Anxieties of influence: Can there be ethics of history? An Ethics Institute colloquy with Richard Aberle
Cindy McMurray
mcmurrcl at plattsburgh.edu
Tue Mar 2 14:00:00 UTC 2021
Wednesday, March 3, 2021, noon - 1 p.m. by Zoom: https://bit.ly/3b3sYec
In William Faulkner’s Requiem for a Nun, the character Gavin Stevens in an
oft quoted passage tells Temple Drake that “the past is never dead. It is
not even past.” In the novel, Gavin Stevens is representing a Black nanny
accused of murdering the white baby of Temple, the woman who has employed
her. Stevens himself is unaware at the time how the past has impinged upon
his case and how the entanglements and complexities of race, gender, and
history play out in the bizarre circumstances of what will turn out to be a
multiple tragedy that will haunt generations of the family. In his Nobel
acceptance speech, Faulkner argued that history had a moral purpose—"The
poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his
privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the
courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice
which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be
the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him
endure and prevail.” Faulkner’s fictional depiction of what he saw as
historical truths functioned to reveal the ugliness and tragic consequences
of our past, hardly, one might think, an uplifting “prop” or “pillar” that
could reveal “the glory of our past.” Amid our current reckoning with our
racial past and with lingering effects of race, gender, and social
inequality, what constitutes a proper role of history? Is a vision of the
past always subject to what some have called “the tyranny of the present?”
Whose past matters and how? What constitutes a truthful historical
narrative? What obligations does the historian have to present ills? What
is an ethics of history? In examining several moments in Southern history,
past Institute Fellow Richard Aberle will guide us in an exploration of
such questions and others as the nation comes to grip with its past and
future.
For further information about colloquies at the Ethics Institute, contact
Dr. Jonathan Slater, director.
The Institute for Ethics in Public Life is generously supported by gifts to
the Plattsburgh College Foundation. Institute colloquies are open to all
members of the SUNY Plattsburgh community.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://ls.plattsburgh.edu/pipermail/employee-digest/attachments/20210302/f21af979/attachment.htm>
More information about the Employee-Digest
mailing list