Melville’s Worlds Symposium
“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.
Alexander Chee, “The Writer and the Life”
Novelist/essayist/journalist Alexander Chee inaugurates this year’s public lecture series devoted to various forms of nonfiction writing. [email protected], organized by the Nonfiction Writing Program in the Department of English, features Korean American writer Alexander Chee, Associate Professor of Creative Writing and Literature at Dartmouth College.
Russell Leo: “Thomas Rymer, Poetic Justice, and the Limits of Representation: Dispatches from the Representative Regime of Art”
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.
255th Opening Convocation
All students, faculty, and staff are invited to attend the 255th Opening Convocation to celebrate the start of the academic year and welcome new students to Brown. President Christina Paxson will officially open the school year. Provost and Schreiber Family Professor of Political Science and International and Public Affairs, Richard M. Locke, will deliver the keynote address. The Convocation procession of incoming students will form on College Street beginning at 3:40 PM and the ceremony will begin at 4 PM on the Main Green.
