Vance gives Katz talk

Tragedy, Theatricality and Eschatology in Augustine's City of God is the topic to be presented by Professor Eugene Vance, as part of the Solomon Katz Distinguished Lecturers in the Humanities Series. The lecture will be at 8 p.m. on Thursday, Feb. 19, in 220 Kane. It is free and open to all faculty, staff, students and the public.

St. Augustine (354-430) wrote his summa defending Christianity against non-Christian Romans who blamed the religion for the sack of Rome in 410. The period of its writing (413-27) was also a time when Christians were devising new cultural forms of their own. Liturgy, iconography and architecture all embody the active search of Christian thinkers for ways to transform the heritage of Roman ethics, religion and ideology into spiritual models and styles suitable to Christianity as the new religion of empire. In his talk, Professor Vance will deal with Augustine's polemics against Roman theater as the negative side of a restless quest for "spectacles" that might disclose to the faithful of God's great plan as it might be fulfilled at the end of time.

Vance is a UW professor of French, Comparative Literature and Comparative Religion. Vance has held visiting appointments at Toronto, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Johns Hopkins, Berkeley and Duke. He has also written many articles on Late Classical and Medieval literature and culture, along with four book publications entitled Reading the Song of Roland, L'Archeologie du Signe (The Archeology of Signs), Marvelous Signals: Poetics and Sign Theory in the Middle Ages, and From Topic to Tale: Logic and Narrativity in the Middle Ages. Vance has been a UW faculty member since 1990 and may be reached through the Division of French and Italian Studies. ¶