Professor Kozlowski Lectures

Having decided to spend the summer researching (rather than trying to produce polished lectures), Professor Kozlowski begins to report his research in this first informal "notes" lecture on V. F. Cordova's How It Is . Cordova was the first Native American scholar to receive a Ph. D in philosophy, and this book seems as good an entry point as any into the complicated world of Native A...

Professor Kozlowski concludes (perhaps prematurely) his discussion of the Ethics of Literature by delivering a broad-strokes summary of Wayne C. Booth's The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction , along with some musing on the series' diverse and complicated conclusions, and thoughts about future projects. To see what else Professor Kozlowski is up to, visit his webpage: https://professork...

There are few matters in art criticism (and life) closer to Professor Kozlowski's heart than the mental/spiritual war against capital-N Nihilism - retaining hope in the face of despair, remaining positive in the face of relentless negativity, and perpetually adjusting one's perspective to acknowledge the value of the good things in the world, even when plans go awry and things fall apart....

Professor Kozlowski discusses the first half of John Gardner's On Moral Fiction : "Premises on Art and Morality", where we'll identify some of the current philosophical ideas undermining the possibility of moral fiction in the 1970's (and today), examine those issues in many writers contemporary to Gardner, and think about the ways that modern media is equally evasive of or t...

Professor Kozlowski interprets Derrida's "This Strange Institution Called Literature" according to his own idea of Derrida's philosophical program, perhaps against the "stable" interpretation propagated by self-proclaimed Derrideans. Is this a valid act of interpretation, worthy of its own elevation to stability? May any act of interpretation be considered "less&qu...

Professor Kozlowski concludes his discussion of Ayn Rand's The Romantic Manifesto by examining Rand's confused description of Romanticism, her curious application of Romantic ideals to popular, commercial art, and her examination of the pedagogical function of art, especially for children. Can we reconcile the valuable insights of Rand artistic philosophy with her hostile, narrow view of w...

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://professorkozl...

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 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...

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 eliti...

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 possibl...

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 an...

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...

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, an...

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 defin...

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.

For the first proper lecture in Ethics of Literature, Professor Kozlowski discusses Tolkien's often-overlooked short story, "Leaf By Niggle."  This serves two purposes: by closely examining and interpreting the story, we can determine much of Tolkien's morality and values, just as many of the writers we discuss in future weeks will examine and interpret other works of literature; Tolkien also...

Professor Kozlowski begins our discussion of the ethics of literature with a simple question: Is Speaking Ethical?  The answer may be simple, but the implementation, and the study of how a work of literature can affect us - for something as simple as its entertainment value, for something as abstract as its beauty, or for something as profound as the imposition of a new ideological perspectiv...

Though Professor Kozlowski admittedly did not play much further, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag remains his favorite game in the franchise, even if it discards or sidelines many of the gameplay elements and characteristics that have defined the series up to this point.  But that raises an interesting question: Is Assassin's Creed at its best when it abandons its fundamental assumptions and p...

Professor Kozlowski concludes his series on Ray Bradbury by eating crow and admitting that his understanding of Bradbury's art and objectives may be biased by an over-close reading of Fahrenheit 451 .  Perhaps Let's All Kill Constance is more a reflection of Bradbury's wild and uncontrollable creativity, and his passion for making big ideas without worrying too much about the details or execu...

Professor Kozlowski wrestles with the existential horror of realizing that Ray Bradbury, one of his favorite writers, may have turned into a hack and hypocrite during his later career.  He therefore delivers a confused, half-intelligible discussion of how Bradbury's 2003 detective-noir-ish Let's All Kill Constance fails to stand up to scrutiny from the perspective of its genre, its own idoliz...

Professor Kozlowski contends with the wild second half of Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes , interrogating the way that Bradbury depicts the good and evil forces of the novel and portrays their struggle, using that as an opportunity to interrogate Bradbury's development as a writer and thinker as he grows older and less restrained. If you have questions or topic suggestions for Professor...

Professor Kozlowski wildly gestures at the irrational logic of Bradbury's novel of boys, dark carnivals, and nightmare happenings: Something Wicked This Way Comes .  By examining the style and language of Bradbury's prose in this, his (perhaps) most characteristically Bradbury-an novel, perhaps we'll draw closer to an understanding of how this work defies expectations and reaches its own inte...

Assassin's Creed 3 was nobody's favorite game in the series.  After immense hype and promise, the game released to critical and popular indifference.  In this sustained blast of hot air, Professor Kozlowski will re-examine this game to discern why it failed, as well as assess whether or not it should be re-evaluated with the advantage of time and distance.  Is this game rightfully-o...

Professor Kozlowski continues his fool's errand of discussing many unrelated Bradbury short stories, including the ominous and horrifying "The City", the high-spirited and troubling "The Concrete Mixer", and "The Rocket" - Bradbury's feel-good capstone to the Illustrated Man collection, which may reveal his optimistic solution to the otherwise-downbeat entries throughout. If you have questions or...