Papers, Lectures, and other work in progress by Steven Schroeder
In these remarks, I have relied on the German text in Ludwig Wittgenstein. Bemerkungen Über Die F... more In these remarks, I have relied on the German text in Ludwig Wittgenstein. Bemerkungen Über Die Farben / Remarks on Colour. Edited by G.E.M. Anscombe. Translated by Linda L. McAlister and Margarete Schättle. University of California Press, 1978, especially Part I, which was written in March 1951.
Ernesto Cardenal Martinez (born 1925) is a Nicaraguan poet and priest who served as Minister of C... more Ernesto Cardenal Martinez (born 1925) is a Nicaraguan poet and priest who served as Minister of Culture (1979-1987) in the Sandinista government formed after the 1979 revolution that overthrew Anastasio Somoza DeBayle. Cardenal’s preparation for the priesthood included work with another poet priest, Thomas Merton, at Gethsemani Abbey in Kentucky, though he completed his theological training in Cuernavaca, Mexico. Cardenal credits Merton as a spiritual and mystical influence but cites Ezra Pound as a more important literary influence. The combination is useful in understanding the relationship between religion and politics that Cardenal embodies. What he learned from Pound, he says, is that anything, most notably history and politics, can be included in poetry. He put this to work especially in his early poems, many of which are historical narratives that tell the story of Nicaragua in particular and of Central America in general. One could say that they function as foundation myths, and this makes them intensely political in a way that has been compared to Pablo Neruda’s work. This mythical function echoes “Pre-Columbian” Meso-American spirituality and is also firmly rooted in Cardenal’s reading of Hebrew scripture – particularly the Psalms, but also the historical narratives that, again and again, tell the story of God’s presence in and with God’s people.
When a community of scholars judges a book great enough to be included in a curriculum, what we h... more When a community of scholars judges a book great enough to be included in a curriculum, what we have in mind is not what the book contains but what it provokes and sustains in conversation with other books and with readers. As arts of liberation, the liberal arts take note of conversations – arguments – that cannot be contained. It is with this in mind that I turn (with a little help from Georgia O’Keeffe) to Goethe’s argument with Newton on the matter of color. Goethe did not object to Newton’s optics, but in his quest for a color theory to parallel music theory, he took issue with the claim that color is contained in light. Between Goethe’s reading and Newton’s, there is a difference that makes a difference in how we see light and what it does on edge; and that has an impact on what we do (and what we think we can do) with color. [Please follow the docs.google.com link under "files" above for a current draft.]
Afterword from Dispersed Cities, a digitally printed limited edition of twelve poems and sixty-tw... more Afterword from Dispersed Cities, a digitally printed limited edition of twelve poems and sixty-two full color images published to coincide with the exhibition "Dispersed Cities," recent work on canvas and paper at The Paper Crane Gallery in Canyon, Texas, 14 March - 15 April 2015
Conference on Hidden Theology and Open Questions, Warsaw, October 2014, Oct 2014
Marx’s critical reading of religion in nineteenth century Germany is most often remembered in the... more Marx’s critical reading of religion in nineteenth century Germany is most often remembered in the United States – if it is remembered at all – as a single clause stripped of its context (and almost always slightly misquoted): “religion is the opiate of the masses.” This seriously truncated and slightly distorted version ignores the lyrical quality of the critique (particularly a parallelism that would be at home in a psalm) and obscures a theological insight most relevant to a conference on hidden theology and open questions. The social-historical context marks this as a rejoinder to the young Hegelians and places it in a theological argument. The argument within which it is embedded is an argument about right (or – coming as it does, between eighteenth century declarations of human rights and the twentieth century declaration that those rights are “universal” – about rights). That connects theological discourse with discourse (ethical and political) about human relations and institutions. There is a reason to the rhyme of repetition with variation: “Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.” The result works like a definition by clearing a place for critical analysis. Four statements in sequence say what religion is by giving an indication of what it does. It is “the sigh of the oppressed creature.” It is “the heart of a heartless world.” It is “the soul of soulless conditions.” And “it is the opium of the people.” The sigh, the heart, the soul, the opium. A creature that is oppressed, a world that is heartless, conditions that are soulless, the people. This cluster is a useful map for exposing hidden theology and opening critical questions.
