Professor Kozlowski Lectures

Professor Kozlowski embarks on his discussion of Ayn Rand's The Romantic Manifesto with an examination of Ayn Rand's controversial legacy, philosophy, and career, before moving on to discuss her philosophy of art and literature, and making a case for her perspicacious take on art's power and effect. To see what else Professor Kozlowski is up to, visit his webpage: https://professorkozlowski.wordpress.com/ And please consider contributing to Professor Kozlowski's Patreon at: https://www.patreon.com/ProfessorKozlowski - where you'll also be able to vote for and suggest new topics for future lectures.

Professor Kozlowski returns to Sartre's What is Literature? to address Sartre's discussion of the situation of the writer in 1947, and expand on his observations there to discuss how that situation - and how literature itself - has changed in 2023. To see what else Professor Kozlowski is up to, visit his webpage: https://professorkozlowski.wordpress.com/ And please consider contributing to Professor Kozlowski's Patreon at: https://www.patreon.com/ProfessorKozlowski - where you'll also be able to vote for and suggest new topics for future lectures.

Professor Kozlowski examines Sartre's phenomenological/aesthetic treatise: What is Literature? Along the way, he'll address issues of artistic commercialization, the role of art and literature in class conflict, and how one's historical and cultural moment changes the way a writer interacts with the world. To see what else Professor Kozlowski is up to, visit his webpage: https://professorkozlowski.wordpress.com/ And please consider contributing to Professor Kozlowski's Patreon at:    https://www.patreon.com/ProfessorKozlowski - where you'll also be    able to vote for and suggest new topics for future lectures.

Professor Kozlowski takes on C. S. Lewis' An Experiment in Criticism to examine the ethical responsibilities of the audience to a work of art or literature, and to discuss how the world of criticism has changed in fifty years.  Among other topics, he'll discuss: bad-faith criticism, criticism from marginalized perspectives, intrinsic and extrinsic criticism, and Lewis' own problems with elitist gatekeeping and inflammatory criticism for self-aggrandizement. Suggested supplementary readings include: Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island C. S. Lewis' The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Achebe's "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness" To see what else Professor Kozlowski is up to, visit his webpage: https://professorkozlowski.wordpress.com/ And please consider contributing to Professor Kozlowski's Patreon at:   https://www.patreon.com/ProfessorKozlowski - where you'll also be   able to vote for and suggest new topics for future lectures.

Professor Kozlowski wrestles with one of the thorniest issues in the discussion of literature ethics: how do we reckon with bad people who make great art?  Jumping off from Maritain's The Responsibility of the Artist, he attempts to lay out an explanation of 1) How realistic and compelling depictions of evil in art and literature don't have to be necessarily immoral; 2) How it may be possible for bad people to make compelling, powerful, and impeccably moral art; 3) Where and when it is appropriate to support good art by bad artists, and when it is utterly immoral.  It may not be perfect, but it is an attempt to make sense of this complicated issue. Suggested supplementary readings include: Andre Gide's The Immoralists Francois Mauriac's The Viper's Knot David Foster Wallace's "This is Water" To see what else Professor Kozlowski is up to, visit his webpage: https://professorkozlowski.wordpress.com/ And please consider contributing to Professor Kozlowski's Patreon at:  https://www.patreon.com/ProfessorKozlowski - where you'll also be  able to vote for and suggest new topics for future lectures.

Oh boy.  Today Professor Kozlowski is talking about Ortega y Gasset's 1925 essay "The Dehumanization of Art", which observes that contemporary art movements (like early modernism in literature, or abstraction and dada in visual art) are "dehumanizing", or de-prioritizing human experience in favor of artifice itself.  But he's actually going to talk about the political dimension of art and literature - how politicians in WWI, WWII, and the Cold War co-opted art and artists to serve propagandist purposes, and whether or not art can be successfully separated from its political dimension.  Today espionage, skullduggery, and military agendas meets philosophy, aesthetics, and art criticism. Suggested supplementary readings include: Familiarize yourself with early 20th-century art movements and artists, such as: Cubism (esp. Picasso) Abstraction (esp. Klee, Kandinsky, and Jackson Pollock) Dada (esp. Hoch and Duchamp) Surrealism (esp. Dali and Magritte) Finks: How the CIA Tricked the World's Best Writers by Joel Whitney To see what else Professor Kozlowski is up to, visit his webpage: https://professorkozlowski.wordpress.com/ And please consider contributing to Professor Kozlowski's Patreon at: https://www.patreon.com/ProfessorKozlowski - where you'll also be able to vote for and suggest new topics for future lectures.

