POSTPONED: Carl E. Schorske Memorial Lecture: Daniel Mendelsohn

Daniel Mendelsohn will deliver the Program in in European Cultural Studies’ 2nd annual Carl E. Schorske Memorial Lecture. The lecture is named in honor of the founding director of ECS, eminent historian Carl E. Schorske (1915-2015).

Erich Auerbach’s magisterial account of realism in Western Literature, Mimesis, famously begins by contrasting two narrative techniques: the Homeric, characterized by the totalizing embrace of “ring composition,” and the more inscrutable Hebrew style, emblematized in the Biblical account of the sacrifice of Isaac. In an excerpt from a new work that entwines biography, criticism, and memoir, Daniel Mendelsohn explores the implications of these styles for authors as diverse as Homer, Fénelon, Proust, and Sebald—and for our understanding of the relationship between narrative and history.

A reception will follow the lecture.