I have on many occasions mentioned here the series of lectures I delivered at UNC Chapel Hill, one on the thought of Karl Marx and another on The Critique of Pure Reason, which were recorded by a graduate student, Alexander Campbell, and then posted on YouTube. But I am not sure that I have been spoken that much about the first series of 10 lectures that I delivered on the subject of Ideological Critique. I recorded these myself, using a little camcorder I purchased at Best Buy along with a lapel mic. I set the camcorder up on my desk in my study at Meadowmont Village, and then deliver the lectures to nobody at all. The first three lectures dealt with Karl Mannheim’s great work, Ideology and Utopia. The next four focused on Edwin Wilmsen’s devastating critique of ethnography, Land Filled with Flies. The eighth and ninth lectures were devoted to Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s early and quite impressive work, The Signifying Monkey. All of those, I am quite confident, are worth your attention. But it is the last lecture, the 10th, that is the subject of this post. Rather unexpectedly, it deals with Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park, or more precisely, with Edward Said’s construal of that novel as being about slavery. Some words of explanation are called for.
In 1993, Said published a collection of essays about British
literature entitled Culture and Imperialism. As one might expect, he devoted
chapters to such novelists as Rudyard Kipling, but rather surprisingly, he
included an essay on Mansfield Park. In
1999, the Canadian film director Patricia Rozema did a marvelous film of
Mansfield Park starring, among others, Nobel laureate Harold Pinter as Sir
Thomas. Susie and I saw the movie in a downtown Amherst art theater (if,
indeed, one can really speak of “downtown” Amherst.) It was immediately obvious
to me that Rozema had been deeply influenced by Said’s essay. Some while later, I
was invited by my big sister, Barbara, to speak at a meeting of the Osher
Lifelong Learning Institute, or OLLI, in Washington, DC. I chose as my subject
Jane Austen as interpreted by Said and rendered by Rozema. In the course of doing some background
research for the talk, I came to the conclusion that Said was in fact quite
correct in his reading, even though he seems not to have known the historical
details that I dug up. When I gave a series of lectures on Ideological Critique,
I decided to include a version of that lecture as a coda.
If you have an interest in ideological critique or in Jane
Austen or in Edward Said, or indeed in Patricia Rozema, I recommend the lecture to
you. It is only a bit more than 30 minutes long but I think is worth your time.
One word of explanation. I found so disorienting the
experience of lecturing to nobody at all that after the first of my 10 lectures
I conceived the fiction of inviting to each lecture one of the men or women who
had been my students over the decades. By the time I reached the last in the
series, I was calling the name (as I learn to say in an Afro-American studies
department) of nine of my former students.
You can find the YouTube lecture here.
15 comments:
It's an excellent lecture and the whole series on ideological critique is well worth listening to.
I had never heard of you and watched the series following a link from Leiter's blog, ending up as a permanent pest here in your blog.
As a non-philosopher and non-philosophy major, I found the lectures on ideological critique to be the most interesting, the least academic and the most creative. Kant's Critique was and is over my head, and while I've read a bit of Marx, the linear algebra was a barrier for someone allergic to math as I am.
When I was in the university, there were courses which were informally called "math for poets" and "physics for poets", that is, math and science courses which allowed a student to cumply with the math and science requirement but in layperson's terms. I'd call your lectures on ideological critique, "Robert Paul Wolff for poets".
That's a cumpliment, by the way.
I will look at the ideological critique lectures, thanks!
Separately - I am currently reading the CPR while watching your lectures. I'm really enjoying both... I read the CPR in my 20s and again in my 30s and now I'm in my 40s so it seems to be a once a decade thing for me, but I'm enjoying it much more this time. As well as the main thrust of his argument to which your lectures an invaluable guide, there are all these asides where he seems to anticipate much later ideas in philosophy (deflationary theories of truth, modal logic, etc), it's a real cornucopia.
