2016-2017 Lectures in Criticism
“Tolstoy, Bresson, and the Ground of the Ethical” will be about the relation between the sight of death and ethical understanding in Leo Tolstoy’s writing and in Robert Bresson’s film L’argent, a filmic adaptation of Tolstoy’s late short story “The Forged Coupon.”
Sharon Cameron, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English, Johns Hopkins. Sharon Cameron teaches nineteenth-century American literature and twentieth-century American poetry. She is the author of Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre (1979); The Corporeal Self: Allegories of the Body in Melville and Hawthorne (1981); Writing Nature: Henry Thoreau’s Journal (1985); Thinking in Henry James (1989); Choosing Not Choosing: Emily Dickinson’s Fascicles (1995); Beautiful Work: A Meditation on Pain (2000); and Impersonality: Seven Essays (2007). Her current work in progress is called “But not for Us”: Essays on Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, and Robert Bresson. At Johns Hopkins Cameron teaches graduate seminars in American poetry; nineteenth-century American authors (Melville, Stowe, Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, Poe, James). She teaches undergraduate courses in these same subjects, and, in addition, a course on Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky in translation.
Read Tolstoy’s, “The Forged Coupon” here.
Watch Bresson’s film “L’argent” here. (*Hulu subscription required)
The Lectures in Criticism series brings renowned scholars in the humanities to Boston University. It has run continuously since 1983, hosting four external speakers every year in addition to one member of the BU faculty.
For more information, visit the Lectures in Criticism website.