Reading as if for Death

press release: In this Humanities Without Boundaries talk, Sharon Marcus asks, how can long-form novels represent the truncated time horizon of imminent death? What can literature teach us about how to inhabit the time between learning we are likely to die and dying? Through a reading of Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel On the Beach that toggles between the personal and the philosophical, Marcus examines the contribution that this little-read work can make to our understanding of how to make life meaningful in the face of its finitude.

Monday, September 20, 5:00 to 6:30 PM, Conrad A. Elvehjem Building, Room L160, 800 University Avenue

All attendees will be required to wear masks for the duration of the event.

Sharon Marcus is the Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Her research and teaching bring together literary theory, cultural and social history, and gender and sexuality studies. A founding editor of the online magazine Public Books, she is the author of Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (1999), Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (2007), and The Drama of Celebrity (2019), as well as many articles, including the co-authored “Surface Reading” and “Building a Better Description."