Lecture (Undelivered Lectures)

"[Cappello's] excellent new book-length essay, Lecture... at once defends the lecture and calls for holistic and creative improvements to the form."—The Atlantic

In twenty-first century America, there is so much that holds or demands our attention without requiring it. Imagine the lecture as a radical opening.

Mary Cappello's Lecture is a song for the forgotten art of the lecture. Brimming with energy and erudition, it is an attempt to restore the lecture's capacity to wander, question, and excite. Cappello draws on examples from Virginia Woolf to Mary Ruefle, Ralph Waldo Emerson to James Baldwin, blending rigorous cultural criticism with personal history to explore the lecture in its many forms―from the aphorism to the note―and give new life to knowledge’s dramatic form.

Mary Cappello’s six books of literary nonfiction include a detour on awkwardness; a breast-cancer anti-chronicle; a lyric biography; and the mood fantasia, Life Breaks In. A former Guggenheim and Berlin Prize Fellow, she is a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Rhode Island. She lives in Providence, Rhode Island, and Lucerne-in-Maine, Maine.