Author Wendy Steiner To Speak At UB

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Author Wendy Steiner, whose book "The Scandal of Pleasure: Art in an Age of Fundamentalism," made The New York Times list of "100 Best Books of 1996," will speak Nov. 18 at UB.

Steiner's lecture, "The Trouble With Beauty," will be held at 8 p.m. in Room 225 of the Natural Sciences Complex on the North Campus.

The lecture, which is free and open to the public, will be the second in "The University and the World" series presented by the College of Arts and Sciences.

Steiner will discuss how modernism outlawed the beauty of women and ornament, opting instead for beauty of form and fetish in an aesthetics of sensual denial, a legacy from which we are still trying to recover.

The author of more than 150 articles and reviews on books, painting, architecture and general culture, Steiner has been a member of the board of the National Book Critics Circle and a judge for the National Book Award.

Her latest book is "Postmodern Fictions: 1970-1990." Others include "Pictures of Romance," "Form Against Context in Painting and Literature," "The Colors of Rhetoric" and "Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance: The Literary Portraiture of Gertrude Stein."

The new lecture series, which highlights issues of broad intellectual and public concern, brings to UB prominent scholars from different fields to address common problems.

Steiner's lecture is supported in part by the Edward H. Butler Professorship of English Literature.