Jay Clayton, the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English and chair of the department, will present “Connecting Disciplines: Future Creatures – Redesigning Life in Literature and Film” at 11 a.m. Saturday, April 21, at the Frist Center of the Visual Arts.
The gallery talk, which is in response to the museum’s current exhibition Fairy Tales, Monsters, and the Genetic Imagination, will explore the strange post-human forms that literature, science fiction and film have imagined for our future.
From babies in bottles in Brave New World, to smarter, fitter, but unhappier humans in the film Gattaca, our culture has struggled to come to terms with advances in genetic science. This talk will provide a guided tour to the dystopias of the 1930s, the science fiction of the 1940s and ’50s, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning fictions of the new millennium that deal with the wonders and woes of enhancing the human form.
The talk is free with purchase of gallery admission and meets at the exhibition entrance.
Contact: Ellen Jones Pryor, (615) 744-4914
epryor@fristcenter.org