There are over fifty thousand novels published in the United States every year. Readers, reviewers, and scholars talk a lot about why one might read certain books; in this talk, Amy Hungerford, Professor of English at Yale University, asks how we decide, and how we talk about, what not to read in the context of literary over-production. She takes as a case study the decision not to read a work that is newly becoming canonized—David Foster Wallace’s Infitine Jest. The argument reflects on feminist reading practices, what counts as rigor in literary studies, and what we expect out of the works we canonize.
This event is co-sponsored with the CWRU Department of English.
Free and open to the public.