Featured series 
Tag: Literature
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Arts & Culture
Yu Hua reads work, participates in star-studded panel at Fairbank event
It’s strange to imagine your dentist as one of the most interesting and controversial novelists of the 21st century. But that’s just what Yu Hua is. Or was — the former dentist who admitted, more frighteningly, that he possessed little formal dental training, recently derided his former profession to a New York Times reporter, saying,…
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Campus & Community
President Faust named American Historian Laureate
Louise Mirrer, president and CEO of the New-York Historical Society, has announced that Drew Faust, Harvard’s president and Lincoln Professor of History, will receive the society’s fourth annual American History Book Prize for “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.”
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Arts & Culture
When Boston was the hub of the literary world
Matthew Pearl, author of “The Dante Club” and “The Poe Shadow,” wove an engaging tale of Boston’s literary legacy — one significantly and curiously shaped by 19th century copyright laws.
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Arts & Culture
Dance, music, literature celebrate human rights
Human rights are all about history, politics, and the law — right? Not entirely. The arts have a role to play. Literature, music, dance, and other forms of creative expression often convey oblique stories of injustice and trauma. They also inspire humans to embrace the human rights implicit in every act of creation.
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Arts & Culture
Mothers in fiction, mothers in fact
In 1930, the French author Colette published the novel “Sido” and bound the first copy with swatches of blue fabric cut from her late mother’s favorite dress.
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Campus & Community
Nicolae Iliescu
At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on December 9, 2008, the Minute honoring the life and service of the late Nicolae Iliescu, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Emeritus, was placed upon the records. Iliescu’s scholarly work includes a study of the influence of Saint Augustine on the Canzoniere of Petrarch.
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Arts & Culture
‘Nation-shaking’ racial, ethnic changes
Real earthquakes are slow to build and fast to erupt. Other, metaphorical, quakes, can follow the same pattern — and be just as earthshaking.
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Nation & World
Religion in the vernacular
In 1215, Pope Innocent III convened the Fourth Council of the Lateran, a religious convocation that laid out to hundreds of bishops, abbots, priors, and Christian patriarchs 70 new decrees. One enjoined the clergy to stop frequenting taverns, engaging in trials by combat, hunting, and practicing what might be called noncelibate habits.
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Arts & Culture
Seidel honored with Crystal Quill Award
Steve Seidel, the Patricia Bauman Arts in Education professor at the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE), received the Crystal Quill Award from the Shakespeare Festival/LA Nov. 20 in Los Angeles. The Shakespeare Festival/LA is an arts organization that uses professional theater traditions to “enchant, enrich, and build community.”
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Arts & Culture
Author McGowan is honored as ‘2008 Harvard Humanist of the Year’
Can parents raise moral children without religion? Greg Epstein M.T.S. ’07 thinks so. He’s the Humanist chaplain at Harvard, and has just finished writing a book due out next fall. Its title: “Good Without God.”
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Arts & Culture
‘The health of poetry’
As a graduate student at Oxford, Gwyneth Lewis wrote her dissertation on 18th century literary forgery. But as a working poet for three decades — and this year as a Radcliffe Fellow — she is as far from that fraud as conceivable.
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Arts & Culture
Achebe celebrates African literature with poetry
Chinua Achebe, the esteemed Nigerian novelist and poet, delivered this year’s Distinguished African Studies Lecture at the Center for Government and International Studies (CGIS). Greeting the standing-room-only crowd in Tsai Auditorium earlier this week (Nov. 17), Achebe surprised the group by announcing that he had an unusual program in mind.
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Arts & Culture
‘Godot’ in the bayou: Artist Chan speaks at Carpenter Center
Paul Chan is soft-spoken, but his words are heavy. Carefully chosen, they offer an insight into his reflective process and the weighty implications of his work.
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Arts & Culture
Poetry, music, death take the stage at New College Theatre
John Adams ’69, A.M. ’72 returned to Harvard on Nov. 17, where he attended a performance of his piece by Harvard’s Bach Society Orchestra (a group he led in the 1960s) at the New College Theatre.
