This talk tracks the emergence of slavery as the defining template through which current forms of human rights abuses are understood. To fathom forms of freedom and bondage today–from unlawful detention to sex trafficking to the refugee crisis to conscription in war–Professor Goyal shows how contemporary literature draws on the antebellum genre of the slave narrative, reinventing such key genres as sentimentalism, the gothic, satire, ventriloquism, and the bildungsroman.

Four alums from the Nonfiction Writing Program will offer insights on careers in nonfiction writing, editing, publishing, and teaching. Essayist and n+1 publicity coordinator, Elisabeth Borst ’17.5; Studio Theatre grants coordinator and writer, Sarah Cooke ’17; award-winning writer and producer, Jessica Weisberg ’06; and award-winning writer and teacher, Cutter Wood ’06, will read from their work and talk about writing beyond Brown.

Please join us for a “What I Am Thinking About Now” presentation by Dixa Ramírez, Assistant Professor of American Studies and English at Brown University.

Department of English lecture series

Nonfiction Writing as Thinking and Practice

Department of English lecture series

Nonfiction Writing as Thinking and Practice

D. Gilson is Assistant Professor at Texas Tech University. He received his Ph.D. in American literature and cultural studies from the George Washington University in 2016. He works in narrative nonfiction, cultural criticism, and the digital humanities, and his books include I Will Say This Exactly One Time: Essays (Sibling Rivalry Press, 2015); Jesus Freak (Bloomsbury, 2018) and the forthcoming Boyfriends (NYU Press, 2019).

“Missing the Point:  Just Forms of History in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.”

Book 5 of Spenser’s Faerie Queene begins with a stanza in which the world spins off its axis.  Having missed “the first point of his appointed sourse,” this “world is runne quite out of square,/…And being once amisse growes daily wourse and wourse.”  The poet therefore declares his intention to “forme” what follows not “to the common line/ Of present dayes” but “to the antique vse, which was of yore” (3.3-5).      

Ellis Hanson, Professor of English at Cornell will present a lecture, “Must We Arrest Oscar Wilde Again?:  Sexual Panic at Present.”  Hanson is the author of “Decadence and Catholicism” and the editor of “Out Takes: Essays on Queer Theory and Film.”  He is currently working on two books, one on aestheticism and the erotics of style and the other on the visual representation of child sexuality in contemporary American culture.  Professor Hanson teaches courses on Victorian and Modernist literature, visual studies, critical theory, and gender and sexuality studies.

“Give me Vesuvius’ crater for an inkstand!” Ishmael’s imagining of what he needs to write Moby Dick testifies to the largeness of scale of Melville’s work, which crosses oceans, spans centuries, invents genres, and imagines new forms of life. “Melville’s Worlds” responds to this largeness of scale, exploring his work across a variety of discourses and disciplines: legal, political, ecological, sociological, and aesthetic.

In this illustrative account of one of Shakespeare’s harshest early critics, Professor Russell Leo offers a provocative history of the origin of the term “poetic justice.” Leo, examining Thomas Rymer’s scathing assessment of the plot of Othello, demonstrates the interrelation of theology, criticism, and poetics in the development of eighteenth-century aesthetics. In doing so he elucidates the limits of the representative regime of art and explores how and why philosophical aesthetics collated religious and artistic experience.