Session 1

Plot: Filial girl sells herself into slavery to pay for parents’ funeral rites. Daring priest dances to purchase her freedom. Such transactions tell us much about the volatile valuation of human life in medieval Japan. What strictures defined personhood and how could spectacular gestures amend them? This presentation takes up medieval Noh plays to explore dramatic labor’s role in redrawing the boundaries between subject and object, performer and commodity, stage and auction block.

Almost by chance, a major quintet was rediscovered in Palermo that falls in the middle of Act I of La gazzetta. Rossini probably cut it before the first performance of the opera, but the quintet is needed to complete the action. Stage directors have wanted to know about it since Dario Fo had the cast declaim the text in rhythm, but without music. Rossini borrowed the piece, in part, from two operas, La scala di seta and Il barbiere di Siviglia, but he developed it very differently from both of those operas.

William Carlos Williams remains best know for his short poems describing wheelbarrows and plums and slippers, for instance. The long poem with which he concluded his career, however, derives from a very different aesthetic, one which integrates lyric fragments with bits and pieces of letters, newspaper articles, paragraphs from history, etc. Paterson can thus be conceived as an assemblage, productively thought of in relation to the visual and plastic arts (the work of Robert Rauschenberg, say) and current assemblage theory in the social sciences.

This talk, based on Pali texts of the Theravāda tradition in South/Southeast Asia, will counter the view of Buddhist ‘wisdom’ as solely a matter of profound spiritual insight. There are many stories where the future Buddha ‘fulfils the Perfection of Wisdom’ by other means: good strategy, cunning, riddle-solving, problem-resolution and other ‘worldly’ skills. What might this teach us about the viability of a concept of ‘wisdom’ in the modern world?

Notoriously, explaining jokes is a grim business--in the words of E.B. White, “Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process and the innards are discouraging to any but the pure scientific mind.” In this talk I try to explain why explanations have this effect on jokes, with the broader goal of shedding some light on the nature of explanations and humor.

The Arts|Science Initiative encourages independent cross-disciplinary research between students in the arts and the sciences. Graduate students from areas such as art history, English, music, cinema and media studies, theater and performance, creative writing, or visual arts are encouraged to pair up with graduate students from astronomy and astrophysics, biological sciences, chemistry, computer science, geophysical sciences, math, physics, or statistics areas for joint research projects.