Join the Department of Slavic Languages & Literatures, the Ellison Center for Russian, East European and Central Asian Studies, and the Simpson Center for the Humanities for the first event in the 2021-22 Public Lecture Series.  

ABOUT THE EVENT
From her writing, in the midst of the social justice uprising after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, about the 19th century Russian author Leo Tolstoy's opposition to state violence to her pondering whether Sally Rooney--the Irish novelist hailed as the first great millennial author--is trying to figure out "how should a millennial Marxist novel be," Jennifer Wilson has quickly become, in the New York Times formulation, "one of the smartest freelance literary critics working today." Wilson's intrepid ability to navigate between literary works, old and new, and the questions at the forefront of contemporary audiences' concerns, jolts the reader into an appreciation of books with a kind of reinvigorated intellectual joy. For example, in positing that Nikolai Gogol's celebrated 1830s-1840s tales of lowly Saint Petersburg clerks are the writer's phantasmagoric attempts to conjure up what the late anthropologist David Graeber has called, in 2018, "bullshit jobs," Wilson provocatively articulates one of the reasons why a literary classic might continue to endure to this day.

In this conversation with Sasha Senderovich, Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Jennifer Wilson will speak about the task of the book critic in today's world.