Abstraction, Nonsense, and the Real in Fiction

Percival Everett is the author of more than thirty novels and story collections, including, most recently, The Trees and Dr. No. He has won the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Book Critics Circle, the Dos Passos Prize, and the PEN Center USA Award for Fiction, among numerous other awards. The recipient of a 2015 Guggenheim Fellowship, Everett is currently Distinguished Professor of English at University of Southern California.

How does nonsense work and can it really exist? Does form generate meaning? For his 2023 Finzi-Contini lecture, titled “Abstraction, Nonsense, and the Real in Fiction,” Everett will present on approaching the notion of reality in fiction.

Everett’s talk will be followed by a discussion with Ernest Mitchell, Assistant Professor of English, Yale.

Cosponsored by Whitney Humanities Center and The Yale Review
Poster