2009 Fellows
 

Crystal Alberts, 2009 Regional Fellow.

Philosophy of literature:

Literature, the Author, and the Digital Age
 

What is the relationship between an author and a text, especially given the new and changeable nature of words in the digital age? Are web pages or blogs substantively different than e-novels or digital reproductions of classic works? These are all variations of classic questions in the philosophy of literature. Two millennia ago, Plato cautioned against writing because words, once permanent, have a life of their own. Their meanings, he argued, are no longer bound to what the author intended. In the nineteen sixties, “the author” was symbolically killed off by Roland Barthes in his book “La Mort de l’Auteur” (1968). Today, many in academe regard the idea of an author as a relic even though one can see, touch, and hear the creator of any written work.

Crystal Alberts struggles with these problems while focusing specifically on digital media – the written word in cyberspace, as well as film, television, and recordings of lectures, each of which is also now regarded as a “text.” Has the concept of an “author” changed since Plato and Barthes? Has the very meaning of literature become something essentially different than, say, when Charles Dickens or Shakespeare wrote? Now that anyone can publish online, what does it mean to be an Author?  What is Electronic Literature?  How is it different from a book?  And, perhaps more importantly, what, if anything, distinguishes electronic literature from the billions of web pages in existence. 

Dr. Crystal Alberts completed a bachelor of arts in English and Religion at Mount Holyoke College and holds a Ph.D. in English and American Literature from Washington University in St. Louis.  She specializes in post-1945 American literature and culture, particularly on the roles of the archive and author in contemporary writing.  She currently teaches in the areas of film, digital humanities, and emerging media.  Dr. Alberts is the co-editor of a forthcoming volume entitled Novel in Tradition: Essays on William Gaddis.  She also has articles in The Missouri Review, as well as Paper Empire: William Gaddis and the World System edited by Joseph Tabbi and Rone Shavers.  She serves as the technical editor for the NEH-funded Elizabeth Barrett Browning Project and is a research associate for the Electronic Literature Organization.

Mark Chekola, 2009 Regional Fellow

Ethics and Philosophy of Social Science

What is Happiness? Can the Perspectives of Philosophy and the Social Sciences Work Together?

The ancient Greek philosophers regarded happiness as one of the most important topics for philosophy, part of the more general question of “What is the best life?” or “How should we live?” The 19^th century utilitarians also regarded happiness as an important concern of philosophy but thought of it in a narrower way. Many thought you could measure it and use calculations to determine which actions were right to do. Not surprisingly, early economists went wild with this idea and developed various suggestions as to how to use such measurement; they developed an understanding of the welfare of individuals and groups in terms of preferences and satisfaction. Some even argued that income itself was a rough indication of how happy people were.

When Mark Chekola wrote his PhD dissertation, “The Concept of Happiness,” in the 1970’s, it was regarded as an unusual topic for philosophy, yet it proved influential for social scientists in the 1980’s, particularly psychologists and sociologist who began their own empirical studies of the subject. Social scientists were attracted to the quantitative approach to happiness because it supplied “data;” it appeared scientific and objective but was significantly different than how the Greeks understood it. Now happiness is back on the table and philosophers have a renewed interest. The question before Chekola is how to reconcile these two approaches. Is the social scientific mathematical approach inconsistent with the classical Greek philosophy of happiness? The first approach is more “subjective,” but the other might be more “objective.” Where does philosophy go from here?

With this and other questions in mind, Chekola has sought more cooperation between philosophy and the social sciences on the topic of happiness. In particular, he serves on a research team at the World Database of Happiness, located at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. He has visited there for a month each fall for the past five years improving the philosophy bibliography in the Database. (Much of the database is available on the web (www.worlddatabaseofhappiness.eur.nl) He seeks a way of joining the strengths of philosophy – its conceptual clarity and focus on good argument – with the social sciences and their emphasis on empirical data. He argues that social scientists can benefit from more careful attention to definition of concepts but that philosophers could gain insight from empirical data. Can a collaboration be forged so that philosophers and social scientists might work together on their studies of happiness, rather than separately or just side by side? Chekola hopes to find out.

Dr. Mark Chekola first came to this region to attend college at Concordia College in Moorhead. When he graduated in 1967, leaving for the University of Michigan for graduate study, he swore he would never live through another upper Midwest winter, yet he returned to teach at Minnesota State University Moorhead and has lived here ever since. He is now a Professor Emeritus at MSUM.

While at MSUM he taught (among other courses) Classical Greek philosophy, a particular love of his, medical ethics, and some seminars on happiness and well-being. His published articles have been in the areas of happiness studies and gay/lesbian studies.

Some of his community and professional service has been in the area of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender issues. He served as chair of an early gay/lesbian group in the Fargo-Moorhead area in the early 1980’s. In the 1990’s, he served on the Governor’s Task Force on Lesbian and Gay Minnesotans. In the American Philosophical Association he served on the Committee on the Status on Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Persons in the Profession, and on the Committee on Inclusiveness in the Profession. 