First Friday Lecture Series, Chicago Cultural Center, Oct 3, 2014
Percy Shelley's claim in his "Defence of Poetry" that poets are "the unacknowledged legislators o... more Percy Shelley's claim in his "Defence of Poetry" that poets are "the unacknowledged legislators of the world" is rarely considered in the context of Shelley's careful argument about the relationship of poetry with mind and society. This lecture will rethink Shelley's essay in the light of a number of poets whose work has made important contributions to politics, with particular attention to the nature of “legislation” as it relates to mind and society – and to the work of poetry.
Lecture at University of Chicago Basic Program of Liberal Education for Adults Spring Weekend Study Retreat on Robert Frost, Apr 26, 2014
First Friday Lecture Series, Chicago Cultural Center, Oct 4, 2013
lecture at Lingnan University, Hong Kong, 26 March 2013
With its sustained attention to narrative, the novel has been an important site for philosophical... more With its sustained attention to narrative, the novel has been an important site for philosophical reflection on time – making particularly important contributions since the beginning of the twentieth century. In this lecture, I will focus on three novelists (one from Europe, one from the United States, and one from China) who are among the most important of that period. Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (a fictional biography that is a critical history of England) and The Waves (a narrative experiment that is as much a poem as a novel) develop a philosophy of time with important implications for the “subject” of ethics. Toni Morrison’s Beloved is especially important for its construction of memory (social and individual) in the face of unspeakable and systemic violence. Mo Yan’s “hallucinatory realism” takes up a similar task in Red Sorghum, Republic of Wine, and Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out. The complex narratives of these works – like Beloved – offer evidence that story is both a matter of time and a site of memory. Mo Yan, Toni Morrison, and Virginia Woolf join novelists such as Flannery O’Connor, William Faulkner, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez (as well as the great poets of the classical Chinese tradition) in recognizing that dwelling on a place the way time turns has the power to make the world new.
...a lecture delivered at the University of Macao on 20 March 2013.
If poetry is language that... more ...a lecture delivered at the University of Macao on 20 March 2013.
If poetry is language that calls attention to its own form, every form is a possibility for poetry. Calling attention is an act: it is what poetry does. Connecting act with form suggests a making manifest, a shape discernible via an interface (which, if we know nothing else, we know is between this and that) – making visible for the eye, for example, by means of light playing off ink or pixels, or making audible for the ear by means of dancing air. What poetry does, we might say, is embodied: words become flesh. “Flesh” has been known to drive us to distraction, a familiar state in discussion of poetry in “digital” form. Distraction is a fine thing, and I have no intention of abandoning it. But, distracted or not, I propose to return to the idea (paraphrased from the “great preface” of the shijing) that poem is where mind goes. Mind must go for poem to be: my sight in this lecture will be set on mind going in digital form(s), sites full of possibility for poetry.
The connection of extraordinary and ordinary, knowing and doing, and the public with intensely pr... more The connection of extraordinary and ordinary, knowing and doing, and the public with intensely private activity makes mysticism a promising place to begin rethinking thinking along lines suggested by pragmatism and its fellow travelers. I begin with one of the most important of those fellow travelers, Henri Bergson, and continue with another, Karl Marx, who is of particular interest to West.
