Progressive Geographies

Professor Couze Venn: Memorial and Celebration – Goldsmiths, May 22nd 2019 6-8 pm

Professor Couze Venn

Memorial and Celebration

Please come to this event to remember and celebrate the life of Couze Venn, the pioneering cultural, social and post-colonial theorist.

Wednesday, May 22^nd 2019 6-8 pm

LG01, lower atrium

Professor Stuart Hall Building

All welcome

Robert Macfarlane, Underland – Penguin 2019, and short piece in The Guardian

The highly anticipated new book from the internationally bestselling, prize-winning author of Landmarks, The Lost Words and The Old Ways
Discover the hidden worlds beneath our feet…
In Underland, Robert Macfarlane takes us on a journey into the worlds beneath our feet. From the ice-blue depths of Greenland’s glaciers, to the underground networks by which trees communicate, from Bronze Age burial chambers to the rock art of remote Arctic sea-caves, this is a deep-time voyage into the planet’s past and future. Global in its geography, gripping in its voice and haunting in its implications, Underland is a work of huge range and power, and a remarkable new chapter in Macfarlane’s long-term exploration of landscape and the human heart.

Nicolas de Warren and Thomas Vongehr (eds.), Philosophers at the Front: Phenomenology and the First World War, Leuven University Press, 2017 – reviewed at NDPR

An exceptional collection of letters, postcards, original writings, and photographs

The First World War witnessed an unprecedented mobilization of philosophers and their families: as soldiers at the front; as public figures on the home front; as nurses in field hospitals; as mothers and wives; as sons and fathers. In Germany, the war irrupted in the midst of the rapid growth of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenological movement – widely considered one of the most significant philosophical movements in twentieth century thought. Philosophers at the Front offers a documentary history of phenomenology in the First World War. Through an exceptional collection of primary source materials (letters, postcards, original writings, photographs) from the Husserl Archives in Leuven, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, and the Archives of the University of Göttingen, the complex narratives of how the war affected the lives and thought of central figures in the phenomenological movement are charted. Key figures such as Edmund Husserl, his sons Wolfgang and Gerhart, Max Scheler, Edith Stein, Adolf Reinach, Martin Heidegger, and others are included in this collection of materials.

The volume includes reproductions of original material, as well as German transcription of all texts and their English translation.

 

Emmanuelle Loyer, Lévi-Strauss: A Biography – Polity, 2018, translated by Ninon Vinsonneau and Jonathan Magidoff

Academic, writer, figure of melancholy, aesthete – Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009) not only transformed his academic discipline, he also profoundly changed the way that we view ourselves and the world around us. 

In this award-winning biography, historian Emmanuelle Loyer recounts Lévi-Strauss’s childhood in an assimilated Jewish household, his promising student years as well as his first forays into political and intellectual movements. As a young professor, Lévi-Strauss left Paris in 1935 for São Paulo to teach sociology. His rugged expeditions into the Brazilian hinterland, where he discovered the Amerindian Other, made him into an anthropologist. The racial laws of the Vichy regime would force him to leave France yet again, this time for the USA in 1941, where he became Professor Claude L. Strauss – to avoid confusion with the jeans manufacturer.

Lévi-Strauss’s return to France, after the war, ushered in the period during which he produced his greatest works: several decades of intense labour in which he reinvented anthropology, establishing it as a discipline that offered a  offered new view on the world. In 1955,  Tristes Tropiques indisputable proof of this the world over. During those years, Lévi-Strauss became something of a French national monument, as well as a celebrity intellectual of global renown. But he always claimed his perspective was a ‘view from afar’, enabling him to deliver incisive and subversive diagnoses of our waning modernity.

Loyer’s outstanding biography tells the story of a true intellectual adventurer whose unforgettable voice invites us to rethink questions of the human and the meaning of progress. She portrays Lévi-Strauss less as a modern than as our own great and disquieted contemporary.

The book is reviewed in Boston Review (thanks to Peter Gratton for the link)