Hutton Honors College

Identities: Language, Literature, and Race
A Discussion Supper with Harvard Scholar
of American Literature and Culture Werner Sollors

Thursday, Jan. 22, 2009 * 5-6:30 p.m. * Harlos House, 1331 E. Tenth St. * SIGN-UP REQUIRED

Do we choose our own identities or are our choices limited by the ways others see us? Is "American" literature the literature written by persons living in America, no matter their nationality? Is it literature written by Americans, no matter their location? Is it "American" literature if written in a language other than English? Is the United States "too isolated" from the literature of the rest of the world for its own literature to be worthy of a Nobel Prize, as the head of the Nobel committee said last fall?

These are the kinds of questions Werner Sollors, a charismatic teacher, an influential scholar, and one of the foremost Americanists, likes to explore; and the supper will offer the opportunity to talk about these or other topics you would like to raise with Professor Sollors.

The Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English and a professor of African-American studies at Harvard, Sollors began teaching at Harvard in 1983 and chaired the Department of Afro-American Studies from 1984 to 1987 and from 1988 to 1990. His many publications include Creole Echoes: The Francophone Poetry of Nineteenth-Century Louisiana (with Norman R. Shapiro and M. Lynn Weiss); Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Literature and Culture (1986); Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (1997); and a book-length contribution to Sacvan Bercovitch's Cambridge History of American Literature (2003) entitled "Ethnic Modernism." He is currently co-authoring A New Literary History of America. A Guggenheim and NEH Fellow, he founded the Longfellow Institute and is one of the few specialists on multilingual American literature.

On campus as a Patten Lecturer, Professor Sollors will deliver two public lectures: Tues., Jan. 20: "African American Intellectuals in Europe in the Interwar Period," and Thurs., Jan. 22: "'Heil, Johnny': Billy Wilder's 'A Foreign Affair,' or, The Denazification of Erika von Schlutow." Each lecture will begin at 7:30 p.m. in Chemistry 122.

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