讲座时间：2016年12月19日（周一）下午3:30
讲座地点：崇远楼二楼东
讲座题目：When Literature Mattered:  American Literature and Culture in the 1940s
讲座教授：Professor George Hutchinson（Cornell University）
讲座内容简介：
When Literature Mattered:  American Literature and Culture in the 1940s

This lecture is an introduction to the most significant features of American literary culture in the 1940s.  It covers the expansion of book publishing into new markets and of literary reading in general, as well as the embrace of modernism by mainstream institutions and readers.   The paper has two main points to make:
1) The revolutionary transformations in publishing that effected a vast expansion of audiences for literary expression; and
2) the focus of “minoritized” authors on what they termed “universals.”  In the latter part of the talk I mean to bring attention to the very different horizon of expectations such authors tried to create from current scholarly reading strategies that are suspicious of all “universals.”
I hope this will encourage people to read the literature of the 1940s with new eyes and expectations that might unsettle some common assumptions.