Occupy Wall Street: Bartleby and the (In)Humanities
Lee Edelman
Thursday 12 April, 2012
6pm, $0
The Cooper Union
7 East 7 Street, The Great Hall
Lee Edelman’s talk will consider Melville’s short story, “Bartleby, The Scrivener,†in relation to the Occupy Wall Street movement and the contemporary status of the humanities. It will focus in particular on the logical connection between the concept of corporations as people and the current corporate vision of (and corporate influence on) the humanities. By bringing together the uses of “Bartleby†by the protestors of the Occupy movement and the use of Bartleby by the Wall Street lawyer who narrates the Melville’s tale, he aims to examine how the corporate humanities promote an ideology of unfractured community that leaves no place for a queer resistance to community itself.
ABOUT LEE EDELMAN
Lee Edelman is Fletcher Professor of English Literature at Tufts University. He has published numerous essays on topics including literature, film, sexuality studies, and literary theory and is the author of three books, Transmemberment of Song: Hart Crane’s Anatomies of Rhetoric and Desire; Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Analysis; and No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. His lecture is drawn from his book in progress, Bad Education: Why Queerness is No Good.
ABOUT LEE EDELMAN
Lee Edelman is Fletcher Professor of English Literature at Tufts University. He has published numerous essays on topics including literature, film, sexuality studies, and literary theory and is the author of three books, Transmemberment of Song: Hart Crane’s Anatomies of Rhetoric and Desire; Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Analysis; and No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. His lecture is drawn from his book in progress, Bad Education: Why Queerness is No Good.