Empiricism, Criticism, and the Object of Criticism
Location: Online and in-person in Brunswick. (Please note that Audrey will be joining us virtually from Miami. Respondees will be variously online or in-person)
Time: 9:30am AEST Friday 31 October
Free registration will be available soon
The MSCP is thrilled to announce a presentation by Audrey Wasser on her recently published essay Empiricism, Criticism, and the Object of Criticism defending the idea of literary criticism as a mode of knowledge production across institutional and public-spheres of engagement and the various epistemic claims these generate, unbounded by strict genre demarcations of theory, criticism or philosophy. Wasser’s essay argues that no literary work exists in itself. Rather, the work is constituted in and through practices of reading and criticism, where ‘constituted’ means determined as an object of knowledge. She treats criticism as a practice of knowledge production, and distinguishes this account from the overly empiricist bent she identifies in otherwise divergent contemporary critical approaches. Her goal is to demonstrate how a view of criticism as productive can support a shared project of knowledge, one that serves as the necessary condition of critical agreement or disagreement.
The session will be structured around a short, 20 minute presentation from Wasser followed by a series of respondents with ample time for questions and discussion at the end. Each registration receives a copy of Wasser’s article to read in advance with the option of online or in-person attendance.
Respondents include - Thomas Moran, Caitlyn Lesiuk, Will Bennett, and Merlyn Gwther-McCusky. Full list TBA.
About Audrey Wasser
Audrey Wasser is Associate Professor of French in the Department of French, Italian, and Classical Studies at Miami University, Ohio. She is the author of The Work of Difference: Modernism, Romanticism, and the Production of Literary Form (Fordham 2016), and the co-editor, with Warren Montag, of Pierre Macherey and the Case of Literary Production (Northwestern 2022). Her work focuses on modern literature and contemporary French thought. She has published articles on Proust, Beckett, Deleuze, and Spinoza, and is currently at work on a book on literary judgment.
