Seminar: Circumstantial Detail

The Labyrinth in full bloom at the Getty Museum Gardens. Photo by Flickr user vgm8383. Used by Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic License

We will consider the part played by circumstantial detail in narrative through a 200-year-old essay by Thomas De Quincey, two stories by Jorge Luís Borges, and a recent essay. Here again the question will be the media by which we make meaning, the proofs by which we render art or testimony plausible.

Lunch provided with registration. Register here. Pre-reads provided to registrants.

John Durham Peters teaches and writes on media history and philosophy. He is the María Rosa Menocal Professor of English and of Film & Media Studies at Yale University. He taught at the University of Iowa between 1986-2016. He is the author of Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication, Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition, and most recently, The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media.