Some impressive news from our former chair, Professor Efrain Kristal. It spans several continents; we begin in Germany.
He recently gave a lecture for the “Of Dawns of Day” Symposium in Honor of Peter Sloterdijk, which took place in Karlsruhe. The symposium was reviewed in a recent article in the New Yorker, and a version of his lecture devoted to Sloterdijk and The Merchant of Venice has just appeared in The Polemics of Resentment: Variations on Nietzsche (Bloomsbury Press).
Professor Kristal was a jury member at the Guadalajara International Book Fair––judging a prize awarded to the French novelist Emmanuel Carrère. Kristal was selected to read the jury’s deliberation at the public ceremony. On the occasion of the trip he also gave a prestigious lecture as the “Primo Levi Chair.”
He then offered two lectures at Boston University: the first for a “Lectures in Criticism” series on “Jorge Luis Borges and the Two World Wars.” The second talk was part of a Translation Seminar Series: “Fictional Knights, Araucanian Heroes, and Literary Translators.” The former text is being reworked for Cambridge University Press.
In April, Professor Kristal gives the keynote lecture for a symposium on Paul Celan, César Vallejo, and Marina Tsvetaeva at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris. And then, in May 2018, he speaks on Nicolas Poussin for an art and medicine symposium. This final event is organized by our Comp Lit colleague and friend, Professor Massimo Ciavolella at UCLA’s CMRS (Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies).
