Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture by Helen Deutsch: Jonathan Swift, Said, & the Demands of Literature
ABOUT THIS EVENT
Helen Deutsch's talk springs from her thinking about her latest book, The Last Amateur, which joins the unfinished conversation between Edward Said and Jonathan Swift, a conversation that began with Said’s unfinished book on Swift, and which continued throughout Said’s career. As Professor Deutsch remarks: “The book begins with and repeatedly turns to the moment in 2003 when I encountered Said summoning Swift in a piece in the Al-Ahram Weekly, ‘Jonathan Swift, thou shouldst be living at this hour!’ That occasion is what galvanized my writing and inspired me to address Said in the same way. Said saw Swift as an occasional writer burdened by a sense of his failure to intervene in the present, who came to see himself as a ‘problem for the future.’ The Last Amateur views Said as just such an occasional writer, who with the help of W.B. Yeats, transforms Swift’s despair into enduring hope. It takes inspiration from my experience in Said’s archive of a mind in perpetual motion, and from Said’s dream of peace and a free Palestine, a dream inspired in part by Swift’s evocation of a whole people of Ireland a century before such an entity would exist. This lecture will consider the ongoing timeliness of the book in relation to the untimeliness of Said’s conversation with Swift, an untimeliness which informs Said’s thinking on late style, and which still demands a response.”
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Helen Deutsch is Professor of English and disability studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is the author of Resemblance and Disgrace: Alexander Pope and the Deformation of Culture, Loving Dr. Johnson, and most recently The Last Amateur: Jonathan Swift, Edward Said, and the Profession of Literature.
ABOUT THIS ANNUAL EVENT
The Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture is given in honor of the public intellectual and literary critic, Edward W. Said, who taught in the English & Comparative Literature Department at Columbia from 1963 until 2003. University Professor Said was perhaps best known for his books Orientalism, published in 1978, and Culture and Imperialism, published in 1993, both of which made major contributions to the field of cultural and postcolonial studies. The Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture, organized by the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, pays tribute to University Professor Said by bringing to Columbia speakers who embody his beliefs and the legacy of his work.
Register here.
Registration does not guarantee a seat. Check-in for registrants begins 30 minutes before the event. (Any open spots are offered to the stand-by line 10 minutes before the event).
This event is in-person only.