However I have a transactional question in the spirit of this post about self-advertisement - I want to read your Kant's Theory of Mental Activity book, however Amazon only sell the kindle version on the US version of the site, and I am in the UK and we can't get it, and it is only available in hardcopy for ~£150. Do you know anything about this or any way of addresssing?
thanks again for the wonderful lectures
Rollo
The First Earl of M-------. I never thought of Jane Austen as being a passive slave-protestor (or even a abolishinist) instead of a defender in what made it possible for gentlemen & ladies, in those bygone days of England, to go to those sumptuous balls she talks so much about in her letters. This Western logic of protecting the economy over attacking exploitation (or vise versa) goes back to the very heart of Plato's debate-philosophy in the Gorgias. In that dialogue the question is: Is it better to suffer or to be the cause of suffering? Socrates chose the former even up to the very end of his life if we have read Plato's Crito & Phaedo knowingly. But are we as guilty as other Victorian-era British citizens when we buy things for cheap at the local Walmart--which is a store that gets most of its merchandise from cheaper sources throughout the East? It's really an US vs. THEM scenario. Every family chooses the survival of relatives over strangers. Every parent chooses their kid over his/her schoolmate. When can we ever truly get it right in the eyes of future historians?
To Rollo:
When I read the clause "...I am in my forties..." I can only sigh with a kind of envy.
Cheers from an 80 year old,
David Z
Alas, Rollo, I do not know what to do. The book was published in 1963 and some years later was reissued by a little firm called Peter Smith publishers, but it long ago went out of print and I do not have a digital copy (it was written longhand and typed up by my mother!). Does anybody know whether I can buy a Kindle copy and give someone else a link to that?
There are a couple of copies of the book online at Internet Archive. The book can be "borrowed" for free--unfortunately for only 1 hour at a time (though I guess you can keep renewing it as long as nobody else wants it).Simply go to Internet Archive (maybe there's an s on the end) and type in Robert Paul Wolff in the search box. Then click on the image for the book.
Amazon is weird because I tried it (from Chile) and they sell the book used in hardcover for 30 dollars plus shipping.
Thanks all for helpful responses.
I will try the internet archive; alas, Prof. Wolff, I fear that the tehnocapitalists at Amazon are too cunning to be caught out by emailed links :)
At least this gives me (another) great excuse for wandering round second-hand bookshops which is one of favourite ways of passing time anyway!
PS yeah being in my 40s feels pretty old to me but point taken - like us all I have never been any older, and I'll never be any younger!
Rollo,
The price of used books in Amazon depends on supply and demand.
My mother published a book about 25 years ago and from time to time, I check out how much it is selling for in Amazon. A few years ago it was selling for over a 100 dollars used, but today they sell it for 15 dollars used (2 copies) and 40 dollars new (1 copy).
So if you don't find Wolff's book in a used bookstore, keep checking Amazon.
Rollo,
If you have access to UK libraries, a borrowed copy might tide you over until a more reasonably priced copy for purchase becomes available.
You may be able to borrow a copy from a library through inter-library loan. (I realize you may have already considered this, but in the off-chance you have not, this might be worth trying. I don't know whether you have any university library privileges.)
WorldCat library catalogue search also seems to suggest that you may be able to get a copy through British Library on Demand.
https://www.worldcat.org/title/kants-theory-of-mental-activity-a-commentary-on-the-transcendental-analytic-of-the-critique-of-pure-reason/oclc/844858320
I am looking forward to listening to the lectures, particularly the one on Edward Said. (Said was a patient of mine in his last years, back when I still lived in New York.)
I listened to the lectures on Henry Louis Gates the other night. Very enjoyable. (Gates himself, though, is an extremely problematic figure. I may say more on that in another post when I have some free time. For now, I will just say that a piece Amiri Baraka wrote in 1984 criticizing Gates' review of Baraka's autobiography, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones, gets to the heart of a lot of what's wrong with Gates. Gates has only gotten worse in that regard in the subsequent 40 years.)
One question though, Prof Wolff:
Why do you pronounce Henry Louis Gates' middle name like the Louis in Louis XIV? I've never heard anyone else prononunce it that way.
Gates is indeed a problematic figure, but I think that book is a good one. I wrote him a letter once congratulating him on the book and saying it was one of the angriest books I had ever read. He wrote back a quite diffidewnt reply and did not at all acknowledge the obvious anger. I pronounce his name that way because I heard other people doing so but I have no dog in that fight, so to speak. I had the great pleasure of knowing Said a little when I taught at Columbia.
Btw, those used books on Amazon are typically not sold by Amazon itself, I believe, but by other businesses, usu specialists in used books etc, with which Amazon has an arrangement of some kind.
Another possibility is to check a used-book site like ABE Books.
'If you have an interest in ideological critique or in Jane Austen or in Edward Said, or indeed in Patricia Rozema, I recommend the lecture to you.'
No comment.
The lecture has already inspired me to write a book. Hoping to finish it by the end of this year...
A great work done Professor Wolff
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