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SUMMARY:Annual Schroeder Lecture: &quot\;You have to change your life&quot
 \;? The Ethics of Reading and German Studies - Prof. Sarah Colvin (Warwick
 )\, Schroeder Professor elect
DTSTART:20131025T160000Z
DTEND:20131025T173000Z
UID:TALK47642@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Sharon Nevill
DESCRIPTION:“You have to change your life” is the famous last half-lin
 e of a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke (“Archaic Torso of Apollo”\, 1908). 
 Rilke’s poem describes as well as stimulating an aesthetic response: tha
 t mysterious reaction to a work of art. Over the last decade or so\, an 
 “ethical turn” has led scholars in the humanities to question (not for
  the first time) the relationship between aesthetic and ethical responses.
 \n\n \n\nTalking about ethics and reading can provoke anxieties about blac
 k-and-white\, prescriptive\, or moralizing approaches to complex works of 
 literature. Those concerns can be addressed by a focus not on the (immobil
 ized) status of text or reader\, but on the (dynamic) relationship between
  them. “Ethics” are defined in different ways\, but often with referen
 ce to the relationship or encounter between self and other. Cognitive theo
 rists\, philosophers\, and literary critics seem to agree that the encount
 er with the other through reading can engender something C. S. Lewis calle
 d enlargement (“we seek an enlargement of our being. We want to be more 
 than ourselves”). But is enlargement – being “more than ourselves”
  – an aesthetic\, or an ethical response?\n\n \n\nIf we consider not onl
 y the aesthetics but the ethics of reading\, then we have to look again no
 t only at why and how we read\, but at the choices we make about what to r
 ead\, and what not to. If the aesthetic response (and perhaps the ethical 
 one too) is a form of Aufmerksamkeit (attentiveness)\, how do we decide wh
 at deserves our attention\, in German Studies and beyond?
LOCATION:The Cripps Auditorium\, Cripps Court\, Chesterton Rd\, Cambridge\
 , CB4 3AD 
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