Session 1

The Things That Terrify: Horror and dread in their social and cultural contexts

July 21, 2021, 7:30 p.m. (Central Time), Moderated by Mary Kay Johnston

Please register by July 19, 2021, to reserve your place and receive the Zoom link.

In Fall 2020, following the widespread George Floyd protests against police brutality, HBO released Lovecraft Country, a 10-episode series based on a book of the same name by Matt Ruff (see excerpt below). The story centers on a Black family in 1950s Jim Crow America who encounters a supernatural mystery which requires them to dig into their shadowed family history for answers. The book is presented as a series of vignettes following a group of characters as they are presented with both mundane and supernatural terrors. The horror of the mundane is deeply rooted in racial terror and the Jim Crow era. In many ways, the horror of everyday life in 1950s America eclipses the Lovecraftian monsters in the text. It's an interesting exploration into the ways we think about horror/dread by centering Black experiences during Jim Crow amidst various "weird tales" horror tropes of the time.

The horror genre itself can be an indicator of society's fears at a particular point in time. Stephen King in Danse Macabre (see excerpt below) remarked that horror was a way to express society's deepest "phobias" and learn to cope with them. In this excerpt, King describes his first encounter with Klaatu, a representative of the Other in The Day the Earth Stood Still, drawing a direct parallel between Klaatu and the Soviet's Sputnik. In Matt Ruff's book, we see the horror of the 1950s recontextualized toward a Black lens, where the main characters themselves are the Other in a white, Jim Crow society. These two examples beg us to ask the question -- In a post-George Floyd era, how is our conception of horror and dread changing, especially as marginalized voices are now becoming amplified in the conversation? How is the horror genre an indication of how society is working through our collective fear and trauma?

• Lovecraft Country, a Novel by Matt Ruff (PDF)

• Danse Macabre, by Stephen King (Simon & Schuster)

Session 2

Post Pandemic: The Value of the Liberal Arts

August 18, 2021, 7:30 p.m. (Central Time), Moderated by Camelia Raghinaru

Please register by August 16, 2021, to reserve your place and receive the Zoom link.

In the introduction to his 2020 book, Invention: The Art of Liberal Arts Scott Lee reaffirms the need for the liberal arts in a world that has been thrown into upheaval by the global pandemic, in order to "recover" the future. I would like to propose a discussion that builds on the idea of recovering the future of liberal arts in the wake of the pandemic. Richard Slaughter analyzes the implications of the phrase "recovering the future" to conclude that the future can no longer be assumed, but rather it must be achieved in the current times marked by a sense of breakdown and loss of certainty. How then can the liberal arts be used to recover what seems like an uncertain future? Slaughter admits that a particular kind of educational focus that fails to provide its students with the necessary insights to survive and flourish needs to be replaced with a different orientation toward the future that turns "visions of disaster and decay" into opportunities to recreate the future as a kind of participatory experience of one's consciousness in space and time.

Recently, I have been reflecting on the larger purpose of my profession as a liberal arts professor. Is there a timeless sort of knowledge, meaning or truth I am to explore in my teaching, with my students, that points to an essence (perhaps upholding the idea of human nature), or is all such discourse purely constructed? Am I to point my students toward an ideal of goodness, truth and beauty, and if so, on the basis of what? Can the liberal arts provide us all, students and professors alike, with some useful tools to even consider the concepts of timelessness, permanence, or truth? On a more practical note, I would like to imagine that my field of study, literature, and the Humanities at large, would be able to impart a bit of hope to my students, as we are heading into a new academic year, and I'd like to be able to identify some kind of basis for that hope that transcends the typical utilitarian values that tend to drive out pursuits. It seems to me that we are heading into a future in which the scientific technological approach is competing for its own limited, but seductive, attempt to provide us with hope and answers. Does the liberal arts tradition stand a chance against this latter Promethean force? I hope you will join me for a conversation on the ways in which we can look at the current crisis of meaning as an opportunity to explore reasons for hope through the liberal arts tradition. 

As a starting point I am offering the following selection (pages 16-19 of Scott Lee's original publication, not the larger pdf, including and especially the footnotes) from Scott Lee's Enriching Liberal Education's Defense in Universities and Colleges: Liberal Arts, Innovation, and Techne found here: https://issuu.com/stjohnscollegesantafe/docs/the_st._john_s_review__volume_56.1_