Lauren Groff

Women’s anger is potent, one of the greatest drivers of social change, and yet it is—even in the 21st Century—still somehow taboo. This talk looks at angry women from literary history, including Dido, Medea, Becky Sharp, Anna Karenina, and Emma Bovary, as well as others, and looks toward the future of female anger.

In the work of the great philosopher and psychotherapist Carl Jung, archetypes are evidence of primordial form-making, a kind of generalized substratum found throughout all of humanity. Readers and writers should be wary of archetypes that don’t grow to reflect changing human eras; this talk identifies and tries to subvert a number of commonly-seen archetypes, such as the witch, the cowboy, and the princess.

In 1951, John Cage entered the anechoic chamber at Harvard University, expecting to hear silence. Instead, as he later wrote, "I heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous system in operation, the low one my blood in circulation.” This experience led to 4’33”, Cage’s famous three-movement composition in which the musicians are explicitly instructed not to play their instruments. The result is perhaps not music (arguable!); the result is also, marvelously, not silence. The gaps in a text—the pauses, rests, caesurae, silences—are empty of words, but they’re full of resonance, the vacuum filled instantly by the reader’s swift comprehension. This talk looks at white space, elisions, pauses, negations and things left unsaid, drawing on the work of Marguerite Duras, William Faulkner, Georges Perec, and Jenny Offill, among others.

A writer is only as strong as her understanding of her own weaknesses. This talk celebrates the way the great masters of writing—including Danté, Jane Bowles, and Cormac McCarthy—embrace and even exploit their failures to create indelible, searing works of art. There are larger, political implications in identifying the ways in understanding how the borders of privilege (and the lack of privilege) contribute to these invisible, deeply internal walls within us.

William Carlos Williams sent a furious sally against the misconception that art isn’t necessary in his marvelous love poem Asphodel, that Greeny Flower, when he says:

It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.

It can be difficult to justify art during the Anthropocene, at a time when it feels as though the world is swiftly darkening. This talk elevates and celebrate the necessity of art, drawing on ideas from poets and writers through the ages, including the great Czeslaw Milosz and George Eliot.