Cancelled: Lives of the ‘Brows’: Autobiography, Taste, Ethics

Please join us for a guest lecture by Dr. Max Cavitch, Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is also an affiliated faculty member of the programs in Cinema Studies, Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies, and Psychoanalytic Studies.

Dr. Cavitch will be discussing literary taste and value in relation to autobiography—one of the world’s most popular and widely practiced genres. From “highbrow” triumphs of artistic intention to “middlebrow” narratives of historical significance to “lowbrow” tell-alls of gossipy celebrity, there are autobiographies to suit every taste. But what is “taste,” anyway? What does it have to do with “literary value”? And, moreover, what do either taste or literary value have to do with the question of whose lives and life-stories matter?

Refreshments will be served. Students, faculty, and interested members of the public are warmly invited to attend.

Free and open to the public.
Sponsored by the Wayne D. McMurray Endowed Chair in the Humanities, Dr. Kristin Bluemel