MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES | HYPERBOLE: SENSE, SENSATION, SPECTACLE

Etcetera: On Hyperbolic Description

March 4 @ 6 P.M.
Daniel Family Commons, Usdan University Center

This talk explores rhetorical, epistemological, material, and metaphysical aspects of hyperbolic description — writing that tries to say ”all“ about a thing, feeling, action, phenomenon, or idea. Weighing examples by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Giambattista Marino, Robert Burton, Denis Diderot, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, it asks: How do such hyperbolic descriptions work? What motivates them? How should they be interpreted? And when does expression eclipse representation? To help answer these questions, it glances at other media and engages recent theoretical voices (Eco, Latour, and Felski) urging descriptions of "networks" rather than definitions that insist on the correspondence between subjects and objects.