Theresa Kelley: Reading for the Future

For many thinkers, their era was an age of prophecy-- of revolution, radical change, new beginnings, perhaps even new worlds. In this Focus on the Humanities Lecture, renowned Romanticist Theresa Kelley talks about how strange it is, then, that prophetic Romantic writing is largely preoccupied with ruin, calamity, loss, and extinction. If these motifs are a dark version of Romantic prophecy, she asks, how do we read for the future?

Kelley is a Professor of English Emerita at UW Madison.