"Charles Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle and Contemporary Latin American Fiction: An Exercise in Intellectual Honesty"

OXFORD, Miss. -- Prominent writer Seymour Menton plans to discuss Charles Darwin's connection with Latin American literature on Monday, February 16th at the University of Mississippi.

His lecture, titled "Charles Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle and Contemporary Latin American Fiction: An Exercise in Intellectual Honesty," is slated for 5:30 p.m. in the Tupelo Room in Barnard Observatory. The event is free and open to the public.

The event marks Darwin's 200th birthday and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his famous book, "The Origin of Species."

The American public tends to think of Darwin within the context of England, but his travels took him to Latin America, the Galapagos Islands belonging to Ecuador and Tierra del Fuego, said Diane Marting, UM Associate Professor of Spanish who is coordinating the lecture.

"Darwin wrote as a naturalist and made the wonders of Latin America known to people in other places," Marting said. "His writings became an inspiration to Latin Americans."

The literature that resulted from Darwin's travels is one of the many areas Menton studies.

"Menton is a teacher and mentor for generations of college professors," said Luanne Buchanan, Assistant Professor of Spanish. "This is someone who has been studying and writing about Latin America for a very long time."

Menton taught at Dartmouth University, the University of Kansas and several Latin American universities. He is a professor and founding Chair of the Department of Foreign Languages and Literature at the University of California at Irvine.

"We are pleased to have a scholar of Dr. Menton's caliber speaking to our students and faculty," said Donald Dyer, Chair of the UM Modern Languages department. "His reputation precedes him, and we are very much looking forward to his timely lecture on Darwin and Latin American literature."

The Department of Modern Languages is hosting the event, with sponsorship provided by the Sally McDonnell Barksdale Honors College and the departments of English and Biology.

For more information contact Diane Marting at dmarting@olemiss.edu or call 662-915-7104 or 915-7298.

LECTURE: 'NATIVE TO AFGHANISTAN: Perspectives on Language and Culture'

Mon, December 01, 2008
Starts at 4:00 pm
Croft 107

Click here for more details:

LONGEST LECTURE

“Beckett, the Poet”
By
MARJORIE G. PERLOFF

Sadie Dernham Patek Professor Emerita of Humanities at Stanford University and Scholar-in-Residence at the University of Southern California.

Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Location and Time: Tupelo Room of the Barnard Observatory, at 7:00 p.m. Reception with refreshments immediately preceding at 6:30 PM.

Marjorie Perloff is one of the most distinguished critics of contemporary poetry. Her work has been especially concerned with explicating the writing of experimental and avant-guard poets and relating it to the major currents of modernist and postmodernist culture. She earned her Ph.D. in 1965 at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., where she began her academic career as assistant and then associate professor. Since 1976, she has been a professor at the University of Southern California, and then at Stanford University, becoming the Sadie Dernham Patek Professor of Humanities in 1990. She is currently scholar- in-residence at the University of Southern California.

Professor Perloff is the author of more than a dozen books on twentieth-century poetry and poetics and visual arts, including The Poetics of Indeterminancy: Rimbaud to Cage(1981); The Futurist Moment: Avant-Guard, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (1986); Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (1991); Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (1996); and a cultural memoir, The Vienna Paradox. This fall, the University of Chicago Press will publish her edited book, The Sound of Poetry, the Poetry of Sound.

In addition to numerous articles, chapters, essays, and keynote addresses; Professor Perloff has co-edited several important books including the Columbia Literary History of the United States, and Twentieth Century American Poetry, which won the English-Speaking Union Ambassador Award for 2001. She is the recipient of a Guggenheim and an NEH Fellowship, and she is an Elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She has served as president of the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA, 1993-95) and the Modern Language Association (2006).

The Christopher Longest Lecture series was established at UM in 1960 by Ann Waller Reins Longest, in recognition of Christopher Longest's distinguished service to the university from 1908 to 1951 in the departments of Classics and Modern Languages. The annual lectures are delivered by scholars in the fields of the modern languages and English literature.

For more information or assistance related to a disability, call 662-915-7298. To learn more about UM's departments of Classics and Modern Languages, visit