October 10, 2019
Ann Snitow May 9, 1943-August 10, 2019 Ann Snitow, a founding faculty member of Lang College and the creator of the Gender Studies Program at the New School, passed away on August 10, 2019. She was a beloved member of the Literary Studies faculty. While indeed her books and essays are crucial texts in feminist studies and in the life of the mind, as Literary Studies colleagues our remembrances here are more personal, testaments not just to her work but to the power of her being.
December 5, 2019
Eugene Lang’s very own Jennifer Firestone, Associate Professor and author, has released a book of poetry titled Story. “Story is a brilliant antidote to closure and the tyranny of narrative.” -Brenda Coultas There is a Story at a beach. […]
By Elaine Savory
On October 22nd, Literary Studies is hosting a one day symposium on a very special book, Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, which has a very special birthday this year. Published in 1966, this year the novel is fifty years old, so to speak. Our celebration is one in a series across the world which only proves how extensively this work is loved and respected. Rhys is a transnational modernist writer, whose style is remarkable. This novel is inter textual with Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, for Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea is Rhys’s response to the horribly distorted representation of the creole mad woman who is Rochester’s imprisoned wife. Many writers have been inspired by Rhys’s work and this novel in particular. Our program includes two major Caribbean novelists, Caryl Phillips and Robert Antoni, who will be in conversation. We will also have Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert, who is now a very significant voice in postcolonial ecocriticism, speaking about Rhys and also Phyllis Allfrey, a younger writer from the same Caribbean country, Dominica, in the frame of environmental concerns. Then two Rhys critics, Erica Johnson and myself will have a conversation about the role of memory in Wide Sargasso Sea. We will also feature a BBC program on Rhys’s writing process, a snippet of her voice and a “Rhys” twitter feed, as well as the work of a student, Alexa Roccanova, whose capstone work at Parsons has Wide Sargasso Sea as an inspiration. This is going to be a really enjoyable day, featuring both critical and creative response to an important work of fiction, and in so doing also celebrating the way in which Literary Studies brings the academic and the creative inventively together. Not to be missed!
