Geoffrey H. Hartman, Sterling Professor (Emeritus) of English and Comparative Literature at Yale University, and Director of Yale's Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, will deliver this year's Richard H. Thorns Lecture. The Lecture, entitled, "Cultural Memory, Wordsworth, and the Birth Pangs of the Modern," will be held at the Campus Ballroom on Wednesday, October 20, at 4 pm.The Lecture is free and open to the public. Reception and book-signing follow. This year's Thorns Lecture will thread together the various interests Professor Hartman has elaborated on in his long and distinguished career. He is the author of thirteen books, ranging from Wordsworth to Derrida, cultural memory to the poetry of the Holocaust. A fourteenth work, entitled A Critic's Journey, has just been published. Professor Hartman is presently Distinguished Visiting Scholar at George Washington University, and has been Project Advisor as well as Founder of the Yale Archive since 1982. He has received several awards (such as the Christian Gauss Prize for Wordsworth's Poetry and the Renee Wellek Prize of the American Comparative Literature Association for The Fateful Question of Culture). He has an Honorary Degree from CUNY, Queens College, and is a "Chevalier" of the Order of Arts and Letters (French Government).
On Thursday, October 21, Professor Hartman will also be offering an informal lecture/seminar relating issues of memory and poetry to the circumstances surrounding historical trauma. The seminar is at 2 pm, in room 290 of the Humanities Building, free and open to the public. Professor Hartman is the author of The Longest Shadow: In the Aftermath of the Holocaust, and is editor of Midrash and Literature and Bitburg in Moral and Political Perspectives. One of his many video testimonies from the Yale Video Archive will be aired by PBS on May 1, 2000. The Free Press will publish a book based on these interviews in April, 2000.
Your attendance of these historical events is strongly encouraged.
