Claude Willan, Associate Professor of English at Rowan University, will join the Long 18th Century Seminar series to present, "Manifolding the Eighteenth Century."

Professor Willan explains, "It is in the literary historiography of eighteenth-century poetry that reports of the death of the Author have turned out to be most greatly exaggerated. In this talk, I show the origins of those interpretive bonds and discuss how they might best be loosed, with recourse to concepts from machine learning.

If we recast its poems as lower-dimensional embeddings, what manifold of eighteenth-century poetics might emerge? If we dare to treat these poems as areferential, what aesthetic possibilities emerge? What do we have to gain from resituating so-called "Augustan" poetry in the category of imaginative literature?"

Coffee will be available at 9:30 am (PT). EMSI events are free and open to the public.