Literature News
WAMC’s On the Road Broadcasts Live from Arendt Center’s Annual Conference “JOY”
Opening the show, Donahue will speak with Bard President Leon Botstein and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and the Humanities at Bard College Roger Berkowitz.
Ingrid Becker Named a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study
Becker will work on a new research project about the rise of the questionnaire—a sociological technology and ubiquitous mass cultural form—in relation to the shifting status of the question in post-1945 Anglo-American poetry.
Robert Kelly and Charlotte Mandell ’90 Write About Pierre Joris ’69 for the Poetry Foundation
“He was never jealous of anybody,” said Mandell. “He was always happy for other people's success.”
Upcoming Events
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11/10Monday5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Olin Humanities, Room 204
Literature Salon:
On Cunning, or, Art and Craft in Shakespeare's Antony and CleopatraAdhaar Noor Desai, Associate Professor of Literature, Bard College
Monday, November 10, 2025This presentation draws on a chapter-in-progress from Professor Desai's next book project, tentatively titled How Shakespeare Judged His Art: Lofty, Stately, Cunning, Rare, Fair. An attempt to reconstruct how writers in early modern England approached literary craft, the book focuses on some of the terms Shakespeare and his contemporaries used when appraising their work. "Cunning"— a term affiliated with domains as distant as courtly poetry, military strategy, and racially suspect "gypsies"—appears in Antony and Cleopatra to demonstrate how elitism and racecraft operate by playing fast and loose with the proximity between skill and deceit, technique and trickery. An excerpt of this chapter draft will be circulated beforehand, and the presentation will include ample time for questions and for discussing research methods, the writing process, and the practical challenges of starting a new project.
5:00 pm – 6:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Olin Humanities, Room 204
Contact: Franco Baldasso
E-mail: [email protected]
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11/11Tuesday5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 Auditorium
Rival Riverains: Joyce and Proust in ParisTuesday, November 11, 2025
5:30 pm – 7:00 pm EST/GMT-5
Reem-Kayden Center Laszlo Z. Bito '60 AuditoriumJames Joyce and Marcel Proust met only once, at a late-night supper in the Hotel Majestic in Paris in May 1922. This lecture will revisit their brief and awkward encounter and explore what it reveals about the literary and social worlds of early twentieth-century Paris, how artistic value is created and sustained, and the contrasting experiences of exile and belonging that shaped each writer’s work.Barry McCrea is the Donald R. Keough Family Professor of Irish Studies and Professor of English at Notre Dame University. He is the author of three books: Languages of the Night, winner of the American Comparative Literature Association’s René Wellek prize for the best book of 2016; In the Company of Strangers which was awarded the Heyman prize for scholarship in the humanities; and a novel, The First Verse, which won a number of awards including the Ferro-Grumley prize for fiction and a Barnes & Noble “Discover” award.
Contact: Éric Trudel
E-mail: [email protected]