The Critical Questions lecture series brings prominent scholars in literature, rhetoric, and film to OSU. In addition to delivering a public talk, the speakers meet with graduate students to discuss such topics as: the genesis of their work; the state of the field as they see it; and the cultural relevance of scholarship in the humanities. Past speakers have included Miles Orvell, winner of the Bode-Pearson prize for lifetime achievement in American Studies; Holly Crocker, author of Chaucer's Visions of Manhood; Cindy Weinstein, Professor of English and Executive Officer in the Humanities at Caltech; and Carl Djerassi, prize-winning chemist and internationally recognized playwright.

 Events in 2012-13

Kit Andrews
Rescuing the Revolution from Itself: Thomas Carlyle, Walter Pater, and the Victorian Reception of German Idealism
October 25th, 2012, 103 Owen Hall, 4:00 p.m.

The influence of Carlyle’s social criticism has been well established throughout the Victorian era on works ranging from Dickens’s novels to Ruskin’s art criticism. In contrast, Walter Pater’s late Victorian essays and fictions have typically been read as a turn away from Carlyle’s broad political concerns to a narrow focus on private aesthetic experience.  Reading Pater’s writings as a further development of Carlyle’s reception of German Idealism, however, reveals the ways Pater actually reenvisages Carlyle’s social critique.  Specifically, Pater continues Carlyle’s effort to rescue the revolutionary potential within the French Revolution from its betrayal by the Revolution.  Furthermore, Pater fashions out of Carlyle’s idiosyncratic engagement with Fichte the literary-philosophical form he finds necessary for this project.

Kit Andrews is Professor of English at Western Oregon University. His teaching and scholarship focus on Victorian literature, European intellectual history, West African literature, and critical theory.  Professor Andrews currently is at work on a project that investigates the nineteenth-century British literary and philosophical reception of German Idealism.

Jan-Christopher Horak
Some Origins of Film Noir in Weimar Cinema and German Exile
January 28th, 2013, 103 Owen Hall, 5:00 p.m.

Jan-Christopher Horak is the Director of the UCLA Film & Television Archive and a professor in the Critical Studies program in the film school at UCLA. His previous archival work includes a stint as the Director of Archives & Collections at Universal Studios, the Director of the Munich Filmmuseum, and the Senior Curator at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York. His publications include: Making Images Move: Photographers and Avant-Garde Cinema (1997), Lovers of Cinema: The First American Film Avant-Garde 1919-1945 (1995), and The Dream Merchants: Making and Selling Films in Hollywood's Golden Age (1989) as well as over 250 articles and reviews in English, German, French, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, and Hebrew.