Lectures on Tap - "Fraudulent, Plagiarized, and Revolutionary Literature"

📍 Location: Exact address given in confirmation email

🧠 Lecture: "Fraudulent, Plagiarized, and Revolutionary Literature"

🎙️ Speaker: Dr. Marek Makowski

Join us for a provocative evening as Dr. Marek Makowski invites us to rethink everything we’ve been taught about “Great Literature.” From high school to college, we’re trained to see literature as lofty, symbolic, and distant from everyday life. But many contemporary writers are pushing back, challenging who gets to be called an author and what counts as a book worth studying.

Drawing on writers like Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector—who promises to speak “without literature”—and Chilean novelist Alejandro Zambra—who claims that “to make literature, it is necessary to not make literature”—Dr. Makowski will explore how traditional ideas of Literature are entangled with power and exclusion. Then we’ll turn to “anti-literature”: experimental, fraudulent, plagiarized, half-written, and discarded novels that point toward more honest, accessible, and life-like ways of writing.

Dr. Makowski’s work has appeared in The New Republic, Public Books, Hyperallergic, World Literature Today, and The Chicago Tribune. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where he has taught courses on contemporary writing and Shakespeare.

Get a drink, connect, and learn at Lectures on Tap! 🙌

Agenda

6:30 PM – Doors open: find a seat (open seating!), order food & drinks, and expect a bar line—arriving early is key.

6:55 PM – Host introduction

7:00 PM – Lecture begins

7:45 PM – Audience Q&A

8:00 PM – Have 1:1 time with the speaker, mingle with fellow guests, and order another round

8:30 PM – Wrap up.