This event is open to members of The University Seminars community only. Registration is required. This year’s Tannenbaum Lecturer is Margo Jefferson and the Tannenbaum-Warner Award recipient is Robert Pollack. TANNENBAUM LECTURE Criticism as Intellectual Inquiry and Emotional Invention Being an Other in America teaches you to imagine what can’t imagine you. I was thinking, when I first wrote this, of certain kinds of otherness. Otherness in terms of race, gender, and class; in terms of temperament and aesthetics. I was thinking about the charged relations between fact, practice, ideology, and passion when one writes criticism. And of the social structures that allow one to discuss any of this and be listened to. This is all part of what’s called Critical Authority. Critical authority traditionally favors omniscience. What happens when we treat critical authority as a process that encourages vulnerability, ambiguity, and ambivalence? A process that allows us to examine our own responses – anger, despair, exhilaration, ecstatic confusion?  What happens when we’re willing to question ourselves as scrupulously as we do our subjects: to keep re-inventing our critic-personae?  Margo Jefferson is a critic and memoirist. She has published three books: On Michael Jackson, Negroland, and Constructing a Nervous System. She received a Pulitzer Prize […]