2017
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Thursday, October 26, 2017 Prometheus In and Out of Prison
Joshua BillingsAssistant Professor of Classics, Princeton University Aspinwall 302 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Prometheus has been a trickster, a rebel, a creator, a benefactor, a savior, a blackmailer, and a prisoner, sentenced to gruesome torture. The talk will describe transformations of the figure in antiquity and modernity, and the meaning of the figure today in the context of prison education. For more info please contact [email protected] |
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Thursday, October 19, 2017 Till we have built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City
Adina Hoffman Olin Humanities, Room 102 6:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 Award-winning essayist and biographer Adina Hoffman will discuss her book, Till We Have Built Jerusalem, which is a gripping and intimate journey into the lives of three very different architects who helped shape modern Jerusalem. A powerfully written rumination on memory and forgetting, place and displacement, the book uncovers multiple layers of one great city's buried history as it asks what it means, in Jerusalem and everywhere, to be foreign and to belong. Adina Hoffman is the author of House of Windows: Portraits from a Jerusalem Neighborhood, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet's Life in the Palestinian Century, and, with Peter Cole, Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza, which won the American Library Association's prize for the best Jewish book of 2011. The Los Angeles Times called her most recent book, Till We Have Built Jerusalem: Architects of a New City, “brave and often beautiful,” and Haaretz described it as “a passionate, lyrical defense of a Jerusalem that could still be.” A Guggenheim Foundation Fellow and one of the inaugural winners of the Windham Campbell Literary Prizes, she divides her time between Jerusalem and New Haven. Praise for Till We Have Built Jerusalem “A fascinating synthesis that manages to distill biography, history, politics, aesthetics, religion and psychology into one illuminating, lively, witty text. This is one of the finest books I’ve ever read on the difficult, fragile arts of architecture and city-making.” - Phillip Lopate “Adina Hoffman does for Jerusalem what great writers have done for Paris, London, and New York: with charm, skill, and originality, she weaves together a vivid social and architectural history of one of the fabled cities of the world.” - Vivian Gornick “Adina Hoffman is that very rare writer who moves lightly across vast realms of knowledge, transmuting the most intransigent material into illuminating and affecting narratives. Here is a book about the making of a city that is as emotionally potent as it is intellectually bracing.” - Pankaj Mishra For more info please contact [email protected] |
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Tuesday, October 17, 2017 Hymns & Qualms
A reading by poet and translator Peter Cole (Yale University)Weis Cinema 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 MacArthur winner Peter Cole reads from his new book, Hymns & Qualms: New and Selected Poems and Translations. Praised for his “prosodic mastery” and “keen moral intelligence” (American Poets), and for the “rigor, vigor, joy, and wit” of his poetry (The Paris Review), Cole has created a vital, unclassifiable body of work. His poetry, writes Ben Lerner, “is remarkable for its combination of intellectual rigor with delight in surface, for how its prosody returns each abstraction to the body, linking thought and breath, metaphysics and musicality. Religious, erotic, elegiac, pissed off – the affective range is wide and the forms restless.” “Hymns & Qualms is a majestic work, a chronicle of the imaginative life of a profoundly spiritual consciousness.” —Harold Bloom For more info please contact [email protected] |
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Thursday, April 20, 2017 Layered Visions, Voices, and Temporalities: The Homeric Hero’s Body in Alice Oswald’s Memorial
Emily Allen-HornblowerAssociate Professor of Classics, Director of Undergraduate Studies; Rutgers University Olin 301 5:00 pm EDT/GMT-4 This lecture will discuss Alice Oswald’s recent work of poetry, Memorial: A Version of Homer’s Iliad (UK 2011, US 2012). I propose to examine how Oswald engages with—but also strays from—her Homeric model in her depictions of death on the battlefield. Oswald’s supple poetic voice deliberately challenges the motif of the glorious death of the hero by mingling together different visions, voices, and temporalities in her retelling of the heroes’ individual stories at the time of their demise, in a manner that gives pride of place to the pain, loss, and destruction that attend their downfall. |