Harvard University Press Blog

Pamuk delivers first Norton lecture; five more to come

The Charles Eliot Norton Professorship in Poetry was endowed in 1925 by C. C. Stillman to honor the university's first Professor of the History of Art. In accordance with Stillman's desire that "the term Poetry shall be interpreted in the broadest sense, including, together with Verse, all poetic expression in Language, Music, or the Fine Arts," Norton Professors have included not just poets in the narrower sense, but novelists, critics, musicians, and accomplished polymaths of all stripes, including Umberto Eco, John Cage, Leonard Bernstein, Octavio Paz, Italo Calvino, Northrop Frye, Lionel Trilling, Jorge Luis Borges, R. Buckminster Fuller, E. E. Cummings, Thornton Wilder, and a host of others.

And so Nobel Prize-winning Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk delivered the first of his Norton lectures yesterday afternoon in Harvard's Sanders Theater. Pamuk, the author of The White Castle, The Black Book, My Name is Red, Snow, Istanbul: Memories and the City, The Museum of Innocence, and many others, spoke primarily of what makes the novel a unique form and how we are to determine what happens to our minds as we read them. Pamuk, who started out as a painter, elaborated on Schiller's distinction between the naive and the reflective poet as it applies to his own experience with novels, both the Turkish ones he read in his youth (he once "raged" against those naive, unselfconscious storytellers as Schiller raged against the serene, untroubled genius of Goethe) as well as the classics that have shaped him as a novelist and as a person (Anna Karenina is his all-time favorite, we learn; he quoted extensively from the passage where Anna reads an English novel on the train back to St. Petersburg). He offered as well a set of nine points on what distinguishes the novel from other forms, the last and most forceful of which being that novels offer (and we seek in them) "a secret center," a buried object that we feel compelled to search out via clues in the narrative. This, of course, provoked questions about where exactly lies the periphery and how are we to locate that bit (hey, it's an audience of academics!), which Pamuk, a self-described autodidact, promised to address in future lectures.

The lectures, we should point out, are free and open to the public, and there are five more coming; here's the schedule, courtesy of the Humanities Center (each lecture begins at 4pm):

Norton Lectures: Orhan Pamuk on "The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist"

Tuesday, September 22 - "What Happens to Us as We Read Novels"

Tuesday, September 29 - "Mr. Pamuk, Did You Really Live All of This?"

Tuesday, October 13 - "Character, Time, Plot"

Tuesday, October 20 - "Pictures and Things"

Monday, October 26 - "Museums and Novels"

Tuesday, November 3 - "The Center"

||| Norton Lectures at the Humanities Center (PDF link)

Barbara Johnson remembered

The renowned literary critic and many-time HUP author Barbara Johnson died on August 27. Johnson was Professor of English and Comparative Literature and the Fredric Wertham Professor of Law and Psychiatry in Society at Harvard, and the author of numerous books, including Defigurations du langage poetique, The Critical Difference, A World of Difference, The Wake of Deconstruction, The Feminist Difference, Mother Tongues, and her latest book, Persons and Things, published last year. Johnson's groundbreaking theoretical contributions to the study of literature made her one of the most respected critical minds of her generation, and her scholarship helped to establish the importance of structuralist and poststructuralist perspectives as central to contemporary inquiry into literary meaning. Below is a personal reflection on Johnson and the significance of her life and work by HUP Executive Editor for the Humanities Lindsay Waters, who had the good fortune to work with Johnson on several important projects over the years.

