosis

1978-79

Helen Vendler: Problems of Form in the Odes of Keats

1. The Ode on Indolence and the Ode to Psyche
2. The Ode to a Nightingale and the Ode on a Grecian Urn
3. The Ode on Melancholy and To Autumn

Donald Fanger: Gogol and Possibility of Literature

1. The Writer
2. The Reader
3. The Writing

Peter Gay: The Case Against the Bourgeoisie

1. Gentility
2. Insensitivity
3. Nervousness

Frank Manuel: The Utopian Propensity in the Western World

1. The Shadowy Boundaries of Utopia
2. Mapping the Utopian Constellations
3. The Utopian Prospect

Sidney Mintz: Sugar, Sweetness and Time

1. Food for Thought
2. Plenty and Want
3. History, Ritual and Meaning: A Cautionary Tale

1977-78

Tzvetan Todorov: Symbolism and Interpretation

1. Linguistic Symbolism
2. Phases of Interpretation
3. Further aspects of Interpretation

Charles Rosen: Private to Public: Instrumental Music in the 18th Century

1. The Myth of the String Quartet
2. The Fragment as Romantic Form

Victor Erlich: Russian Formalism Revisited: The Conceptual Framework of Russian Formalism: Antecedents, Contexts, Key Terms, and Major Emphases

Jacques Roger: Evolution — Old and New

1. History of Evolution
2. The Changing Meaning of Evolution
3. Evolution as a Theory

Edward Shils: Bohemia and its Legacy

1. Three Portraits of Bohemia
2. Modernism in Literature and Art
3. The New Individualism

1976-77

John Passmore: The Seriousness of Art: Truth; Beauty

Umberto Eco: Semiotics Old and New

Eugene Wigner: The Unity of Science; the Future Vocation of Science

Ralf Dahrendorf: Life Chances: Explorations of a Concept

Edward Said: Criticism Between Culture and System

1975-76

Monroe Spears: The Iconography of Time in Three Modern Poets

Gary Wills: Happiness in the Declaration of Independence

Marilyn Lavin: Eloquence in Piero della Francesca

Serge Doubrovsky: French Psychoanalytic School of Criticism

Sir Peter Medawar: Karl Popper’s Philosophy and “The Two Cultures”; Scientism and Poetism; Experimentation as Criticism; Critique of Prediction; Is Knowledge Finite?

Single Seminar
Mihailo Markovic: Marxism and Stalinism

1974-75

Hugh Kenner: The Meaning of Rhyme

Theodore Draper: The Rise and Decline of American Power

Stuart Hampshire: Morality and Nature

Julian Moynahan: Anglo-Irish Literature

Phillip Rieff: NOT –What is Not to Be Done

Single Seminar
William Weaver: Verdi’s Librettos

1973-74

Allen Tate: A Southern Mode of the Imagination, The Fugitive Group, and a Review of Paul Elmer More’s Neo-Humanism

Louis Dumont: From Mandeville to Marx –Genesis and Accomplishment of the Economic Ideology

Wayne Booth: Criticism – Warfare or Inquiry?

Paul Zweig: The Adventurer

Michael Fried: Toward a Supreme Fiction: Absorption and Theatricality in the Art Criticism of Diderot

1972-73

Hans Morgenthau: On Abraham Lincoln

Otto von Simson: On German Medieval Art

Isaiah Berlin: The Origins of Cultural History

Warner Berthoff: The Continuance of Virtue

Alfred Meyer: On Friedrich Engels

Richard Ellmann: On Ulysses

1971-72

Elizabeth Hardwick: Domestic Relations: Situations in Literary History

John Patrick Creagh: Tristan Corbiere and Us

Wright Morris: Telling It Like It Is: A Triumph and Its Consequences –Reflections on the Vernacular in Modern Fiction

John Simon: On the Films of Ingmar Bergman

Eugene Goodheart: Utopia and the Irony of History: and The Imagination and the Temptations of Politics

Diana Trilling: We Must March My Darlings: A Return to Radcliffe College (a comparative study of Radcliffe)

Nathalie Sarraute: Her Theory of the Novel

1970-71

Lionel Trilling: Sincerity and Authenticity

Roger Shattuck: Origins of the Dadaist Movement Both in Literature and Art

Stanley Cavell: The Senses Walden Makes

Jurgen Habermas: Establishing a New Theory of Society and Societal Acts Based on Utilizing the Results of the Most Recent Anglo-American Analytical Philosophy

---

1960s

1969-70

John McCormick: Visions of History in the Post-Romantic Novel

Frank Kermode: Problems of Form and Structure in the Contemporary Novel

Erik Erikson: Re-Enactment and Innovation

Single Seminars
Erik Erikson: Public Lecture
Herbert Marcuse: The Idea of Dialectic in Professor Adorno’s book, Negative Dialektik

1968-69

Yves Bonnefoy: Modern Poetics and the Temporal Predicament

Peter H. von Blanckenhagen: The Image of Man in Classical Art

Alain Clement: Tocqueville’s Democracy in the United States

Single Seminars
Kenneth Burke: An Introduction to his System of Philosophy
Rufus Mathewson: Analysis of Siniavsky’s works

1967-68

Paul Fussell: The Life of Writing: Samuel Johnson

Geoffrey Hartman: The Progress of Poetry

Roman Jakobson: Poetry of Grammar and Grammar of Poetry

Single Seminar
Elizabeth Sewell: Coleridge of Revolution

1966-67

Nicola Chiaromonte: Relation Between History and the Novel

Francis Fergusson: On Allegory in Dante and Shakespeare

Paul de Man: Contemporary Interpretations of Romanticism

1965-66

Stephen Spender: The Idea of the Imagination in Romantic Poetry and in Modern Poetry

John Jordan: Illusion and Reality in the Later O’Casey, and Post-Yeats Irish Verse: Clarke, Devlin, Kavanagh and Others.

