Lecture
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
"[Cappello's] excellent new book-length essay, Lecture... at once defends the lecture and calls for holistic and creative improvements to the form."—The Atlantic
In twenty-first century America, there is so much that holds or demands our attention without requiring it. Imagine the lecture as a radical opening.
Mary Cappello's Lecture is a song for the forgotten art of the lecture. Brimming with energy and erudition, it is an attempt to restore the lecture's capacity to wander, question, and excite. Cappello draws on examples from Virginia Woolf to Mary Ruefle, Ralph Waldo Emerson to James Baldwin, blending rigorous cultural criticism with personal history to explore the lecture in its many forms—from the aphorism to the note—and give new life to knowledge’s dramatic form.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Cappello (Life Breaks In: A Mood), a University of Rhode Island English and creative writing professor, turns her attention to the untapped possibilities of the lecture in this eloquent first entry in Transit's Undelivered Lectures series. Cappello opens with a defense of the lecture "as a form of art," rather than as a dull classroom ritual, and moves on to the alternate forms it might take, in order to become more rewarding and engaging for both the lecturer and the lectured-to. What if it started with the question-and-answer portion, instead of ending with that? Or if it was understood as the performed version of nonfiction writing specifically, the essay? Cappello suggests that lecturers should allow themselves to meander and investigate their subjects, just as essayists often do. In a gorgeous examination of poet Louise Bogan's notes for a planned 1962 lecture at Bennington (with photographs included), Cappello explains that good lectures should show evidence of how to "think with rather than of" ideas. After reading this eloquent book, anyone will agree that, even with the ever-increasing rise of student-directed learning and online education, the lecture is not archaic, but rather waiting for a vital new mode.
