A talk by Professor Ross Posnock, an Anna Gaberdian Professor of the Humanities in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. His books include, among others, Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual (Harvard UP, 1998), Philip Roth's Rude Trade: the Art of Immaturity (Princeton UP, 2006), and most recently, Renunciation: Acts of Abandonment by Writers, Philosphers, and Artists (Harvard UP, 2016).