Harvard University Norton Lectures | To Save and to Destroy: On Writing as an Other, Lecture 4 | On Crossing Borders
SPEAKER: VIET THANH NGUYEN
Norton Lecture Four: On Crossing Borders
Colonization violated borders and redrew them, generating political, economic, and cultural consequences that are still being lived and felt. Part of the literary and cultural response has been to find the right forms that can speak back to colonization; the ones that interest this lecture cross or abolish (generic) borders and invent new styles like “horrific surrealism.”
“On Crossing Borders” is the fourth of six Norton Lectures with Viet Thanh Nguyen. For all Lecture dates and information, click here.
Norton Lectures are free and open to the public, but tickets are required. Tickets will be available starting at noon on the day of the lecture online through the Harvard Box Office (handling fees apply) or in person at Sanders Theatre. Limit of four tickets per person. Tickets valid until 5:45pm.
Free parking is available at the Broadway Garage, located at 7 Felton Street, between Broadway and Cambridge Streets.
About the Speaker
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and numerous other awards. His most recent publication is A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial. His other books are the sequel to The Sympathizer, The Committed; a short story collection, The Refugees; Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction); and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. He has also published Chicken of the Sea, a children’s book written in collaboration with his son, Ellison. He is a University Professor at the University of Southern California. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, he is also the editor of The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives.
Introductions By:
Bruno Carvalho, Interim Director of the Mahindra Humanities Center.
Jesse McCarthy, Assistant Professor of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University.
About the Norton Lectures
The Charles Eliot Norton Professorship in Poetry was endowed in 1925. Harvard’s preeminent lecture series in the arts and humanities, the Norton Lectures recognize individuals of extraordinary talent who, in addition to their particular expertise, have the gift of wide dissemination and wise expression. The term “poetry” is interpreted in the broadest sense to encompass all poetic expression in language, music, or the fine arts.
