On May 30, Dr. Ilinca Iurascu will give a talk on “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Crocodile” at the Vancouver Institute for Social Research. The event will take place at 7pm at the Or Gallery, 555 Hamilton Street.
Starting from one of the more obscure and often overlooked literary references in Freud’s Das Unheimliche – a tale about haunted houses and reptilian ghosts – Dr. Iurascu’s talk will engage with a series of texts that feature a strange theoretical animal: the crocodile. In a trajectory that leads from Freud’s Viennese home to Max Ernst’s collages from 19th-century illustrated journals, she will explore some of the curious literary apparitions of ‘the beast in whose mouth we all are’-to paraphrase a well-known formulation by Jacques Lacan.