First Friday Lecture Series, Chicago Cultural Center, Oct 5, 2012
This anniversary of John Donne’s death (31 March), approaching at a time occupied by occupations ... more This anniversary of John Donne’s death (31 March), approaching at a time occupied by occupations of one public space after another in the name of (almost) everybody, marks an appropriate moment for reflection on fear and religion by way of poetry. Donne’s career, before and after his ordination, is a life in poetry poised between love and death – or, more properly, in love, in medias res, eye to eye with death in the arc (as Doris Humphrey suggested) between dying and dying. In his critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Marx characterized religion as “the general theory of this world,” inverted, as he understood it, because the state in which we live is upside down. A general theory of a world is a product of that world, but it is also a vision of the whole of that world articulated by one acting in it as a theorist, inside standing as though out. In a time and place marked by pervasive feelings of impending danger identified with death and politics, Donne embraced poetry as a sacramental act affirming the real presence of love. At a time when those feelings are familiar, that is where I propose to begin – not with a paper on Donne but, taking Donne as an exemplar, with a brief essay in what can be done in poetry in medias res to nurture a res publica that is not twisted by fear toward violence.
First Friday Lecture Series, Chicago Cultural Center, Sep 4, 2009
Distinguished Lecture Series, Department of English, University of Macau, April 2008.
This is a close reading of five “parables” (Luke 15-16) attributed to Jesus and arranged as a ser... more This is a close reading of five “parables” (Luke 15-16) attributed to Jesus and arranged as a series within the narrative Luke constructed and addressed to “Theophilus,” later adopted into the canon by the Christian community as the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles. My question is not so much what Jesus said or did as what these five pieces do. I come to these pieces (traditionally identified as “parables”) as the work of a poet engaged in ethical reflection and instruction – ethical reflection and instruction that clearly came to play a significant role in social and institutional transformation. I read them as poems, and I believe they can tell us something about poetry and politics that could prove significant for moral action and reflection beyond the institutions that have claimed them.
I offer this paper as a report on work in progress – my ongoing struggle as a poet and a scholar ... more I offer this paper as a report on work in progress – my ongoing struggle as a poet and a scholar of religion to come to terms with a “mainstreaming” of Beat culture that was crystallized for me at the 2004 “Beat Meets East” conference in Chengdu, Sichuan, China, when a representative of the U.S. Consulate General in Chengdu officially welcomed the conference and spoke in glowing terms to an audience of scholars and Chinese students of the place of writers such as Jack Kerouac, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder in American culture. While the official was perfectly correct in affirming the place of Beat writers in American culture, it was a bit jarring to hear the announcement from a representative of the Bush Administration. What was a decidedly fringe movement (a bunch of people, as Amiri Baraka put it, “who came to the conclusion that society sucked”) in the middle of the twentieth century had found its way into the mainstream, as exemplary of American culture, by the beginning of the twenty-first.
I offer this piece not as a "complete" argument or an argument that seeks completion but as a sor... more I offer this piece not as a "complete" argument or an argument that seeks completion but as a sort of provocation in the spirit of an academic tradition in which theses are posted publicly as an invitation to argument that is, at the same time, a call to action. The fifteen theses that follow, taken together, make a case for thinking about universal human rights in particular ways. And that case is particularly relevant where universal rights claims clash with particular sovereignty claims. If universal human rights language is to be more than a cover for universal assertion of particular rights by privileged elites, it needs a conversation about what is understood as a right and how as well as about the possibility of universal claims that legitimately challenge particular authorities in particular places.
rhino poetry forum, 26 March 2006, Evanston, Illinois
Wittgenstein said philosophy ought reall... more rhino poetry forum, 26 March 2006, Evanston, Illinois
Wittgenstein said philosophy ought really to be written as a form of poetry. Because he practiced what he preached, I take him as a patron saint.
