SPAH Seminar Series Week 21: Professor Andrew Huddleston

Part of the SPAH Seminar Series, Andrew Huddleston gives a talk on 'The Idea of a 'Religion of Art': The Case of Wagner'

This talk draws on a wider project of mine considering a theme in the aesthetic theorizing and art-making of the post-Kantian period, especially pronounced in German Romanticism, and going through the 19th century, and into the 20th century to certain key segments of artistic, literary, and musical modernism. An oft-expressed ambition is that art will somehow step in and fill the void left behind by waning religion. In this talk specifically, I use Richard Wagner's theoretical writings (and some responses to his works and his agenda) as one lens for better understanding this exalted ambition for art and the limitations of this ambition. 

About the speaker:
Andrew Huddleston is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, where he is Director of the Centre for Research in Post-Kantian European Philosophy. He studied as an undergraduate at Brown and at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and did his PhD at Princeton under the supervision of Alexander Nehamas. Huddleston previously taught at Exeter College, Oxford and at Birkbeck College, University of London. He specializes in 19th and 20th Century European Philosophy, Aesthetics, and Ethics. His book Nietzsche on the Decadence and Flourishing of Culture (2019) was published by Oxford University Press, and he is presently at work on a book tentatively titled Art’s Highest Calling: The Religion of Art in a Secular Age. 

To attend, please email spahpg@essex.ac.uk for the Zoom link. The seminar will also be streamed in NTC.3.07 for those wishing to attend on campus.