Professor Kozlowski wrestles with his own potentially-perverted artistic sensibilities by confronting Tolstoy's overall thesis on the function and definition of good art, as well as trying to assess, deconstruct, and make sense of Tolstoy's sometimes seemingly-contradictory and erratic artistic judgments by redefining them according to contemporary wisdom and categories of understanding. Suggested supplementary readings include: Tolstoy's own short stories, especially "God Sees the Truth, But Waits" and "The Prisoner of the Caucasus" Beethoven's 9th Symphony (and Piano Sonata Op. 101) Wagner's Ring Cycle John Charles Dollman's "The Temptation of Saint Anthony" Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov Nietzsche's Thus Spake Zarathustra, The Case of Wagner and Beyond Good and Evil To see what else Professor Kozlowski is up to, visit his webpage: https://professorkozlowski.wordpress.com/ And please consider contributing to Professor Kozlowski's Patreon at:     https://www.patreon.com/ProfessorKozlowski - where you'll also be   able to vote for and suggest new topics for future lectures.

Professor Kozlowski tackles the first half of Tolstoy's aesthetic masterwork (?) What is Art? to isolate and examine (1) Tolstoy's grievances with art in the late nineteenth century (and (1b) how much of that applies to contemporary artistic criticism), (2) the failings in other aesthetic systems at the time, (3) Tolstoy's own (admittedly-ambiguous and problematic) principles of artistic merit, and (4) how Tolstoy's targets (including Baudelaire, Impressionism, Shakespeare, and Beethoven's 9th Symphony) fare under his criticism.  There's a lot to unpack and a lot to talk about, so strap in and get ready for another convoluted discussion about art! Suggested supplementary readings include: Baudelaire, Verlaine, and Mallarme (translations included in Tolstoy's Appendices) Wagner's Ring Cycle (we'll talk about it more next week) Turgenev's The Hunting Sketches (for an example of peasant-oriented Russian literature) Genesis from the Bible (one of the few artworks Tolstoy frequently holds up as exemplary) Revisit some 19th century art movements like Romanticism, Realism, and Impressionism. To see what else Professor Kozlowski is up to, visit his webpage: https://professorkozlowski.wordpress.com/ And please consider contributing to Professor Kozlowski's Patreon at:    https://www.patreon.com/ProfessorKozlowski - where you'll also be  able to vote for and suggest new topics for future lectures.

Professor Kozlowski reads a wide variety of Tolstoy's essays on art, including his "Schoolboys and Art," "Introduction to Semyonov's Peasant Stories," "Introduction to the Works of Guy de Maupassant," "On Art (NOT the same as What is Art?)," and "Afterword to Chekov's 'Darling'".  Through these writings, we'll track the development of Tolstoy's thoughts on art, including his normative definition of art, the three criteria Tolstoy employs to discuss art, and how he applies these aesthetic principles to the work of Maupassant and Chekov. Suggested supplementary readings include: Anna Karenina - we'll be returning to this one often Tolstoy's "Master and Man" Semyonov's "The Servant" Three stories by Guy de Maupassant: "Boule de suif", "A Piece of String," and "Solitude" Chekov's "Darling" Dickens' Oliver Twist - for baseline knowledge of Dickens' preoccupations Numbers 23-24 (The story of Balaam and Balak is Tolstoy's favorite metaphor for misguided artists) To see what else Professor Kozlowski is up to, visit his webpage: https://professorkozlowski.wordpress.com/ And please consider contributing to Professor Kozlowski's Patreon at:   https://www.patreon.com/ProfessorKozlowski - where you'll also be able to vote for and suggest new topics for future lectures.

Professor Kozlowski introduces his online section of Troy and the Trojan War for Spring 2023, explaining the rough outline of the course, the expectations for conduct, grading procedures, and general advice for student performance.  Non-students need not listen.