The Restoration-Victorian Reading Group invites you to "Idols of the Fragment: Schlegel and Barthes," a talk by Simon Reader (Associate Professor of English, CUNY College of Staten Island) on Thursday, March 2 at 5:30 pm in Fisher-Bennett Hall 330. This talk is generously co-sponsored by the Program in Comparative Literature.
Discussion and a catered dinner, for which we hope you'll join us, will follow. If you would like to stay for dinner please RSVP via email (hleclair@sas.upenn.edu), letting us know of any dietary restrictions.
Professor Reader's talk, drawn from a new project entitled #barthes: Mythologies of the Fragment, examines how two fragmentary afficionados—Friedrich Schlegel and Roland Barthes—hesitate over and eventually renounce the rhetorical strategy of writing in deliberate, short bursts of prose.
Prof. Reader is the author of Notework: Victorian Literature and Nonlinear Style (Stanford 2021) and president of the Northeast Victorian Studies Association. His scholarship focuses on the aesthetics of minor genres—notes, fragments, and aphorisms.