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Lecture
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 John Cage, 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 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 John Cage, 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.
- GenresEssaysNonfictionTeaching
120 pages, Paperback
Published September 8, 2020
12 people are currently reading
302 people want to read
About the author
Mary Cappello
10 books20 followersMary Cappello is a writer and professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Rhode Island. She is the author of four books of literary nonfiction, and her essays and experimental prose have been published in The Georgia Review, Salmagundi and Cabinet Magazine. Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Salon, The Huffington Post, in guest author blogs for Powell's Books, and on six separate occasions as Notable Essay of the Year in Best American Essays. A 2011 Guggenheim Fellow in Creative Arts/Nonfiction, she recently received a 2015 Berlin Prize from The American Academy in Berlin, a fellowship awarded to scholars, writers, composers, and artists who represent the highest standards of excellence in their fields.
Cappello is originally from Darby, Pennsylvania, a suburb outside Philadelphia. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. from State University of New York, Buffalo, and her B.A. from Dickinson College. Cappello has taught at the University of Rhode Island, as a Fulbright Lecturer at the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow, Russia, and at the University of Rochester.
(from Wikipedia)
Cappello is originally from Darby, Pennsylvania, a suburb outside Philadelphia. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. from State University of New York, Buffalo, and her B.A. from Dickinson College. Cappello has taught at the University of Rhode Island, as a Fulbright Lecturer at the Gorky Literary Institute in Moscow, Russia, and at the University of Rochester.
(from Wikipedia)
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
November 3, 2020
I am doubtful that I can summarize this book.
William H. Gass once described the lectures of Ludwig Wittgenstein as chances for the students to watch the philosopher think. The lecture as a form of communication has many styles and lecturers harbor a myriad of beliefs about the point of lecturing.
Mary Cappello's Lecture opens with a series of questions posed by Virginia Woolf in her essay, "Why?" Woolf's questions interrogate the idea of the lecture, considering it an obsolete practice and wondering how we might cultivate better ways of forming, presenting, and communicating ideas that empower everyone equally.
Cappello agrees with Woolf, acknowledging the value in such an endeavor; but, rather than asking "why lecture?", she wants to breath new life into the lecture, or rather, "re-inhabit what was great and stirring about the lecture when it was a form of art."
Gliding from Woolf to James Baldwin to John Cage to Mary Ruefle to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Cappello weaves together what is dazzling and dizzying about the form of the lecture. She distinguishes the lecture from the essay. She explains the unique features it allows: the repetitions, the meanderings, the interruptions of questions, the improvisation, even the contradictions of thought, claims of false information, the potential for never arriving at a point.
She is talking about the true practice of the lecture. She is talking about great practitioners. She is talking about insightful responses to those great practitioners. She is most definitely not talking about TED Talks-type of presentation. In fact, about TED Talks, she says: "TED Talks give me the creeps. Please do not confuse them with lectures. They all have a whiff of organized religion about them and a feel of the sermon on the informercial mount."
Cappello reminds us that it's not always of the utmost importance what is said but rather, how it is said. Whether being moved to tears by a lecture on Emily Dickinson by Susan Howe or listening to a recorded lecture by her mentor Marty Pops repeatedly over decades, she carefully draws our attention to what makes a lecture a lecture and that is the listeners. It's the note-takers that allow this art form to exist as it does. And she gives us not only her experience as a lecturer behind the lectern, but as a student writing in her notebook while she listens. The collage-like pages from her notebooks, written in an almost indecipherable pen, are shown in the book. It gives us a glimpse into her mind which is really a glimpse into mentation.
"In any case, by now it should be clear: I do not think of the lecture as an object, but as a type of voicing and of song whose intention is not for you to consume it, judge it, survey it, accept it or reject it (what objects generally require) but to move with it to places un-fore-told in oneself and in the world."
I read Lecture in one sitting so as to experience it as one would a lecture. I feel like I should have much more to say as I definitely felt moved and interested on every page. But I would be hard pressed to give a clear idea as to why it moved and interested me so steadily. Perhaps it was an experience, and I'll just have to leave it at that.
"The lecture will have succeeded if, like the essay, it cannot be summarized, but only experienced."
William H. Gass once described the lectures of Ludwig Wittgenstein as chances for the students to watch the philosopher think. The lecture as a form of communication has many styles and lecturers harbor a myriad of beliefs about the point of lecturing.
