Join the English Department American Area for a lecture by
Peter Coviello (Professor; University of Illinois, Chicago)
Love and Ruin; or, The Shining in an Age of Last Things
What can it mean to love the things we love (books, records, movies, people) in a time of polycrisis and disaster? And how do our icons speak to us – what news can they deliver – in the midst of such planet-sized calamity? Taking its cue from the iconic horror of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, this talk asks what it means to live in the shadow of cataclysms at once everywhere sensible and, in their ruinous breadth, difficult to apprehend, to know. All manner of things find us through our icons, those talismanic conduits to the inconceivable. We will consider the fate of knowing, unknowing, and criticism itself here in a time of crisis and collapse, an age of Last Things.
Peter Coviello is a scholar of American literature and queer theory. A writer of criticism, scholarship, and literary nonfiction, he is the author of six books, including Make Yourselves Gods: Mormonism and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism; Long Players; and Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America. His recent book, Vineland Reread, was listed among the New York Times’s “New and Noteworthy” titles for January 2021. He is the editor of Walt Whitman’s Civil War memoir Memoranda During the War and of the Penguin Classics edition of Herman Melville’s short fiction. His newest book, Is There God After Prince?: Dispatches from an Age of Last Things, was selected for The Millions’ “Most Anticipated” list for 2023.
This event is co-sponsored by the Department of American Studies.