Literature

Literature episodes:

• 01.11.2018

  Conversation & Readings from the Podcast Harry Potter & the Sacred Text

  Vanessa Zoltan (co-host) and Ariana Nedelman (producer) of the celebrated podcast, Harry Potter and the Sacred Text, along with Huntington curator Vanessa Wilkie, discuss how media format shapes message. The podcast team discusses why they choose to do their program...

  
• 11.01.2017

  The Originality of Milton’s “Paradise Lost”

  David Loewenstein, Erle Sparks Professor of English and Humanities at Penn State, discusses the daring originality of Milton’s “Paradise Lost.” This year marks the 350th anniversary of the great poem’s first publication in 1667. This talk is part of the...

  
• 09.25.2017

  Isherwood, Auden, and Spender Before the Second World War

  Author and sculptor Matthew Spender talks about the friendship between his father, Stephen Spender, and Christopher Isherwood and W.H. Auden, from the late 1920s until Auden and Isherwood emigrated to the United States in the late 1930s. He will focus...

  
• 07.27.2017

  Joy Ride

  Architect David Martin discusses his book Joy Ride: An Architect’s Journey to Mexico’s Ancient and Colonial Places. A journal of his travels filled with sketches, photographs, and observations, Joy Ride celebrates the timeless sophistication of Mexico’s architecture and offers fresh...

  
• 07.24.2017

  Kindred: A Graphic Novel Adaptation

  Based on the acclaimed science fiction novel Kindred by Octavia E. Butler, a new graphic adaptation by Damian Duffy and illustrator John Jennings gives fresh form to Butler’s powerful tale of slavery, time travel, and the inexorable pull of the...

  
• 05.11.2017

  Hilary Mantel: “I Met a Man Who Wasn’t There”

  Tudor statesman Thomas Cromwell was described by an eminent historian as “not biographable.” Faced with an intractable puzzle, can a novelist do better? Hilary Mantel, two-time Booker Prize–winning author of “Wolf Hall” and its sequel “Bring Up the Bodies,” describes...

  
• 03.20.2017

  Excavating the Book

  Stephen Orgel, J. E. Reynolds Professor in Humanities at Stanford University, discusses books and their marketing throughout history, emphasizing the ways in which books are embedded in history, and how literary interpretation is at least partly a form of archaeology....

  
• 12.10.2016

  You Don’t Know Jack

  In recognition of the centenary of Jack London’s death, The Huntington’s Sue Hodson, curator of literary manuscripts and former Jack London Foundation Woman of the Year, speaks about Jack London as a novelist, sailor, journalist, social activist, photographer, and adventurer,...

  
• 11.04.2016

  Radical Reproduction

  Amy Kind, professor of philosophy at Claremont McKenna College, and Shelley Streeby, professor of ethnic studies and literature at the University of California, San Diego, explore futuristic notions of family and reproduction in the work of science fiction author Octavia...

  
• 09.30.2016

  Becoming Gay in the 1960s: Reading “A Single Man”

  Novelist Edmund White (“A Boy’s Own Story”) discusses the lasting impression that Christopher Isherwood’s groundbreaking novel “A Single Man” had on him as a young author assembling his gay identity in the pre-Stonewall era. Recorded Sept. 29, 2016.

  
• 03.10.2016

  Preserving Endangered Manuscripts in the Middle East and Africa

  Benedictine monk Father Columba Stewart, executive director of the Hill Museum and Manuscript Library, explains how a Minnesota-based monastery has digitized 50,000 manuscripts originating from Syria, Iraq, and other places where traditional culture is threatened.This talk is part of the...

  
• 02.18.2016

  Saul Bellow and American Prose

  Saul Bellow has been called the greatest writer of American prose of the 20th century. Zachary Leader, professor of English literature at the University of Roehampton, explores this claim and tests it. This talk was part of the Ridge Lecture...

  
• 03.02.2011

  Making a Literature: Black Writing and Jim Crow (Distinguished Fellow Lecture)

  Kenneth Warren, professor of English at the University of Chicago and the R. Stanton Avery Distinguished Fellow for 2010–11, examines how the rise of segregation in the late 19th century created an imperative among black writers to produce a distinctive...

  
• 01.14.2011

  Precarious: From Manuscript to Print in Early America (Zamorano Lecture)

  David Hall discusses the challenges of writing and publishing in colonial America, when authors sent documents to England for publication, only to see them altered dramatically by far-away editors and printers. Hall is professor of New England church history at...

  
• 11.09.2010

  Pasadena and the Making of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper”

  Charlotte Perkins Gilman came to Pasadena to live in 1888. Here she wrote “The Yellow Wall-Paper,” a harrowing story of a woman’s descent into madness, fueled by her own experience. Helen Horowitz, professor of history, Smith College, and the Los...

  
• 05.06.2010

  Sam and Jamie: ‘No Theory Please, We’re British’

  The famous relationship between lexicographer Samuel Johnson and his friend and biographer, James Boswell, is discussed in a lecture by Paul Ruxin. A noted expert on this literary pair, Ruxin is the owner of one of the largest collections of...

  
• 05.06.2010

  Johnson Agonistes: Portraying Samuel Johnson

  By the time James Boswell published his monumental biography of his friend Samuel Johnson in 1791, the latter’s life had been more fully documented than virtually any other figure in Western history. But Johnson, the famed lexicographer and man...

  
• 05.06.2010

  Samuel Johnson and His Famous Dictionary

  Loren Rothschild, a noted collector of the works of Samuel Johnson, talks about the life and work of the great 18th-century man of letters who compiled the first comprehensive dictionary of the English language.

  
• 05.06.2010

  What is a Book? (Zamorano Lecture)

  How significant are books for the circulation of written texts?  The question has become more urgent in the age of digital media, and yet historically books have often been rivaled by other textual forms. Peter Stallybrass, Annenberg Professor in...