Literature

× Thursday, April 3, 2025

The Poetry of Physics: What Literature Can Teach Us About the Ultimate Nature of Reality

William Egginton, Decker Professor in the Humanities, Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, and Director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute, Johns Hopkins University
Olin Humanities, Room 102 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
In this lecture I explore the two major physical theories of the twentieth century, relativity and quantum mechanics, by way of what we could call their poetic and philosophical foundations. Key to this approach will be the idea that reality isn’t an unfiltered picture of what’s out there, but rather a complex human construct, and that because of that we need essentially human means to understand it, among them literature and philosophy. In this light I argue that philosophers like Plato and Kant, and poets like Dante and Borges, are key to understanding the ideas of Albert Einstein and Werner Heisenberg.

William Egginton is the Decker Professor in the Humanities, Chair of the Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, and Director of the Alexander Grass Humanities Institute at Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of multiple books, including How the World Became a Stage (2003), Perversity and Ethics (2006), A Wrinkle in History (2007), The Philosopher’s Desire (2007), The Theater of Truth (2010), In Defense of Religious Moderation (2011), The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World (2016), The Splintering of the American Mind (2018), and The Rigor of Angels (2023), which was named to several best of 2023 lists, including The New York Times and The New Yorker. He is co-author with David Castillo of Medialogies: Reading Reality in the Age of Inflationary Media (2017) and What Would Cervantes Do? Navigating Post-Truth with Spanish Baroque Literature (2022). His most recent book, on the philosophical, psychoanalytic, and surrealist dimensions of the work of Chilean director Alejandro Jodorowsky, was published in January 2024.

× Tuesday, April 22, 2025

Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, and Literary Biography: A talk by Zachary Leader

Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EDT/GMT-4
Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce has been called “the greatest literary biography of the twentieth century.” This talk, by the critic and biographer Zachary Leader, tells the story of the book and its maker, in the process arguing for the artistic claims not only of Ellmann himself, a remarkable man, but of literary biography in general.

Zachary Leader (born 1946) is an Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Roehampton. He was an undergraduate at Northwestern University, and did graduate work at Trinity College, Cambridge and Harvard University, where he was awarded a PhD in English in 1977. Although born and raised in the U.S. he has lived for over forty years in the U.K., and has dual British and American citizenship. His best-known works are The Letters of Kingsley Amis (2001), The Life of Kingsley Amis (2007), a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer Prize in Biography, and The Life of Saul Bellow: To Fame and Fortune, 1915-1964 (2015), which was shortlisted for the Wingate Prize in the U.K. The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife 1965 to 2005 was published in 2018. He has written and edited a dozen books, including both volumes of the Saul Bellow biography, and is General Editor of The Oxford History of Life-Writing, a seven-volume series published by OUP. A recipient of Guggenheim, Whiting, Huntington, Leverhulme and British Academy Fellowships, he is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Introduction:  Gregory Moynihan, Associate Professor of History, Bard College
Q&A Moderator:  Elizabeth Frank, Joseph E. Harry Professor of Modern Languages and Literature, Bard College