How can one emancipate oneself from the sordidness of day-to-day politics? How can intellectuals and scholars emancipate themselves from incessant breaking news delivered by phones? These two questions may seem odd, even unwelcomed. At a recent academic conference I attended, I was surprised to hear so many participants describe themselves as organizers and activists. Yet, most of these participants also said they were “exhausted”. Was this exhaustion a call for emancipation from the knowledge of the state of current affairs - from too much information? Surely, it was not about building an ivory tower.

Academics are not journalists. However, most papers at conferences and conversations in classrooms – at least in the Humanities and at my large public university – seem to be reactions to the latest headlines. Academics are engaged – perhaps despite themselves - with a reality that is often depressing and suffocating. Freeing oneself, at least momentarily, from what has become a state of alert may be the most emancipatory narrative. Commonly used words like « crisis » and « emergency » sound like « panic » and « outrage » which are rarely conducive to thinking and writing. The participants of this session are not advocating for indifference, but for distance.

In this session, another type of emancipation will be broached. Great films, novels and paintings provoke emotions (admiration, sadness, nostalgia, joy, etc.). Overwhelming, powerful and sudden, these emotions remove from triviality and consternation. « Artistic emotion » is an old-fashion idea that has been disqualified as conservative or uninteresting. But what does one do with one’s tears while looking at a painting, watching a film, or reading a novel? Works of art may be useless in the face of political adversity, but they can emancipate individuals from banality, stupidity and fear.

Maxime Blanchard

(Graduate Center & City College, The City University of New York)

Against Nature: Watching La Piscine by Jacques Deray

My talk will discuss La piscine, a film by Jacques Deray with Alain Delon and Romy Schneider, Jane Birkin and Maurice Ronet. The film was made in the summer of 1968 and came out in 1969. It was a commercial success, and it has also become a classic, even a cult film. It does not mention May 68. Nevertheless, it might be the most eloquent film about May 68. I will discuss how the film spectacularly dismisses politics in favor of aesthetics and superficiality (fashion, luxury, glamour, etc.). I will talk about my students’ enthusiasm for the film. I will also examine my own posture: a teacher who has decided to avoid “politics” in his classroom in favor of a more formalist reading.

Terry Cochran

Université de Montréal)

Playing the Glass Bead Game: Historical Dimensions of Knowledge without Consequence

Despite western culture’s ongoing fascination with Herman Hesse’s work as testimony to an overarching spiritual quest, each of Hesse’s novels opposes esoteric and aesthetic knowing, absolutely useless for historical progress, and knowledge pertinent for practical, engaged society. (These conflicting perspectives are most often incarnated in particular yet complementary characters.) In exploring this issue more extensively, I propose reflection on Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game (Das Glasperlenspiel), which displays an overt tension between, on the one hand, knowledge for knowledge’s sake and, on the other, modes of analytical understanding directed explicitly toward the sociopolitical realm (including, in the novel, the domain of organized religion).

Catherine Mavrikakis

(Université de Montréal)

Aesthetic Frisson: The City as a Work of Art in Death in Venice by Thomas Mann and Bruges-la-Morte by Rodenbach

The experience of shock when encountering a work of art has long been theorized through philosophical and psychological frameworks, from Kant and Burke to Magherini. In this study, we aim to explore the encounter with the decaying city as both a revelation and a source of aesthetic frisson in two novels written at the turn of the 20th century: Bruges-la-Morte by Rodenbach (1882) and Death in Venice by Thomas Mann (1912). In these works, the city emerges as a space in which the aesthetic ordeal lies at the very center of the narrative. Drawing on the scholarship of Bernadette Carrère, we analyze the sense of urban sublime experienced by the characters and consider the nature of an aesthetic pleasure grounded in the confrontation with the end of an era—or with one’s own mortality. The frisson is thus conceived as the experience of potential disappearance before the grandeur of the work itself.