“Storytelling from Mesopotamia to the Moon” with Martin Puchner
October 6, 2018
Saturday, October 6th, 2018 at 8:00 pm
This lecture will take place at Cary Hall.
I will take you on a romp through world literature by focusing on the intersection of storytelling and writing technologies, including the inventions of paper, parchment, and print and their influence on literature. Along the way, I will unfold four stages of literature, beginning with foundational epics and the sayings of master teachers (such as Buddha and Socrates) to the rise of story collections and a modern world literature. Having begun in Mesopotamia four thousand years ago, I will end in 1969, on the moon.
Martin Puchner, the Byron and Anita Wien Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University, is a prize-winning author, educator, public speaker, and institution builder in the arts and humanities. His writings, which include a dozen books and anthologies and over sixty articles and essays, range from philosophy and theater to world literature and have been translated into many languages. Through his best-selling Norton Anthology of World Literature and his HarvardX MOOC Masterpieces of World Literature, he has brought four thousand years of literature to audiences across the globe.
His most recent book, The Written World, which tells the story of literature from the invention of writing to the Internet, has been widely reviewed in The New York Times, The Times (London), the Financial Times, The Times Literary Supplement, The Atlantic, The Economist, among others, covered on radio and television, and is forthcoming in over a dozen languages.
In hundreds of lectures and workshops from the Arctic Circle to Brazil and from the Middle East to China, he has advocated for the arts and humanities in a changing world.
At Harvard, he has instituted these ideas in a new program in theater, dance and media as well as in the Mellon School of Theater and Performance Research.
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