SPEAKER BIOGRAPHY

Ross Posnock is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His books include Henry James and the Problem of Robert Browning (University of Georgia Press, 1985), The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity (Oxford University Press, 1991), Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual (Harvard University Press, 1998), and Philip Roth’s Rude Truth: The Art of Immaturity (Princeton University Press, 2006). He has edited The Cambridge Companion to Ralph Ellison (2005), is series editor of Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture, and is a contributing editor of Raritan and American Literary History. In 1994 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship.

LECTURE DESCRIPTION

In his lecture, Professor Posnock will use the concept of “cosmopolitan poverty” to argue for an alternative model of primitivism that turns away from seeing the animal as man’s hidden essence of unalienated freedom and instead sees the human and nonhuman animal as fellow creatures. His approach is inspired by the picture of Wittgenstein’s eyes that W. G. Sebald juxtaposes to owls’ eyes on the second and third pages of his novel Austerlitz. Professor Posnock will present a genealogy of “cosmopolitan poverty” that starts with the first cosmopolitan Diogenes the Cynic, is conspicuous in American literature (Whitman, Thoreau, William James’s pragmatism and Philip Roth) but is most creatively enacted in the cosmopolitan poverty of Wittgenstein and Sebald.