Critical Questions: A Visiting Lecture Series in Literature and Culture 2009-1010

Dr. Matthew Wickman, Brigham Young University and University of Aberdeen
Thursday, October 29th, 2009 - 4 p.m.
Memorial Union Journey Room

"Robert Burns and the Inhuman: Mice, Lice, Numbers, Networks"

One reason for Robert Burns’s enduring global popularity is that he represents the image of simplicity in a modern era most often defined by its spiraling complexities. This image may also explain why Burns has often gone overlooked in academic circles, which have dedicated themselves to exploring the limits rather than the presumed basics of human experience. But today, as the humanities increasingly engage the brave new world of mathematics and the hard sciences, Burns may be newly relevant on surprising grounds--less as a nostalgic emblem of lost innocence than as a figure gleefully entangled in the paradoxes of modern being.

Dr. Cindy Weinstein, California Institute of Technology
Thursday, March 11, 2010 - 4:00

"Heaven’s Tense: Narratives in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’s The Gates Ajar"

The Gates Ajar was written to heal the wounds of a nation grieving over the massive numbers of deaths during the Civil War.  In making the dead present, Phelps's novel consoles her readers; however, this spiritual solace has interesting consequences for the text's narrative form, which loses its grip on the temporal distinctions between past, present, and future.  "Heaven's Tense" analyzes Phelps's fascinating and inconsistent use of tense in relation both to cultural contexts, such as the Civil War and Austin Phelps's (her father's) pronouncements on rhetorical style, and twentieth-century narrative theory.