Ronald Dworkin: Philosophy and Law

Frithjof Bergmann: Philosophical Approaches to Literature

1964-65

Marshall Cohen: Aesthetics and Poetics

Noam Chomsky: Concepts of Language: The Evolution of General Linguistics Since the Seventeenth Century

Robert Fitzgerald: Some Problems involved in the Translation of the Odyssey

1963-64

Paul Lazarsfeld: Strands in Contemporary Social Research

Glauco Cambon: “Disponibilite” in Modern European Literature

Victor Brombert: Flaubert

1962-63

Mark Kac: Chance and Regularity: A Genesis of Statistical Thinking

H. D. F. Kitto: The Greeks and the Rational

James Burnham: Liberalism as the Ideology of Western Suicide

Harold Rosenberg: Problems of Contemporary Art

1961-62

William Lee Miller: Ethics and American Policy

Alfred Kazin: Novelists and Storytellers of American Society

Renato Poggioli: Modes of the Pastoral

John Hollander: Musical English – Some Problems of New and Traditional Meters

1960-61

I. A. Richards: Poetics of What We Will

R. W. B. Lewis: Hart Crane’s The Bridge and Approaches to it

Louis Kronenberger: The Literature of Worldliness

Harry Levin: The Gates of Horn (on Zola and Proust)

---

1950s

1959-60

George Steiner: The Pursuit of Tragedy

Sean O’Faolain: The Pleasure Principle in the Novel

Eric Bentley: Bertolt Brecht

Charles Singleton: Dante – Commedia

1958-59

Dwight MacDonald: Mass Culture

Clement Greenberg: The Logistic of Modernist Painting

Kingsley Arnis: Science Fiction

Rosemond Tuve: Some Late Medieval Books and Elizabethan Allegory

1957-58

Stringfellow Barr: Prolegomena for a History of Hellenic Culture

Claude-Edmonde Magny: James Joyce

W. H. Auden: Prosody of Our Century: a Reading of Poems

Alfred Alvarez: The School of Donne

1956-57

Leslie A. Fiedler: The American Novel

Sidney Hyman: The American Party System

Elizabeth Sewell: Poetry as a Form of Thought

Ernst Krenek: Recent Advances in Musical Thought and Sound

Single Seminars
W. S. Merwin: A Reading of his Poems with Comments
Mary McCarthy: Current Realism in the American Theater
Alfredo Rizzardi: American Studies in Italy

1955-56

Albert Beguin: The Work of Georges Bernanos

Richard Eberhart: Will and Psyche in Poetry

Scott Buchanan: Modes of Analogy in Metaphysics

Meyer Schapiro: The Explanation of Styles

1954-55

Robert Speaight: The Drama of T.S. Eliot and Paul Claudel

Joseph Frank: Existential Themes in Modern Literature

Leo Spitzer: On Philology and Literary Criticism (Medieval romance texts)

Erich Kahler: The Crisis of the Individual

Single Seminar
Pierre Schneider: Mimesis and Metexis

1953-54

Hannah Arendt: Karl Marx and the Tradition of Political Thought

Victor S. Pritchett: Comedy in the English Novel of the Last Fifty Years

Sean O’Faolain: The Basic Assumptions of Modern English and American Fiction

John W. Aldridge: The Dramatics of Meaning in Fiction (the contemporary American novel)

Single Seminar:
H. D. F. Kitto: On the Oresteia

1952-53

Paul Tillich: Love, Power, and Justice

Edmund Wilson: American Literature After the Civil War

Leon Edel: The Stream of Consciousness in the Novel

Irving Howe: The Political Novel

Single Seminars:
John Berryman: On the poem Hommage to Mistress Bradstreet
Kenneth Burke: The Ancient Mariner: An Analysis to Illustrate a Method
Virgil Thomson: Criticism as Journalism

1951-52

Herbert Read: The Cult of Sincerity: Organic Form in English Poetry, Coleridge to Pound

Father Pierre de Menasce: On the Relative Independence of Thought from Language

Americo Castro Randall: Man and the Humanities

Jarrell Single Seminar: On the Poetry of W. H. Auden

Single Seminar:
Kenneth Burke: On the Analysis of Poetry

1950-51

René Wellek: From Neoclassicism to Romanticism

Robert Fitzgerald: Krisis, Praxis, Poiesis

Jacques Maritain: Poetry and Reason

1949-50

Erich Auerbach: Certain texts from Pascal, Baudelaire, Flaubert

Francis Fergusson: Six Cantos of Dante’s Purgatory

Delmore Schwartz: T. S. Eliot

Mark Schorer: The genre of the novel (eleven novels in English)