Spring 2020 will undoubtedly be remembered as the strangest semester of our lifetimes—the rapid swerve from what should have been a blissful spring break with the promise of warmth and daffodils, to a tightly imposed shutdown that cut us off from each other and forced us to congregate in little boxes on Zoom. But through the fear, the crises, the strange stilling of time, and the disconnections of online teaching, we have been moved and inspired by our students who continued to show up for...
Ayten Tartici has been awarded the 2020 John Addison Porter Prize, one of the few prizes awarded by Yale university-wide, for her dissertation submitted in fall 2019 under the title Adagios of Form. Ayten Tartici won this highly prestigious prize for a work which highlights figures of slowness in modernist prose – instead of speed – as the distinctive poetic and political quality of the works she studies. Marcel Proust and Italo Svevo, William Faulkner and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James and...
Spencer Wolff (Comparative Literature, Ph.d. 2013) will be publishing his debut novel, The Fire in His Wake (McSweeney’s, 2020) edited by doctoral candidate Nyuol Matiok, also in the Comparative Literature Department. The novel recounts the dramatic journey of a Congolese refugee who ends up in Rabat, Morocco and tries to make his way to Spain (and whose life intersects with that of a young employee at the UNHCR over the course of a tragic summer). The novel touches on many of the themes of...
Marta Figlerowicz published an article in Public Books, an online magazine of ideas, scholarship, and the arts. Her article “Intellectual Alchemists,” considers the differences between American and European intellectuals.
We hope you will enjoy her work.
Martin Hägglund’s This Life has been awarded the René Wellek Prize for the best book in the field by the American Comparative Literature Association. The Wellek Prize is generally considered to be the most prestigious award in comparative literature. Past winners include Umberto Eco and Edward Said. In their prize motivation, the awards committee offered high praise for This Life:
“Martin Hägglund’s This Life: Secular Faith and Spiritual Freedom is unclassifiable. A work of great critical...
Dear Friends and Colleagues,
I am saddened to report to you that Marguerite Waller died a few days ago. Margie received her Ph.D from Yale’s Comparative Literature Department. She taught at Amherst College and the University of California-Riverside, and published with distinction on English and Italian literature and on social and women’s issues. She was a vibrant intellectual and personal presence in our field, and she will be missed.
I enclose the following obituary, written by...
Ayten Tartici ’19 recently published “Slow Consumables,” a long-form article on the aesthetics of slowness in contemporary art, music and literature in Johns Hopkins University’s ASAP/Journal.
Ayten earned her PhD in Comparative Literature in December 2019. Her dissertation, entitled “Adagios of Form,” focused on the intersection of aesthetics, politics and temporality in 20th and 21st century literature and art, particularly the modernist novel.
The full article is available at https://muse....