Mary Cappello's Lecture opens with a series of questions posed by Virginia Woolf in her essay, "Why?" Woolf's questions interrogate the idea of the lecture, considering it an obsolete practice and wondering how we might cultivate better ways of forming, presenting, and communicating ideas that empower everyone equally.
Cappello agrees with Woolf, acknowledging the value in such an endeavor; but, rather than asking "why lecture?", she wants to breath new life into the lecture, or rather, "re-inhabit what was great and stirring about the lecture when it was a form of art."
Gliding from Woolf to James Baldwin to John Cage to Mary Ruefle to Ralph Waldo Emerson, Cappello weaves together what is dazzling and dizzying about the form of the lecture. She distinguishes the lecture from the essay. She explains the unique features it allows: the repetitions, the meanderings, the interruptions of questions, the improvisation, even the contradictions of thought, claims of false information, the potential for never arriving at a point.
She is talking about the true practice of the lecture. She is talking about great practitioners. She is talking about insightful responses to those great practitioners. She is most definitely not talking about TED Talks-type of presentation. In fact, about TED Talks, she says: "TED Talks give me the creeps. Please do not confuse them with lectures. They all have a whiff of organized religion about them and a feel of the sermon on the informercial mount."
Cappello reminds us that it's not always of the utmost importance what is said but rather, how it is said. Whether being moved to tears by a lecture on Emily Dickinson by Susan Howe or listening to a recorded lecture by her mentor Marty Pops repeatedly over decades, she carefully draws our attention to what makes a lecture a lecture and that is the listeners. It's the note-takers that allow this art form to exist as it does. And she gives us not only her experience as a lecturer behind the lectern, but as a student writing in her notebook while she listens. The collage-like pages from her notebooks, written in an almost indecipherable pen, are shown in the book. It gives us a glimpse into her mind which is really a glimpse into mentation.
"In any case, by now it should be clear: I do not think of the lecture as an object, but as a type of voicing and of song whose intention is not for you to consume it, judge it, survey it, accept it or reject it (what objects generally require) but to move with it to places un-fore-told in oneself and in the world."
I read Lecture in one sitting so as to experience it as one would a lecture. I feel like I should have much more to say as I definitely felt moved and interested on every page. But I would be hard pressed to give a clear idea as to why it moved and interested me so steadily. Perhaps it was an experience, and I'll just have to leave it at that.
"The lecture will have succeeded if, like the essay, it cannot be summarized, but only experienced."
September 10, 2020
A fascinating and exuberant argument in favor of the lecture as "knowledge's dramatic form."
November 11, 2020
An associational take on the value of the lecture influenced by Virginia Woolf's call to bring lecturing to an end. The opening is strong but the arguments as the progress become weaker. I enjoyed the section on notes and note-taking and how she broke down the process.
December 15, 2020
took notes and stared off into space and wrote a lot while reading this. capello's lectures shifted and meandered to surprising places, and made me want to pay attention and attend to the world.
November 23, 2021
El capítulo en el que reivindica el quedarse dormida durante una lectura y cuando escribe sobre por qué y cómo es que escribimos notas en cuadernos y tenemos nuestros propios lenguajes íntimos para entender esas mismas notas me llenaron el corazón.
May 25, 2020
Cappello writes about lectures outside the classroom mostly, but as a college writing instructor and alumna of a small liberal arts college, I couldn’t help but think of her arguments in a pedagogical context. I have never quite been convinced by arguments to resurrect the lecture as a pedagogical method. However, in a moment when classes are moving online, which is a mode that doesn’t really lend itself to the student-led seminar discussions that I generally gravitate toward, this book is not only interesting but necessary.
December 11, 2020
Where, outside of certain churches, where can a person hear a lecture that lasts over 90 minutes? Once upon a time, the lecture was a popular medium for disseminating knowledge, faith, and lore. Popular speakers toured and often spoke for hours on end to audiences of hundreds or thousands, without aid of amplification. Well-known lecturers, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, sometimes developed a reputation in print as writers, and writers often note what they hear—one’s person lecture becomes another person’s note.
And “notes” implies a scrapbook-like approach to the essay (essays, notes, and lectures almost being synonymous in Cappello’s usage), notes that may not have an obvious organization, an explicit connection to the putative topic, a peripheral-vision approach to the subject that allows for a (metaphorical) creeping up to—feints and parries, attempts at something—an “essay” in the sense that came to be associated with Montaigne, the person most identified as the genre’s progenitor: as a test of ideas to see where they lead, without pre-conceived notions or hopes for where the ideas will lead.
