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Fall 2019 PAL Courses

 Toril Moi LIT690S-03; FRENCH 690S-2-01; GSF 590S-01; PHIL590S-04 Mon 1:25 – 3:55 p.m. Friedl 102 Simone de Beauvoir An overview of Simone de Beauvoir’s career as a writer, philosopher, and feminist thinker. The course will focus on Beauvoir’s understanding of the relationship between literature and philosophy, and between existentialism and feminism. We will pay special…

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Stages of Life – The Second Annual Duke-Stanford Graduate Conference

 Co-Sponsored by Duke University’s “PAL” (Center for Philosophy, Arts, and Literature) and Stanford University’s “Phil+Lit” (The Initiative in Philosophy and Literature) and Hosted by The Franklin Humanities Institute at  Smith Warehouse, Duke University Friday April 5th, Ahmadieh Lecture Hall (Bay 4) of Smith Warehouse 2:00-2:30  Welcome and Mingling 2:30-2:45  Welcome: Toril Moi(James B. Duke Professor of Literature and…

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Cover Slide for Fall 2020 PAL Courses

Fall 2020 PAL Courses

 Saskia ZiolkowskiROMANCE STUDIES 590SWednesday 3:30 – 6:00pm (Online) SVEVO and WORLD LITERATURE Italo Svevo (1861-1928) wrote some of the most important modern Italian novels, like La coscienza di Zeno (Zeno’s Conscience), but has never achieved the world status one might expect, especially for someone who was taught English by no less a figure than James…

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Thinking Publicly | What is the good of public intellectual writing?

 Jon Baskin – Founding Editor of The Point, Associate Director of the MA Program in Creative Publishing and Critical Journalism a the New School, New York, and author of Ordinary Unhappiness: The Therapeutic Fiction of David Foster Wallace (Stanford UP, 2019). When we founded the The in 2008, we assumed that the chief obstacles to getting good essays from academics would have to do with prose style.  In fact the most serious challenges we faced were both more interesting and more intractable.  They had to do not with how academics could write for a public audience, but with why they wanted to. In this talk, I’ll discuss the two pictures…

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Cover slide for PAL Courses Spring 2020

Spring 2020 PAL Courses

 Toril Moi ENGLISH 582s-01/LIT 681S-01/PHIL 681S-01 Mon. 1:25-3:55pm Friedl 102 Duke University WITTGENSTEIN AND LITERARY THEORY The course offers an introduction to Wittgenstein’s late philosophy, and asks what its relevance for literary studies might be. We will focus on a detailed reading of important sections of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. We will try to understand Wittgenstein’s…

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