to probe 'Why Literature Matters'
"In times of political upheaval, is literature a luxury or a necessity?"
That is one of the questions that will be considered by an international assembly of distinguished scholars and writers when they meet Friday-Saturday, April 1-2, for a symposium on the significance of literature in the lives of individuals and the spirit of world events.
Titled "Why Literature Matters," the event is sponsored by the Department of English and the Whitney Humanities Center, with the assistance of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library and the Kempf Memorial Fund.
According to the organizers of the event, the symposium participants will "articulate some of the reasons why literature does -- and should -- continue to matter at the beginning of the 21st century."
Among the questions that will be considered, say the organizers, are: "Why continue to write, read and study literature in an age when so many other media compete for attention?" "Why does literature seem to matter more in societies that attempt to control or censor it?" And, "How important is it for writers or critics to believe that the common reader still lives?"
Participants include Israeli novelist and social critic David Grossman; playwright and novelist Caryl Phillips; novelist and New Republic editor James Wood; Scottish poet and scholar Robert Crawford; poet, librettist and editor of The Yale Review J.D. McClatchy; poet and Yale faculty member Elizabeth Alexander; award-winning critic for The New York Review of Books Daniel Mendelsohn; poet and translator Rosanna Warren; novelist and short-story writer Tessa Hadley; former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky; and Anne Fadiman, author of the best-selling "Ex Libris: Confessions of a Common Reader," who currently serves as the Francis Writer in Residence in Yale College.
The other participants and their university affiliations are Maria Rosa Menocal, Ruth Yeazell, Langdon Hammer, Paul Fry and David Bromwich, Yale; Mark Edmundson and Jahan Ramazani, the University of Virginia; Wendy Steiner, University of Pennsylvania; Anthony Grafton, Princeton; Stephen Greenblatt, Harvard; and Declan Kiberd, University College, Dublin.
"That so many eminent writers and critics will converge on New Haven to address this question is itself inspiring testimony to the continuing vitality of literature at the beginning of the 21st century," says Yeazell, who organized the event with Menocal and Elliott Visconsi, also a Yale faculty member. "We may not all agree in the end as to why literature matters, but it is already clear how much we all believe that it does," she adds.
The event will include four sessions on literature's relationship to individual lives, the historical moment, the university curriculum and the common reader. Highlights will include a keynote address by Israeli author David Grossman, titled "Writing in a Catastrophe Zone," at 4:30 p.m. on April 1 (co-sponsored by the Program in Judaic Studies at Yale), and a public reception on April 2 at 5 p.m. in the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, 121 Wall St. A complete conference schedule can be downloaded at www.yale.edu/english/Events/wlm.htm. Except for the Beinecke reception, all events will be held in the Whitney Humanities Center, 53 Wall St. The symposium is free and open to the public.
For more information, contact Elliott Visconsi at elliott.visconsi@yale.edu or Manana Sikic at manana.sikic@yale.edu or (203) 432-0673.
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