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Arts & Culture
Probing an unlikely friendship
Theirs was an unlikely friendship. One man was a black abolitionist, orator, and journalist who had been a slave from Maryland, the other a white politician from the backwoods of Kentucky, Indiana, and Illinois.
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Arts & Culture
Puzzling through Yeats with Helen Vendler
Helen Vendler knows a thing or two about William Butler Yeats. She has authored three books on the Irish poet’s work, including her most recent volume, “Our Secret Discipline: Yeats and Lyric Form,” published in 2007.
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Arts & Culture
The Nobel for literature: An insider’s view
One of Per Wästberg’s best times as a college student in the 1950s was the night he got locked in Widener Library. “I got so enthralled [in the stacks], the library closed and I couldn’t get out,” Wästberg said with a laugh, noting that the floor of the library was nicer than his room at…
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Arts & Culture
Power of the pen in early America
In 1747, three members of the Abenaki Native American tribe and their Mohawk ally posted a petition on a wall of an English fort in the Connecticut River Valley. The paper was small, but it spoke volumes.
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Arts & Culture
Heaney ‘catches the heart off guard’
Over the years, readings by poet Seamus Heaney have been so wildly popular that his fans are called “Heaneyboppers.” A reading this week at Sanders Theatre, sponsored by Harvard’s Department of English and American Literature and Language, was no exception. The event’s free tickets were gone weeks ago, within hours, and on Tuesday (Sept. 30)…
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Arts & Culture
Radcliffe Fellow Markovits talks about ‘mad, bad, dangerous’ poet
George Gordon, Lord Byron died in 1824 at the age of 36 — a short life, but long enough for Byron to become a personage so vivid and controversial that he was arguably the modern era’s first celebrity.
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Campus & Community
Harvard News Office writer Ken Gewertz dies at 63
Longtime writer for the Harvard News Office Ken Gewertz died on Sept. 7 at his home in Watertown, Mass. He was 63.
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Campus & Community
Weinberg, Phillips honored at PBK ceremony
Late this morning (June 3), Adam Goldenberg ’08 — in a fashionable bow tie and flowing academic robes — joined a long line of gowned seniors in the shade of trees outside Harvard Hall. A few months before, the Vancouver, B.C., social studies concentrator had dressed a little differently (in pink tights and a yellow…
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Arts & Culture
Reminiscences of Maxim Gorky
In 1895, Russian journalist Alexei Maximovich Peshkov, a onetime shoemaker’s apprentice who had quit school at 10, adopted a new name: Maxim Gorky. After that, literary fame came fast and furious for this self-taught, fresh-voiced grandson of a Volga boatman. Gorky — the name means “bitter” — could tell a story, remember everything he read…
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Campus & Community
Wendell Vernon Clausen
At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on April 8, 2008, the Minute honoring the life and service of the late Wendell Vernon Clausen, Pope Professor of the Latin Language and Literature, and Professor of Comparative Literature, Emeritus, was placed upon the records. Clausen integrated exacting philological scholarship with a finely tuned…
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Campus & Community
Faculty Council
At its 10th meeting of the year on April 2, the Faculty Council considered a proposal to rename the Department of English and American Literature and Language and discussed several items on the dean of the Faculty’s agenda. The council next meets on April 23. The preliminary deadline for the May 6 Faculty meeting is…
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Campus & Community
John Harvard Book Project wraps up at local schools
In October 2007, a group of Harvard College students proposed a novel way to commemorate the 400th anniversary of John Harvard’s birth — donate books. Their initial idea developed into the John Harvard Book Project, which ran from November through February and raised funds from students, faculty, and staff with the goal of purchasing books…
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Arts & Culture
Ancient text has long and dangerous reach
Ask a well-read individual to list the most dangerous books in history, and a few familiar titles would most likely make the cut: Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” Marx and Engels’ “The Communist Manifesto,” Chairman Mao’s “Little Red Book.”
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Arts & Culture
Vivian Gornick takes on novelists Bellow, Roth
This year, Vivian Gornick, — a writer who lives in New York City — is a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She updated her observations on the brilliance (literary) and the failings (cultural) of male Jewish American writers of three decades ago on Feb. 4 in the Julia S. Phelps Annual Lecture…