Kevin Stearns/University Photography

Carrie Rohman of the University of Pittsburgh presents a paper on "Ethics and the Non-Human Other" during a School of Criticism and Theory colloquium at A.D. White House on July 6, while fellow SCT participant Jason Cohen listens.

Would you travel halfway around the world to talk about Wittgenstein? Many graduate students and professors do just that. The famed philosopher's work in logic and language is among the studies tackled each summer by participants in the School of Criticism and Theory (SCT) at Cornell University.

They come from all over and from diverse fields of study, including comparative literature, history, film studies and theater. They engage in discourse with fellow participants and pre-eminent theorists, apply critical theory to their own work and explore cultural trends, ideology and more.

"At first I was nervous, but it's what I was hoping it would be -- it's proven to be very accessible," says Christo Chadjichristos, who teaches architecture at the University of Cyprus. "Architecture is much more exposed to criticism than other disciplines. If you want to challenge your own paradigm, this place could provide the right environment."

The SCT, founded at the University of California-Irvine and based at Cornell since 1996, is a unique six-week interdisciplinary experience. The 2005 summer seminar held from June 19 through July 29 is the ninth at Cornell, welcoming 92 participants from 24 countries, including Kuwait, Denmark, Sweden, Canada, Spain, Hungary, Korea, Germany, Portugal, Sri Lanka, Poland, Switzerland and China.

Chris Hallman/University Photography

School of Criticism and Theory faculty member Robert J.C. Young delivers a lecture on asylum seekers on June 27 in Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium.

"It's become a completely international program," says Dominick LaCapra, SCT director and the Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies at Cornell.

"There are more non-Americans in it than Americans, and it kind of makes the conversations open up in different ways," says Todd Thorpe, a third-year graduate student in English at the University of Notre Dame. "When you have people from Australia, Argentina and Taiwan together, you're not going to have a homogeneity of outlook."

SCT participants meet Monday through Thursday at the A.D. White House, with three-hour seminars two mornings a week. Each afternoon is set aside for lectures, colloquiums and time to meet individually with seminar leaders. Friday is free time -- "study day, also grocery day," says Elise Wortel, who is in Elizabeth Grosz's seminar on "Time and Becoming: Darwin, Nietzsche, Bergon, Deleuze." Grosz, a professor of women's and gender studies at Rutgers University, is one of the four SCT faculty leading a six-week seminar.

"From day one, I found it exhilarating," says Wortl, a cultural studies and comparative literature student at Radboud University in the Netherlands. "I'm writing on Deleuze, and I never thought that with Darwin, there would be so many connections between them."

Social events include a closing banquet and a picnic at Taughannock Falls. Some participants have part of their $2,500 tuition funded by their home institutions, which include 35 to 40 SCT-affiliated universities, LaCapra says. Cornell also provides some scholarship support.

"I think the students get an awful lot out of it," says SCT faculty member Toril Moi of Duke University. "When I ask them, 'What is this school environment doing for you?' I've seen their faces just light up. It's always huge fun to teach here, because the classes are so lively."

Moi's seminar in language philosophy, "The Fate of the Body Under Skepticism," uses her own book "Sex, Gender and the Body" and Stanley Cavell's "The Claim of Reason," plus works by Wittgenstein, Shakespeare, Henrik Ibsen, Sigmund Freud and others. Moi also compiled a viewing list of 16 classic films, placed on reserve in the university library for her students. The films include "Gaslight," "The Stepford Wives" (the 1975 version), "The Lady Eve," "Blade Runner," "The Philadelphia Story" and "Bringing Up Baby." The aim is to apply the philosophy and see literature, drama and film in new ways.

"There's only so much time in six weeks," Moi says. "My approach is to assign as little reading as possible, because they are rushed off their feet from the start -- it's a very intense experience."

While they're here, participants don't just soak up theory, they sling it. Colloquiums allow them to deliver papers and presentations in their specialties, for a group of peers to comment on. The individual seminars and lectures often are open forums for discussion.

"I think their thinking is transformed by the experience," LaCapra says. "The reason is there's enough time to discuss things thoroughly, and also the diversity of fields covered."

Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, a Stanford University professor of literature known to his students and colleagues as "Sepp," is leading a seminar on a reconceptualization of the humanities, titled "Production of Presence."

"Most of the humanities is talking about how the effects of meaning are produced," Gumbrecht says.

In a single session recently, he covered the history of Western epistemology, with an emphasis on Heidegger and Descartes; had two participants read brief papers; and then he delivered a 300-year overview of the humanities and literary studies since Romanticism. He also went over a revised syllabus, incorporating contributions from the participants. "It was Sepp's openness that allowed us to do that," says Jason Cohen of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

SCT participants form collegial bonds here. "This is a really nice way to enter the larger profession," Thorpe says.

"Over the years, the quality of the participants has been quite amazing, and I think they learn as much from one another as from the faculty," LaCapra says. "And they form contacts that last long after the seminar ends."

All SCT faculty take part in a free public lecture series. Robert J.C. Young of the University of Oxford augmented his seminar, "The Theory and Politics of Cultural Translation," with a talk about asylum seekers and immigration on June 27.

"The really great thing is his injection of humanism into the topics we're talking about," says one of Young's students, Emilio Suari of the University of Illinois-Chicago.

One SCT participant, digital media artist Brooke Singer of the State University of New York-Purchase, spoke on activism and new technology in her talk, "Reshaping the Wireless Commons," on July 6.

The school also offers four mini-seminars of one or two weeks, led this year by Homi Bhabha of Harvard University, Joan Scott of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, Catharine Stimpson of New York University and Hortense Spillers, the Frederick J. Whiton Professor of English at Cornell.

"We have to defend critique as a tradition within the university," Scott said to a full house in Hollis E. Cornell Auditorium June 28 in her lecture, "Against Eclecticism."

Scott referenced philosophers Victor Cousin and Jacques Derrida as she raised concerns over current trends in academe, including "the emergence of orthodoxies in such areas as women's studies," and threats from conservative critic David Horowitz and Students for Academic Freedom, whom she says are promoting "an agenda aimed at overturning the supposed leftist bias on campus."

The mix of faculty and guest speakers is designed to combine "fields that will interact in interesting ways" and "a diversity in method and approach," LaCapra says.