Contemporary culture topic of Grand Valley Fall Arts Celebration lecture
Award-winning writer, critic and translator Daniel Mendelsohn will
present “Medea on the Jersey Shore: Tragedy and the Crisis of Reality
in Contemporary Culture,” Thursday, September 20, 7 p.m., Grand Valley
State University Eberhard Center, Robert C. Pew Grand Rapids Campus.
The lecture is one of six events during Grand Valley’s popular Fall
Arts Celebration.
Earlier this year, Mendelsohn was elected into the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences as part of a 2012 class that included
Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, actor Clint Eastwood, and
Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos. Trying to pigeonhole Mendelsohn‘s own
area of expertise is a challenge, given his broad range of interests
and writings. A common element found in much of his work is fresh
insight about contemporary culture as influenced by his scholarly
training as a classicist.
Mendelsohn, now the Charles Ranlett Flint Professor of
Humanities at Bard College, studied Classics at the University of
Virginia and Princeton University, where he completed his doctorate in
1994. Since then his articles, essays, reviews, and translations have
appeared frequently in such diverse publications as The New York
Times, The New York Review of Books, Esquire, Travel + Leisure, and
The Paris Review.
A recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for
Excellence in Reviewing (2001) and the George Jean Nathan Prize for
Drama Criticism (2002), Mendelsohn has written six books, including an
award-winning account of his search for the truth about six relatives
who perished in the Holocaust, “The Lost: A Search for Six of Six
Million.” A collection of essays, “How Beautiful It Is And How Easily
It Can Be Broken,” was a Publisher’s Weekly Best Book of 2008.
“Waiting for the Barbarians,” a new collection of Mendelsohn’s essays
on subjects ranging from Susan Sontag and Noël Coward, to TV’s “Mad
Men” and Greek myth in “Spider-Man,” will be published in October.
Mendelsohn’s lecture will be followed by book signing and a
reception. All Fall Arts Celebration events are free and open to the
public. Seats fill quickly; arrive early. For more information, visit
www.gvsu.edu/fallarts, or
call (616) 331-2180. Follow Fall Arts Celebration on Twitter at
#GVFallArts.
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