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On Barbara Johnson

Before I was offered a job at HUP in 1983, I had fairly deep connections with a number of Harvard professors—Hilary Putnam, Stanley Cavell, Werner Sollors, Roman Jakobson, Helen Vendler, Barbara Lewalski. I had never met Barbara Johnson, but we had one key friend in common—Paul de Man. I was publishing de Man’s books at Minnesota. So, when I was offered the job, I made a return trip back to Cambridge to size things up once more. I saw just a few people on campus, including Barbara, whom I spoke with for the first time. My question to her in a nutshell was: "Is it safe to work here?" By then I knew Yale a little, but Harvard not at all except for a memorable visit to Jakobson in 1979. These schools seem to be as convoluted as the Vatican, but I was raised in the bosom of the Roman Catholic Church, and such East Coast schools and the Pentagon share something of the Byzantine structure of the Vatican, so I was not totally ignorant of complex social structures. It was December 1983, days before de Man would die. Barbara's answer to my question was "yes." She had just moved from Yale to Harvard the previous year, so she knew whereof she spoke.

Some months after I got here, HUP's director, Arthur Rosenthal—one of the greatest American publishers in the era after World War II and founder of Basic Books—suggested to President Derek Bok that Barbara be appointed to HUP's Board of Syndics, and together Barbara and I got a chance to discover whether it was safe to be at Harvard. Arthur liked to "mix things up" in the world at large and in the little world around Harvard Yard. Bok supported him through thick and thin. I presented a number of projects to the Board of Syndics that led to what the Catholics call "baptism by fire" for Barbara and myself. She was ingenious, charming, indefatigable as a supporter of unusual projects of merit. But there were members of the Board who were allergic to certain names—"Heidegger," for instance—so any book having much to do with his ideas needed good reasons before we could win approval for it.

The Idea of Justice

 From The Economist:

In the courtliest of tones, Mr. Sen charges John Rawls, an American philosopher who died in 2002, with sending political thinkers up a tortuous blind alley. The Rawlsian project of trying to describe ideally just institutions is a distracting and ultimately fruitless way to think about social injustice, Mr. Sen complains. Such a spirited attack against possibly the most influential English-speaking political philosopher of the past 100 years will alone excite attention. The Idea of Justice serves also as a commanding summation of Mr. Sen's own work on economic reasoning and on the elements and measurement of human well-being...Mr. Sen writes with dry wit, a feel for history and a relaxed cosmopolitanism...The Idea of Justice is a feast...Nobody can reasonably complain any longer that they do not see how the parts of Mr. Sen's grand enterprise fit together...Mr. Sen ends, suitably, with democracy. It can take many institutional forms, he says. But none succeeds without open debate about values and principles. To that vital element in public reason, as he calls it, The Idea of Justice is a contribution of the highest rank.

||| The Idea of Justice is available now from HUP and at your favorite bookstore.

Reprise -- Kennedy, Dukakis, Patrick read the letters of John and Abigail

Since we're publishing this month a collection of the wit and wisdom of one of our most formidable and literate First Ladies, thought we would re-post a link to the video of an event we put on in 2007 to celebrate the publication of My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams, in which we solicited the help of a few of Massachusetts's most well-known contemporary public servants, including Governor Deval Patrick, former Governor Michael Dukakis, and the late Senator Edward Kennedy, in sharing some of John and Abigail's most revealing and affecting correspondence. Video courtesy of Boston's WGBH.

||| The Letters of John and Abigail Adams -- Faneuil Hall, November 17, 2007.

Affectionately Abigail

This month we're publishing The Quotable Abigail Adams, edited by John P. Kaminski. For the book, Kaminski mined Abigail's writings--including letters to friends, neighbors, family and even heads of state--and selected quotations that best embody her wit and wisdom. The selections are arranged by topic, ranging from health, family and religion to travel, foreign affairs and government. As many of the quotations in the book are of a Twitter-friendly length, every Thursday there will be a new thought from Abigail on the HUP Twitter account. And since Abigail signed many of her letters "affectionately yours," we've named this project Affectionately Abigail. You can find yesterday's selection here.

The Quotable Abigail Adams comes two years after My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams, an expanded collection of the letters of John and Abigail that covers the complete span of their correspondence.

Michael Hardt discusses Commonwealth - September 17, NYC

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Michael Hardt is the author, with Antonio Negri, of Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth. Commonwealth is available from HUP late-September 2009.