Eduardo Cadava. Paper Graveyards; Nadar's Memoir. 2012
http://www.egs.edu/
Eduardo Cadava, prominent contemporary
American literary and philosophical critic and thinker, talking about the
Nadar, photography, portraits, and images
. In the lecture Eduardo Cadava discusses the concepts of archive, spectors, photographopolis, death, in relationship to
Walter Benjamin,
Balzac,
Lucretius,
Rosalind E. Krauss,
Arcade Project, focusing on multiplicity, time, and mourning.
Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the
European Graduate School EGS Media and
Communication Studies department program
Saas-Fee Switzerland Europe 2012 Eduardo Cadava.
Eduardo Cadava,
Ph.D., is a prominent contemporary American literary and philosophical critic and thinker. He joined the faculty at
Princeton University in
1989. He is a
Professor in the
Department of
English and an
Associate Member of the Department of
Comparative Literature, the
School of Architecture,
The Center for
African-American Studies,
The Program in
Latin American Studies, and the
Princeton Institute for
International and
Regional Studies. He also is a member of the Committee for
European Cultural Studies, and of the steering committee for Princeton's graduate
Program in Media and Modernity. He teaches in the areas of literary theory, visual and cultural studies, philosophy, theories of translation, and, within the field of literature, he specializes in
American literature, and also in
French,
German, and
Latin American literature. He also is a Professor at the European Graduate School (EGS), where he teaches an intensive summer seminar.
Cadava has written extensively on topics ranging across literature, philosophy, photography, architecture, music, democracy, war, memory and forgetting, race and slavery, human rights and citizenship, and the ethics of decision. He has published three books, co-edited three books, published over fifty essays, and translated several works from French into English. The first book is a meditation on Walter Benjamin's discussions of the relation between history and photography and is entitled
Words of
Light: Theses on the
Photography of
History (
Princeton University Press,
1997). The second addresses the politics of
Emerson's climatic and meteorological reflections and is entitled Emerson and the
Climates of History (
Stanford University Press, 1997). While these two books could be said to cover materials from different areas of specialization and even different national literatures, they both reflect Cadava's interest in the relations between literature and history. In particular, each book expresses his interest in what he calls the "historical physiognomy" of an author's language: in
Benjamin, for example, he follows Benjamin's use of the language of photography in his discussions of history and, in Emerson, he traces the
American writer's recourse to the language of the weather in his writings on history. In both instances, he argues that each writer confirms his conception of history through the figures he chooses to represent it.
Cadava recently has completed a collection of essays entitled
Paper Graveyards: Essays on
Art and Photography, which is forthcoming in
2013. The six essays that comprise the book form a kind of constellation around a series of related themes, including the relations among images, writing, memory, ruins, death, mourning, and the technical media. They touch on works by, among others, Nadar,
Andreas Embeiríkos (the modern
Greek surrealist poet and photographer),
Roland Barthes,
Leon Golub, and
Fazal Sheikh, and, with the exception of the essay on
Barthes, they cover materials that are rarely considered. They also engage several of the most central issues within contemporary debates on art and photography—the relation between the photograph and the photographed, the visual and the linguistic, and photography and writing, the role and place of art and photography within the historical and political domains, and questions of medium-specificity. The title of the collection comes from a passage from Johann
Christian Hallmann's 1682 Leichreden (Corpse speeches) that Walter Benjamin cites in his Trauerspiel book and that identifies our being with images of death.