A Film Blog You Must Follow and A Book About the Long Turn Away From "Capital-T" Truth
Featuring Pages and Frames and and interview with Professor Kunal M. Parker
June 3rd Meetup Reminder: Book Swap in NYC
If you are interested in attending our free meetup in NYC this coming Monday, don’t forget to RSVP. It’s going to be a night of new friends and conversations you won’t want to miss. Please register here, and bring a book!
Pages and Frames
Pages and Frames is the brainchild of author and scholar Daniel Moran. Dan is a writing professor at Rutgers, author of Creating Flannery O’Connor, and host of the Fifteen Minute Film Fanatics podcast. Pages and Frames dives into the space where film and books overlap. If you’re looking for a blog thats simultaneously enriching and entertaining, look no further.
A sample essay:
Scholarly Sources
Kunal M. Parker is a Professor of Law and Dean's Distinguished Scholar at the University of Miami.
Listen to Kunal discuss his recently published book, The Turn to Process: American Legal, Political, and Economic Thought, 1870-1970.
Q: Who should read The Turn to Process and why?
A: Anyone who is interested in the history of American legal, political, and economic thought—and American intellectual life generally—in the twentieth century. At the heart of the book is an exploration of how the turn away from truths, ends, and foundations towards methods, processes, and techniques is a modernist response to the problem of living in a historical world shorn of foundations. But the book does more: it shows how American legal, political, and economic thinkers privileged certain methods and why; how means came to possess a life of their own insofar as they were asserted to determine our very ends; and how the intellectual world of the Cold War decades is far weirder, complicated, interesting and—yes--even beautiful than we have hitherto thought.
Q: What are you reading right now?
A: I am at the very beginning of a brand new project on citizenship, race, and empire in the early modern period extending into the nineteenth century. At least as I envision it right now, the project will also be a kind of meditation on the writing of history. So, I am reading a ton of different things on the early modern period, slavery, and the writing of history. A very big change from the twentieth-century intellectual universe I explored in The Turn to Process.
I usually read multiple books at the same time, but I'll mention just three that I am reading at the moment: Kathleen Davis' Periodization and Sovereignty: How Ideas of Feudalism and Secularization Govern the Politics of Time; Michael Guasco's Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World; and, for fun, Anne Bronte's truly wonderful and very modern The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.
Q: Is there a book you read as a student that had a particularly profound impact on your trajectory as a scholar?
A: Many, many books did. The work of the historian John Pocock stands out. But if I had to choose just one book, I'd choose Heidegger's Being and Time, not so much because I subscribe to the way Heidegger does things, but because the book (and Heidegger's other work) allowed me for the first time to think about history (and time, more generally) in ways I simply had not before.
Q: Which deceased writer would you most like to meet and why?
A: To be perfectly honest, I am not sure I'd want to meet any deceased writer, including those who've written stuff I've loved and been influenced by. Most likely because of the vast gaps (historical, cultural, etc.) that separate me from most of the deceased writers I read, I suspect that experiencing their texts on my own terms and in my own way is likely to be a richer (and less fraught) experience than meeting them in person.
Q: What's the best book you've read in the past year?
A: Another tough question: there have been many. I'm going to go with a non-academic work: Stendhal's unfinished Lucien Leuwen, which (like his other work) is an absolutely brilliant exploration of politics, social status, and ambition in post-Napoleonic France.
Q: Have you seen any films, documentaries, or museum exhibitions that left an impression on you recently?
A: I was recently (a few days ago) at the Picasso Museum in Paris and absolutely loved an exhibition on art commissioned in the 1920s for the residence of the art dealer Léonce Rosenberg. The complex story of art in the twentieth century tracks in some ways—but also veers away from—the story I tell in The Turn to Process, so it's always interesting to me to see what I did more or less correctly in that book and what else I have to learn about the period (which is, of course, an unfathomably vast amount).
Q: What do you plan on reading next?
A: Francois Hartog's Chronos: The West Confronts Time. But there's a long, long list of things I want to get through over the next few months.