The Shapes My Brain Holds: Kantian Spontaneity and Virginia Woolf's The Waves
Speaker(s): Maya Kronfeld (Comparative Literature, UC Berkeley)
Maya Kronfeld is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research centers on American and French modernism, and the Philosophy of Mind. Her most recent talks are on T.S. Eliot and Bertrand Russell, Theodor Adorno and Rhythm in Jazz, and Frederick Douglass and Logical Presupposition. Maya is also a pianist and keyboardist who has performed with Linda Tillery, Toshi Reagon, Nona Hendryx, and Georgia Anne Muldrow among others. Her dissertation, “Spontaneity and the Stream of Consciousness” rethinks modernist narration in light of Kantian spontaneity and its musical cognate term, improvisation.
Maya will present Virginia Woolf's The Waves as an experiment in "constructivist impressionism" and explain how Woolf's fictional rendering of consciousness helps to clarify and move beyond some of the key impasses in philosophical empiricism, especially those animated in the transition from Hume to Kant (self as mere bundle of sensation, limits of atomistic explanation, limits of passive receptivity, importance of spontaneity).