The Irving Howe Memorial Lecture
Irving Howe (1920-1993) graduated from City College 1940. He was a founder of Democratic Socialists of America and was considered one of the country's most influential literary critics until his death. He founded Dissent Magazine, and was a professor at Brandeis and Stanford Universities before he became a Distinguished Professor of Literature at the City University of New York. His books include Politics and the Novel, World of Our Fathers, and Socialism in America. A noted editor of Yiddish literature who discovered the author Isaac Bashevis Singer for an English-speaking audience, he also put together A Treasury of Yiddish Poetry. He won the MacArthur Award in 1987.
Please return in Fall 2007 to find out more about this year’s lecturer
The annual lecture endowed in his honor three of the subjects closest to Irving Howe’s heart, including politics, Yiddish and Jewish culture, immigrant history and the modern literary imagination. Previous lectures are listed below.
1996 “Politics of Religion: The Jewish Experience”
Michael Walzer, Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton
1997 “The Alibi of Art”
Roger Shattuck, Professor Emeritus, Boston University
1998 “Two More Cheers for Utopia”
Alan Ryan, Warden of New College, Oxford
1999 “Art and Invention: How Shakespeare and Pushkin Create Character”
John Bayley, Warton Professor of English Literature, St. Catherine’s College, Oxford
2000 “Shakespeare and Politics”
Frank Kermode, King Edward VII Professor of English Literature at Cambridge University
2002 “In Schools We Trust?”
Deborah Meier, Educator, McArthur Fellow, member of the Editorial Board of Dissent
2003 “The Root of Anti-Semitism”
A. B. Yehoshua, Novelist, essayist, playwright, and Senior Lecturer at the University of Haifa
2004 “What Was the Third World Revolution?”
Clifford Geertz, Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton
2005 “Can We Stop the Radical Right?”
Paul Krugman, Professor of Economics and International Affairs at Princeton University
2006 “The Enchantment of the Word: Language and the Study of Literature”
Robert Alter, Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley
The Stanley Burnshaw Lecture
Bi-annual lecture with co-sponored by the University of Texas
Stanley Burnshaw, born in New York City on June 20, 1906, is a poet, critic, novelist, playwright, publisher, editor, translator, and scholar recognized primarily for his poetry and literary criticism. He received an award for creative writing from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1971, and in 1983 was awarded an honorary doctor of humane letters degree by Hebrew Union College--Jewish Institute of Religion. The Stanley Burnshaw Reader (1989) provides an excellent overview of his work in poetry, translation, literary criticism, and biography. Three weeks before his ninetieth birthday, the City University of New York awarded him an honorary doctor of letters degree.
Please return in Fall 2007 to find out more about this year’s lecturer
The Burnshaw lecture is hosted alternately by The Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center and The Harry Ransom Center for Research in the Humanities at the University of Texas, Austin, every other year. Previous lectures are listed below:
1997 “Joyce’s Ulysses and the Common Reader”
Robert Alter, Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley
1998 “T. S. Eliot and the Poem Itself”
Denis Donoghue, Henry James Professor of English and American Letters, New York University
2000 “The Music of Poetry”
Galway Kinnell, Poet and Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing, New York University
2002 “Genius and Genius”
Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale
2004 “The Art of the Impossible: Poetry and Translation”
Charles Simic, Poet and Professor of English at University of New Hampshire
2006 “Poetry as Enchantment (in a Disenchanted Age)”
Dana Gioia, Poet and Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts
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