Cornell University hosts Culler Theory Lecture by the expert

A leading literary theorist with expertise in cultural aesthetics, marxism, and psychoanalysis will deliver this year’s Culler Theory Lecture at Cornell’s Society for the Humanities. Anna Kornbluh, professor of English at the University of Illinois Chicago, will address “Immediacy: Some Theses on Contemporary Style” on Tuesday, March 7, from 5 – 6:30 p.m. in the Guerlac Room at the A.D. White House. A reception will follow. This event is free and open to the public and no registration is required.

Anna Kornbluh’s research and teaching focus is on the novel, film and critical theory, especially Marxism, psychoanalysis, structuralism and formalism. Kornbluh is one of the founding members of Humanities Works, a postering project designed to champion the value of a humanities education.

“Anna Kornbluh is one of the leading literary theorists of our time, entwining Marxism and psychoanalysis in dazzling and often polemical new critical readings,” says Caroline Levine, professor of literatures in English in the College of Arts and Sciences. According to Kornbluh, the March 7 lecture will propose “a category for and periodization of contemporary cultural aesthetics…connect[ing] widespread negation of mediation and despecification of medium with the priorities of flow, speed and disintermediation in stagnating capitalism.”

The Society for the Humanities hosts the Culler Lecture annually, as a form of acknowledging the Society’s ongoing legacy of promoting the value of critical theory.