Lectures and Workshops by Distinguished Visitor Professor Agnes Heller
- Agnes Heller - distinguished visitor profile
- Agnes Heller’s Monash Itinerary
- The Music, Culture, Society Conference
Between 26th February and 3rd April 2008 distinguished visitor Professor Agnes Heller will present a series of Lectures on Comedy, a Public Lecture, run a PhD Masterclass and present a keynote address at the Music, Culture and Society Conference.
Comedy Lecture Series
(DTS3700/COM3700 Comedy – open to auditors)
The lectures will discuss Aristophanes’ The Clouds, Plautus’ Amphytrion, Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, Moliere’s Tartuffe, Beaumarchais’ (and Mozart’s) The Marriage of Figaro, and Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
The course will include set texts on the theory of comedy: Sigmund Freud’s Jokes and their relation to the unconscious, Henri Bergson’s Laughter, and Agnes Heller’s Immortal Comedy.
DTS3700/COM3700, Comedy, is coordinated by Associate Professor Peter Snow and Associate Professor Peter Murphy. Inquiries about the unit or Professor Heller’s lectures should be directed to Peter.Snow@arts.monash.edu.au or to Peter.Murphy@arts.monash.edu.au.
Time and Dates: 12-1pm Tuesday 26th Feb, 4th,11th,18th March & 1st April
Venue: CL_11/H5 (ground floor of Menzies building).
Keynote address
Modern Hermeneutics and the Presentation of Opera at Music, Culture and Society Conference
Opera, on stage, had been declared a “dead” bourgeois genre, in the fifties and sixties. Its resurrection and, recently, its growing attraction, grew out of the new idea of staging opera as a kind of “music drama”, as a kind of “Gesamtkunstwerk”. This idea, again, was inspired by a new kind of hermeneutics, one that provoked radical and entirely unusual interpretations. The paper analyses some of these new kinds of interpretations, putting emphasis on the various new interpretations of Wagner’s Ring and of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. It tells the story how the spirit of our times (the depreciation of violence, feminism, etc.) have contributed to a reversal in the evaluation of characters like Siegfried or Don Giovanni, and how this reversal illuminates their similarities.
Time and Date: 9.30-10.45, Saturday 8th March
Venue: Monash Conference Centre, Level 7, 30 Collins St, Melbourne
PhD Masterclass
Thinking, Writing, Researching (open to all PhD students)
A discussion about the experience of thinking and writing. Agnes Heller will talk about the life cycle of research - from the PhD thesis to the mature work. Professor Heller will discuss matters such as: What is it that makes some people think and write? Where do ideas for books come from? What is the discipline of writing a book like? How do we know we have a vocation for writing? For thinking? What does it feel like to think?”
Time and Date: 6-8pm, Monday March 10th
Venue: Manton Theatre SG01/11 (ground floor of Menzies building)
Public Lecture
The Autonomy of Art or the Dignity of Artworks
Both “autonomy ” and “dignity” are moral concepts. The moral category “autonomy” is traditionally applied to art, and understood sometimes dogmatically, like by Adorno. Yet it never becomes clear what is autonomous: Art as such? The sphere of Art? Or the single artwork? This paper suggests substituting the normative word “dignity” for the heavily evaluative term “ autonomy”. In the case of the ‘dignity of man’ the norm of dignity prohibits using man as mere means - so it is in the case of works of art. They can serve as means, yet they need always also be treated as ends in themselves. The concept “dignity” of art will be illuminated - not illustrated – by examples of contemporary works.
Time and Date: 4.15pm-6.30pm, Thursday 3rd April
Venue: Monash Conference Centre, Level 7, 30 Collins Street, Melbourne