Ross Posnock presents “Fighting Words: Challenging ‘Surface’ and ‘Reading’ via William James, Susan Sontag, and J. D. Salinger”

Idea 1Ross Posnock, Anna Garbedian Professor of the Humanities at Columbia University, will present a talk at UC Berkeley entitled “Fighting Words: Challenging ‘Surface’ and ‘Reading’ via William James, Susan Sontag, and J. D. Salinger.” The event will take place on Thursday, February 25, from 5 to 7pm in 300 Wheeler Hall.

Posnock’s essay, “’Don’t think, but look!’: W. G. Sebald, Wittgenstein, and Cosmopolitan Poverty,” can be found in Representations 112. Part of a special issue on “The Way We Read Now,” Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’s theory of surface reading can be found in “Surface Reading: An Introduction” (Representations 108).