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Papers, Lectures, and other work in progress by Steven Schroeder
If poetry is language that calls attention to its own form, every form is a possibility for poetry. Calling attention is an act: it is what poetry does. Connecting act with form suggests a making manifest, a shape discernible via an interface (which, if we know nothing else, we know is between this and that) – making visible for the eye, for example, by means of light playing off ink or pixels, or making audible for the ear by means of dancing air. What poetry does, we might say, is embodied: words become flesh. “Flesh” has been known to drive us to distraction, a familiar state in discussion of poetry in “digital” form. Distraction is a fine thing, and I have no intention of abandoning it. But, distracted or not, I propose to return to the idea (paraphrased from the “great preface” of the shijing) that poem is where mind goes. Mind must go for poem to be: my sight in this lecture will be set on mind going in digital form(s), sites full of possibility for poetry.
Wittgenstein said philosophy ought really to be written as a form of poetry. Because he practiced what he preached, I take him as a patron saint.
If poetry is language that calls attention to its own form, every form is a possibility for poetry. Calling attention is an act: it is what poetry does. Connecting act with form suggests a making manifest, a shape discernible via an interface (which, if we know nothing else, we know is between this and that) – making visible for the eye, for example, by means of light playing off ink or pixels, or making audible for the ear by means of dancing air. What poetry does, we might say, is embodied: words become flesh. “Flesh” has been known to drive us to distraction, a familiar state in discussion of poetry in “digital” form. Distraction is a fine thing, and I have no intention of abandoning it. But, distracted or not, I propose to return to the idea (paraphrased from the “great preface” of the shijing) that poem is where mind goes. Mind must go for poem to be: my sight in this lecture will be set on mind going in digital form(s), sites full of possibility for poetry.
Wittgenstein said philosophy ought really to be written as a form of poetry. Because he practiced what he preached, I take him as a patron saint.
Essays in Philosophy, Vol. 8, No. 2, June 2007
Essays in Philosophy, Vol. 8, No. 1, January 2007
Cimarron Review, No. 110, January 1995, pp.102-118.
Essays in Philosophy, Vol. 8, No. 2, June 2007
Essays in Philosophy, Vol. 8, No. 1, January 2007
Essays in Philosophy, Vol. 8, No. 1, January 2007
Essays in Philosophy, Vol. 8, No. 1, January 2007
Essays in Philosophy, Vol. 7, No. 1, January 2006
All of the texts are from the first of ten notebooks and were drafted between June and August 2004. Some of the material has appeared previously in poetry collections I have published since 2006, but I have gone back to the original drafts to rethink and reconfigure what appears here. Almost all of the material in this first volume was composed while walking and committed to writing during stops along the way (perchings in my flight, one might say, with William James and Richard Luecke in mind). That the material was composed while walking is important for the rhythm of both the poetry and the prose in the collection. It may be measured in breaths, steps, stops, and heartbeats – a reminder that this is the work of material bodies moving in space and time – the writer, the reader, the words on the page, and the ground beneath the feet of all three.
The images are details from paintings included in a series I have been working on for the past several years, “study the wildflowers, how they grow.” The title of the series is a translation of a phrase that appears in slightly different forms in two of the synoptic gospels, Matthew 6:28 (καταμάθετε τὰ κρίνα τοῦ ἀγροῦ πῶς αὐξάνουσιν) and Luke 12:27 (κατανοήσατε τὰ κρίνα πῶς αὐξάνει). It seems to me that both suggest careful study – close reading – of how wildflowers grow (not just a passing glance), and that's the direction I have gone in this series of paintings. I've allowed the paint to flow with minimal intervention, allowing the flowers to move (as wildflowers do) the way liquid moves on paper. They spill over lines and boundaries – sometimes in surprising ways, and that is an important part of their beauty. For a tiny circle tessellated, I scanned originals from the series at 2400 dpi, then divided them into small segments that allow a close look at details that would likely escape a casual glance. On each page, a chance operation (a roll of the dice) determined the image, its position on the page, and its orientation. Each image occupies roughly half the page, with the other half devoted to text (including the space around and between words). In my mind, the images, like the text, are an inscription made in the process of studying the world by walking it.
—Donna Pucciani
—Larry D. Thomas, 2008 Texas Poet Laureate