He has also been concerned about the over-professionalization that has been occurring in Academia and the tendency of philosophers at universities to write for the limited audience of other graduate-school trained philosophers. In the American Philosophical Association he is currently chairing the Diversity Essays Project, a project to encourage the writing of essays on diversity issues suitable for use in undergraduate teaching and for the general public. He is the founder of the Fargo-Moorhead chapter of “Philosophy for All,” a monthly philosophy discussion group that has been meeting regularly since 2004.

Paul Gaffney, 2009 Visiting Fellow.

Social and political philosophy.

Competition and the Social Ideal

Competition is not the whole of life: humans are, at least to some extent, collaborative, sympathetic, and benevolent. But a full understanding of the human condition could not fail to assign an essential place to its importance.

 For many, the experience of competition is an intrinsic value; it plays an indispensable role in the good life. Those who seek out athletic competition, either as spectators or as participants, would seem to accept this view (ignoring, for the moment, those who distort this enterprise by reducing it to an instrumental financial interest). While athletics is something of a “pure” instance, it may be regarded as an end-in-itself, defined largely by its own rules, there are other varieties of competition that increasingly regulate our social life. For example, contemporary legal systems use adversarial confrontations to maximize justice; market capitalism includes as a defining characteristic the competitive struggles of self-seeking agents; democratic politics makes the ability to persuade or “win over” the majority the sine qua non condition of success, even if persuasive opinion is not “best” or “true” according to other criteria. In short, ours is a competitive world, and it is becoming more and more competitive. 

 In his work with the institute, Paul Gaffney will examine these developments. He believes that, in their rightful place, competitive systems are not only best at achieving certain outcomes, they are also themselves instantiations of certain ideals such as respect, fairness, and human dignity.

Paul Gaffney is Associate Professor and Chair of the Philosophy Department at St. John’s University, NY, and Adjunct Professor of Business Administration at John Cabot University in Rome, Italy. In 1997 he was named St. John’s College of Liberal Arts Professor of the Year by Student Government. He has published many articles and reviews on topics such as Ethics, Law, Education, and Sport. A former college basketball player at Niagara University, he is currently working on a book entitled The Competition Ideal: The Structure and Meaning of Antagonistic Relationships.

Clay Jenkinson, 2009 Regional Fellow.

Social philosophy:

Insider/Outsider:
The quest for authenticity in and around North Dakota
 

Our society, perhaps all of humanity, is described in terms of kinship and groups. But inquiry – the search for knowledge and for the answers to our deepest questions – is supposed to be universal. That at least was the Enlightenment’s conviction. The cultural studies movement and post-colonial discourse have challenged the assumption that there are universal questions or that one culture can fairly investigate another.

As the 21 ^st century begins, how do we negotiate this tension between our desire to examine the world as if virtually everything were fair game and our increasing sensitivity to questions of appropriation and representation?

 Clay Jenkinson’s current project faces the question head on. He is currently beginning to write a novel about an improbably friendship between a Native American girl and a white boy on a reservation border town, in the hopes of examining the flash points between the two cultures of North Dakota, cultures that frequently collide but seldom communicate in any mutually respectful way. But Clay Jenkinson is a self-described Anglo-German left-brained scholar. Does he have a right to intrude upon North Dakota’s Native American world, even as a respectful guest, and what credibility could he possibly bring to a world he reads about and observes, but in no significant way “lives?”

At the same time, as a regular newspaper columnist, he offers suggestions and observations about North Dakota and its future. Yet while he was born and raised in the state, he spent a large portion of his life outside of it. Has he lost the authority to make claims and recommendations and if so when and why? Is he still a North Dakotan? Do you have to be a North Dakotan to observe the habits of the heart of the North Dakota community? How long can you be gone without losing your citizenship? And how long do you have to be back before you have regained it, if ever?

In his work with the Institute, Clay will examine these fundamental questions and others. What makes an outsider? Does true criticism require insider status? What are the consequences of temporary separation from the group in terms of identity and trust? In essence, his research will examine the question of authenticity and what it means to North Dakota and the peoples who reside in it. Do we want our young people to leave and come back or do we not them to leave at all? If they come back bearing new perspectives and ways of seeing North Dakota, shall we embrace them or shun them? What are the nature and limits of cross-cultural communication between those who live here, even those who live next door to each other? His fellowship is timely and important, locally-based but with universal importance.

Clay’s personal mission is “to help start the conversation we need to have about our identity, our values, our past, our future, continuity and change, heritage and opportunity, land and people, community and history, landscape and resources, North Dakota as a unique place and North Dakota as a typical place, North Dakota as platform or North Dakota as place.” He is well aware that, like all invitations to conversation, this one may be declined.

Clay Jenkinson is most famous for portraying Thomas Jefferson in the long-running and always inspiring public radio show The Thomas Jefferson Hour, and is one of the most sought-after Humanities scholars in the United States.