Gratuitous Violence

Comic Experience and Lyric Misogyny

David Carroll Simon is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland and author of Light Without Heat: The Observational Mood from Bacon to Milton (Cornell UP, 2018). He will present new work on misogyny and erotophobia in renaissance comic traditions and the disturbing exemplarity of those traditions for understanding aspects of our own cultural moment. Simon’s recent essays on cruelty and comedy have appeared in Studies in Philology as well as in Critical Inquiry’s 2017 special issue on comedy, edited by Sianne Ngai and Lauren Berlant.