Presented by The Department of Comparative Literaturein conjunction with the Kelly Writer's House
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Lecture Series 2009-2010
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Symposium 2010
Next Lecture ~ Sept 24, 2009 6:00 pm ~ Kelly Writer's House
"Life Outside: On the Descriptive Turn in Literature and Sociology"
Heather Love
Penn Professor of English, Heather Love, is known for her work in subjects ranging from queer theory and film to race and ethnicity. This talk will focus the value of critique versus description and the rise of the later in the social sciences and literary and cultural studies. Building from the work of sociologist Erving Goffman, Love intends to ask the question, "what is description good for?"
Love is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History (Harvard, 2007). She has published widely on gender studies and queer theory, modernism and modernity, affect studies, film and visual culture, psychoanalysis, race and ethnicity, and critical theory. She is co-editor of a special issue of "New Literary History" ("Is There Life after Identity Politics?") and is currently at work on a special issue of "GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies" devoted to the work of anthropologist Gayle Rubin. Her current research concerns the literary source materials for Erving Goffman's 1963 sociological classic, Stigma: On the Management of Spoiled Identity ("The Stigma Archive").