“Criticism & Theory: A Conversation” featuring Joe Moshenska (Oxford) and Jonathan Kramnick (Yale)
You are warmly invited to a conversation about critical methodologies and the future(s) of literary study, featuring Joe Moshenska and Jonathan Kramnick and co-sponsored by the Departments of Comparative Literature and English and the Program in Early Modern Studies.
Wednesday, Nov. 6, 1-2:30 pm
LC 211; refreshments provided!
Joe Moshenska is Professor of English at Oxford, where he teaches early modern literature and serves as co-director of the Workshop in Experimental Criticism. His scholarship–on topics ranging from the history of touch to the cultural afterlife of icons in Reformation England–pursues criticism at the intersection of literary studies and such adjacent fields as anthropology, philosophy, theology, science, and the visual arts. His current project, a literary biography of Baruch Spinoza, traces the influence of the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher on writers as varied as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, George Eliot, Gustave Flaubert, James Joyce, P.G. Wodehouse, Jorge Luis Borges, Clarice Lispector, and Cynthia Ozick.
Jonathan Kramnick is Maynard Mack Professor of English at Yale, where he teaches and researches eighteenth-century literature and philosophy, foundations of literary theory and criticism, and interdisciplinary approaches to the arts. He is the author of four books, including studies of literary form and the ecology of consciousness, eighteenth-century theories of action and objectivity, and the forging of a nationalist literary canon. His most recent book, Criticism and Truth: On Method in Literary Studies, defends the epistemology of close reading at the heart of contemporary literary criticism.