Whitney Humanities Center events in the Humanities Quadrangle (HQ) at 320 York Street are always free and open to the public. Following Yale policy, all guests must be vaccinated and boosted—and masks are strongly encouraged. Please join us!
Along with in-person events, we will continue to make some of our events available to a Zoom audience. If a registration link appears with a listing, the event will be accessible via Zoom.
One of Truffaut’s most personal and beautiful films, photographed by Néstor Almendros, and one of the least known of his major works—audiences in 1978 weren’t ready for this stark rumination on death from a filmmaker known for his gentle humor and enchanting personability. Not far removed from his own premature end, Truffaut himself stars alongside Nathalie Baye in this adaptation of Henry James’s short story “The Altar of the Dead,” about a newspaper obituary writer who has become obsessed with the memory of friends departed from this mortal coil—represented here by images of the director’s own deceased loved ones. A man tries to account for each dead intimate in his life, but can only adequately acknowledge their importance by building towards the one death that will make sense of it all: his own. Darkly life-affirming.
7:00pm, Humanities Quadrangle (HQ), L01
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
4:30pm, Humanities Quadrangle (HQ), L02