Essays have their prescriptive form, too—as everyone can attest who had the five-paragraph essay form inflicted on them (and as the lyricist of Peggy Lee’s “Fever” apparently never overcame). And the format of TED Talks has quickly ossified into easy parody. Let’s call the non-prescriptive form the “art essay,” the form that continues to resist form and codification, or “the Montainge essay.” Emerson’s essays have been attacked by some literary scholars because the paragraphs often teem interchangeable (and sometimes the sentences themselves, too), without leading toward some transcendent point (as might be expected of an American Romantic, such as Emerson). And yet, as readers of essays like Emerson’s know (or listeners of speakers know), such essays and lectures convey coherent intelligence and urgency, an individual’s unique voice, a tour a reader wants to take just for the view.
Capello begins her brief book on the lecture discussing and illustrating the freedoms offered by notes; by their randomness of topic and possible randomness of placement on page; the underlining, circling, connecting passages with arrows, adding pictures, etc. While this collage-effect can’t be visually duplicated on stage, the juxtapositions of moods, ideas, and observations can be conveyed through words.
But Capello tempers such flights with more prescriptive comments in the second half of the book, which—while not encouraging the use of templates—could result in lectures as predictable as any given TED Talk if her suggestions regarding listening, looking, and note-taken, for example, were followed by more than just her students. As I tell my own students, “A well-engineered solution is a well-engineered problem,” so I’m more hesitate about her ideas in the second half of the book.
That’s the idea of a lecture, though, isn’t it? To provoke more ideas than answer questions tidily? To have no need or expectation of an audience agreeing with or being convinced by a lecturer is one of its freedoms.
And “notes” implies a scrapbook-like approach to the essay (essays, notes, and lectures almost being synonymous in Cappello’s usage), notes that may not have an obvious organization, an explicit connection to the putative topic, a peripheral-vision approach to the subject that allows for a (metaphorical) creeping up to—feints and parries, attempts at something—an “essay” in the sense that came to be associated with Montaigne, the person most identified as the genre’s progenitor: as a test of ideas to see where they lead, without pre-conceived notions or hopes for where the ideas will lead.
Essays have their prescriptive form, too—as everyone can attest who had the five-paragraph essay form inflicted on them (and as the lyricist of Peggy Lee’s “Fever” apparently never overcame). And the format of TED Talks has quickly ossified into easy parody. Let’s call the non-prescriptive form the “art essay,” the form that continues to resist form and codification, or “the Montainge essay.” Emerson’s essays have been attacked by some literary scholars because the paragraphs often teem interchangeable (and sometimes the sentences themselves, too), without leading toward some transcendent point (as might be expected of an American Romantic, such as Emerson). And yet, as readers of essays like Emerson’s know (or listeners of speakers know), such essays and lectures convey coherent intelligence and urgency, an individual’s unique voice, a tour a reader wants to take just for the view.
Capello begins her brief book on the lecture discussing and illustrating the freedoms offered by notes; by their randomness of topic and possible randomness of placement on page; the underlining, circling, connecting passages with arrows, adding pictures, etc. While this collage-effect can’t be visually duplicated on stage, the juxtapositions of moods, ideas, and observations can be conveyed through words.
But Capello tempers such flights with more prescriptive comments in the second half of the book, which—while not encouraging the use of templates—could result in lectures as predictable as any given TED Talk if her suggestions regarding listening, looking, and note-taken, for example, were followed by more than just her students. As I tell my own students, “A well-engineered solution is a well-engineered problem,” so I’m more hesitate about her ideas in the second half of the book.
That’s the idea of a lecture, though, isn’t it? To provoke more ideas than answer questions tidily? To have no need or expectation of an audience agreeing with or being convinced by a lecturer is one of its freedoms.
March 19, 2021
3.5 stars. A short, more-interesting-than-I-expected look at lectures and their purpose. Intelligently written, even if it was a bit over my head at times, and I liked that it made me think about lectures and note-taking from perspectives that I hadn't thought about previously. I'd like to check out more of the author's work.
December 20, 2020
The opening section promised much and got me excited, but the chapters that followed didn’t meet that promise. For an essay on the potential of the lecture, I found that the author spent too much of time on the act of note-taking _outside_ the context of a lecture.
November 7, 2020
This is just...not very good
February 5, 2024
I read this for a class I'm taking, and while I enjoyed reading it, I'm not entirely sure what to make of it now that I've finished.
November 17, 2021
Savored over the course of half a year. Enjoyable and thought provoking, this book reminded me to reflect on different ways of engaging with information and to consider how I actively participate as a reader or listener.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews