September 6, 2024 Lectures Les Cinquante Glorieuses By Fredric Jameson A glass of crème de menthe. Photograph by M. Lawrenson, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain. From a lecture given to students at Duke University on January 21, 2021. In the early years of the fifth century, a famous philosopher visited Athens. You could say that this philosopher, Parmenides, was the inventor of ontology, and thus, in a way, the first real philosopher. Athens was a small town, and everybody knew who he was. Being a celebrity, he met a lot of people, one of whom was the young Socrates, who might have been a teenager. They had a long conversation. That would have been around 450 B.C.E., and if you believe the reports of this, perhaps you could date the beginning of Athenian philosophy from that encounter. Socrates will then meet the young Plato in 407 B.C.E. Plato abandons playwriting and becomes part of Socrates’s circle, and after Socrates’s execution for blasphemy in 399, he starts to write the dialogues, a lot of which are fictional, perhaps including this meeting with Parmenides, which becomes one of Plato’s most complicated works. Did this actually happen? Who knows? In any case, Plato will turn his circle into a kind of school, the Academy. In about 367 B.C.E., a young man from the North—who is not an Athenian and therefore never really enters Plato’s intimate circle—will come to this school to join his group. This man, Aristotle, is from the general area of the Macedonian coast, and in 343 he is summoned by the king of Macedonia to tutor his son, who becomes the king when Philip II is assassinated, the figure whom we know as Alexander the Great. Aristotle then returns to Athens and founds his own school, the Lyceum, which practices a certain critique of Platonism. The Lyceum is founded in 335 B.C.E. Read More
June 25, 2024 Lectures On Wonder By Srikanth Reddy Claude Mellan (French, Abbeville 1598–1688 Paris), The Moon in Its First Quarter, 1635. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. From the Elisha Whittelsey Collection, courtesy of the the Elisha Whittelsey Fund. I. The World Worlds It’s probably not the most promising beginning to this talk for me to observe that my subject, like silence, has a way of disappearing the moment you speak of it. Love, anger, regret, even boredom—wonder’s antipodes—may entrench themselves in us more deeply over time, but wonder, I’d venture, is always already a fugitive affair. Maybe it’s a matter of developmental psychology; in the middle of life, I find myself becoming a nostalgist of childhood wonder. (These days I feel it mostly in my dreams.) Or maybe it’s civilization itself that’s outgrown its wonder years. We start out with the marvels of the ancient world—the Great Pyramid of Giza, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Colossus of Rhodes—only to arrive, in our disenchanted era, at Wonder Bread. Any way you slice it, wonder is ever vanishing. Still, I suspect the occasional sighting of this endangered affect has something to do with why someone like me continues to write poems in the twilight of the Anthropocene. Of course, William Wordsworth said all this more eloquently and in pentameter verse, too. Maybe poetry is a faint trace of wonder in linguistic form. By following that trace for the next hour or so, I hope we’ll come a bit closer to wonder itself. Read More
May 8, 2024 Lectures Book as Enemy By Adania Shibli Adania Shibli. Photograph courtesy of Adania Shibli. Smoking might be banned at book fairs, while one doesn’t expect books to be banned from book fairs. Even if a character in one of the books exhibited at a fair is smoking, this wouldn’t lead to a ban on characters smoking in books, or to a ban on that specific book. The simple, obvious reason is: literature does not equal reality. Fiction, especially, has its own way of working and should be examined on its own criteria. Smoking in real life has negative impacts on one’s health and the health of others, and banning it can prevent people from becoming ill. Smoking in a book can be evaluated only in terms of its relevance to a character and their actions in a text. In 1988, when smoking was still allowed in many indoor places, probably including book fairs, I learned from my schoolteacher about the creation of the first public library in my village in Palestine/Israel. Upon hearing the news, I rushed to the little room where this library was being assembled, offering the librarian my help in labeling the books and arranging them on the shelves. I had a love for books, which I wanted to share with others. Read More
April 19, 2024 Lectures On the Distinctiveness of Writing in China By Yan Lianke Yan Lianke at the Salon du Livre, 2010. Photograph by Georges Seguin, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 DEED. When I talk to non-Chinese readers like yourselves, I often find that you are interested in hearing about what distinguishes me as an author but also what distinguishes my country—and particularly details that go beyond what you see on the television, read about in newspapers, and hear about from tourists. I know that China’s international reputation is like that of a young upstart from the countryside who has money but lacks culture, education, and knowledge. Of course, in addition to money, this young upstart also has things like despotism and injustice, while lacking democracy and freedom. The result is like a wild man who is loaded with gold bullion but wears shabby clothing, behaves rudely, stinks of bad breath, and never plays by the rules. If an author must write under the oversight of this sort of individual, how should that author evaluate, discuss, and describe him? To address this question, we will first consider the distinctive conditions faced by contemporary Chinese authors. Read More
April 12, 2024 Lectures “We’re Never Alone” By Tobias Wolff Tobias Wolff at the Spring Revel in 2024. The Review was thrilled this year to honor Tobias Wolff with the Hadada Award, our annual prize for lifetime achievement in literature. At this year’s Spring Revel on April 2, Wolff spoke to a gathering of writers, artists, and friends. We are pleased to publish his remarks here. When Lady Astor was breathing her last, a large group of family and friends gathered around the bed to see her off. Just before she departed this life, she snapped awake and looked around and said, “Is this my birthday, or am I dying?” Well, don’t tell me. The scene here bears some resemblances to hers. I look out and see my dear wife, Catherine, and my oldest and best friends, and others who’ve come into our life in later years, even as I still vividly recall the laughing, never-to-be-forgotten faces of two beloved friends who left our company too soon, George Crile and Edward McIlvain. I have been lucky, blessed, really, in family and friendship, and in too many other ways to describe here. The Irish painter John Yeats, the poet’s father, described the making of art as the social act of a solitary person. Actually, he said “a solitary man.” They talked like that then. Anyway, I nodded in recognition when I came across that line. Maybe Hemingway could write in a crowded café, but I and the other artists and writers I’ve known have had to be shut away somewhere, out of the human stream, to get our work done. Yet as the years have frosted and mowed this head of mine, I have come to a different understanding of the situation. You may have retreated to your attic studio, you may even have pulled up the ladder behind you, but you were not alone. Never. Read More
March 18, 2024 Lectures “It’s This Line / Here” : Happy Belated Birthday to James Schuyler By Ben Lerner James Schuyler at the Chelsea Hotel, 1990. Photograph by Chris Felver. I’d planned to write about one of my favorite James Schuyler poems in time for the centenary of his birth last November, but Past is past, and if one remembers what one meant to do and never did, is not to have thought to do enough? Like that gather- ing of one of each I planned, to gather one of each kind of clover, daisy, paintbrush that grew in that field the cabin stood in and study them one afternoon before they wilted. Past is past. I salute that various field. The tiny, beloved “Salute”—which is not the poem that I mean to discuss—both gathers and separates, does and then undoes what the poem says Schuyler meant to do but never did. (And isn’t this, the play of assembly and disassembly, to a certain extent just what verse is? How part and whole relate or fail to as the poem unfolds in time is a basic drama of poetic form.) Schuyler’s enjambments—at once distinct and soft, like the edge of a leaflet or the margin of a petal—are sites of hesitation where meanings collect before they’re scattered or revised. For a second I hear “Like that gather-” as an imperative: Do it that way, gather in that manner, before the noun “gathering” gathers across the margin. I briefly hear “one of each I”—each of us is a field of various “I”s—as the object of the gathering before it becomes the subject who has “planned” it. (The comparative metrical regularity of “Like that gathering of one of each I planned,” the alternating stresses, haunts these enjambments, a prosodic past or frame the poem salutes and breaks with, breaks up.) I am always slightly surprised when “to gather one,” at the end of the seventh line, repeats “of each,” as opposed to modifying a new specific noun, at the left margin of line eight. (This break makes me feel the tension or oscillation between “each” and “kind”—and a kind is a gathering of likes—between the discrete specimen and the class for which it stands, the particular dissolving into exemplarity, when you write it down.) Read More