Greig Roselli
My earliest philosophical memory is as a child: wondering about the meaning of the word “narrow.” I had heard the word spoken by an adult earlier in the day. I had brought my bike through an entangled cobweb of thorn bushes in the woods behind my house and the passage was hard to navigate. I was brushing off thorny branches when I realized what the word “narrow” meant. It was a place difficult to get through, I remember thinking. I distinctly remember thinking about how I had come to this realization. And the rest is history!
As an undergraduate, I was awarded a scholarship to study in Leuven, Belgium. I lived in the same town as the Counter-Reformation philosopher and theologian Erasmus studied. I drank good beer. I read Heidegger’s Being and Time and I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Kierkegaard’s concept of despair from The Sickness Unto Death. I studied — albeit, painfully — Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy and Nietzche’s The Gay Science, as well as Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics.
I was naïve and impressionable and I worshiped the professors at the Higher Institute of Philosophy. I acquired a philosophical way of looking at the world strongly inspired by Leuven’s emphasis on the historical-critical method and its legacy of continuing the tradition of continental philosophy. At the time, I was terrified at the prospect of having to retain the entire history of philosophy in my head and the burden of having to articulate philosophical arguments to teachers I had propped up as paragons of the discipline.
As all undergraduates do, we had to take on a bevy of oral exams at the end of the academic year. I was especially apprehensive about the oral Ethics exam. I wore a coat and tie, and chose the question from Professor Desmond’s desk — it was something about Ethics and the problem of being. He wanted to know if Ethics was still viable within a post-metaphysical framework. I tentatively read aloud my answer. When my mouth had stopped moving, he recorded a grade. He asked a follow-up question; “Can ethics, then, presuppose a metaphysics or does metaphysics presuppose ethics?” Honestly, I do not remember what I told him, but, in the end, I remembered he smiled.
I wanted to pursue a licentiate in philosophy in Leuven but I returned to Louisiana and worked on a Master’s degree in English at Southeastern Louisiana University instead. I had a knack for literary theory, buttressed by my background in Western Philosophy. In my coursework, I integrated the study of Virginia Woolf, Orhan Pamuk, and with the works of Walter Benjamin, Jacques Lacan and Michel Foucault to wrestle with broader issues such as coming-of-age, problems with empire, innocence and experience and the development of consciousness in the novel. I was concerned with the ways the child acts in literature as a symbol representing larger issues such as sexuality, power, globalization, and war.
Graduate school exposed the difficulty I had of integrating philosophical knowledge into the criticism of literary texts. I worked on Lacan’s psychoanalytic rendering of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real as representation of boys’ traumas as well as metaphors of the larger problem of nations engaged in war in Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans, J.G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun and Kappa Senoh’s A Boy Called H: A Childhood in Wartime Japan.
I am an active contributor on Noodle, Newslines, LinkedIn, Teachers Pay Teachers, as well as here on my personal writer's blog. In 2013, I published a collection of essays called Things I Shouldn't Have Said (And Other Faux Pas). In 2012, I gave a paper entitled "Proust and the Problem of the Photographic Image" about modernity and realism in philosophy and the fate of the novel. Was featured in the Fall 2010 issue of Canon, an interdisciplinary journal for the New School for Social Research in New York City on a piece on wonder, and I contributed a chapter, "Youth, Masculinity and the Shattering of Sight in Snow" in Essays Interpreting the Writings of Novelist Orhan Pamuk: The Turkish Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, by Nilgün Anadolu-Okur published by the Mellen Press in June 2009.
Currently, I am a High School English teacher and I live in New York City.
It's all a work in progress.
