Lecturer to Discuss "The Trouble with Beauty"

Writer and critic Wendy Steiner will examine problems in contemporary aesthetics in a lecture titled after her book, "The Trouble with Beauty," at 8:15 p.m. Thursday, April 13, in Neilson Library Browsing Room. The event is free, open to the public and wheelchair-accessible.

Steiner, the Richard L. Fisher Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and the founding director of the Penn Humanities Forum, will draw on her expertise in modern literature, visual art and ethical issues in the arts to address artists' struggles with the issues of aesthetics and beauty in their work.

An accomplished writer, Steiner "is read and found interesting by people in both literature and the visual arts," says Michael Gorra of the Smith College English Department. Steiner has also authored "The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism," named one of the 100 Best Books of 1996 by the New York Times, and "Pictures of Romance: Form Against Content in Painting and Literature."

She writes regularly for the New York Times Book Review, the London Review of Books and other journals, and she has written on such controversial contemporary artists as Robert Mapplethorpe and Andres Serrano.

March 30, 2000