CSC Fellow to examine excess in art

CSC Fellow to examine excess in art

BY LINDSEY FIELDER
Rice News staff

In the final 2003-04 Center for the Study of Cultures (CSC) Fellows lecture, Deborah Harter, associate professor of French, will examine a variety of representations of excess in art and fiction from the American and European worlds of the 19th and 20th centuries.

The lecture, “Imaging Excess: Portraits of Pathology from Balzac to ‘Silence of the Lambs,’” will take place today at 4 p.m. in the Humanities Building, Room 117. Harter will explore how literary and visual portraits of the pathological in art and in fiction — like their counterparts in science and medicine — seek to frame and to contain excess. She will question whether this art functions as a sort of “cultural unconsciousness,” shaping people’s common, as well as private, visions of themselves and the world.

For more information on the center or the CSC fellowships, visit <http://culture.rice.edu>.