DEANS’ LECTURE THURSDAY EXPLORES A LITERARY FEAST OF COLOR
An MSUM Deans’ Lecture Series event on “In Living Color: How Reading American Literatures Together Enriches the Literary Feast” by Hazel Retzlaff from the English department starts at 4 p.m. Thursday, April 30 in the Center for Business 111.
T.S. Eliot wrote that whenever a truly new literary work appears, it alters those that came before it. This means that Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” that icon of English literature, changes when placed beside the black American poet Robert Hayden’s “Middle Passage,” just as Walt Whitman’s “I Sing America” changes when compared to Langston Hughes’ “I, Too, Sing America.” Retzlaff’s talk uses the established practice of comparative literature to show the richness of American literatures that emerges when we read works by writers of different ethnic groups, genders, and sexual orientations side by side.