April
14,
2022
Speaker:
Ramzi Fawaz, PhD
Professor of English
UW-Madison
In this talk, Ramzi Fawaz argues for the value of psychedelic experience as a framework for amplifying the social and political impacts of literature on the affective lives of readers and viewers. Neurochemical studies of the psychedelically “tripping” brain suggest that the experience can have wide-reaching, long-term positive outcomes including the expansion of one’s sensory experience, a stronger ability to grapple with life’s contingency and human mortality, and the mitigation of depression, anxiety, and addiction. Fawaz identifies several crucial ways in which literary criticism and pedagogy’s enhancement of cultural meaning making dovetails with the best aspects of psychedelic states, including the activation of students’ aesthetic sensibilities. A psychedelically inflected criticism aims to achieve the psychedelic experience’s “blossoming of mental states” by revitalizing the literary text as a site for exploring, refining, and retuning the sensorium, thereby enriching one’s perceptual and imaginative capacities. Fawaz unpacks how the insights of psychedelic experiences can shape distinct pedagogical and interpretative practices that respond to our current global political crises. This can potentially revivify the therapeutic value of the humanities as an institution invested in honing the creative and ethical faculties of generations of youth while attending to their long-term affective well-being.
Sponsors for this event include the Holtz Center, the UW Center for Transdisciplinary Research in Psychoactive Substances, the American Institute of the History of Pharmacy, and George Urdang Chair in Pharmacy History.
Attendees must register to attend this virtual presentation.
Ramzi Fawaz is professor of English at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics (NYU Press, 2016) and Queer Forms (forthcoming NYU Press, 2022). His new research concerns the social and politics impacts on literature and culture of psychedelic experience.
