UCLA Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies

The UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CMRS)—in collaboration with UCLA’s Center for Jewish Studies, and faculty from the UCLA Departments of English, Sociology and Philosophy—will organize and administer the Seminar. Professor Brian Copenhaver, the Director of CMRS and Professor of Philosophy and History at UCLA, will serve as the Seminar’s Director. Funds awarded by the Mellon Foundation will support participation of a Post-Doctoral Fellow and several Graduate Students Fellows, as well as faculty from other universities. CMRS will also contribute its own funds to support participation in the Seminar by faculty from other universities, and to cover other costs.

Faculty participating in the seminar will come from many disciplines: art history, biblical studies, comparative literature, English and French literatures, history, law, philosophy, political science, religion, rhetoric, sociology, theater and other fields can illuminate the problem of disputation. In order to create and sustain a coherent context for so many voices, the Seminar will depend on an orderly sequence of conversations and an evolving definition of the central topic of disputation. To keep the Seminar’s discussions focused, there will be regular intervention throughout the Seminar by UCLA and other faculty who will pose questions about various instances of the main topic from the three points of view selected to frame the Seminar: literary, philosophical and sociological.

Professor Calvin Normore (Philosophy, UCLA) is responsible for the philosophical continuity of the Seminar. Professor Christopher Baswell (English, UCLA) is responsible for the Seminar’s literary continuity. Professor Jeffrey Prager (Sociology, UCLA) will be responsible for sociological continuity.

Although the Seminar itself will not be offered for academic credit, other concurrent and credit-bearing courses for graduate students participating in the Seminar may be offered at UCLA by the Departments of English, Philosophy and Sociology, with meetings coordinated by CMRS.

The Seminar will consist of a series of sessions, approximately six per academic quarter, focusing on specific topics. Presentations will be made and discussions will be led by faculty from UCLA and other universities. Since it is anticipated that most participants will be unable to attend every session, the Seminar’s graduate student and postdoctoral fellows will prepare summary materials, bibliographies and web resources before and after each meeting of the Seminar. Materials will be posted by CMRS staff on the Center’s website.

Theoretical Perspectives of the Seminar

Comparative insights about disputation will develop along several axes in the Seminar: between and among historical periods (medieval, Renaissance, contemporary); languages and literatures (Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, English, French, German, Spanish, Italian); religions (Islam, Judaism, Christianity); cultures and ethnicities (Western European, Near Eastern, Native American); and gender and class. Because disputation evolved in the West over the course of more than two millennia as the forms of pre-modern culture constantly changed, multi-dimensional terms of comparison are indispensable for understanding the problem of disputation – leading naturally to a wide range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary responses. The many voices contributing to the discussion will be focused throughout the Seminar by questions asked from three selected theoretical perspectives: literary, sociological and philosophical.

Literary and linguistic questions that the Seminar will consider are:

How do the settings of fictional disputations (animal debates, private settings, social settings, elite classes, mixed classes, etc.) affect their procedures and impact?

How do fictional settings – or fictional debaters like birds and beasts – serve as safe(r) arenas for potentially dangerous topics in disputation?

How do gender, class, and ethnicity shape or affect literary disputes?

How do we encounter unequal participants in debate, for instance lord and clerk, or (in medieval Christendom) Christian and Jew?

Do literary disputes set up implicit or explicit limits of access, by such means as specialized language, or such gateways as class or education?

Can the traditional structure of dispute itself serve as a social or psychological censor?

How does disputation, external or interior, shape the development of literary character?

Reason vs. emotion in disputation. What are the competing uses of dialectic and rhetoric in literary disputation?

Sociological questions will include:

What social structures and norms of conduct operate in disputation?

What is the locus of disputation: public, private or in-between?

What access is there to disputation and what participation?

What methods disseminate the process and product of disputation?

How can the audience of disputation respond to it?

How can the audience remember, record, reproduce, quote and become persuaded by disputation?

Where do its contents and outcomes place disputation in typologies of power?

Where does professionalization situate disputation in a mediated public sphere?

And philosophical issues will include:

What theories of argument best illuminate disputation?

What does speech-act theory tell us about disputation?

Is disputation a form of performative utterance?

Is disputation governed by a logic of questioning?

How does disputation navigate the boundary between semantics and pragmatics?

Do game theory and games of partial cooperation apply to disputation?