EventsThe New Social Environment#218

W.J.T. Mitchell with Charles Bernstein

Friday, January 22, 2021 1 p.m. Eastern / 10 a.m. Pacific

These free events are produced by The Brooklyn Rail.

Scholar and theorist of media, visual art, and literature W.J.T. Mitchell joins poet and scholar Charles Bernstein for a conversation on Mitchell’s recent book, “Mental Traveler: A Father, A Son, and a Journey through Schizophrenia”

In this Talk

How does a parent make sense of a child’s severe mental illness? How does a father meet the daily challenges of caring for his gifted but delusional son, while seeking to overcome the stigma of madness and the limits of psychiatry? W. J. T. Mitchell’s memoir tells the story—at once representative and unique—of one family’s encounter with mental illness and bears witness to the life of the talented young man who was his son.

Mental Traveler: A Father, A Son, and a Journey through Schizophrenia is available The University of Chicago Press here:https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/M/bo49299282.html

W. J. T. Mitchell

Scholar and theorist of media, visual art, and literature W. J. T. Mitchell is Senior Editor of the interdisciplinary journal Critical Inquiry, a quarterly devoted to critical theory in the arts and human sciences. Mitchell is associated with the emergent fields of visual culture and iconology (the study of images across the media). He is known especially for his work on the relations of visual and verbal representations in the context of social and political issues. He has been the recipient of numerous awards including the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Morey Prize in art history given by the College Art Association of America. In 2003, he received the University of Chicago’s prestigious Faculty Award for Excellence in Graduate Teaching.

Mental Traveler: a father, a son, and a journey through schizophrenia

Charles Bernstein

Poet Charles Bernstein is the winner of the 2019 Bollingen Prize for Near/Miss (University of Chicago Press, 2018) and for lifetime achievement in American Poetry. He is the author of Topsy-Turvy (Chicago, April 2021) and Pitch of Poetry (Chicago, 2016).

We’d like to thank The Marion Boulton Kippy Stroud Foundation and Teiger Foundation for making these conversations possible, and for their support of our growing archive 🌈✨