Fall 2007 Core Humanities Lecture Series

Aaron Santesso - Monday, October 1, 4:00pm, SLH 002

"Dickens in the Casino: Surveillance, Empiricism and the Novel "

Casino surveillace and the Victorian novel seem like odd bedfellows—and yet one might say that every surveillance agent is a Dickens fan at heart. This lecture will look at modern casino surveillance as a system which attempts to make the individual instantly knowable, and will trace the history of parallel attempted systems in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature, philosophy and science.

Valerie Weinstein - Wednesday, November 28, 3:00p, OSN 203

“The Grey Zone”: The Aging of Germany’s WWII Generation

Published a year before his death in 1987, Holocaust survivor Primo Levi’s essay “The Grey Zone” challenges popular history’s binary view of the Holocaust as black and white, focusing on ways fascism and the concentration camp system corrupted its victims. As survivors and perpetrators have aged, this moral “Grey Zone” has become increasingly of interest, not only as a more complex way of interpreting survivors’ experiences, but also as a way of normalizing perpetrators and their actions. Turning to examples such as the biography, documentary film, and feature film based on the experiences of Traudl Junge, Hitler’s secretary, this talk will address the spread and function of the “Grey Zone” in recent German culture and the potential and problems it presents.